Do you think you can ever trust a politician’s word?
At the risk of being labelled terminally-whitepilled, I don’t think most politicians are deliberately lying.
At the same time, I really don’t think that most politicians, or people who preach government force as a solution to problems, really consider the underlying basis of their thoughts.
You do something because it’s just, you know, the way that things are done.
You want people to stop doing something? Great. I don’t think that it’s a good idea to do that thing, either.
So you’re okay with men with guns locking people in cages for doing something you don’t like? How about breaking into residences in the middle of the night?
Oh. Um. That’s how we’ve always done that.
Here’s an idea — don’t hurt people, and don’t take their stuff.
And I’m having trouble concentrating on this, unfortunately, so I’m stopping.
I’d planned to start writing this the other day, and I forgot. It’s evidence, maybe, that my therapy is working. I have OCD, and the writing streaks might be an example of a compulsion. I’m supposed to avoid them. Oh well.
Writing makes me focus my thoughts. Nice segue into the topic for today —
What’s your take on religion?
For a long time, from about age sixteen, until my mid-twenties, I considered myself a pretty committed atheist. Note that I said atheist, not agnostic. Even before I recommitted to theism, I was hostile towards the idea basic ideas underlying fundamental agnostic thought. (Yes, they’re fundamentalists….)
You’ll never have enough evidence to know; it’s impossible to know.
Okay, that’s fine.
But, you, as an individual, can make a decision based on the evidence you have. I can’t ever know whether gravity is an absolute certainty, either.
But I have enough evidence to wholeheartedly support the theory.
When it comes to God, the afterlife, etc., there might not be enough evidence for you to make a pronouncement.
You do have enough evidence to make a judgment on just about anything; Han shot first. You are allowed to change your mind when you get new evidence.
I actually got into a conversation the other day after listening to an interview with Bryan “Hotep Jesus” Sharpe. He’s written a book about the origins of some of the American wars.
There’s things I thought about the First World War that have really been shaken over the past few years.
The Triple Alliance’s story about what happened seems to be, well, less than true.
I had the same feeling as things were coming out about the Covington Catholic kids while I was at Shmoocon. Okay, so the kid is in a MAGA hat, and he’s smirking as this guy is beating a drum next to his face.
Twitter, CNN, etc., are saying that the kid had a punch-able face, and that these affluenza kids were harassing a brave native American veteran. Reason did a good job covering all of this. But if you stopped taking in new evidence about it after hearing your chosen outlet’s initial reporting, you’d never know.
If you took in information from multiple sources, you might get the wrong story.
There are people close to me who refuse to investigate further.
To me, however, very little is permanently-settled
TRUST THE SCIENCE!
You know, the sort of science that said that COVID came from the thing in the wet market that Randy Marsh nailed, right?
One of the other things that Bryan is hitting on is the idea of self-perfection.
I get it, but it makes me doubly-jealous. First, there’s lots of things I think I’d like to do that my body just won’t cooperate with. Second, my will power is weak more often than I’d like.
Following a religion’s self-control teachings, however, is something that does help with the self-perfection.
You learn a lot about being a responsible adult from participating in something that taxes you both mentally and physically.
For some, that’s religion. For others, it’s serious sports training. For others, still, it’s things like joining the military. Whatever. You structure your thinking towards a certain cause, and it helps you.
Some people like this guy have embraced things like Orthodox Christianity. But, really, does it matter what it is? There’s a basic human need to do that sort of thing, whether it’s one of the Abrahamic religions, one of the Eastern religions, Scientology, whatever. I’m pretty well convinced that this is something that humans need.
That doesn’t fit well with either Atheism. It also doesn’t really fit in with Evangelical Agnosticism.
If you ever wish for something you’re, in a way, participating in some sort of mystical experience. Ever hold your breath watching the completion of a competition?
Late writing today, but it’s Saturday, so I feel like it’s what I’m supposed to do…..even if I did write yesterday.
So, what have I done already today?
I messed around, more, with figuring out the mess that is Mailman3. When I updated ^H, Mailman2 was deprecated. Getting things back up and running has been a real pain. This is even more true with a completely headless system. What to do, what to do…..
Switched away from Apple Podcasts. New player is PlayAPod. H/T Todd Moore. Apple really screwed up with the last update; the app takes about five minutes to load after being off for a while. Nope. Not doing that. But it’s a question of what I should subscribe to, mainly. Oh! I forgot that one. *search* Subscribe.
Fantasy Football. Sent pings to some folks who’d previously been in leagues prior to the disaster that was 2020. Not a disaster with the Fantasy season, but just with everything. If anyone is reading here, too, please send me an email if you’d like to join.
I still need to figure out the rest of my prompts for this summer’s writing period
I wasn’t feeling well last night, and decided to go ahead and try to take some of the copious leave I have.
So. What’s up.
Well, my left-handed comment last week to Brian McWilliams get a lot more punctuation. (Link to long, very disjointed Twitter thread…which will probably not work a few months after I initially write this entry. I periodically go back and delete all of my Tweets. Not because I regret many of them, but because things can come back and be misconstrued out-of-context). The discussion, however, did affect even my way of thinking about things.
Government does a couple of things well — breaking things, and killing people. Everywhere else, private industry does a better job.
If you knew of someone who needed immediate help with a problem, would calling some bureaucratic agency, or starting a Go Fund Me be more effective?
The host of the Peddling Fiction Podcast had a friend whose daughter was in the hospital with an unknown medical issue. Johny put out a request to listeners like me, and we gave money to support child and mom as they dealt with whatever the problem was/is.
Complicating matters, there, is that John, and his friend live overseas.
How long would it have taken to get things organized through government?
Much longer, I’m certain.
Would the money have gotten there with more taken off-the-top? Of course. That’s not a good thing.
People want to help. Paying a thug with a gun and a badge doesn’t increase generously.
But, back to the disagreement I was having with Brian, the way he was describing it is making the focus on the consumer when pitching Libertarianism.
No, that’s a pitch to a shrinking segment of the population. But that segment of the population, historically, seemed enormous, and the educators coming from that segment, focus on those like them.
Think Globally, Act Locally. Things will work out better than if you’re worried about what others are doing.
Maybe more tomorrow, but I should go do my daily stuff.
When you don’t really think that government is the answer to, well, much of anything, questions about whether you think your representative in the state capitol is doing a good job by pushing the government-enforced monopoly to lower prices.
“Has your impression of $Local_Democratic_Delegate improved because his effort to have electricity savings sent back to residents?
“No.”
“Has your impression of $Local_Democratic_Delegate improved because he’s trying to lower prescription drug prices for Medicare recepients?
“No.”
*confused silence*
Have a nice day!
Local communicatees should be handling electricity; maybe individual neighborhoods/developments/etc…
Why would increasing the amount of government influence over any of it raise my impression of a particular politician?
And this is what I call my last Saturday before going back to work….
But I’ll put in for the Monday after the Comedy show I’m seeing next month off. Even if it’s only in DC, I have leave I need to burn.
Monday (the Federal holiday for Independence Day, as the 4th actually fell on Sunday), I took the train down to see my mom. Overall, the trip went okay, though I did manage to lose my glasses on the trip back up.
Just now, I bought a replacement pair. $12.95. Yeah. I can deal with that even if I have to essentially throw them out when I finally get a replacement prescription.
But, largely, I didn’t do much of anything. I did get to Waffle House on Wednesday before I scrambled back to NoVA early to avoid the tropical storm.
I checked email when I got back on Wednesday night, then did some things on Thursday, but largely I’ve been off.
Am I re-energized, ready to get ack to the grind? *shrug*
Thankfully, the news has slacked off a bit this week.
Listening to this Podcast, there’s ads from Facebook advocating new Intertubes regulations.
So that they can make themselves bigger, more indispensable.
No. I am not in favor of anything that’d do that.
I need to figure out what my topics are going to be for my summer writing compulsion session.
Busy week. Lots of discussion about some of the things I heard towards the end of last week.
Still keeping my thumb on the pulse of the tumult with the LP, and becoming increasingly convinced that there’s lots of folks with exactly the wrong approach to well….just about everything.
That was definitely a left-handed compliment. You can find the sarcasm by clicking on MyProfile, and selecting Insight.
But the tweet speaks to the push on messaging. He was talking in the podcast about focusing messaging to individual personal benefits.
It’s all about you.
That is exactly the sort of messaging that was aimed at the Baby Boomers.
Lots of stuff swirling, and I’m looking forward to my “vacation” back to Tidewater after Independence Day.
I’m trying to remember the last time I had a vacation with nothing to do.
This won’t be one of those, unfortunately. I have a ton of old computing and electronics stuff that I need to clear out of my mom’s house as she prepares to finally move to somewhere more appropriate.
It will also give me an excuse to hit Waffle House.
I’m listening to this. One of my moments of clarity Friday was that the host should never be President. I haven’t heard anything, here, that is really moving me off of that position.
Paying a little attention to some of the internal LP things happening with what went on in New Hampshire. Obviously, I’m not a party member, but what happened is fascinating. And wrong. It was resolved last night, I think, but I’m having trouble following the proceedings. I didn’t watch the livestream of the meeting; I was watching the HR Geeks weekly Jitsi get-together.
Speaking of that, I upgraded the software on the VM where all of this runs. I broke the mailing lists. Again. So on my to-do list for the next few days is figuring out how to restore the lists. The list I’d set up for ^H (Sup, dawg?) really didn’t have any subscribers, but there were more on the HR Geeks list. GNU Mailman 2 is gone in the latest Linux distro I’m using, so I need to figure out what’s up in version 3. It appears that they’ve moved past the weird Python database. What I don’t know is whether it stores all of the messages inside the DB backend. If so, that’d actually probably not be a bad thing. When I was younger, I was very opposed to having anything stored in a database. I guess I didn’t really understand the benefits then. Maybe too much reading DJB‘s evangelism about the technical correctness of UFS
I’m headed back to Tidewater sometime soon. Primarily to do family stuff with my Mom. But it’s largely to get away from work for awhile. I’m not taking my work laptop. I’m going to be off. I’ve really not done that at all since probably 2012. So, spend some time with my mom and her mean little dog, maybe go to Waffle House.
Seeing some of the stuff out of the NFL minicamps last couple of weeks has been interesting. I’m wondering if with some of the connections I’ve made over the past few years I can actually fill it with people who actually want to play. I do need to tweak some of the settings again, but I am still committed to points-per-reception, and points-per-completion. Last year I was running something like four teams in the league to make sure we had enough people playing to sorta make the league work. Maybe I won’t need to do that this year.
Summer writing. I’m kind of inclined to do it this year, though it is feeding one of my obsessions. Maybe it’d be better to just do it in July instead of doing the strange month-landing-to-my-birthday thing. Dunno. Writing is an obsession for me, part of OCD, so I’m supposed to try to avoid it. But…
The telemedicine stuff that’s really given me a lot of flexibility over the pandemic isn’t working properly. I can do telemedicine to the doctors I see in DC, but I can’t do the same for my psychologist in Maryland. What the actual fuck? I could ride the WMATA short bus around the Beltway to see her, but that’d be very inconvenient while I’m still working. I hope that, despite that, the days of what I saw going on years ago. Maybe the idea is that you’ll have to join a union, and your health insurance will come through the union pre-tax. We’ll see.
But that’s enough for the day. My mug filled with Lorenzotti Coffee is empty, the podcast I’m listening to is about finished, so I should stop.
Theme of the Week 89 – Where is the most inspiring place you have ever been? Why was it inspiring?
I’ve been mulling this one for a while today as I burn PTO to deal with the new Federal Juneteenth holiday.
I think the only place that’s ever really inspired me lately is inspiration to leave.
I think my wayfaring childhood plays a big role in that. Maybe there’s certain keys that remind me of unpleasant places I’ve landed, but I’m trying to think of somewhere
I really don’t think anything would give me positive inspiration now due to my limited eyesight. Inspiration triggered by something aside from visual stimuli seems tough. The auditory stimulations, maybe, is a route, maybe.
But the visual things I saw before I could really appreciate them might have desensitized me to things I really should appreciate.now.
Similarly, I remember as a kid marveling at the USS Alabama on a car trip over Mobile Bay. After living for several years near the USS Wisconsin, when I saw it again, the awe was missing.
Now with my vision basically gone, I don’t know that there’s anything that’s really taken me in more than a decade.
So I don’t know.
Part of the reason I’m under professional psychological care is that I think about doing risky things, knowing that there won’t be anything enthralling that comes out of it.
Most of what I think about doing is generally harmless. The things that I think about doing could be dangerous. But I don’t do any of them.
