In this Twitter thread. It’s pointless to try to argue policy with Trumpist true believers so long as they remain true believers.
Instead, I would suggest focusing on reaching out to the unmotivated who sat by and allowed Trump to take power because they didn’t care enough about either side. Then there’s those who were simply too disgusted by both sides to vote for either. On that latter subset of voters: in a world where, as Marx observed, “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them,” why wouldn’t they be?
Also, focus on the disenchanted; some (not all, you can not count on it being all or even most) Trump voters will, after enough pain, start to question their decision and can be peeled off from his base. We’re already starting to see that with some capitalists and farmers getting queasy about the trade wars Trump is starting.
But there’s going to be true believers that stay true believers. Heck, there’s still Hitler and Stalin fans out there, who believe their idols have been massively unfairly treated by the opinions of a misinformed public. Trying to convert such people with facts and logic is mostly a wasted effort.
From the standpoint of many Never Trump conservatives it’s politically incorrect to point this out, but there really is not an quantum gap between Trump and the Republican Party from the era of Nixon onwards.
It’s been a party built on lies and bigotry, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to Reagan’s lies about welfare queens driving Cadillacs (no evidence of such a person existed), to Bush the Younger’s lies about Iraq and his acolytes’ expressions of love for myth and contempt for truth, and their dislike for the rule of law.
Trump is merely more crude and blatant (and thus, in a sense, more fundamentally honest) about his fascistic principles; that’s all. For more details, see this Twitter thread.
It didn’t go as badly as the norm for such things, and they are desperate to hire new talent, so there’s a chance that I will get an offer. But only a chance, and not much of one at that. The effort to get out of tech work must continue unabated.
The effort must continue unabated even if I do land an offer, because past experience indicates such a result will be at best only a temporary solution to the permanent mismatch between me and where the tech world is today.
At least I got a lunch at an upscale restaurant and a free notebook (with paper that doesn’t bleed with fountain pen ink at that) out of the day’s efforts, so they weren’t a total waste no matter the outcome.
The above picture was taken by me last week in Lillooet, BC. There were several large patches of yellow flowers by the road, easily enough to get my attention as a passenger. Their size and color indicated they were probably cactus flowers. I alerted the driver so we could go back, stop, and admire them.
Many are surprised to learn there is wild cactus growing in Canada; my fellow companions on that trip were amongst the surprised. Many are equally or more surprised to learn that the same species also grows wild in western Washington, in the most rain-shadowed areas of the Olympic Mountains. Here is a patch I saw near Sequim earlier this spring:
Opuntia fragilis growing near Sequim.
It shouldn’t really be a surprise that cacti are found in either Lillooet or Sequim, as both locations are rain-shadowed. Lillooet in particular is known for being a dry spot, and being well inland often has just the sort of hot, dry summer conditions that cacti love. Plants don’t care about our preconceived biases or political boundaries; they grow wherever the environment is suitable for them.
The winters aren’t hot or dry, but this species is one of the hardiest and most northerly of cacti. It grows as far north as the Peace River Valley in northeastern BC, a region that can see temperatures colder than -40˚ in the winter.
Its common and scientific names point to how its pads easily become detached from the mother plant, their thorns embedding themselves in the fur, clothing, or skin of unwitting creatures that brush against them. When removed and discarded, they root and create new plants. In this trait, this prickly pear acts more like a cholla. That’s not a huge surprise, as the chollas (genus Cylindropuntia) and prickly pears are very closely related; for many years both were even lumped into the same genus.
Some of my own Opuntia fragilis are getting ready to bloom. I may be interested in plants, but unlike most who are, I’m not very good at gardening. This cactus was the answer to my question: “What could I plant in those window boxes (preferably a native plant) that I wouldn’t kill by forgetting to water or being away and not able to water?”
Those window boxes in question face south and are beneath eaves that serve to keep most rainfall out of them, the perfect micro-habitat for a sun-loving rain shadow plant like this. It felt a little odd dumping the nice potting soil out of them and replacing it with the gravely glacial till (of which I have plenty in my yard) that our local populations of this cactus prefer.
I’m heading into the city for another job interview. We’ll see how well it works out. I would like to say I am cautiously optimistic but honestly I am not. This is not pessimism; it is realism. Everything I have learned in the last few years points to:
Overall trends in the computing industry running precisely counter to my own personal needs for a work environment, and
Persistent ageism, coupled with how I am not getting younger as the years pass, leading me to being rejected based on appearance alone.
At this stage, job interviews are something I am doing on a non-interference basis to the pursuit of other strategies for financially supporting myself. If I do manage to get lucky and land a job, experience has shown it will prove to be temporary anyhow, and extremely unlikely to last longer than a few years. It will be a means of kicking the can down the road and buying some time for me to complete the difficult process of securing a good alternate strategy to conventional tech work, nothing more.
My iPad decided to randomly demand all sorts of security information (which I don’t have committed to memory and never will, because I have better things to memorize than random bits of data like that). Worse yet, it then decided to demand I boot one of my Macs (which of course I didn’t have with me at the time) to complete the process of allowing me to use it again.
I think this is Apple’s way of punishing me for attempting to use the Internet while in Canada, which they seem to regard as a sign of fraud and theft because (gasp!) it’s a foreign country. Well, yes it is, but Apple should take a look at the fucking map some time: it’s as big a deal for someone to travel from Seattle to Kamloops, BC as it is for someone to travel from Chicago to the Upper Peninsula.
An iPad is a smaller and lighter than a full-featured computer, which makes it significantly more portable than a full-featured computer, which in turn means it is likely to be the device someone takes with them on a trip, while leaving larger and bulkier computing devices behind at home. Therefore it is unrealistic to demand someone follow the process of booting and using another of his computers to re-enable an arbitrarily disabled iPad. This is so obvious that it feels somewhat painful to have to type it.
All of which serves to reinforce the idea that it will be a cold day in Hades before I ever get a smartphone stupidphone. Why would I want a phone that randomly decides to brick itself while I am on a trip?
