Still getting over the cold, don't feel like fighting. Mencken's comment about democracy has never been more apt. Nether has Churchill's.
If you don't know what they are, feel free to assume I'm making mock of you and/or whoever you voted for, and call me names in the comments, which I shall probably delete later. Or you could, you know, look that stuff up, since you have ready access to more knowledge than has ever been widely, immediately available to ordinary people in all of human history. Why waste it all on arguing with strangers?
In re the "ready knowledge at your fingertips": One way in which I am a bit of a crank and am feeling my age is how I tell students they have NO IDEA how easy it is now to verify/look up/find things compared to when I was in college, before we had the Web.
ReplyDeleteI regularly get people whining at me about how "hard" it is to find peer-reviewed articles. They have no flippin' idea. If I could shove them in a time machine and send them back to 1988, I would. Partly to get them out of 2017 me's hair.
- Random statement wishing you a good morning/day/afternoon/evening.
ReplyDelete- Comment disguised as a passive/aggressive question with the answer built in?
- Further statement augmenting point of initial non-question, indicating disbelief that anyone would disagree.
- Closing statement of never coming back, followed by fake sincerity of thanks.
How was that?
I understand your sense of not wanting to take part anymore, even in discussions with genuine friends (as opposed to us shadowy figures out on the 'Net). The work of the past 16 years, first with an "R" and then with a "D", of establishing our now-imperial presidency has led to far too much power concentrated in one place in the fed-gov, but no one wants to address that basic issue. It didn't use to matter quite so much who occupied the massa's big white house on the hill, but now it actually does, and has the capability to reach right down into our own little personal lives and trash us.
As one small example, if I had access to genuine catastrophic health insurance rather than the dot-gov-mandated pre-paid health care plans, I'd have retired. I want something where I pay all of my routine costs up-front, negotiating with my providers as I go, but with a deductible of, oh, I don't know, maybe $10,000. The insurance would kick in at 100% over that figure in the event of a major-medical (like cancer, or some major accident). But the insurance companies are limited by law to only the ones in my state, and are prohibited by current law from offering such policies.
I don't expect my car insurance to pay for oil changes and brake jobs, I expect them to cover me in the event of a real catastrophic problem like totaling my truck. I want the same thing from my health insurance. But the imperial presidencies, in conjunction with collusion from the usual suspects in Congress, have made this impossible.
I don't know how we're going to get out of this. The increasing polarization of the two wings of the DemoPublican party (the two wings of the vulture devouring the country) seems to only be adding to people not listening anything that doesn't meet their preconceived notions.
Thanks for being a beacon of rationality in an otherwise increasingly crazy world. Bear with us; we appreciate it.
If I may offer a suggestion, good lady, I would say that what might be needed is a break and a little downtime. We are all getting hammered 24/7 with political crap from all directions. I can't even call it info overload, because 92% of it doesn't even rise to the level of information.
ReplyDeleteTake a break. Shut off the noisy inputs, relax with a good book or some music. Go for a drive somewhere new. If you want to post, write about something technical, or hobby related. Skip the political scene, and ruthlessly delete the comments that try to drag you back into it.
Peace
Hope you get better. The other, not going there. It's not worth it.
ReplyDelete