There's not enough bitching

[Kaldrak]

I think I'm becoming an ideologue...and I have no idea if I should try to prevent it or not.

[Anastasia]

How so, Kaldrak? What's gotten you there?

[Kaldrak]

How so, Kaldrak? What's gotten you there?

You really want to know? Okay, long post incoming.

For most of my life I've been almost completely apolitical. I didn't really care who was in the White House or which party was in the majority in congress or the senate. I was peripherally aware of who was the president and actively avoided reading the news most of the time. I figured that life was depressing enough without reading a bunch of shit that was only going to make me feel worse about everything. And then...then about two years ago I started watching comedians in an attempt to battle my chronic depression. Most of them weren't political pundits, but one of them....

Yeah, I started watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart right near the end of his run. It was like magic, I swear. He was hilarious, but more than that, he informed me of so many things that I had no idea were really going on. I looked up the information I watched on the show and started reading two Newspapers every day. USA Today and the Washington Post. This was right when the presidential primaries were starting to heat up in the summer of 2015. God, I STILL can't believe how long that shit campaign ran for. Almost year and a half before the actual election? Madness....

This has been one of the worst experiences of my life, honestly. Becoming politically aware during one of the most divisive presidential campaigns we've ever had? And I suddenly realized I was a liberal? Ye gods. I was raised getting spoonfed right wing conservative ideals from my church every weekend. Ridding myself of the right wing programming has taken years and shaken my faith until it almost broke, but here I am, unsure of almost everything except what I HATE.

Anyway, that whole 'election' thing happened and I realized that I was in an ideological bubble. I said to myself, 'they must not see him the way I do, or else no one would've voted for him.' So I tried to find out what the other side believes. Tried to understand. I entered the conservative ideological bubble online and looked around. It's...alien there. Some mix of libertarianism/conservatism and what I can only call worship of capitalism. Whatever religion they profess to believe in, it is Christianity in name only. How can people who so loudly claim to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, proclaim greed for the sake of greed as righteous, holy, and inviolable? Of course, they don't say this, but it's the end result of what they do, so it really doesn't matter at all what they say.

And the seething hatred directed towards the Left and liberals in particular seems endless. No one wants to reach out to the other side and I feel like I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. On the Left you have the Social Justice Warriors who refuse to allow opposing opinions and who condemn everyone who challenges them as racist and bigoted. On the Right you have a legion of people who loudly support Republican politicians who seem to me to be an almost comical level of mustache twirling evil.

The contempt burns.

And the president? The president is a goddamn Captain Planet villain. Other than my unhappiness with his personality and character, there's almost no issue that I agree with Trump on, or, for that matter, almost any other Republican politician today. He's not really doing anything all that strange. It's a standard Right Wing agenda that will boost the rich and squeeze the poor and middle class, just like Republican presidents in the past, leading back to the insane idea that 'trickle down economics' somehow works and benefits the poor in some goddamn way.

So...so here I am. I can agree with no man or woman on the other side with the little 'R' next to their name. Which...I have to figure is how some of them got to be where they are, only with the side's flipped.

Fuck me, this sucks.

[Yuthirin]

The collective will of the USA has stated that they don't want a politician in charge of the nation. Now we're finding out what that means! The good news is that this probably will never happen again, and that we've only got like 3.75 more years of it.

[Dracos]

Did it really?  meh, I don't like it here but we added another to the rare collection of those that won more of the vote and lost the election anyway.  An event that's only happened twice in the last 20+ elections, both in my lifetime and both to the same group.  Oddly enough it's a group that was founded a couple hundred years ago precisely because that happened (Andrew Jackson having had that basically happen there).

Either way, most people don't vote on principle, though we'll all lie about it.  We vote on Team.  The team that those around us vote for and that our parents voted for for the most part.  The team that reached out and gave a first good impression and villainized the other.  We vote on stories of monsters, we keep crooks in charge, we politely entertain folks that screw people over.  The US of today is a pretty Tribal place.

But most of the time that doesn't matter.  I mean excepting those who want to show off really repugnant beliefs and when really monsterous political action happens...we're largely resilient against massive changes and most people can be perfectly friendly, good natured, polite, and funny while voting for other team.

Sure, many of 'em like living in an echo chamber.  Internet is great for that.  But outside of a few tens of thousands of rabid animals, most are quite civilized.  So why think of them as monsters?  They're neighbors.  And most the time, they really aren't all that bad.

[Kaldrak]

My problem isn't really with the voters, though you're probably right about them. It's with the politicians.

Anyway, I'm done ranting. Talk with you all later.

[Anastasia]

Yeah, that's fairly heavy stuff and I've been debating how to reply to it.

Best advice I can give you is to hang in there and talk to people. It's better to relate to others than bottling it all up.

[Kaldrak]

Thanks. Sorry for all the politics.

[Dracos]

Got tired of Firefox getting stally lately.  Something they probably screwed up in the last dozen updates or so but it has always had the problem.  It's also been piece by piece destroying features that I like that chrome doesn't have.

Trying chrome again, which uses 3-4 times as much memory, but so far doesn't pull a 'hey, I know we're running on a massively powerful hardware, but we're gonna have framerate problems showing a youtube video while we sputter around 2 GB of ram'.

[Yuthirin]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASTRESS

[Anastasia]

Yeah, firefox has been having issues for me lately, but I don't like changing browsers.

[Jason_Miao]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASTRESS

I think about you as a person, writing this, and feel a great deal of sympathy for you.
I think about your avatar saying this, and think it's freaking hilarious.

I'm so conflicted.

[Kaldrak]

I appear to have contracted strep throat.

My last week has sucked majorly.

[Rukatin]

Alright. I have been in the process of getting my own car, and was lucky enough to have my older brother give me his old one.
Unfortunately it had a myriad of problems. I had to pay 800 to get a fuel pump to the engine fixed, and it ran fine for a couple of days.
But just now when I tried to take it out to go to work, it started swerving all over the place. I got out and took a look, and both the front wheels were pointed inwards. The turning do-hickey that kept the wheels aligned broke. More money to spend.

[Rukatin]

And now the fucking transmission broke.