The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible (Vladimir Nabokov)
I just needed to get something off my chest.
Since many of my fellow Caucasians often seem rather thick when the subject of racism is the topic of discussion, I thought I would take the time to “whitesplain” racism to the less observant among the melanin-challenged community.
Continue reading “A Brief Explanation and History of Racism by a Random White Guy”
“The Bible says marriage is between a man and a woman,” people like to regurgitate when they are attacking the concept of same-sex marriage. I could spend my time going over some of the fucked-up shit people believed about marriage in biblical times, and how marriage in those days was basically a transfer of property from father to husband. I won’t bother, because it doesn’t matter what the Bible says about marriage, or what people believe the bible says.
Continue reading “Keep Your Religious Hands Off Our Legal Marriage”
For those of you who are not aware of it, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a campaign that means to render the Electoral College impotent and irrelevant. The idea is that states agree to change their election laws with regards to how their electoral votes are awarded during a presidential election. Each state awards its electoral votes to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, regardless of the vote totals for that specific state. For example, if the Republican candidate were to have the most popular votes nationwide, then that candidate would receive California’s electoral votes, even if the Democrat won California. This system only goes into effect once there are enough states on board to give the popular vote winner 270 electoral votes and the election.
Don’t get me wrong, as I have said before, I think the Electoral College is the inflamed appendix of democracy, both useless and dangerous, so I absolutely sympathize with the NPV folks’ desire to short circuit it.
Unfortunately, I also think the National Popular Vote is a bad idea.
Continue reading “The National Popular Vote is the Bad Idea We Need Right Now”
So, I just voted, a full 10 days before the California primary. This was possible because Orange County, where I presently live, has radically overhauled their voting procedures for the better in 2020 and, I have to say, I have no idea why they don’t do it this way everywhere. Hopefully, this first time goes smoothly, and other jurisdictions around the country emulate what we are doing here.
Continue reading “My Home County Does Voting Right”
In an earlier post, I detailed my reasons for not embracing libertarianism. To me, the libertarian view of government is lost back in the eighteenth century and mistakenly conflates a popularly-elected democracy with a European aristocracy. Their mantra of “less government equals more freedom” is not merely unprovable, but also displays an overly simplistic faith in the free market as a “one size fits all” solution to every single problem.
It’s this faith-based appeal to the free market that brings me back to the subject of libertarianism.
Continue reading “Why I Am Not a Libertarian, Part Deux”
In 1985, Sting released “If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free,” the first single off his debut solo album, The Dream of the Blue Turtles, and immediately started take quantities of shit from the grammatically pedantic for using “them” as a singular pronoun. That was just lazy English, you see.
It’s now almost 2020, and in a society increasingly aware of and comfortable with the fluidity of gender, using “they” and “them” as singular pronouns is not only acceptable, it is often preferred.
I’m not ready to give Sting credit for being some kind of linguistic futurist, but what this evolution shows is quite simple. Artistry and creativity are more durable than pedantry.
In his 1980 cinematic debut, The Empire Strikes Back, the Jedi master and grammatically-challenged Fozzie Bear soundalike known as Yoda said that “anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side.”
Sorry, your greenness, but I’m going to call bullshit. Fuzzy-headed, hippie bullshit. That’s right. I’m sticking up for anger.
Continue reading “In Defense of Anger”
In the last week, we’ve had two early trailers hit for next summer’s highly anticipated movies: Wonder Woman 1984 and Ghostbusters Afterlife. These films kind of sit adjacent to issues that prove the internet has the collective intelligence of a very primitive fungus.
Continue reading “The Stranger Thing About That New Ghostbusters Movie”
In my previous post, I considered what might happen if Donald Trump failed to concede defeat should he lose his bid for re-election in November of 2020. How likely is such a scenario?
Continue reading “Will The Thing Leave?”
On his HBO show, Real Time, comedian Bill Maher has repeatedly asked his interview guests about the possibility that, should he lose his bid for re-election in 2020, Donald Trump might refuse to step down as President. By and large, his guests have tended to pooh-pooh the idea as alarmist or paranoid. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr assured Maher that there are institutions that would take care of such an eventuality and forcibly usher the vanquished former president out of the building.
I have to say, and this isn’t often the case, but I’m with Maher on this one, in that I don’t find such reassurances to be, well, reassuring. There may be institutions with that purpose, but exactly how much exercise have they gotten in the last 200-plus years? Is there really a playbook in case a defeated president refuses to relinquish power?
Continue reading “The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave?”