Oh hey, I’m mentioned in the New York Times.
The writer found this old blog post and then contacted me for a quote.
It’s cool that it was in print too. My dad even texted me (“Is this you???”).
Oh hey, I’m mentioned in the New York Times.
The writer found this old blog post and then contacted me for a quote.
It’s cool that it was in print too. My dad even texted me (“Is this you???”).
Before 2016 I had several chances to vote for one of the Clintons — including Hillary’s first senate run in New York — and did not. My reasons for never voting for a Clinton amounted to:
You see: reasons.
Now that I am older, I still think Bill is a scumbag and I’m glad I never voted for him.
But I voted for Hillary in the Texas primary and will vote — several times if I can get away with it! — for her in the general election in November.
I came to this decision after a bit of soul-searching and also because I want to avoid the apocalyptic hellscape of a Trump presidency.
“But what about Bernie?” no one has actually asked me.
Nowadays in my soft, middle years I have the bleedingest of bleeding hearts and my politics align pretty well with Bernie’s. (Except on guns, which I believe should be dropped into a volcano along with the Second Amendment.)
So…Bernie’s fine. I still voted for Hillary.
Yes, it was a pragmatic choice and not one I would have made when I was younger. Younger me would totally be on the Bernie train. Younger me hadn’t had his heart broken a half-dozen times by other can’t-win candidates. Younger me was also more of a misogynist. (Imagine if a rumpled old lady came onto the scene shouting exactly what Bernie shouts. We’d hold our noses at her old-person smell and she’d slouch off to eat cat food from the can.)
If I were a single-issue voter, climate change would be that issue. Climate change is the largest threat to our species and we are failing to do anything about it. It’s so much worse than most of us think. None of the candidates are talking about it enough; all of them will compromise with the oil industry if given the chance. We will continue digging up dinosaur fossils and lighting them on fire until it is too late.
But I would rather have Hillary in office making half-measures on climate change than see Trump reverse the scant progress that has been made. Worse: There is a non-trivial chance Trump would spark a nuclear war, rendering climate change moot. In other words, I’d rather our civilization die slowly than quickly. I want my kids have long lives with breathable air. (God help them if they breed.)
Why am I posting this? No one reads my blog or cares about my political opinion. There are pundits and essayists who are much more passionate and articulate about all of these issues.
I’m writing this because liberals like me tend to sit on the sidelines and assume everything will be okay; that in the end Americans aren’t suicidal enough to elect Trump. But history is full of characters like Trump who were called buffoons and whose rise to power caught people off-guard. I’m done sitting on the sidelines. If we Americans elect this fascist, at least I’m on record denouncing him.
Now… go vote for Hillary.
They used a lot of weird time signatures but no one noticed because the songs were pretty.
What if, instead of feeding free content to corporations like Twitter, we started blogging again?
I’ve been thinking of using this platform for microblogging–posting “tweets” here instead of on Twitter.
It’s difficult to shake the idea that blog posts are permanent and tweets ephemeral.
And admittedly I am hosting this on WordPress, not on my own host, and ads are part of the package.
This is my first post using the WordPress app on my phone. The tiny keyboard promotes brevity.
There is also the concern that on Twitter there is a chance of an audience. Here? Not so much.
Auto-posting from WordPress to Twitter is tacky, imo.
Uaing “imo” in a blog post felt wrong.
I still say blog “post” instead of just “blog.”
This concludes my twog of the day. I tried and failed to keep it under 140 characters.
I don’t often make New Year’s resolutions, at least not publicly, but this year I have a few. (Well, two.)
For me, for my experience, it’s better. I feel happier about the time I spend on Twitter, and it’s made me try to be more thoughtful, and more disciplined with other things I do in my time online.
I’m back to retweeting the occasional dude, but I’m much more mindful about the voices I amplify. In 2015 I will continue this mindfulness and expand it to include a broader range of diversity. I might have only 400 followers, but dammit, I care!
My fellow web people will relate to this one.
Several times in my career, someone, usually a senior marketing executive, has asked me whether we can collect the email addresses of everyone who visits the company website. Not “can you set up a form where users submit their email address?” but “does the website do this automatically?”
They were not thinking through the implications of this question. They were not considering that if we could do this, so could every other website, and therefore their email address had already been collected thousands of times.
It’s not that they’re dumb; they just wanted to know if we could send email to our site visitors. And to them, as with most people, technology is a black hole. No one knows how it works.
So, at least on a subconscious level, many people, if not most people, assume that their personal data is being constantly collected.
Which, it turns out, it is.