Putting the shoe on the other foot

Let’s play make-believe for a minute.

Pick a random country half way around the world; it’s not important who, exactly, but let’s just say Mongolia for the sake of argument. Now imagine that Mongolia has very poor relations with the United States, would like to see it’s government toppled, and influence the U.S. toward installing a more Mongolian-style government.

In order to accomplish this goal, Mongolia has started a program to arm, train and advise anti-government insurgents in the United States. Thanks to its good relations with Mexico, Mongolia has managed to traffic arms and troops across the southern border and set up bases for the rebel groups it supports in the desert of New Mexico. The anti-US rebels, with Mongolian special forces embedded among them in an advisory role, begin to carry out attacks against American troops and law enforcement. Eventually their area of control expands until the insurgents are occupying a significant amount of territory within the borders of the United States, from which they continue to attack Americans.

Eventually the U.S. government gets tired of this and launches a counter-attack against the insurgents. Thinking it would be a simple stand-up fight, the American troops are caught off guard when Mongolia launches air raids from bases in Mexico and repels the U.S. assault, killing scores of American soldiers in the process.

Mongolia then announces to the media that it has acted in self-defense, and that the Americans were being aggressive and provocative for attacking Mongolia’s special forces and it’s allies (on U.S. soil).

Would you believe that the US is the aggressor in this scenario? Would you agree that Mongolia acted in self-defense?

No fucking way.

Anyone in their right mind would reason that 1) Mongolia was openly acting in an attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government, 2) their special forces and proxies were occupying U.S. territory, and 3) the U.S. military was responding to attacks upon Americans and defending the sovereignty of the United States; therefore, the Mongolians were the aggressors and it was the U.S. that was acting in self-defense.

Now let’s switch things up. Suppose the actions are the same, but change “United States” to “Syria” and change “Mongolia” to “United States”.

So I ask again: why does the American (and Turkish, and Israeli, etc.) military get to invade Syria, train and arm rebels who aim to overthrow the government, carry out attacks on the Syrian army, occupy swathes of Syria and say that they’re off-limits to the country’s own government…and then claim self-defense when government forces respond to defend their sovereignty? It’s completely illogical and, frankly, fucking ridiculous.

The American military has no right to be in Syria.

It has no right to “defend” itself against the Syrian government, in Syria.

Invaders and occupiers do not have the right to claim “self-defense”.

The only reason ISIS even exists is that the U.S. and other anti-Syrian governments stoked an insurgency that could weaken the government’s authority, but was too weak to exercise any authority of its own, thus creating a power vacuum. Want ISIS to stay defeated? Leave Syria and let its government reassert its control over the country.

Plastic shopping bags are OK

I consider myself a pretty “green” dude. I’m an environmental engineer by trade and my job involves making companies reduce their pollution emissions. I chose this profession and particular position specifically because of my personal ideology. I’m very concerned that climate change is going to make life on our planet difficult for our descendants and is already making life on Earth impossible for some other species. I try to be conscientious about my personal choices and how they affect the ecosystem, and I’m very interested in ways that I can minimize my personal impacts. Naturally, I’ve signed on to a few petitions and I got an e-mail from Change.org suggesting one. But this one in particular I won’t be signing.

Because, honestly, I think that plastic shopping bags are fine and I don’t want them banned.

Carbon Footprint

It seems very counter-intuitive to most people, but plastic shopping bags have a lower global warming potential than reusable plastic or cotton fabric bags. We know that plastic bags are made from oil. And, all things being equal, an item that can be reused multiple times seems likely to be the more efficient use of the resources consumed than one that we use once and dispose of.

However, all things are not equal, and the input resources needed to make a single-use plastic shopping bag are much, much smaller than the input resources needed to make a reusable plastic or cotton shopping bag. The difference is so great that a person who uses single-use plastic bags probably has a lower “carbon footprint” from their grocery container choices than one who uses reusable bags.

In fact, the UK government conducted a life-cycle assessment which determined that you would have to re-use your reusable plastic shopping bag 11 times, or your cotton bag 131 (!!!) times just to break even for global warming potential. In my experience, those bags don’t typically hold up that long.

The truth is that it takes multiple times as many resources to manufacture a plastic bag that can be used multiple times. And a cotton bag requires all sorts of resources (including fossil fuels) to manufacture — planting, irrigation, harvesting, transport, processing, weaving into textiles, so on and so forth — that it’s simply not as efficient as using plastic. Better to use the cotton cloth for clothing.

Waste Disposal

This is the “gotcha”; if you’ve been following me this far, you might say “sure, but carbon footprint isn’t everything. Truckloads of plastic are being dumped into the ocean and are killing aquatic species. And anyway, I don’t like seeing plastic bags being blown around my neighborhood and getting stuck in trees.” And I agree. I have a simple solution, though.

Stop dumping plastic bags into the ocean. It’s pretty fucking easy.

How do the bags end up in the ocean, stuck in trees, etc.? Poor waste management practices. If your local waste collection utility is dumping its trash into the ocean instead of a proper landfill, there’s a Change.org petition you should be signing. There is also an additive to plastic shopping bags that can allow them to biodegrade with a negligible increase to global warming potential. So industry could be doing a lot to keep this waste from being mismanaged, and that’s a cause we could get behind.

But there is a simple choice that you can make to rule out all of those other possibilities, and that is to simply take your plastic shopping bags in to be recycled. Every grocery store I’ve ever been to has a bin at the entryway to return your used bags. Just take them back there to be recycled and viola, they’re not going to kill any sea turtles or get snagged in your bushes.

Of course, you have to remember to take them back. But if you switch to reusable bags, you’ve got to remember to take those as well. So it’s literally the same exact thing.

Yes, it seems intuitive that reusable shopping bags are more “green”; but depending on how you use them (and how you take care of your used single-use bags) the most likely aren’t. If you are more conscientious about taking your reusable shopping bags with you and getting maximum usage out of them, than you are about recycling your waste bags, maybe the best choice for you as an individual is to go with the reusable. But I would argue that most of us simply aren’t in that boat. Therefore, I don’t think reusable shopping bags are a net win for the earth mother.

Dire Straits

Ever since I was a wee little lad, there’s been a recurring piece of “breaking news” to the effect of “China does military thing, alarming Taiwan”. Of course China is presented as the aggressor who is picking on it’s much smaller neighbor, the country of Taiwan. And, the narrative goes, Taiwan is a US ally and we’ve pledged to support them, so if China were to follow through on attacking Taiwan, they would drag the US reluctantly into World War III. This is a compelling narrative if you don’t know a lot about the history of China during the 20th century.

In fact, “Taiwan” isn’t actually a thing, at least not as we like to think of it. Taiwan is officially called the Republic of China; “mainland” China is the People’s Republic of China. Both governments believe themselves to be the only rightful rulers of all of China. The cut-and-paste paragraph in news articles relates that China sees Taiwan as a “rebellious province”; you could also say that Taiwan sees the PRC as it’s 33 rebellious provinces.

During the 1940’s, China underwent a revolution that culminated when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic. By the early 1950’s the revolutionary period had died down and the PRC was effectively governing most of China, with one notable exception. The overthrown Republic of China government had set up a “temporary” capital in Taipei, Taiwan Province and continued to assert that they were the legitimate government of all of China. The ROC was all but defeated and confined to a small island, but the PRC lacked the ability to carry out an amphibious invasion and retake the final province that wasn’t under their control. Thus, the Chinese civil war ended in a stalemate that endures to this day.

It’s 2018, and the government of Taiwan — a tiny island — still presents itself as the legitimate ruler of the entire country of China. In fact, Taiwan held the Chinese seat at the United Nations (including the Security Council) until the world came to its senses and recognized that the PRC was the actual Chinese government and that the leftovers who were hanging on to one tiny island province could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered the legitimate rulers of the entire country. On the flip side, the PRC seems okay-ish with allowing Taiwan to govern itself autonomously while pretending that they’re not, as long as Taiwan doesn’t declare formal independence (although I think China could be justified in reasserting their authority over the island; it is historically a Chinese province, after all).

There is a point that I’m building toward with all of this history: considering the series of events that led up to the China-Taiwan standoff, it seems incredibly ridiculous that the United States has gone all-in on defending Taiwan and would get pulled into a war with China over it.

Taiwan is, historically, part of China. The Republic of China only continues to exist due to a historical/logistical anomaly. Their claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of China is ridiculous. The war is over and they lost. For the United States, a war with China would be a disaster; fighting them on their own turf would be catastrophic, as would the economic and diplomatic aftermath. Why would we go to war to defend a tiny fraction of a rump state that can’t accept the fact that they were defeated? We don’t have to go to war with China over Taiwan. We could just not do it.

There’s a lot of political games and history involved, but at the end of the day, I hope that if war breaks out between China and Taiwan, the United States will find a way to stay out of it. But with Tronald Dumpster at the helm, who even knows?

The prophecy fulfills itself

There’s such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belief that something is true, or the desire for it to be, can influence a person’s behavior in such a way to cause it to become true — even if it was originally false.

We’ve been hearing rumblings that the federal government may soon end public service forgiveness for federal student loans. This forgiveness is an incentive for college graduates to work for state, local and federal governments. In exchange, after 120 on-time and in-full student loan payments, the remaining balance of the student’s debt is forgiven.

Why get rid of this program? One could look at it as simple deficit-hawking: the government can’t afford to simply stop collecting this debt.

But looked at another way, we can see a self-fulfilling prophecy. For decades we’ve been bombarded with the dogma that the government can’t do anything right, and that (insert Congressman Whoever’s cousin’s contracting firm) could do any task the government could but better and cheaper. I reject this reasoning on both theoretical and anecdotal grounds, but that’s another blog post; the point is, the right wing in US politics believes this to be true regardless of whether or not it actually is.

This influences their behavior such that they tend to neglect, undermine, or put obstacles in the way of the “big” government, making it difficult to effectively operate. Many public service jobs involve doing real shit work and often (contrary to popular belief) pay substantially less than their private-sector equivalent jobs. There are likely to be a substantial amount of people who are willing to stick it out for a decade in order to get the monkey of student debt off of their back, and without that incentive, would bail. This would lead to higher turnover and more vacant positions that are harder to fill, increasing inefficiencies and hampering agencies’ abilities to do their job. And then the Paul Ryans of the world will say, “See? I told you the government can’t do anything right, and it’s actually getting worse.”

The thing is, going out of your way to make your prophecy fulfill itself doesn’t prove your point. It simply proves that you’re a malicious asshole who wants to screw people over for your own personal benefit. Not that we should expect anything less from the likes of Paul Ryan and Donald Trump.

Don’t do that

It’s almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit (above zero) in Anchorage, in early January, today. So this little tidbit that’s been on my mind for some time seems appropriate for me to vent.

Please don’t use this as “proof” that climate change is real.

You know when Donald Trump tweets shit like “oh man it’s cold in the Midwest in January, climate change must be fake lulz!” and he’s obviously an idiot for saying that? Yeah. Well when you say a warm day proves climate change is real, you’re kind of doing the same thing.

Climate change is real, but an occasional short-term deviation from the mean in any location doesn’t prove anything, one way or another. The temperature is going to regularly dip and spike below and above the mean, sometimes by a wide margin. But when we talk about climate change, we’re referring to long-term changes world-wide. Trying to take a snapshot in one moment at one place and extrapolate that to the entire globe over decades is ridiculous. It’s far too small of a sample size. That’s true no matter which side of the line an outlier falls upon.

So don’t be a reverse Donald Trump. I mean, you can still punch Nazis, but what I’m trying to say is that one warm day doesn’t prove climate change.

In it for the long haul

I’m nearly two months late to jump on this bandwagon, but I’m going to do it anyway. In recognition of the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution this year, a lot of people looked back on 20th century socialism and hypothesized about what went right, and what went wrong. What are the lessons we can glean from this experience as we move forward in the 21st century?

I think the most profound thought to strike me is: the pace of change is slow, and the struggle will be a protracted one.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” — V.I. Lenin

I think that a lot of the failures, shortcomings, or what have you, of Marxist-Leninist states during the 20th century occurred when the leaders of these societies made a faulty assumption: that the world was on the brink of revolution and at any moment, the capitalist house of cards would come tumbling down. They were, as we’ve seen, wrong.

In the days of the Bolshevik revolution and the following civil war, the leaders of Soviet Russia made many key decisions based on the assumption that the rest of Europe was on the brink of revolution. They believed that the more industrially developed countries on the continent would soon become soviet socialist states, given enough time, or if the new Red Army could only punch through eastern Europe and link up with them. This did not come to pass; the revolutions that did occur (except for those on Russia’s periphery) were put down and the Soviet Russia was left to fend for itself. The Central Powers forced humiliating terms upon them at Brest-Litvosk. Russia itself descended into famine and barbarism as the Reds struggled to feed and maintain morale within their own army, not to mention the population as a whole.

As unorthodox as it seems to some, Stalin’s eventual promotion of the concept of “Socialism in One Country” wasn’t wrong. It was an admission of reality: help was not coming and the newly-founded Soviet Union would have to stand on its own. The Soviets also saw the rise of fascism and predicted that another war was coming. The result was that, despite socialism theoretically promising a better quality of life and more freedom for the proletariat, working people would have to make do with less — at least for now. The Soviet Union would undergo a miraculous transformation from a war-ravaged, backward country into a modern industrial powerhouse; but the cost was famine, privation, and authoritarianism.

I think you can also see this pattern in other countries during other revolutionary waves during the 20th century — China under Mao, Che Guevara’s concept of the “new man” in Cuba, etc. The idea is that the revolution is coming, or is in progress, and that eventually socialism will bring prosperity and freedom, but for now everyone needs to knuckle down, throw themselves into the class struggle, and accept hardship in the present in exchange for greater benefits at some point down the road.

Here’s where I think that rationale breaks down: it’s been 100 years since the first Marxist-Leninist state was declared — a state, mind you, that no longer exists. While I still believe in the concept of the world revolution as ideally and theoretically valid, the notion of it being one big wave (or a series of waves) that sweep the globe is not valid. One need only to look briefly at the history of the last century to realize that the process of building socialism is slow and arduous, and that it’s not irreversible.

Further, while a hundred years is merely a blink of an eye compared to all of human history, to an individual it represents an entire human life. In practice, when socialist authorities have banked on the promise of future prosperity in exchange for present hardship, they’ve asked people to make sacrifices for a greater good that they would never live to see. It’s one thing to expect the generation who lived through and participated in a revolution to see the long game and have a sustainable ideological commitment to the cause, but it’s not realistic to expect their children’s children to have that same level of investment.

The point is this: 21st century socialist societies will have to be countries that people actually want to live in, now — not later. That’s why I think Khrushchev’s “thaw” and domestic policies (liberalization of the arts, raising material living standards to western levels, etc.) were largely correct. I think that the process of reform and opening up in China is intriguing and will possibly forge a new path in establishing a strong base from which to build socialism, without alienating its people. There are also a lot of changes occurring in Cuba; while some folks who have a dogmatic view of socialism (for or against) decry these changes as a “return to capitalism”, I see them as a creative way of building socialism that people actually want to live in that still fits within a Marxist-Leninist framework.

And yes, I do realize that 21st century Marxist-Leninist states did improve the material and often political living conditions of the proletariat; the fact that communists were improving people’s actual lives right now was the thing that converted me from an Anarchist to a Marxist in the first place. But I can’t look at what went down in Germany, Tiananmen Square, etc. in the late 80’s/early 90’s and hand-wave that all away as a conspiracy, mass delusion, or whatever. Obviously there were a lot of people that thought something was missing, and the fact that the communists couldn’t deliver led to disastrous counter-revolution.

Let’s be real. At the end of the day, people want nice things. Material things, or “consumer goods” you might call them. People want to be entertained. People don’t want to be thrown in the GULAG. We, as Marxist-Leninists, are materialists who strive toward communism — a state of prosperity and full emancipation of the proletariat. It would be contradictory of us to scorn people for wanting to be prosperous and free since that’s what we claim to be fighting for. Communists in the 21st century will have to “deliver the goods” — figuratively and literally — now, not at some indefinite point far down the road when we’ll all be dead and buried.

I believe in the world revolution, but I also believe that it will be slow, and full of decades where nothing happens. In the mean time, life goes on. Communists in the 21st century will have to be champions of enriching people’s lives, now, not long after they’re dead.

Crying wolf

There is a significantly sized, significantly obnoxious segment of the population who believes that the solution to gun violence is to have more guns, and that the second amendment means you can and should have any kind of weapon you want in any location at any time. I have a major problem with this. It’s not because I want to ban all guns. It’s not because being allowed to do a thing doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s appropriate, though I do believe that. It’s also not because a scenario in which there are too many “good guys with guns” is likely to turn into a circular firing squad and get a bunch more people killed, although I believe that as well.

It’s because this culture of “all guns, all places, at all times” is akin to crying wolf.

There was a time in my life where a person who was sitting at Taco Bell eating a Cheesy Gordita Crunch when a dude with a gun walked in, could reasonably infer that the place was going to get robbed and/or shot up and make an informed decision about the course of action to take (hide, run away, call the cops, get ready to fork over their wallet, etc.). It’s getting to the point now where you can’t do that anymore, because there are enough rubes out there who think that just because it’s their God-given ‘Murican Right to bring an AR-15 to the salad bar that they totally should bring an AR-15 to the salad bar. The natural assumption is no longer that someone is going to be threatened with the gun; we all just default to “this is some douche canoe trying to make a political statement, so I can just go about my business”. The problem is when you’re wrong and get shot in the face.

Imagine sitting in a college campus library, and you look out the window and see someone strolling across the parking lot with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. You might rightfully assume that this person was here to murder a bunch of people. You could call the cops, but the cops can’t do anything — open carry is now allowed on campus! The person with the gun is just a law-abiding “patriot” who isn’t breaking any rules or giving the cops a reason to hassle them. Until somebody actually gets shot, the police cannot deter the shooter. Never mind the fact that by then it’s too late.

“Gun Control” is a squishy subject. There’s this belief floating around that “the government” has some sort of a concrete, well-formulated plan that they would spring into action if the NRA and a handful of Republican congressman would just get out of the way. The fact is that there is no plan, and different people have vastly different ideas of what “gun control” might involve.

In my view, a good start would be if gun owners weren’t fucking idiots and handled their guns more responsibly, whether that needs to be mandated by law or just beating them with some common fucking sense. Keep your guns put away and secure. Don’t buy a bunch of stupid fucking toys that have no purpose other than 1) they’re “cool” and 2) make it easier to kill more people in a crowd. And for fuck’s sake, don’t carry your gun around with you every goddamn place you go as if everyone who sees it is going to think it means you have a huge dick. Just stop.

Nikki Haley’s epic pout-fest

This week, the US vetoed an otherwise-unanimous decision in the UN Security Council condemning Trump’s announcement to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. A General Assembly vote then followed, in which the final tally was 128-9 in favor of condemning Trump’s recognition. It was a pretty epic trouncing.

Trump’s representative at the UN, predictably, threw a giant fucking tissy fit like the whiny little baby she is.

Arguing that, because the US contributes financially to supporting the UN, they should (apparently) always get what they want because the customer is always right or something, and that this was all a big conspiracy to embarrass ‘Murica, the US would be “taking names” of the countries that voted for the resolution.

Yep. She’s going to take 128 names.

I’m sure the entire fucking world is shaking in its boots. 

I have some advice, Ms. Haley. Given how lopsided this vote was, maybe you should stop and honestly assess the implications. What I mean is…maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s you. It really could be possible that this was just a dumb fucking idea and no one else agrees with it, couldn’t it? So please, just stop. Stop embarrassing our country with this 7th grade bully “we’re taking names” nonsense and whiny “boo hoo hoo, you don’t agree with me and it hurts my feelings, I’m taking my ball and going home” bullshit. If you act like a fucking idiot and people call you out on it, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. Just stop digging this hole deeper. Stop humiliating us.

“Investing” is shitty for the economy; booze and women are better.

Recently, Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, summed up the GOP’s stance on why they should kill the estate tax:

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

But this raises some questions in my mind. Which is actually better — “investing”, or “booze and women”?

Grassley’s remarks fall on a moralistic concept of what’s good and bad. Obviously (in his opinion) “investing” is virtuous; booze and, I guess, women, are bad (Grassley’s misogyny is a topic for another blog post, but you might have caught his assumption that heterosexual females aren’t making meaningful economic decisions). And, apparently, the government should “recognize” the people who are supposedly virtuous. But I don’t really give a shit about whether what an individual does with their money is moral or not. I recognize the irony in the following statement, but I, a literal communist, and unlike the “small-government conservative” Grassley, don’t believe that the government should be using its tax policy as a means push a subjective moral agenda, but rather should be basing it on what’s good for the actual economy.

But what is “the economy” anyway? I looked it up in the Business Dictionary:

An entire network of producers, distributors, and consumers of goods and services in a local, regional, or national community.

So, that’s what the economy is — but what’s better for it? The estate tax as it is exempts the first $5.5 million in assets, so we are talking about people who have supposedly invested more than that amount. That’s a lot of money. What do we mean when we say “investing”? This isn’t the old days where you buy stock in a shipping company so that they can raise funds to buy a schooner and sail crates of cargo across the ocean to the New World. So what are these people doing with $5.5 million? Buying up real estate? Speculating? Putting it into some bizarro Wall Street instrument that takes money and magically turns it into more money?

None of this has anything to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. It’s just hoarding assets and doing some tricks to make the value of them appear larger than they were when you purchased them. The modern concept of “investing” is many steps removed from anybody doing any actual labor that results in a product or service. And, remember, we are talking about the estate tax which specifically applies to people who have amassed over $5.5 million in assets and just hung onto it until they died. For the most part, these people had no plans to return that money to the actual economy. Why is that supposedly virtuous?

Now consider, on the flip side, the person who spends “every darn penny”. I’m not advocating living completely paycheck to paycheck. I think everyone should have an emergency savings account, and have the ability to save up for long-term goals. But in both of those cases, the idea is that they will actually be spent, eventually. You’re going to buy that badass hot tub, or tap into your emergency account when your job moves to Honduras and you get laid off; I’m talking about saving money for an actual purpose. I’m not talking about amassing wealth like you’re trying to get the high score in a video game. I’m not talking about saving up several million dollars and just hoarding it until you die.

But that’s just me telling you not to be an idiot (and the current U.S. government has no problem promoting idiocy) with your money. It really has little to do with the economy. So if you really want to live hand to mouth, do you — it’s not my place, or the government’s place, to tell you not to. Because you know what’s great for the economy? Buying booze. The dollars you spend on booze filter through the people who work at the liquor store, drive the beer truck, work at the brewery, and so on. You know what else is great for the economy? Spending money on “women”. I don’t know if that means going out on a nice date, keeping a restaurant in business and putting tips in the wait staff’s pockets. Maybe it means that you solicit a prostitute or put some cash in a stripper’s thong, and she goes and pays her rent and feeds her kids. These are good things. You’re creating jobs. You’re putting money into goods, distribution, and services. You’re keeping the actual economy moving instead of just locking your money up in “investments”. 

This is a very Mickey Mouse level Marxist-Leninist analysis, but it doesn’t take a genius-caliber understanding of this shit to make the point. Government policy that favors “investors” over working-class consumers who actually produce and consume goods and services, and policies which accelerate the accumulation of resources on the “investor” end at the expense of working-class consumers, are bad for the economy. This is why capitalism is inherently unstable and unsustainable in the long-term. But people like Grassley fail to grasp this, because they’re so entranced by their Ayn Rand wet dreams to recognize plain fucking facts when they’re slapped in the face with them. They have to fall back on their moral-high-horse analysis where the government “recognizes” our supposed betters, because if we based our tax policy on what’s actually effective in the real world, that would pull the plug on their hoity toity Malthusian delusions and that would be a total bummer, man.

Losing Faith

Part of the narrative in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Tronald Dumpster has been that Russia “hacked” the election. This whole thing just makes me frustrated with my fellow humans.

Not because I have some sort of affinity for Russia; I think Putin’s a douche canoe and wouldn’t put interference past him. Not because I roll my eyes so hard they get stuck in the back of my head every time I hear the word “hack”, defined as “finding a way to obtain a desired result”, in a context that involves absolutely no actual hacking. Not because the United States government routinely interferes in elections around the world without batting an eye, meaning it’s kind of childish for Americans to get all uppity when someone does it to them.

I’m frustrated with my fellow humans because we fucking fell for it.

Russia didn’t literally hack into the voting rolls and change the ballot count. They selectively released (dis)information in a biased manner to influence voters against Clinton and toward Trump. Sure, they had an ulterior motive, but at the end of the day all they did is present information to us. We had to choose what to do with that information. And we chose to elect Donald Fucking Trump President of the United States of America despite the fact that there is absolutely no fucking reasonable circumstances where that could ever, ever be the correct choice. 

Everyone wants to blame Russia for Clinton’s loss, but it is not Russia’s fault that we are a country of fucking idiots. Kudos to them for recognizing that we are dumb as shit and using that to their advantage by getting us to elect the worst President ever. Well played, Russia.

Fast forward to the recent election for Alabama’s vacant Senate seat in which Democrat Doug Jones narrowly beat Roy “I like to fuck 14 year olds” Moore, the Republican candidate. Let me be very clear: Roy Moore is a fucking pedophile. And he barely lost. Why was the election so close? How did a sexual predator of literal children almost win? Because white people are fucking garbage.

I am saying this as a white person, to my fellow white people: seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? We were presented with the option of voting for a pedophile — a fucking pedophile — and we took the ball and ran with that fucker as long and as hard as we could. We voted for that molester allllll day long. We had the chance to show our support for an old man that wants to have sex with little girls and we slam fucking dunked it.

I just don’t know what to say at this point. We can go on and on trying to explain this shit away but at the end of the day, we are individuals with ostensibly functioning brains and “free will”. The information is presented to us and we are entrusted with the power of thinking carefully, considering things from all perspectives, and making the best decision given the resources available to us. And we keep fucking it up like a bunch of fucking dumb asses. 

Some days I just want to give up.