I Want My Country Back
We’ve heard conservatives saying “I want my country back” nowadays, a refrain begun soon after Obama took office, a cry marked by the fact that what they claim they lost never went away—except for what they won’t admit, that being a white or Republican president.
Well, you know what? I want my country back. The one I was born and raised in. Not in terms of which political party runs things or what race the president is, but the principles and ideals we were all taught were the foundations of our country.
I want back a country where torture is reviled, not a widely condoned or even a reluctantly accepted practice.
I want back a country where civil rights were things we gained, not lost.
I want back a country where you don’t have to half undress before getting on a plane, and we weren’t so willing to surrender our liberty for the flimsy perception of safety.
I want back a country where a strong education is universally seen as vital and desirable, and a college education does not break you financially.
I want back a country where if a politician says something so outrageously stupid or untrue that anyone could tell, that politician would be hounded out of office, not cheered. Or that most of the nation could actually tell.
I want back a country where the social priority was to fight poverty, not to pander to billionaires.
I want back a country where the press gives us news, not propaganda.
I want back a country where at least most people felt it was a good thing to sacrifice for the common good.
I want back a country where corporations are not people and money is not free speech.
I want back a country where unwieldily corporate conglomerates were broken up, not where entire markets—especially media—are dominated by fewer and fewer controlling entities.
I’m not saying we should have a perfect society or any other unreasonable expectation; I am not pining for a political or social ideal. I’m not asking for anything we never had but thought we did. These are all things that actually used to be real for us, but are gone now.
Can I have that back?
it all comes down to the bullshit, right?
a stupid people is one on the road to ruin.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-americans-support-war-against-iraq.aspx
~72% of this nation are nitwits.
most people here would kill 1,000 foreigners if it meant one American (that they actually cared about) was saved.
Civil rights for me and not for thee is the name of the game now.
http://www.calgunsfoundation.org/2014/11/federal-judge-rules-against-californias-bid-to-delay-end-of-gun-waiting-periods-for-some/
“Education” is a work of the debil.
“Sacrifice for the common good” sounds like communism to me. Got mine fuck you is a much more resonant philosophy these days.
But I do wonder how well the GOP’s “Job Creator” propaganda bullshit will work, or last on the electorate.
Next 2 years are going to be pretty bad, maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_House_2014.svg
in other news I broke down and got an iPad Air 2 last week, gonna finally retire my 2010 iPad.
This is the most absolutely perfect thing to take on a train commute and poking around in iOS 8 I’ve been amazed at this device’s potential as the end-all do-all computing appliance.
It’s got 3 billion transistors driving 3M pixels, 2.4X the pixel count of my 2008 MBP.
The 2GB of RAM really opens up the possibilities, too.
What is needed now is to refine and de-cruft all the API baggage Apple still has on the development side. Swift is a step in the right direction but is bringing its own complications.
I thought the original iPad was pretty cool but overall it (and iOSs 3.2, 4.x, 5.x) was a bit clunky.
iOS 8 is so much closer to my own design sensibilities, and provides a pretty good baseline of functionality — CloudKit, GameKit, StoreKit, SpriteKit, SceneKit — it’s really a cornucopia.
Problem is there’s simply too complex for anyone without years of programming experience to approach. I’d like to change that, somehow — Microsoft’s open-sourcing of its C# stuff might be the key for this lock.