On Last Week’s Incident in the Capitol

It isn’t often that I write a long, detailed opinion piece, but I feel like this time in particular is a time in which it is my patriotic duty to speak up.

Sometime late in 2019, I remember coming across an op-ed by a political commentator whose name I cannot remember.  This opinion piece highlighted the growth of extreme movements within the United States - namely AntiFa and The Proud Boys and related groups on both sides of the political spectrum - and how they’d become more bold in their violence in recent years.  It then dug back into the kind of messaging that was being boosted by Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies on social media during the 2016 election - and in this piece, the author discussed something that is often overlooked:  the social media messaging portion of Russia’s efforts during that election weren’t focused on boosting a single candidate’s campaign or even with reaching on side of the political aisle.  The messages they were boosting were, across the board, pushing rhetoric to inflame and provoke the extreme elements of both sides of our political divide and to widen that gap.  The author finished the op-ed by offering his analysis that these efforts had been effective, and that our country was in the process of being torn apart by divisive and hateful rhetoric - that Americans had been turned against Americans, and that this was going to have a destructive effect on our democracy. 

I remember reading that op-ed and being skeptical.  Sure, things had reached a fever pitch in 2016, but in 2019 it seemed like everything was calming down.  The economy was doing alright, there hadn’t been as much chaos or violence in the news, and the doomsday of Americans turning on each other over political differences seemed far-fetched.  I came away thinking that the Russians’ efforts to divide us had been in vain, and that our country was past the pains of that particularly fraught period.  We would elect someone other than Trump in 2020, and our troubles would pass.

I didn’t have 2020 vision.  I didn’t forsee the economy tanking due to a virus, streets erupting in protests over racial disparities once again, AntiFa and Anarchist elements openly looting and rioting in the unrest, and then, following a chaotic election, Trump’s supporters taking to the streets and getting violent, and then eventually descending on the capitol, fully invested in a conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged.  I didn’t forsee QAnon getting an outsize following and inserting themselves into this whole storyline.  I didn’t forsee a large portion of our society swallowing an outright lie about election fraud and refusing to believe that our democratic system worked.  I didn’t forsee any of this, and I feel like I’ve awakened in the midst of a national nightmare.  

Put simply, the situation is dire.  The potential consequences are dire.  Our nation’s population has large factions that actively believe that their opponents are *Un*-American.  The diehard Trump supporters believe that Democrats do not have the best interests of the country at heart, and most Democrats (and most Independents that aren’t leaning right) believe that Trump supporters are fascists, Nazis, traitors, and bigots.  The political rhetoric coming from both the White House and from those with large media followings has stoked these tensions and gotten them to where they are today - with a little help from Russian Social Media operations way back in 2016, which seems like a distant memory now. 

Making matters worse, these factions seem to have adopted separate realities with separate sets of facts- in one reality, the election was rigged: Covid-19 was either fake or not a serious threat: there’s a cabal of pedophiles orchestrating our government, and some guy named Q is an inside guy telling us the truth when the media won’t; Trump is either not a racist, or is only as racist as their lovely grandparents and their grandparents can’t be *that* bad.   In the other reality, the election was thoroughly secured, had a verifiable paper trail, and has been investigated to death -- and Joe Biden won by a large margin; Covid had the capacity to overwhelm hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths if we didn’t take the proposed measures seriously; A Pedophile ring running our government is as patently ridiculous as the day is long; And Q is an obvious bullshitter who moves the goalposts every time his predictions and ‘insights’ fall flat; and finally, that Donald Trump is demonstrably racist and bigoted. 

Working on these separate sets of facts, both of these factions have come to believe that the other is everything wrong with their country - that their opponents (including everyday working-class people who support their opponents) are not patriots, are against what America stands for, and are worth lashing out at violently in the streets. 

These factions aren’t leaving with Trump, and they proved it in the Capitol last week.  They threatened for weeks to unleash violence on the Capitol.  They posted detailed plans about how they were going to intimidate our representatives - our elected voice in Congress - with violence, well in advance.  They repeatedly used phrases on social media before the attack, and shouted these kinds of phrases during the attack:  “We will not go quietly”  - phrases that all but indicated that they weren’t done just because pesky Democracy had denied their candidate a victory.  

What, then, is our course as a country as Trump leaves office in a couple of short weeks?  How will our leaders unite us?  Personally, after much reflection, I believe our elected leaders do have a duty to attempt to unite us - or to at least refrain from provoking these tensions - but I believe the real duty is upon all of us. 

It is incumbent upon all of us to remember that our fellow Americans are not our enemies - they are our neighbors, and most of us all share the same kinds problems and burdens in life.  We all look to some political philosophy that tries to meet these challenges and address them, and seek political leaders who espouse these pet philosophies.  If someone’s going through the same struggles as you and has a different idea of how to fix those problems for his or her country, they are not your enemy.  Sure, certain things aren’t up for good-natured debate - racism, xenophobia, and bigotry can be excluded.  But we should be able to discuss our problems as a country with our neighbors, and discuss differing ideas of how to solve them, without descending into vitriol and animosity.  We should be able to understand each other.  I feel that the only way to fix that is to make the effort to reach out and talk to those we disagree with.  I have neighbors, family members, and coworkers who hold vastly different political ideologies from me, and for too long, when I hear them discussing politics, I shy away from joining the conversation, because I feel like I’d be inviting that kind of vitriol and bickering into my life.  It can be uncomfortable and awkward to arrive at that stage of a conversation, where someone things you a radical leftist or a bigot simply because you dared to offer a slightly differing opinion from theirs.  Social media amplifies this, because that’s the kind of response it has conditioned us to expect - the kind of response that would come from anonymous shitpostsers on the other side of a keyboard.  But I’ve found that when I do, in good faith, step in and have those difficult conversations - and really have a conversation, rather then try to insert my opinion over their - when I sit down and listen to my friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors tell me about their issues and what they care about politically, and I then carefully consider their ideas and offer my own - I’ve found that experience vastly rewarding.  I’ve found myself able to identify with people who I’d otherwise completely disagree with, and I’ve even found that those conversations can end with a mutual understanding and even a slight change of heart on one side or the other, or simply a mutual respect.  It turns out, we’re all (the vast majority of us) interested in seeing our country and all of its people flourish and thrive, safe and secure, and passing on a better country to the next generation of Americans. 

Therefore I’m making an effort to get out of my shell and have those awkward conversations again.  We’ve all allowed ourselves to wallow in echo chambers, neither exposing ourselves to differing opinions or exposing our opinions to others.  This pandemic, combined with social media’s tendency to be a “build-your-own-echo-chamber” kit, has amplified this in 2020.  But in 2021, let’s all resolve to have those difficult conversations and to really listen to each other.  If you do it for no other reason, do it to save our Republic from being destroyed from within. 

I’ll finish this opinion piece with a quote you may be familiar with, one that I heard repeated on the radio recently and that has resounded infinitely with my soul in recent days: 

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature”

-- Abraham Lincoln

That is from Lincoln’s inaugural address in 1861.  We, as a country, failed to listen to Lincoln then.  The Civil War occurred, and it took our country centuries to recover.  You might argue that it was necessary to eradicate the institution of slavery and that slavery, as an institution, could not have been eradicated as quickly without the civil war.  I will not disagree.  But I will disagree on the idea that a coming civil war is necessary or beneficial - if we come to that point now, History will remember us as violent and shortsighted fools who destroyed their country, the global bastion of liberty and human rights, from the inside out.

When we recall the past, we usually find that it is the simplest things - not the great occasions - that in retrospect give off the greatest glow of happiness

Bob Hope (via delta-breezes)

Someone has put my most burdening existential crisis into words here. Wow.

there are too many versions of me in the universe! the girl i bumped into but didn’t stop to say sorry to has a version of me in her mind. the guy i let borrow my homework has another version of me in his. even my friends, my family, and everyone i’ve ever met in my life has their own version of me in their minds that i’m not even aware of

Magic is not so much something which you do occasionally behind closed doors or in the space behind your closed eyes, but a way of living your life—a way of approaching the world you move through and everything in it.

—Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine

A word

Andy Rooney @pinterest

#truthbomb

I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild an want it back.

Mary Oliver

Learning Guitar (for the Nth time)

Dug the old acoustic guitar out of storage and tuned it up. I've been practicing for a couple of weeks now and I've already made more progress learning than I did in my previous attempts at learning guitar. What's more is, I've found a local music shop that offers guitar lessons. Hopefully learning guitar will help me with songwriting. Who knows, I might actually put some music out into the world someday...

Something weird might just be something familiar viewed from a different angle.

Marceline’s Mom, Adventure Time

Success!

It took a lot less time than I thought to get that JS+jQuery+JSON solution mentioned in my last blog post to work.  My next steps will be to build up the website around that script.  The website will incorporate three blogs:

This one, for my thoughts, opinions, and basic microblogging and announcements.

One dedicated to my lyrics (hadenodom-lyrics, which was just created and doesn’t have any posts yet)

One dedicated to my stories and fiction/prose writing (hadenodom-stories, also doesn’t have any posts yet)

That’s basically going to be my site.  These three blogs, plus a page with social media links and such.

I’ll also need to create a post page, so you can click the header of any post and view it on the site.  The page will need meta tags for search engine visibility, and will need to display it as though it’s content on the site, without a tumblr frame or anything.  It’s doable, but for now I’m going to focus on the site as a whole, and drill down to this function once everything else is built up. 

The Third Post:  Using Javascript, jQuery, and JSON to Pull Down a Tumblr Blog’s Contents

That’s today’s experiment.  Using a Gist I found on Github (here: https://gist.github.com/interstateone/6744507), I’ll be trying to pull down the raw html of posts from my blog and insert them into a webpage.

I haven’t played with javascript in quite some time, have very little knowledge of jQuery, and next-to-no knowledge of JSON, so this might be a wild ride.  I hope I learn something about JSON, because it seems to be used everywhere (pretty much every major website API seems to lean on it, and it seems very useful), yet none of the curriculum in any of the programming courses I’ve attended has ever taught it.

Anyways, I’m mainly telling y’all about it because I need a third post on my blog to properly test it.  This is that third post. 

Why do I need a third post?  Well, the thing is currently only pulling and displaying one post.  I inspected the JSON content being pulled down, and it contains one post as well, so it’s not a parsing error.  I’m hoping it’s an off-by-one error, that it’ll display two posts now that three posts exist, and I can adjust something minor like “i” to “i+1″ to correct it.  Pro-tip for all you beginner programmers out there:  if your script is supposed to return two objects, but only returns one, add a third object to the mix.  If the script still returns one object, then your script isn’t counting objects at all, and will always return one object.  If your script goes to returning two out of the three objects (or three out of four, four out of five, etc), then you’ve got an off-by-one error and you need to trace out how your script is counting and iterating through objects.  Usually, the fix is as simple as changing:

    i = 1

to

    i = 0

The Plan for My Domain

Since I’ve decided to stop using GoDaddy hosting, I’ve went absolutely mad comparing hosts and have decided to use AWS.

Part of it is because of practical reasons, like having scalability, saving on hosting, and the wide array of services and tools available on the platform.  The other part is, I get to learn AWS.

As of today, I’ve created an AWS account, stood up an instance with “Amazon Linux”, installed a basic LAMP stack on it, and successfully tested hosting a basic phpinfo page from it.

Next steps are to build a simple, functional website with basic info about myself, a blog (probably this blog, but embedded in the site), and a simple portfolio.  Then, I’ll upload it to my AWS instance and point my domain to said AWS instance.

I won’t be using AWS just for this site, though.  I’m planning to transition to using NextCloud for my personal document storage solution, hosting everything from records in an encrypted format to my eBook library.  I’ll also be using a NextCloud plugin to offer web-based document editing as a replacement for Google Docs.

The only thing I won’t be using AWS for is hosting an email server.  I tried using an email address tied to my domain name and administering it myself before, and *never again*.  You can’t, as a self-hoster, beat the reliability, spam filtering, uptime, etc that an experienced tech company can offer you.