The Obvious Connection Between My Miata and the Zombie Army

As I've mulled over my previous posting, "The Greatest Lesson Ever Taught", it occurs to me (and I just added as a postscript) that the fact that people can be thwarted by trivial impediment is surely related to the fact that most people do nothing.

My posting last year, titled "Filtering the Zombie Army", read, in part:

Most people do nothing. If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee.

You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.

I'm not saying they're lazy. I'm not saying they're liars or deadbeats. Just that they do nothing. Most people do nothing. I think of them as the Zombie Army.
....

The practical upshot - the thing you can count on - is this: the thing you want them to do is the thing they won't do. Even if they'd like to. Even if they really meant it when they claimed to be spunkily "all in". Most will do nothing.

The Greatest Lesson Ever Taught

You should be charged $145,000 to read the following. I'm not even kidding. It teaches virtually everything you need to know about interface, web design, consumer behavior, and customer friction; the stuff that really matters in commercial enterprise.


Earlier this year I bought a cover for my second car, an old Miata, to keep the birds from crapping all over it. It takes just one minute to easily uncover the car, and another minute to easily replace the cover after I get home.

I have not driven the car once since.


See also "Filtering the Zombie Army"

Past and Future

Talking to someone plagued with guilt over a past action, worried he'll never overcome it:


What do you suppose it will feel like to be you in the future? Try to envision how Future You will feel. Even just 20 seconds in the future! Will the future feel different? Will it feel tangibly futuristic?

Ok, and...we're there! I'm now speaking to Future You! The curtain has pulled back and here he is! So, how does it feel? Futuristic in any way? No? Same old feeling, just like always? Super-familiarly “now”, even though you're Future Man?

Let's try another. What did it feel like to be in the past? Try to remember who you were when we began this conversation. You're recalling through the gauze of memory, so Past You doesn't feel quite real; he's a bit of a ghost. Well, in 20 seconds I'm going to ask you to look back and remember this. So take stock! Do you feel ghostly?

And....20 seconds have passed. We're there! So look back. Who was that person? How did the ghostliness get in? How did the reality drain out? Is there truth to any of that? Can you directly remember it feeling like “now” then, or is the recollection more of a photocopy of the real thing? If it feels like a photocopy now, did it feel at all that way then?

Collate all this information and ponder it (if, like me, you're someone with enough curiosity to constantly reexamine the obvious). The future, looking forward, seems alien. The past, looking backward, seems ghostly, drained of real Now feeling. But actual experience never varies. It's always totally Now. It's never not now. Unquestionably Now-ish always and forever. No one has ever experienced past or future, so they’re not real. They’re intellectual constructs. What's real is right now. And now. And now. Here you are. And here you are. And here you are.

That being true, it means we always start fresh. Every moment starts fresh, with infinite potential.


See also "Baking Fresh Every Time"

The Club™

A business proposal not just for one venue, but a chain of them. This would be a mashup of a coffeeshop, a country club, a craft beer bar, and a buying coop.


People pay something like $2000/year to be in The Club™ (not quite luxury, and plenty of value offered for the price. Comparables: Amazon Prime and airline lounge clubs).

The Club™ offers:

• A quiet reading room, way more comfortable than a coffeeshop. Great wifi.
• A bar.
• A cozy screening room with an impressive library of Blu-Ray movies. Reserve a slot to play your choice, and the schedule gets publicly posted so others can join if interested, with discussion afterwards (plus less formal followup in bar).
• A small store selling, at near cost, items normally marked way up (batteries, phone chargers and cables, etc.).
• Fun member events...quality stuff (good lectures by interesting people - draw from membership if possible - badminton and backgammon tournaments, etc).

Coffee, drinks, and light snacks are priced only moderately above cost (bartenders are strict about not serving intoxicated people). Perhaps price rises at peak times, or when occupancy rises above X level.

Beer, wine, and snacks are super well-chosen. Seating is super comfortable. Bartenders are super friendly. The film library is super thoughtful. It's all super clean and super well-run. Elite in terms of quality, not hollow status/luxury (strict quality-mindedness attracts quality members; that's how Chowhound attracted such a great, friendly, expert crowd).

No live music performances in the screening room, because local music almost always sucks, and The Club™ is all about quality.

One-time visit fee $75. Guest fee $35. 

Employees are trained to encourage introductions and friendly interaction, particularly between dissimilar members, engendering this as core The Club™ culture. Members pick this up and do likewise for new members. Social structures are far more adaptive to modeling than people realize.

Rules are strictly enforced. Members can be kicked out (and refunded). Management weeds diligently to ensure a more attractive garden (another facet of the quality-mindedness).

I'm assuming Slog readers don't need to be explained that people need a place to go besides home and work, and current choices are not quite satisfying. Also, the digital age paradoxically makes us crave personal connection and social affiliation more than ever. Yes, British clubs are fading, but the need remains, and could be served by updating the concept and sucking out the musty stodginess.

I have no idea if the numbers could work, but, if not, there's surely a way to add on one or more revenue centers without losing the overall feeling of generosity. Just for one thing, if quality-minded members are attracted, that would be akin to the Chowhound audience, so my never-implemented marketing strategy might apply. As I wrote here:

Chowhounds' appreciation of quality obviously extends beyond food. Nutjobs who trek 75 miles for slightly better muffins don't watch whichever crappy movie is on at the multiplex, and they don't buy uncomfortable socks just because they're on sale at Kmart. They don't purchase lackluster bicycles or radios, and their music collections are full of people who can really sing. These are discerning and diligent consumers, mega brand-loyal folks who not only appreciate quality, but pretty much live for it...and evangelize it!

Companies with truly good products and services would love to connect with such consumers - consumers to whom they can pitch intelligently and on-the-merits. Companies like Virgin, Apple, Aveda, Saturn, Patagonia, and anyone with a particularly high-quality, high-value product - especially the new-and-exciting - could count on chowhounds to take interest, to early-adopt, and to spread word with ferocious passion. Where else can one find an audience so precisely tuned for that? It's a rare occurence, because such people, like cats, resist being gathered.

Would club members likely roll their eyes at a demo of new Tesla or Apple tech? Would they ignore really interesting and intelligent pitches re: genuinely cool things before film screenings, and on wall-mounted monitors?


While I'm not expert re: physical plant issues, I'd imagine you could repurpose franchises out of defunct hotels, gyms, etc.

Forgiveness

Addressing the remaining stragglers (per the intro here, the Slog's perceptual framing jag has thrilled most readers into a walking ovation) - more specifically, the three of you actually pondering the framing issue - here's an enlightening question to ask yourself:

How hard is it to forgive?

If your answer is "not so hard!", great! But play with the slider. Consider worse behavior and more toxic people. Dig deeper into your dark memory. Is there a point where you must acknowledge that, gulp, yeah, sure, that person might be a little harder to forgive?

Thousands of words can be encapsulated into one counterintuitive - yet undeniable - observation. And let me insist in advance that I'm right. You'll know I'm right, deep down. So the exasperated "WTF" you're about to experience is the sensation of your assumptions scraping against the truth. Ok, here goes. Brace positions, everyone!

Forgiving the most egregious people is just as easy as flipping to the other view here:

It's that easy. It's always been that easy.

There are reasons people become who they are and do what they do. Genetic reasons. Psychological damage reasons. Inability to handle fear or anger or other impulses. More than anything: frozen perspective. It doesn’t have to do with you. Nothing anyone does really has much to do with you. People are strapped tightly into their private cinematic experience, and you’re a mere blip on their screen. They don’t talk to you so much as to the “you” in their heads: an avatar; a caricature; a two-dimensional cartoon with your name attached, like a voodoo doll. Unlike them, you’re not locked mercilessly into a movie. You’re free to reframe. You have psychic room to forgive....in less than the blink of an eye. You can forgive the best, the worst, the whole damn lot, just like that! Forgive the thoughtless slights and the brutal clobbers. They know not what they do. You can do it right this instant, preferably with feeling. It'd be infinitely more useful than reading further!

I don't like citations in general (if your point isn't persuasive on its own, corroboration from some authority won't convince me much), and I'm even less into biblical citations (as I once explained, talk of "god" strikes me as the worst sort of name dropping). But I'll just throw in one more: Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you and persecute you. It's not about dry saintly self-denial; quite the contrary, it's about asserting control over your world via a framing choice; a shift of perspective - a perceptual flip - out of ugly bondage and into beauteous freedom; out of Hell and into Heaven (this is how to “be the change” you’d like to see on the world. Someone must go first!). It’s the most gleefully libertine pivot one can make; more tequila and Corvettes than hair shirts and nun habits. More Bugs Bunny than Joan of Arc. You can reframe this most puzzling of biblical injunctions as being entirely about framing!

It's probably best to think about the above for a while (perhaps a long while) before reading on. Maybe actually try it. Playfully, like a child teaching herself to wiggle her ears.

Forgiveness and humor are two of the easiest manners of reframing. Both feel great and leave you unburdened (what gets us down in this life can always be traced back to a frozen perspective - inner choice, not outer outcome). Yet some people are too stuck to participate in humor (or at least they draw a line beyond which things are definitely not funny), while forgiveness is downright rare. Many of us are too stuck to forgive much of anything, ever.

Yet both can occur in a fraction of a nano-second (less, actually; unlike cognitive thought, reframing happens instantly, which seems to indicate it happens beyond the physical universe...but that's a whole other issue). The mental effort required is precisely zero. We may have convinced ourselves that it's hard, but, again, the only resistance is our own needlessly frozen perspective.

I once forgave the world utterly in a chain reaction that became all-encompassing...and have never been the same. This reframing is as effortlessly and instantaneously available as any other flip of perspective. Easy peasy! We have infinite options. We just forget.

If you prefer not to forgive - if you don't want to feel great and recognize that you have a great life in a great world - that's perfectly okay. We're not all blue pill people; most of us choose to go along with the foggy dream logic. And that choice makes sense, given that we're all here to immerse in a movie; to pretend to have highly dramatic experiences within overarching stories. It's understandable to not want the show interrupted. A kid banging away on his Game Boy™ would rather not be tapped on the shoulder and reminded "it's just a game!" But just remember: you do have a choice. And it is very, very not "hard".

Nth Attempt to Remind Everyone We're in Utopia

The following partial list of Utopian improvements we enjoy here in the future previously appeared in a posting from earlier this year. It was buried under a slew of tweets I'd embedded by Tom Nichols, who trollishly enjoys challenging perpetually outraged people on Twitter to reframe perspective and recognize the Utopia they're in. He’s especially savage with people who insist things are getting worse. 

Nichols does this better than I do (so I'd urge you to read the posting above and to follow him on Twitter), but the list I came up with was pretty good, so I've rerun it below. Note that I took a more wordy approach to the issue in a recent posting, "Did You Miss the Part About How We're in Utopia??". And I once took the time to explain why people don't want to be in Utopia, which explains why many of us deem this Utopia a hellscape. Things seem worse as things get better because we've lost all perspective, and the recognition of this stems from clear thinking, not mindless optimism.


Cars never stall (i.e. they “just work”), don’t need to be warmed up, are almost never broken into, and last twice as long.

No gross haze of leaded fuel fumes and cigarette smoke.

It’s vanishingly unlikely you’ll ever be punched in the mouth, even if you’re an insufferable asshole.

Most people are anti-war, whereas that was once a weirdo minority with a semi-derogatory title: “pacifists” (when was the last time you even heard the term?).

The experience of “getting lost” feels like a freaky, outrageous edge case. I used to spend as much time dealing with being lost as I did trying to hunt down facts at the library or looking for a payphone (or for change for the payphone).

Television is a vast portal of endless rich inspiration.

Nobody gets headaches anymore (since bottled water). We were absolutely plagued with them before (I don't mean migraines).

Food that’s better than basic nourishment for under $$$, and waiters who don’t scowl if you’re not wearing expensive shoes.

Sushi; spicy food; espresso and lattes; organics; and authentic Thai, Mexican, and Chinese.

All human knowledge, media, products, and music plus infinite free worldwide communication on a slab of glass in your pocket.

Nice wood floors; not always crappy synthetic carpeting everywhere.

Gun Safety Laws, Mass Shootings, and the Iraq Invasion

I'm re-upping this posting from October, 2015.


I enjoy the challenge of trying to explain the right to the left (I'm myself near the center - a pox on both their houses, etc. - which gives me some perspective). Here are my previous efforts at right-whispering (this one is a good start).

I hate guns. All they've ever done is maim my loved ones. But I've lived in urban and suburban areas, where they're not part of a legitimate culture. If it were up to me, we'd melt them all down, but I recognize (and am apparently rare in the recognizance) that we share the country with other cultures and values, which deserve consideration and compromise.

Whenever these mass shootings happen, many people, understandably, advocate for tighter gun control. But the more intelligent, less emotional voices on the other side make good points:

1. There is nearly one firearm for every man, woman, and child in the US. So "lots of guns" is a given for the foreseeable future. It's politically unfeasible (not to mention unconstitutional) to take firearms away from their lawful owners; so any proposal hinging on the need to meaningfully reduce guns is daft. If the mass shooting problem is to be addressed, it must be done with the assumption of a landscape flush with guns as a given, whether we like it or not. That's not a right wing talking point; it's common sense.

2. The crazies will always find access to guns. We can try to tighten their access a bit (mostly to the inconvenience of non-crazies), but crazy people tend to be, if nothing else, persistent. And further stigmatizing and segregating the mentally ill would be no solution (who among us, for one thing, is completely mentally well 24/7?).

3. I'm no expert, but I gather that current gun-control/safety proposals would likely have prevented scant few of the mass-shootings we've seen in recent years. This point seems well-conceded by pragmatic voices on the left.

To me, that last one is pretty convincing. Since it's already unlawful to kill innocents with guns, further legislation needs to be very smart. Or else it can simply fulfill a kneejerk desire to "do something". But good government oughtn't work that way, and, alas, no one claims to have the smart answer. Leaders shouldn't simply flail, even amid horror.

Let me be clear: every single gun safety law I've heard about makes abundant good sense to me. I'd love to see them all implemented! The gun trade is horrendously under-regulated, and most Americans are sane enough to recognize that we need to tighten them. But none of them would prevent the shootings we're seeing. These solutions wouldn't fix the problem.

That's why the right is outraged by seemingly common sense proposals. Remember after 9/11, when neoconservatives seized the opportunity to invade Iraq, a long-time to-do item for them - for reasons completely unrelated to 9/11? And do you remember how the rest of us screamed our heads off about exploiting tragedy to pursue unrelated political aims? That's how the right feels when liberals renew pushing for gun control (always on their to-do list) after these tragedies, when those laws wouldn't prevent these sorts of tragedies any more than Saddam's demise would have prevented 9/11. It's not that they're against gun safety. It's that they've spotted the misdirection, and it gets their backs up.


Another thing to remember: anytime you hear astronomical statistics on American gun violence cited by the left, know there's a catch. Suicide accounts for way more than half of it - though it's seldom noted by gun-control advocates. So it's not just the right who bugger statistics and blur fact. Dissemblance makes people mistrustful, and mistrust explains why sane conservatives, otherwise inclined to gun safety laws, push back so hard against them.

Software Problems, Gastric Reflux, and the Cult of Eschewing Blueberry Yogurt

If there's a replicable problem with some software, no problem! You write to the developer, reporting that when you hit the button while pressing the key the duck's supposed to quack, but...no quack. The developer tries it himself, and is able to replicate your replicable problem. The bug is squashed, and presto. All fixed!

But some problems are intermittent. You search for a reliable trigger, and the developer struggles to determine the source, but it's all maddeningly unpredictable. Essentially random! Over time, a few dozen, or hundred, or thousand, or million people come to share your anguish, all searching for a cause and a workaround. This can persist for years, even decades.

As a wonky Mac nerd, I've watched this scenario unfold in online forums hundreds of times. The exact same patterns predictably appear each time.

There are the moralists. They, themselves, are not experiencing the problem, which clearly means the others have only themselves to blame. They're morons who are using their computers wrong. Right-users are just fine.

Then there are the drones who offer the same mindless, rote bundle of suggestions for any unexplainable problem. It makes them feel/seem smart, and hey, it might help (this mindless scattershot approach is like asking everyone in a bar to sleep with you on the odd chance someone says yes). Repair permissions! Zap the parameter ram! Reinstall your system software! Clean your keyboard with a Q-Tip and isopropyl alcohol! Folks take the day off from work to diligently work down the list, and not once in the history of computing has it ever fixed a widely-experienced intermittent problem.

Eventually religions form. Human minds cannot tolerate randomness. We resourcefully find some sort of order in even the most staticky white noise. This is what humans do; what we've evolved for (among other things, it makes conspiracy theories attractive). We need to know, and if we don't know, and can't know, we'll concoct some flimsy explanation and make ourselves believe it, religiously, even if the theory keeps disproving itself.

Someone announces that they've finally found The Answer. If you press the button seven times, turn up the volume then turn it back down again, fluff your pillows and eat a danish, then restart your computer twice in 17 second intervals, that seems to work!

Others will follow these arcane instructions and, praise cheeses, find blessed relief. Why? Because intermittent problems are intermittent, which means literally anything you do seems to fix it. Thus a cult is formed, and, like any incipient religious movement, it will reflexively disregard contrary evidence. Yes, the problem came back, but I might not have waited exactly 17 seconds. Also, it's raining. Anyway, it's better now, but there's some other x-factor we haven't quite pinned down.

Meanwhile, other religions arise, offering various incantations and mythologies. Leff's Law of Intermittent Software Problems: the moment when the most people are the most confused is inevitably the moment of the greatest unflinching certainty that it's all been pinned down (non-coincidentally, this is also Leff’s Law of Religion).

---

Gastric reflux is notoriously hard to pin down. Droning doctors will hand you a long list of things to try doing (and to not do). The scattershot approach. No one in the history of reflux has ever been fully fixed by following these rules. Meanwhile, moralists who don't have reflux will tell you (however politely) that you're fat and slovenly and eat poorly; that you're an alcoholic and a general moral failure.

As you dive into online discussion, you'll find a rich array of religious cults built around reflux. You may even create one yourself! "I've figured it out!" you'll at some point announce. "Blueberry yogurt! That's the problem! When I eat blueberry yogurt, I get reflux, and when I don't, I'm fine!"

Lots of problems here. First, "always" getting reflux means it happened twice (three times, tops). And since you don't eat blueberry yogurt all the time, and don't get reflux all the time, odds are high that on any given day you won't eat blueberry yogurt and you won't get reflux, giving a false impression of success. What's more, you're not factoring in all the times in the past when you've eaten blueberry yogurt without a problem. That's not a tabulation you've been running all these years because it's not super interesting. I've probably scratched my left ear twelve million times without triggering a migraine.

Here's how you really get roped in: Amid the vastness of the Internet and its infinite typing monkeys, you'll discover 4 or 5 or 26 fellow travelers who also believe that blueberry yogurt is the answer. Sweet corroboration! This evidence locks in your conclusion, and a new congregation has formed: the cult of eschewing blueberry yogurt.

Faith will soon be tested. On some days without blueberry yogurt, you'll still get reflux (but NOT AS OFTEN!!!!). On some days without reflux, you will have eaten blueberry yogurt (a FLUKE!!!! There's also an X-FACTOR!!!!). These results would challenge the faith of non-believers, but you are fervid, standing by your conclusion while acknowledging that the problem is subtle and multi-faceted. However: you're making progress in sussing out the full truth!

The intermittence of the problem has sucked you in. It's like a reverse slot machine that pays out continuously and briefly stops once in a while. No matter what you do, you'll feel smart - you're doing it right! - most of the time. Each new move feels like it's working, while every queasy bout feels like some nagging x-factor you've not quite closed in on.

In a bullish market, day traders feel like geniuses, because the overall rising market proves every move wise. But markets always dip!

Progress seems to be made. Most of the time you feel good! Hard-won insight like the blueberry yogurt revelation has helped a lot! If you’d made even a cursory effort to track and log your condition - nobody does! - you'd observe that the outcome has always been more or less constant. Nonetheless, we're getting on top of this thing. We're all considerably above average.


Intermittent problems are the big peril with refurbished tech. Easily detected, well-understood problems will generally be addressed, but items may be returned due to intermittent issues, and there's no protocol for checking/fixing them because they're inherently hard to detect (much less repair). Of course buying new is also a risk, but I'd imagine that returned items turned around via refurbishing tend to have a greater frequency of such issues.

Motive

I recently sent a pep talk to a grieving friend, but he took it the wrong way.

I replied:

It may seem like I imagine myself to be preaching from a position of imaginary superiority. But that’s 180 degrees wrong.

I imagine myself beaten, bloodied and sprawled on the tarmac, but finding, to my shock, my equanimity perfectly intact. This makes me the prophet of blithe failure, of worse-case scenario, compelled to deliver to those consumed by comparatively trivial injury the good news of what’s actually possible (i.e. freedom and delight despite the cinematic appearance of things and the neurotic compulsion to judge the current moment by what's missing). If I can coax you into occupying my perspective and feeling reassured for even a moment, the disquieting course which tempered this equanimity will have been worth it!

Over the past year, I’ve come to realize that it all boils down to a vanishingly tiny magic trick that I hadn't realized others don't recognize as perpetually available: the ability to lithely reframe. By simply remembering that you can always shift perspective (even while fraught or furious), the prevailing drama loses its grip, revealing stress and suffering to be self-induced and strictly optional.

Bona fide problems are exceedingly rare. When they occur, they're immediately acted upon in the moment. If someone ran into your room right now shooting a rifle, you wouldn’t think about it. You'd dive under the furniture without stopping to weave it into your perennially lousy luck or any of the other pain points you've been mentally curating. Real problems needn't metastasize into burdensome stories.

Bemused Bullshitting Colorful Characters Are Not the Enemy (though shouldn't be president)

For previous efforts to explain seemingly inexplicable right-wing behavior (a centrist can explain much better than partisans can!), see postings labeled "right whispering", including this one drawing an interesting connection between left and right hypocrisy on guns and abortions.


Check out this 45 second video:

Donald Trump’s new FEMA administrator. Because Florida. pic.twitter.com/ktMk8fKk2l

— Billy Corben (@BillyCorben)

I know this guy. Not this specific guy, but guys like him. I myself am a guy like him. He makes me feel comfortable.

What he's saying is utter bullshit, obviously. But notice his sardonic grin and deliberately doofy body english. He knows he's riffing colorfully. I mean, he's leaning into it, making himself believe it, but he's 75% grinning and bullshitting....while the rest of Twitter judges and scolds like craggy schoolmarms. Bunch of tight-assed colorless killjoys.

He's being "a character", and thank goodness for characters. I don't want to live in a society composed entirely of smoothed-out corp-bots. Guys like him add color to this giant collaborative art work we're all engaged in here on this planet. More power to him.

That said, I don't want him to be president.

Not because he's dumb (I don't think he's dumb), and not because he's full of shit (I do think he's full of shit), but because he's not qualified. Thing is, I'm positive he's deadly rational and pragmatic and even superior when it comes to inventorying warehouses or installing dry wall or running a small business, or whatever he did in Beantown before moving to Florida. There's stuff he's super good at, but with other stuff, he's a bit loopy. Just like you and me! Reader, would you care to riff on-camera about pork belly futures or geosynchronous orbits or the history of talcum powder production? And try to be entertaining and provocative? Give me 45 secs on those topics, and let's see how you do! You'll sound like him.

Predictably, Twitter is calling him a dimwit, a fool, and much worse. They don't recognize that he is just like them - competent in his area of competency, but a bemused riffer on all else. He knows stuff you and I don't. He just has a different bundle of know-how. The world works because we're all specialists in our bundle. It's a feature, not a bug.

But if he were to feel the brunt of the Twitter tsunami of harsh condescension, he'd surely brew up some reciprocal loathing. Bemused bullshit would condense into seething ire. And condescension-fueled seething ire is at the route of our current socio-political predicament. I hang out in rural Texas a lot. I like it there. And the question I'm most often asked is "do people in New York really hate country people like us?" (I recount one such recent conversation here). If you're a liberal urbanite who feels disliked and disrespected by your red state counterparts, consider how you think/talk about them!

Much as I like this guy, and am this guy, I don't want him to be president, because it's not his key competency. But in 2016 a bemused bullshit character snuck into that office as a fluke; a performative protest against an unlikeable seemingly inevitable victor. Horrible for the country, for sure, but, hey, that's how democracy works; all elements get a shot. And the bemused bullshitting characters who bemusedly voted for one of their own (I'm not talking about the rabid cultists) have since developed seething ire at our merciless condescension re: them and their choice - their sacred franchise to do as they wish with, even flippantly.

Thus bemusement condenses and eyes blind to the calamitous results of a bemused electoral choice. "Hey let's shake the dice" curdles into "Seriously, fuck y'all" after a couple years of being screeched at and deemed racist monsters. Folks unsurprisingly don't enjoy that. It makes them stick more tenaciously with their bemused bullshitting choice. They make themselves really believe in it. Loopy colorful bemusement easily hardens into "fuck y'all" dead seriousness.

This, I believe, describes and explains the lifecycle of this predicament. Or at least reframes it (and the more we reframe, the more clearly we see and understand, so I make it my task to endlessly seek out and try on alternate perspectives).


BTW, If you could read through that without concluding that I assume him to be a Trump voter (fwiw I have no idea), that places you in the top 99th percentile of reading comprehension. Humanity has seemingly lost the ability to parse parallel comparisons.