The forecast went from "rain Monday morning, then cloudy all day" to "intermittently rainy all day Monday." So I'm lazing around in Mike's house, catching up on YouTube videos (my laptop, Mike's WiFi) and then moving on to Skillshare. Mike's coming home for lunch (his office isn't far from his home); this is apparently normal for him.
I had planned to walk the Dahlgren Railroad Heritage Trail for several hours today, but I guess I'll try that tomorrow. The forecast for tomorrow, as of right now, is for sunny and cool weather (52ºF, 11ºC). If this holds, I'll definitely head out early in the morning. LTE signal is dicey in this part of Virginia; if you're in Fredericksburg's more "urbanized" sections, it's not a problem, but once civilization starts to fade into suburbs and woods, LTE becomes spotty, which means my portable WiFi hotspot becomes unreliable. Knowing this, I Google Mapped the route out to the trail, which is twenty miles away from Mike's house, and sent the directions to myself to copy to my phone's notepad. So I've got the driving directions written down and accessible offline for old-school, GPS-free navigation.
So today is just a day of laziness. I watched "Tombstone" at Mike's behest last night; it had its good and bad points. I'll watch it again, since I have it on my Apple TV queue, once I'm back in Korea, after which I'll review it. Good God, so many reviews.
Given my introversion, and given that I'm islanded in the suburbs, I don't get to interact much with the unfamiliar hoi polloi of Stafford County. When I do find myself in public places or on line for a cash register, I haven't seen a single left-right screaming match yet. At least in this part of Virginia, from what I've seen, people seem civil. In the context of Mike's family, Mike and his wife lean differing degrees to the right while their kids apparently lean more to the left (I have to confirm this), but politics rarely comes up in conversation, and while I've witnessed plenty of minor quibbling and bickering, as happens in most families, there's been nothing acrimonious. Gee, it's almost as if tolerance could be the formula for living together peaceably! So, lefties: stop intolerantly getting in people's faces, trying to swipe someone else's MAGA hat (no, the hat didn't "make" you want to steal it; the Tesla didn't "make" you want to key or spray-paint it; it's shocking, I know, but you do have free will and moral responsibility), burning down parts of cities, putting swastikas on Teslas, calling heterosexual men bigots if they say they won't date trans women, etc. The right isn't racist or violent—that's you guys. The right just wants to be left alone, and we should all be free to do our own thing as long as we're abiding by the libertarian non-aggression principle. Your freedom ends at the tip of my nose, as they say (though it's more complicated than that, obviously).
I would say that there are plenty of tolerant people on both sides of the aisle, just as there are plenty of intolerant people on both sides of the aisle. No single side has a monopoly on either. The media from each side, though, will highlight the intolerance in order to paint the other side as nothing but bigots, leading people living in media bubbles to believe that their side are the angels and the other side are the demons. This is why I trust a pundit about as far as I can throw him/her/it.
ReplyDeleteI used to be a "pox on both their houses" cynic about politics in general, but when I saw the media campaign against Trump in 2016, the lies being told about his election prospects, and the constant lies ever since, I've become a lot more one-sided in my opinions. Even today, you have to go to alt-media sources, still not mainstream, for a more accurate view of news. The left loves to call the right violent and racist, for example, but the instances of violence and racism cited are merely opinions twisted and taken out of context. Meanwhile, who's keying and spray-painting the Teslas? Who's trying to grab hats off people's heads? Who's indoctrinating college students about the toxicity inherent in white maleness? All of that is coming from the left. (I'm not asking those questions from a place of rage, and if I do have any ire, it's certainly not directed at you!)
DeleteTo be clear, I also don't think the right is just an innocent victim in all of this. If the religious right is part of "the right" in general, then religious nuts who (1) think the earth is 6000 years old, or (2) believe that the Bible's vision of marriage is the only possible vision, or (3) argue that a woman's role should conform to millennia-old standards, or (4) that society would be so much better if only it embraced Jesus harder all have a lot to answer for.
But if, as I recently argued, politics is pendular, it's less about "a pox on both their houses" and more about focusing on which side is currently crazier. I freely grant that, during the Dubya years, the theocratic right—with its neocon, world-building project—was thoroughly unhinged. If Trump has done anything (and I've argued this a couple times as well), he's proved that Clinton-era policies and priorities were and are the right way to go. Trump has performed some impressive legerdemain in getting the current "MAGA right" to accept 90s-era Democrat thinking as the MAGA platform. Trump is basically a 90s-era Democrat, even now. So I'll say it: the old Democrats were largely right. A lot of today's righties have a hard time admitting that, and they'll twist and bend and squirm to say it ain't so, but it is. Trump is proving it every day by being anti-FTA, putting America first (the GOP were the globalists in the Dubya era), and being pro-worker in a way that the current Democrats aren't.
But today's left has pulled the Democrats, and liberals generally, way too far to the insane, Trump-deranged left, which is why I can't agree with moral equivalence, at least not on such a narrow timescale. Maybe when viewed over the course of decades, it all balances out somehow, but for the times we live in, I think it's clear that one side is currently saner than the other. My opinion, for what it's worth.