Tag: elections

Maybe you’re wondering, probably not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I haven’t said a word, at least in this space, about the current New York Times-driven media frenzy to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There are a couple of reasons for that; you can probably predict most of them without me saying anything.

  • I can’t do anything about it and I have enough fucking stress in my life right now;
  • I find the entire thing hideously, insanely, diabolically stupid;
  • The people calling for Biden’s ouster fall into one of two categories: media-aligned chaos agents, by and large who should be lined up against a wall and shot, and frustrated Bernie types who still think the DNC somehow used their magical election-fixing powers and forced millions of fucking people to vote for Biden. The former are actively for Trump (the NYT never gets another dime from me) and the latter will not be satisfied with anyone the Democrats replace Biden with anyway;
  • Not one in ten of these people have actually thought through how complicated it would be to replace Biden with anyone other than Kamala Harris, and again, the people who have been calling Harris “Copala” for the last six years, again, are still gonna be mad. Fuck ’em.

There’s been some horseshit about Parkinson’s disease lately; there is no way that the legislation Biden signed this week about Parkinson’s disease could have resulted in Parkinson’s experts showing up at the White House, right? Nah.

Ultimately I will literally vote for Biden’s corpse, or Harris, or Bernie fucking Sanders, or a cold pile of bloody vomit in November, whatever is running against Trump. I give no fucks. President Cold Pile of Bloody Vomit will be an adequate replacement. I don’t have the mental energy to war-game this out; it’s the exact same bullshit as But Her Emails or Kerry’s Purple Hearts or Obama being from fucking Kenya. The news media has to have a big lie for every Democratic president. Ultimately, I’m gonna vote for the old guy with the stutter, even if he gets sick a couple more times between now and the election, and anyone who doesn’t want to do that can literally die in a fire for all I care, and that’s all the fuck I have to say about it.

Time to bring this back

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Since my last post was in the Politics category, and I put Biden in as one of the tags, a little wandering around brought me to a lot of 2020 posts. I was not, to put it mildly, especially excited to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and in fact voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary even though she’d dropped out by then. Biden was in the midst of sexual assault allegations that, for once, actually proved to be unfounded, and given that I wasn’t convinced by his candidacy anyway I went ahead and voted for someone I actually wanted to be President.

It occurs to me that we really haven’t heard much from Warren since 2020. Maybe I’m just listening in the wrong places.

Anyway, this is mostly an idle thought, but this is further evidence that I Know Nothing About Politics, something I’ve tried to keep in the forefront of my mind since the disaster in 2016. I couldn’t have been any more wrong about what kind of president this guy was going to be. My record of wrongness in presidential elections is pretty stunning over the last eight years, frankly.

Like I said, stray thought, but I’ve spent all day reading (James Islington’s The Will of the Many is so much better than the Licanius trilogy that it’s hard to believe the same guy wrote both) and I don’t have much of anything else to talk about, so … yeah. Grab the image and spread it around if you like; I feel like the left in general is succumbing to savior syndrome again and I’m pre-tired of the next six months.

In which I endorse: 2024 Primary Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

This primary kind of snuck up on me. I will grant that my particular style of media and news consumption renders me functionally immune to political ads, but other than a handful of prominent signs for local races near work I haven’t seen a Goddamned thing out there. That said, there’s a race or two worth talking about, and a couple of candidates I’m genuinely enthused about, so here we go:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. for President. This will surprise no one, of course, and Biden is running unopposed in Indiana, so it’s not like there’s even another candidate I can vote for. That said, at least in terms of his impact directly on my personal life, Biden has been the best president of my lifetime and it’s not close. I am both happy and proud to vote for him again.

Valerie McCray for US Senate. There is actually a primary race for Senate this year; both candidates passed my initial smell test, and passed my secondary test of “do you have a website that actually contains useful information about you, and makes me feel like I want you as my Senator?”. Dr. McCray’s is here and her opponent, Marc Carmichael, has his website here. While Carmichael doesn’t seem like an unacceptable choice, my rule is that when presented with two acceptable candidates I vote against the white guy. Right now I’ll be fine voting for him if he makes it through the primary, which, given that this is Indiana, I suspect he will.

Jennifer G. McCormick for Governor. Dr. McCormick was formerly Indiana’s Secretary of Education after Glenda Ritz flamed out, and I swear to God she was a Republican when she was appointed, and I spent more time than one might expect while following her on Twitter wondering how the hell a Republican appointee was getting away with saying the very liberal Democrat-ish things she kept saying. Well, if she was a Republican then, she’s a Democrat now, and I was really happy to hear that she’d decided to run for Governor. She’s running unopposed, which also surprises me, so it’s not like I had a second choice, but I can’t imagine who in this state I might have chosen over her. Sadly, she’ll likely get smoked by whatever rape-enabling troglodyte the Republican primary shits out. But we can hope!

I voted for Lori A. Camp for my House representative; I didn’t have another choice, and I’m going to stop short of calling it an endorsement. Honestly I hadn’t heard of her before going in and the sum total of my research was to make sure that I didn’t have to do any research. I glanced at her website; it’s fine, I suppose. I still want Pat Hackett.

Tim Swager for District 10 State Senator. This is inside-baseball as hell; why am I mentioning it here? Because the incumbent, David Niezgodski, is embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy, and everything I’ve seen about it makes me feel like he’s probably a slimy piece of shit. I am, I admit, a teensy bit leery of Swager as well, who has been spending a lot of money on sending mailers so that everyone knows that Niezgodski is a staffer-harassing asshole who maybe voted against abortion access once or twice– I’m not convinced of this– but said mailers are awfully thin on why Swager himself would be a better choice. His website is also rather thin but contains no obvious red flags, so, sure, you can be State Senator over the creepy married dude who broke into his staffer’s house.

I strongly suspect I’m going to go 0/5 here, if not in the primary than in the actual election, although Niezgodski might be weaker than I think; who knows. But I don’t miss elections. So here we are.

In which I skipped Super Tuesday

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I have paid less attention to this election, at least in writing, than any election since probably Bush/Gore. The reasons are probably pretty obvious; first, that the outcome is more or less predetermined no matter what foolish children on TikTok or Dean Phillips think and second, I don’t enjoy the existential horror that rears up every time I contemplate the idea of the Beast getting a second crack at the White House. It doesn’t help that I’m holding firm to my stance that I Know Nothing About Politics, and it also doesn’t help that the polls seem to be pretty clearly saying one thing, and every other aspect of reality appears to be saying another thing, and those two things are not the same.

(Almost starts a rant, aborts)

Anyway. Today was an e-learning/meetings day, and tomorrow and Friday both ought to be pretty calm. Ought to; we’ll see, as e-learning days can really screw up the rhythm of the week and it’s entirely possible that I’m going to get a loud and annoying Monday-Tuesday cycle (Tuesday is reliably the worst behavior day of the week) for the second time this week instead of the usually more sedate and chill Thursday-Friday. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

On last year and next year

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I went back and looked at the post I wrote at the end of 2022, and while I was willing to admit that 2022 had been a good year, I was clearly feeling pretty gun-shy about the idea. The notion that after the utter carnage that 2016 through 2021 had been, an actual good year had finally happened really seemed to beggar belief. I can’t justify any such hesitation about 2023; last year was a good year by nearly all personal metrics other than my own health, and even that wasn’t all that bad. In a lot of ways, I really don’t have anything to complain about, and I’m tantalizingly close to a major, major milestone in my life, one that ten years ago I didn’t think was ever going to happen: assuming no disasters occur (hah!), I am on track to be completely debt-free other than my house by the end of this school year. That’s entirely due to trends that started in 2022 and accelerated in 2023.

(I just took a few minutes to look, and I was officially diagnosed with sleep apnea in November of 2022, so that’s not 2023’s fault. I can’t even get mad at 2023 about that.)

Here’s the thing, though: 2024 fucking terrifies me. Like, bone-deep. Like, I don’t know how you diagnose someone with anxiety when the world is actually like this terrified. Why? Notice how I said “personal metric” up there? By that I mean, like, my life, my health, my family, my job, my finances. That sort of stuff. That’s all good right now, although I know how fast shit can change. Anything other than that? Fucked. Fucked. This was the hottest year in the history of humanity and nothing’s going to change. I have brought a child into this bullshit and he has to somehow survive for several decades after I’m gone while the world is busy being on fire. Israel is committing genocide in plain fucking sight of the entire world and no one is doing anything about it and there is literally nothing I can do to change anything about it. There’s a fucking presidential election this year. The state legislature is about to go back into session and who the fuck only knows what sort of bullshit they’re going to put on us this year.

(The pronoun bill? Sorta fizzled. Everybody just sort of mutually decided that we weren’t going to pay any attention to it, and nothing happened. I violate the pronoun law a hundred times a day and nothing is going to happen to me.).

I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to survive ten fucking months until the election. And the level of panic that sets in any time I try to seriously contemplate what I should do if things don’t go our way is indescribable. 

So. Yeah. Last year was the last good year. Even if we win 400 electoral votes this fall I still have to make it to November before that happens. I just don’t see anything coming this year that I can look forward to, other than that whole “no debt” thing, which isn’t going to work out for me all that well when I have to sell everything and move to Canada on no notice. Or, y’know, not, since the fascists taking over could pretty much result in anything. Who the fuck knows.

Also, so far it’s been 2024 for two days, and I was woozy and sickish all day yesterday– I have never been hung over even once in my entire life, but based on how people have described it to me, I may as well have been– and last night I managed to throw out my back in my sleep because I’m 47 and that shit can happen now. So, yeah, fuck this year.

Anybody have the number for a good therapist? Maybe that’s where all my money can go.

On the imminent death of my TikTok account

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

This is not the first time I have had to address this nonsense in this space, so you’d think the whole fucking world would be aware of this and not make the same mistakes again, but God damn it, people, former presidents and particularly active presidents do not typically attend the funerals of First Ladies. They just don’t. That’s it. Biden, in fact, in attending Rosalynn Carter’s memorial service this week, was the first sitting president to attend the funeral of a First Lady since Kennedy.

I don’t care if you like it or not, it’s fucking protocol. It’s how this works. Quit bitching when you don’t see whatever president at a First Lady’s funeral. I’m fuckin’ tired of it.

You will note that every living real First Lady and that classless Eurotrash participation-trophy wife from the last administration were all in attendance, even though literally no human being alive or dead wanted Melania or her fucking grey coat there.

Anyway. I’m fucking tired of TikTok and it’s bullshit stupid people with their bullshit stupid opinions, because since I’m no longer on Twitter TikTok is now the place where I’m most likely to encounter that type of thing. And I can’t fucking take it any longer. I am really and truly going to have a fucking rage stroke before the election if I don’t do something to shield myself from internet stupid, and that’s going to mean TikTok has to go, which would make this my only active social media account remaining, and I’m in complete control of who gets to talk here.

I’d do it right now except that, again, in the absence of Twitter, TikTok is where I do most of my book discovery now, and I genuinely don’t know where I’d go to hear people talking about books without it. If you have suggestions, let me know, because if I don’t find a way to reduce my stress and blood pressure I’m going to have to exercise, and we all know that’s a fucking terrible idea.

In which I run the table

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

For the first time, I think, in my entire voting life, every single person I voted for in this admittedly not terribly important election won. James Mueller has been re-elected as Mayor, defeating his opponent by 75-25 or so, Bianca Tirado won as city clerk, and all of my City Council candidates won as well, including my former co-worker Sherry Bolden-Simpson, who unseated the sole Republican on the City Council by a mere 37 votes. So, yay! I don’t have a Republican representing me on City Council any longer!

Turnout was fucking garbage, of course, as it always is. South Bend’s population has hovered right around 100,000 for most of my life and just barely over ten thousand people bothered to take the ten minutes it would have required to cast a ballot. I have no idea how many voters are in my actual Council district, but there were only about 2700 votes cast. Just fucking sad.

Keeping an eye on all the other races, of course, especially the ones with any sort of national importance to them, and so far– at 8:32 PM– things seem to be mostly going our way? I could use some good news, so hopefully all of that holds up.

I wonder what it would take to get a marijuana legalization bill on Indiana’s ballot? I’m not about to volunteer to do the work– I genuinely don’t think I’d partake even if it were legal, honestly– but it looks like three of our four neighbors will have legal weed by the end of the night, and I’m only saying “three out of four” because I’m too lazy to look up whether it’s legal in Kentucky or not, and I’m gonna guess it isn’t. I live close enough to Michigan that if I wanted to get my hands on some gummies or some shit it wouldn’t be difficult. Shit, my 83-year-old aunt offers me edibles every time she sees me lately.

On bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I was, for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct at the moment, looking through my blog for everything I’ve ever written about Joe Biden the other day, and then this tweet came across my feed:

This irritated me at the time, and I snarked at the tweet, and for some reason it’s still on my mind a couple of days later so I’m going to piss on it again. This chart is bullshit, orchestrated by a media that is absolutely desperate to manufacture some drama about this upcoming election and whether Biden will be the nominee, which he absolutely will if he is still alive. First of all, let’s look at the actual claim: that Biden has the second-lowest “ninth quarter,” which as we all know is a super important fucking metric, of post-WWII presidents. Second-lowest? Yeah, Reagan’s was worse.

You may not be old enough to remember the 1984 election. I am, though. It looked like this:

So this is already a bullshit statistic, because the worst “ninth quarter” performance by a president since WWII led to a fucking ass-whupping in 1984 unseen since, what, fucking FDR? (EDIT: Yep. I looked it up.) Mondale won his home state and Washington DC, and he only won Minnesota by eighteen hundredths of a point. It was 49.72% to 49.54%. Less than four thousand fucking votes. A bad storm in Minneapolis that day and he’d have lost.

That’s already fucked up, but it gets worse. The next two worst results also lost, but the two after that were Clinton and Obama, both under 50%, and both of whom won reelection comfortably. And the highest approval rating on that chart is George H.W. Bush, who lost. Humiliatingly, frankly.

I’m not quite pissed enough to run the statistics and figure out how related “ninth-quarter approval” is to reelection, but that’s at least partially because it’s obviously not. OpinionToday needs to shut the entire fuck up, and I really need to kill my Twitter account.