How Disney Explains Nostalgia

After some reflection on the subject and the way the Internet (and other digital technologies) have fundamentally changed our lives, I’ve started to think that in many ways, life was better in the past. At least from a U.S. perspective - I can’t speak to the experience of people who live in countries that actually care about their citizens.

By “ancient places”, I don’t mean the time of the Roman Empire, mind you. Instead I’ll talk more about the 1980s and 1990s. Even if I wasn’t old enough to live through that time, it still seems relevant for this purpose, as there are plenty of people still around today who did experience this era.

First of all, I’ve noticed that people are generally less informed about current events than they were in the past. To some extent, this is self-evident; if more Americans knew what the hell was going on, Donald Trump would never have won the 2016 election, let alone the 2024 election. Trump might be the most egregious example of people here voting against their own best interest, but he isn’t the first.

This is no coincidence. With the proliferation of Internet-based news sources, whether they be digital versions of the New York Times, blogs like this one, or conspiracy channels like Infowars, this has jeopardized the ability of physical newspapers to remain competitive.

And when you think about it, why should one go after a physical newspaper? They use paper, a resource that (for now) comes from trees being chopped down. But people being more environmentally conscious is not the chief reason why “traditional news sources” are declining. Simply put, they can’t compete with news sources that can be at your fingertips with no financial cost (though possibly a significant mental health cost).

 America’s “news deserts” are disproportionately located in rural areas of the country. Much like food deserts, places that have limited options to purchase healthy food, news deserts have little to no access to information about events near them. (For what it’s worth, food deserts and news deserts frequently overlap).

It used to be that local politics was something people paid attention to. After all, it’s still commonly said that all politics is local. And I’ll admit that for as much as I follow national (and sometimes international) politics, I barely know what’s going on in my own city. And I’m far from the only one. By some estimates, a third of U.S. news outlets that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2024. And again, rural areas have been hit the hardest by this trend, because they are less likely to have the financial resources to sustain a newspaper.

Speaking of small towns, I recently watched a Wendover Productions video about the proliferation of stores like Dollar General. Now, Dollar General is technically not a dollar store - in fact, since the stuff you buy there breaks every so often, you don’t save much money in the long run. Terry Pratchett was right all along - it is indeed more expensive to be poor, especially in the USA.

But let’s talk about Wendover’s video. When he speaks here at 17:58,  narrator Sam Denby states that “Main Street, USA” is in danger. The stock footage used, perhaps ironically, is of a thriving Main Street in a small American town. 

Once upon a time, these Main Streets were thriving. Nowadays, the only small towns in the USA with thriving Main Streets tend to be affluent areas that 5% or less of the population can comfortably afford to live in, historic locations in New England where architecture has changed little, or places with lots of seasonal tourism. These three categories are not mutually exclusive; in many cases, one of them reinforces the other two.

 Say what you will about Walt Disney as an individual, but I remember watching old Disney movies like Lady and the Tramp and The Fox and the Hound, both of which are set in small-town America. For people of all ages (and not just those cringe-worthy “Disney adults”), these films bring to mind happy memories, and one possible reason why occurred to me recently.

Movie poster for “Lady and the Tramp”. Image taken from the Film Art Gallery.

Movie poster for “The Fox and the Hound”. Image taken from Amazon.

 The Wikipedia article for the former movie states that Walt Disney wanted the setting to be his childhood hometown of Marceline, Missouri. Now, it’s been a few years since I watched Lady and the Tramp, and I’ve never seen the live-action remake. I probably never will. But that’s beside the point.

Anyway, from what I recall, the town featured in Lady and the Tramp (which may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) is a thriving place. There’s lots of local businesses for such a small town, such as a zoo, a dog pound, and of course the Italian restaurant that contains the movie’s most famous scene. I understand that Disney probably took some creative liberties and gave this fictional town (that may or may not be Marceline, Missouri) whatever the plot demanded. 

Now, my Internet’s a bit spotty right now, so getting Google Maps open was a hassle. (Isn’t that another exhibit - if your Internet doesn’t work, you can’t do anything!) But I decided to look at Marceline, MO on that platform and see what it looks like today. Per Wikipedia, modern-day Marceline has a population of about 2,100 - very much a small town. And I want to be clear about one thing: Even if the people of Marceline probably didn’t vote the way I would have liked, I still don’t mean to insult them at all.

Google Street View imagery of Marceline, Missouri. It was taken in June 2023.

On second thought, Marceline doesn’t look like the best example. Given that such a prominent figure of the American entertainment industry grew up there, of course, it may be that it qualifies as a historic town. The town’s elementary school is even named after Walt Disney.

Sure, the buildings don’t look the shiniest, but the shops aren’t boarded up either. There are several restaurants that aren’t just fast food. The hardware store I found is a chain, but it’s not Dollar General at least. By small-town standards in the year 2025 (or rather, 2023, because that’s when the current Google Street View imagery was taken), Marceline’s downtown doesn’t seem too bad.

Another Disney movie that many look back on fondly was The Fox and the Hound. While many will talk about the fractured friendship between Tod and Copper, it occurred to me recently that the movie’s setting is in an idealized rural location. And I’ll explain below why that matters.

Screenshot of “The Fox and the Hound”, taken when Widow Tweed’s efforts to milk Abigail the cow go awry thanks to Tod. Image taken from IMDB.

In today’s iteration of American politics, particularly of some Midwestern states like Iowa and Missouri that have large rural populations, “supporting small farmers” has become a major talking point. Widow Tweed, who takes care of Tod the fox in that Disney classic, is a small farmer who maintains it all herself. She raises her own hens and milks her own cows, leading to the chaotic scene pictured above. 

Needless to say, there’s not a lot of small farms anymore in America. Instead we’ve got Big Agriculture with their factory farms and massive meatpacking plants. Rather than a beautiful pastoral estate like the one Widow Tweed lives on, most farmers today work for a corporate giant. This article from Human Rights Watch, coincidentally published just months before the zoonotic COVID-19 pandemic began, discusses the conditions in greater detail.

The “TL;DR” is that working there is an awfully dangerous job. Lots of workers have chronic pain from the movements they are forced to perform. Many have sinus issues so bad that, according to one worker interviewed, they’re afraid to blow their nose for how much blood will come out. It’s an even more dangerous job than being a police officer in America, which is saying something given that we have more firearms than people. And the workers are disproportionately people of color and undocumented immigrants, because of course they are.

If The Fox and the Hound were set in the 2020s, Widow Tweed’s farm would likely not exist. At a minimum, it would be struggling to stay afloat, taking on plenty of water in the process. Someone should write a modern-day version of it - hell, maybe I’ll try my hand at it eventually. It’s not like I have anything better to do.

I’m not going to say that everything was perfect decades ago. Far from it. But I hope I’ve demonstrated a reason why many people look back on the past, particularly older Disney movies, with rose-colored glasses.

America Is Ready Player One

Cover of “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline. Image taken from Amazon.

I know. It’s a pretty crazy claim. Real life can’t be the same as a work of fiction, can it?

Yes. Yes, it can. 

I’ll start with my own experience. I realize that this is anecdotal, but I’ll explain it anyway. 

Growing up in a suburban Massachusetts community, I lived close enough to my elementary school that I could walk there easily. My mother would frequently take me and my siblings there on foot (or by car if the weather was less than ideal), and she’d get to hang out with the other parents who were doing the same thing. You could consider the schoolyard a “third place” of sorts.

Those were the good old days, and before you call me an old man, just know that I’m still more than a month shy of my 25th birthday. Got that? Good.

When school let out, it was very common for children to meet at one another’s homes. Again, we lived pretty close together in those days. There was also a nearby park not associated with any school, and I spent many spring evenings on the playground while my older brother played Little League baseball. That’s how my parents and I made friends back then - in person, the old-fashioned way.

I’m not going to deny that some people still have the social stamina and determination to form bonds in the real world. However, saying that “some people know their neighbors, therefore social atomization isn’t a problem” makes about as much sense as saying “some people run marathons, therefore obesity isn’t a problem.” 

The issue at hand is the way things are trending.

You see, when I was a child, I had a Nintendo Wii, on which one of the games I played the most was Mario Kart. I remember it being such a massive deal when I could connect to the Internet and race against random people from all over the world. The limited chat functionality if you were playing against friends (an option I never availed myself of before the service shut down in 2014) seemed revolutionary.

Why did that seem special, though? Simply put, because it wasn’t the default. 

These days, a large percentage of video games are played online - indeed, a great majority of them require an Internet connection to play. I remember when it was such a hassle to set my Wii up for a game of Nintendo WFC Mario Kart, but these days, people are always online unless they actively choose not to be.

I’ll admit that I am guilty of this myself. It’s a beautiful spring day out there right now, but I’m inside writing this essay. Even when I’m on my front porch, I very often have my computer open in front of me to talk to my friends on Discord. And that’s a problem.

Now, I present my thesis: We’re living in a dystopian novel. A very specific dystopian novel.

I’m not normally a defender of Ready Player One these days. In most respects, it’s a sorry excuse for literature. But I’m starting to think that author Ernest Cline was on to something about the modern world, even if that wasn’t his intention.

The year is 2025, and America has gone to shit. It’s just gone to shit two decades early. In the United States today, we have to deal with mass shootings - but events like Columbine or Sandy Hook are only a small fraction of the overall gun violence in this country. We’ve got road rage shootings every day because we’ve collectively lost our patience as a society. People kill each other over the smallest things, aided by the fact that we’ve literally got more firearms than people.

Main character Wade lives in the Stacks, a trailer park outside of Oklahoma City, while the late owner of the OASIS, James Halliday, had a net worth estimated at $240 billion USD. When the book came out in 2011 (and when I first read it in 2015), $240 billion seemed absolutely insane even by billionaire standards. Now, however, America’s shadow President Elon Musk is even richer than that. As for the Stacks, the homeless population keeps on rising. Maybe it’s not as visible and sensational as it is in Ready Player One, but it still exists. Housing keeps getting more expensive, as do other things people need to survive.

In Ready Player One, the plot revolves around an Easter Egg hidden within the OASIS and a competition to find it. Given that the winner is going to receive a sizable share of Halliday’s fortune (or maybe not even a share!), it’s highly coveted.

We see this in real life too. So many Americans vote for Republicans because they don’t see themselves as members of the working class who could benefit from progressive economic policy. Instead, they see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who could benefit from owning the libs. The American Dream, after all, has historically been to get rich and famous.

At one point in the book (and no, I don’t hate myself enough to check what page it is), Wade mentions that people can broadcast themselves to the world whenever they want, doing whatever they want, whether or not anyone is watching. In 2011, Twitch streaming (and YouTube streaming for that matter) was in its infancy. The idea of playing video games for a live audience was, again, absolutely revolutionary.

That’s not the case anymore. To become a popular gaming YouTuber, you basically need to be a streamer; recording your let’s-plays and uploading them later isn’t going to make you popular. And don’t even get me started on SEO and the quest to beat the algorithm, which is what drives people to hire massive production crews. It’s often said that Mr. Beast ruined YouTube, and I’m starting to see why people think that.

It’s not just gamers who constantly want attention. We have people literally risking their lives to be famous, like one Trevor Jacob. Remember him? He’s the YouTuber who claimed engine failure and jumped out of a perfectly good plane just for views, leaving it to crash into the side of a mountain. (On a side note, the video title “I Crashed My Airplane” is just perfect - he did it on purpose).

Runaway climate change, like what happens in Ready Player One? Yeah, it’s happening here too. We’ve even got a climate denier as President yet again. Despite increasingly devastating wildfires every year, the only significant American response has been from the entertainment industry making some TV series about conventionally attractive firefighters. 

And speaking of entertainment, it’s all giant corporations these days. Amazon might not run the world to the degree Ready Player One’s OASIS does, but it’s not far off either. Gone are the days when they merely sold books online. Now they own entire grocery store chains and even an aerospace company that recently gave Katy Perry et al a glorified carnival ride. But there’s also Amazon Instant Video, which lots of people use for streaming TV shows and whatnot.

As dominant as Amazon is, they don’t have a monopoly on peoples’ time and attention. Consider the Walt Disney Company as well. They don’t just make movies from the imagination of one imaginative man with some retrograde ideas about race - not anymore! They’ve got theme parks, cruise lines, streaming platforms, and even entire residential neighborhoods. I’m not kidding about that last one.

One of the most commonly criticized elements of Ready Player One by its detractors is its misogyny. Women, such as Wade’s obsessive love interest Art3mis, are often portrayed as one-dimensional, and plenty of reviewers have taken notice. And then Aech is (spoiler alert) only there so that Wade can say “I’m not racist, I have a black friend”.

We’ve got plenty of misogyny in real life too. It’s not just the United States Supreme Court overturning the constitutional right to abortion, either. The “manosphere” of content creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan influenced the latest election, and that TV series Adolescence has also drawn attention to it. (And yes: I know Adolescence is set in the UK, not the USA, but I’m sure American schools are, as usual, even worse than British). 

I could go on and on about the parallels between the 2044 described in Ready Player One and the reality of life in 2025-era America. But I think I’ve covered my bases. 

The point of dystopian science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) is that events depicted in the former are supposed to be at least conceivably plausible. Harry Potter, for instance, is no closer to coming true now than it was when the first book was published. That’s not the case for the work of Ernest Cline.

Ready Player One is not a literary masterpiece. Not even close. But in its own sick, twisted, and depressing ways, it predicted the future. And for that, we should appreciate it. 

Trump Didn’t “Steal” The 2024 Election

Donald Trump shaking hands with President Elon Musk. Image taken from Yahoo News.

Before I get into the meat of this article, I want to clarify one thing: I am a leftist. The right wing falls victim to disinformation and “fake news” far more frequently than the left does, and when they do, they deserve to be called out on it. But I also think we should be honest with ourselves and call out falsehoods when we see them.

First of all, let’s talk about the 2024 election. At a time when so many Americans want to move on from the election and are sick of politics, I’m going to relitigate that election again. Feel free to click out of this article if you don’t want to hear about it.

A number of people have said that the 2024 election was stolen from Kamala Harris. Sometimes they cite Donald Trump’s January 2025 statement that Elon Musk “knows those voting machines.” Other times they say something far more easily refuted, which is that the election was stolen because “Harris had much larger crowd sizes.”

I readily concede that the metric of the “enthusiasm gap” is largely obsolete, to the extent that it ever really mattered to begin with. The idea that whoever’s voters are more excited to vote for their candidate could only swing an election decided by the tiniest of margins these days. Given how polarized the American electorate has become, of course, presidential elections are frequently decided by a football stadium’s worth of people - that’s no secret.

But the 2024 election was not. It was a veritable landslide by American standards. Democrats don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. A Republican winning the popular vote had not happened since 2004, which is basically a lifetime ago in today’s environment. 

In terms of the “enthusiasm gap,” it needs to be said that every vote counts the same, no matter how the voter feels about it. Whether you volunteered twelve hours a day for your chosen candidate, or whether you walked into the polling place completely and totally inebriated, the voting machine doesn’t care. All that matters is what bubble you filled in on that ballot.

Where this metric can make a difference is when someone decides whether to turn out or not. Indeed, prior to the election many people speculated on whether the pro-Palestine protestors would stay home and cost Kamala Harris the presidency. Spoiler alert: They did. And they doomed all of us to live in this fucked-up nation.

People might also point to the gap between the campaigns in terms of their ground game. After all, during the 2024 election, Joe Biden and later Kamala Harris employed a veritable army of canvassers in every swing state and plenty of other states as well. Donald Trump, meanwhile, did not. He outsourced every aspect of his ground game to inexperienced outsiders.

Indeed, in the last three presidential elections, the candidate with the better ground game has ended up losing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was basically run on a shoestring out of some dude’s basement, and he still defeated Hillary Clinton where it mattered. In 2020, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed and ran almost no ground game, whereas the Republicans stayed the course despite the COVID-19 pandemic. While this is commonly cited as a reason why Trump came closer than expected to victory in 2020, he still was not able to defeat Joe Biden that time.

It seems that ground game doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Part of that is because of a shift in culture. I’m 24 years old, on the older side of Generation Z, and I was taught never to answer the door if I didn’t know who was on the other side. If a stranger knocks on your door, that’s seen as rude and creepy, whereas it didn’t used to be. I guess Americans have grown increasingly paranoid in recent years.

It’s the same way with phone calls. Whenever someone calls me on my iPhone, I always check the caller ID first. If I don’t know who it is, I immediately hang up. That’s what most members of my generation, which saw one of the largest swings to Trump in 2024, do. 

Another argument that some liberals trot out is that Kamala Harris had massive crowds at her rallies. Many thousands turned out for her Houston rally the week before the election. At the time, many people believed this showed she had a lot of support in Houston, and she might be able to win Texas as a result.

Knowing what we know now, of course, this is a fallacious line of thinking. Houston is a major city - it’s the fourth-largest city proper in the United States, even if it barely feels like a “city” when you’re driving through it. It’s one of the worst-designed cities in the world. But that’s besides the point.

Despite losing Texas statewide by nearly 14 percentage points, Kamala Harris still garnered more than 4.8 million votes there. Of almost five million voters, it’s very easy to get thirty thousand to fill a stadium. But it takes far, far, far more than thirty thousand voters to win Texas. As it turns out, Harris supporters were just a lot more vocal than Trump supporters.

Then again, I’ve never understood the “shy Trump voter.” Imagine being so ashamed to vote for Trump that you’ll lie to a pollster and tell them you aren’t voting for Trump, then not thinking Maybe I shouldn’t vote for Trump. But there are so many people in this country that there are probably some who think that way. 

This might be hard to believe, but not everyone is as plugged into politics as I and my three readers are. Lots of people passively vote without realizing what one or both candidates wants to do if elected. Now, I think that’s a bad thing - I wish Americans were better-informed. But that’s the harsh reality. 

So here’s what I want you all to take away from my little rant. When people ask me Saclux Gemini, did Donald Trump steal the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election from Kamala Harris?, my answer will depend on what you mean.

If you mean, “Did Elon Musk hack into the voting machines so that people who voted for Harris were counted as voting for Trump?”, then no. At least, probably not. It just seems implausible that Trump, who was out of office at the time of the 2024 election, would have been able to hack into machines that way. Voting machines, as Al Jazeera reported back then, aren’t connected to the Internet. However, if one means “Did Donald Trump and Elon Musk take measures to stack the election unfairly in their favor?”, then my answer is far more nuanced. 

It is true that voter suppression exists in the United States. The 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia was one of the most egregious examples . Brian Kemp, whose image has sadly been rehabilitated in the eyes of many moderates, should never have been allowed to oversee his own election. Now that federal Republicans are trying to pass the SAVE Act and will turn a blind eye at best to efforts at the state level, voter suppression is only likely to get worse.

That’s also to say nothing about the media environment we find ourselves in, which was enabled by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Now that Twitter has become Xitter (pronounced “shitter”), far-right content has been greatly amplified, and that has definitely swayed public opinion. We can have a broader conversation about the GOP-friendly media environment another time, but I see no reason to believe that votes were actually hacked.

Rather, it seems more likely to me that American swing voters were even more gullible than usual. Hey, they’ve made dumb decisions before. Was electing Trump in 2024 really that much of a stretch?

In my mind, the discourse about the 2024 election being stolen distracts from more important things the left should be doing. Honestly, Democrats last year should have remembered this more forcefully:

If he gets more votes, he doesn’t need to steal the election.

The Shitstorm Is Coming And It Might Get Loud

A meme I found on ImgFlip. I think this is from that show “Trailer Park Boys”.

A few days ago, there was a fire at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence. Governor Josh Shapiro and his family were evacuated from the mansion at 2 AM - if they had not been so swift, the assassination attempt would have succeeded. And yes, I consider it an assassination attempt, because that’s what the perpetrator admitted to. I will not name the perpetrator here; I don’t want to glorify him. 

As happy as I am that Governor Shapiro is okay, I feel pretty certain that political violence is going to greatly increase in this country. It’s easy to get a gun here, but this case demonstrates that you don’t even need a gun to do serious damage. It feels like a “crossing the Rubicon” moment - any candidate who’s an electoral threat to any Republican is in serious danger. There’s no going back from this, even if we one day have a Democratic President again.

A few weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance and several national “security” officials like Pete Hegseth texted their war plans in Yemen to a journalist from The Atlantic. This leak, which has come to be referred to as “Signalgate”, generated a lot of outrage at first. But at first is the keyword.

You see, it’s been less than a month and almost nobody is talking about Signalgate anymore. Okay, that’s not true - maybe foreign intelligence services are still debating how much information they should withhold from us because we can’t be trusted to keep it secure. But the general public in the United States has almost completely moved on from this scandal.

Speaking of intelligence, let’s look at Director of National Intelligence and Russian asset extraordinaire Tulsi Gabbard. Recently she came under fire for having declared her residency in Texas when she voted in Hawaii.This is the “voter fraud” that Republicans constantly cite as a justification for voter ID laws that are really meant to suppress the votes of those more likely to support Democrats. 

Now, voter fraud is a serious crime, even if it doesn’t take place nearly as frequently as Republican officials would have you believe. That being said, I think it says a lot about the current state of affairs that I don’t really care about this that much. I care far more about Gabbard being a Russian spy. And yet, nobody’s talking about Gabbard’s connections to Putin and Assad anymore.

That’s actually a common thread here: Nobody’s talking about any of this anymore.

The attempt on Josh Shapiro’s life should have been an Earth-shattering story. Instead, it wasn’t just memory-holed - people didn’t talk about it much even on the day after it happened. And you’ve gotta wonder, why is that?

I’ve got a reason. That reason is because it was largely overshadowed by the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

If you’ve been following the news, you probably know his story in general terms. If you didn’t see the news about Garcia, or if you’ve simply forgotten amid the chaos of the last few months, then I’ll summarize it.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an American citizen originally from El Salvador. He was recently detained by the Trump administration’s ICE goons and sent down to a notorious prison in his country of origin. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a rare unanimous decision, ordered Trump to “facilitate his return.” Admittedly, they did not provide a deadline by which this must happen, but it’s still a stunning rebuke considering the likes of Samuel Alito sit on said court.

Despite the 9-0 ruling against him by an otherwise very right-wing Supreme Court, Donald Trump has continued to defy this order. He has refused to return Garcia to the United States. Now, in fairness, Garcia is probably already dead. And if he isn’t, Trump is afraid of what the man will say once he’s back. Either case would result in riots in the United States - at least, I’d hope so.

As disgusting as this case is, it’s not even the most important part of that White House meeting. I think you know which meeting I’m talking about.

Donald Trump talking to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the White House. Image taken from ABC News.

During the meeting between Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump dodged the question of whether he’d do anything to facilitate Garcia’s return. Bukele told reporters that he would not return Garcia, and Trump seems to be going along with it. “There’s nothing I can do” is what he basically said.

Let’s talk about that for a moment. Even though Trump has been systematically destroying our alliances with other wealthy democracies, the United States remains one of the world’s most powerful countries in terms of military might. If Trump truly wanted to follow the Supreme Court’s orders, Bukele’s opinion be damned, there are any number of actions he could take. Instead, Trump is going to let the leader of a small country like El Salvador walk all over him.

Trump probably thinks that defying a court order makes him look tough. In this context, though, it makes him look like a pushover. In theory, he has so much power over Bukele if he actually wanted to use it. The fact that he chooses to let Bukele control him makes him look like, as some would say, a pussy.

There’s another moment from that meeting that’s getting a lot of attention. I’ll let Trump say it this time:

"Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."

Now, let’s ignore for the moment how very non-eloquent that quote is. Within the context of what Trump was talking about with Bukele, it’s genuinely chilling.

Trump wants Bukele to build five more prisons in El Salvador for American citizens who disagree with him. 

Is that actually going to happen? Quite possibly if nobody stops him. But if even the Supreme Court isn’t willing to use their own power and instead delegate it all to Trump, can he be stopped at all? It’s doubtful.

Lots of people on Reddit have made Nazi Germany comparisons. Very often, these people are dismissed as alarmists, and sometimes this is for good reason. But make no mistake - I truly believe in a matter of a few months, we’ve gone from 1932 to 1939. Everyone who opposes this administration should be very, very afraid.

Oh yeah, and while everyone else is distracted by the Bukele meeting, Russia launched yet another airstrike on Ukraine, this time the northeastern city of Sumy. As of this writing, thirty-six people have been confirmed dead as a result. Despite this attack occurring as Ukrainian civilians went to church for Palm Sunday, politicians on the religious right here are silent. In fact, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, vetoed a G7 resolution to condemn this strike. This proves that Rubio isn’t actually one of the “adults in the room” - there is no such thing this time.

This gesture should be seen as outrageous, and it is. But it’s more than likely going to be forgotten in a few days when there’s another outrage. Look how quickly “Signalgate” was memory-holed. I’m confident that in a few days, people will have forgotten about Trump’s meeting with Bukele until American citizens are sent to these concentration camps en masse.

Of course, this is a deliberate strategy known as “flooding the zone.” The more crazy shit happens, the less the average person can react to it all, or even know what’s going on. This makes it a lot more difficult to organize a resistance.

Unfortunately, so far it seems to be working.

Cancel The World Cup

One of the opening brawls during a February 2025 hockey game between the United States and Canada. Image taken from The Independent.

Now, I need to get one thing out of the way: I don’t normally care about professional sports. Like, at all. The outcome only really matters to me insofar as if the Boston teams win, the people around me are going to be in a better mood.

That being said, it needs to be said that the World Cup is scheduled for next year. It will be jointly hosted by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. As much as it pains me to say this, I believe that the USA should be stripped of its host status for the event. Here I’ll present some reasons why.

First of all, it’s never been safe to host the World Cup in the USA. Even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and reelected in 2024, gun violence has been an enormous stain on the nation. In fact, even before the current set of travel warnings against us due to Trump’s immigration enforcement leading to foreign tourists getting detained, there were still plenty of advisories about the risk of being caught in a mass shooting.

This isn’t hypothetical, either. While foreign tourists have historically rarely been victims of mass shootings, it has happened before. As an example, four Canadian citizens lost their lives in the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a music festival. And the massacres have only accelerated since 2017.

Sure, people might say “But Saclux, they held a World Cup in South Africa.” And that’s true, they did. While South Africa has an overall higher crime rate than the United States, there’s a lot of nuance to be had here. Even though I’ve never been to South Africa, I’d imagine that in that country, you know where the dangerous places are and to avoid them. 

In the USA, by contrast, danger is everywhere. The top five deadliest mass shootings in American history were at the aforementioned music festival, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, a university, an elementary school, and a church. Even if Trump were not President, I wouldn’t blame any foreign spectators and/or teams if they don’t feel safe.

Aftermath of the 2024 Kansas City parade shooting, which followed that year’s Super Bowl. Image taken from People.com.

The picture above is from Kansas City after the 2024 Super Bowl. It just so happens that Kansas City is one of the places that is to host a soccer game for the World Cup. But given what happened there just last year, will teams feel safe playing anywhere in America? It’s doubtful, and I don’t blame them whatsoever.

Some people might point out that the World Cup will have a crazy amount of security for both players and spectators. And that’s also true. But if someone crazy enough to attack a World Cup venue is that determined, they can still cause a lot of damage in the security line. 

As horrific as all mass shootings are, they’re not the only reason why the United States should not be allowed to host the World Cup next year. Gun violence happened under Biden too, after all.

Lately, Trump has been detaining foreign tourists left and right. The Salvadoran man whom the Supreme Court ordered Trump to “facilitate the return of”? This illegitimate President is defying that order. To be fair, he’s probably already dead given what we know about Bukele’s prisons. 

It’s not just Garcia, though. There are many cases of detained tourists, including from countries that are our former allies. When Russia did this to Brittney Griner a few years ago, it was shocking and received tons of rightful condemnation. But we’ve grown numb to this as Americans, just as we’ve grown numb to so many other atrocities.

And let me be clear: These detentions we hear about on the news are likely only the tip of the iceberg. It’s probably happened to hundreds or even thousands of people since Trump returned to office. Yes, it probably won’t happen to members of a World Cup team, but is that a risk they want to take? Or, more to the point, do they want to support a country that detains tourists from countries that are supposed to be their allies? 

This is to say nothing of US-Canada relations, which are at an all-time low right now. Trump has repeatedly called Canada the “51st state”, and that isn’t going to happen without an invasion. Maybe he is joking, but should we risk World War III by assuming that? Even if he isn’t serious, this rhetoric is incredibly dangerous, and Canada will never trust us again for anything that requires longer than a four-year commitment.

The invasion threats are a joke until they aren’t.

Of course, if America actually invades Canada within the next year, the World Cup will probably be canceled anyway. Whether or not the United States can host it will be the least of anyone’s worries. Even if the invasion does not occur, it’s going to be a shitshow of epic proportions.

The final reason I’m going to present is not explicitly political - it’s merely practical.

I’m far from the first person to make this observation, but public transit in the United States is absolute ass. This is no secret - we prefer our gas-guzzling cars and getting stuck in giant traffic jams. Maybe not all of us (I for one would love better and cleaner transportation infrastructure), but enough of us that it remains this way.

Most of the stadiums that have held World Cup matches have contained abundant transport links for modes that weren’t car-based. Say what you will about Russia in 2018, but at least their major cities have metros. That is not the case in America.

Two sports stadiums in Arlington, Texas, USA. The stadium in the background is the AT&T Stadium, which is to host several World Cup games in 2026. Image taken from r/CityPorn.

Pictured here is AT&T stadium in Arlington, Texas. It is currently scheduled to host multiple games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Fun fact: Per Wikipedia, it’s going to temporarily change its name to “Dallas Stadium” in accordance with FIFA’s rules against corporate-sponsored names.

But look at that. As the image’s caption from r/CityPorn said, there is no public transportation in sight. And that’s because none exists in Arlington, Texas. As car-dependent as most of the United States is, Texas takes the sprawl to a whole nother level. The traffic jam out of the stadium is going to be legendary, and it’s going to lead to another deluge of international shame on the United States. As if we needed more shame!

Arlington isn’t the only stadium in the US that’s like this. Even Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, one of the states with better public transportation (which, to borrow a phrase from Not Just Bikes, is like saying you have a better-smelling outhouse), still sees lots of car traffic. There’s a reason why the tradition of hanging out before a sporting event is referred to as “tailgating” in America. But enough about that.

With regards to the transit situation, we can look at one potential silver lining. If FIFA chooses to disregard one random blogger’s advice and host the World Cup in the United States anyway, it’s going to be a mess and an international embarrassment for America. But on the bright side, if enough Americans see how insane we are as a country, we might actually agitate for change, including more walkable cities that have viable alternatives to driving. If it takes a disastrous World Cup to show us that we need to mobilize for a better country, then so be it.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Things I’ve Learned From GeoGuessr

I know I’ve been woefully inconsistent on uploading these. There truly is no excuse, not that many people happen to read these posts anyway.

In any case, one reason I’ve been rather sporadic is because I’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing GeoGuessr. And yes, I know that GeoGuessr is sort of old news at this point, but as someone who adores geography and intends to study urban planning in graduate school, the game still holds magic for me.

For those of you who are unaware, the goal of GeoGuessr is to pinpoint as close as possible to the location you’re given on Google Street View. I tend to play duels, meaning that I have to get closer to the location than the other person. In terms of clues to look for, there’s any number of them.

A map of traffic directions by country. Red countries drive on the right, whereas blue countries drive on the left. Image taken from Wikipedia.

The map above is the most obvious one. If you’ve got English signage and notice cars driving on the left, do not guess the United States or Canada. It is true, however, that many countries that drive on the left were former British colonies. But then, lots of countries, period, are former British colonies. Nigeria, for instance, drives on the right, which has tripped me up numerous times when I thought it might be Ghana.

Another thing I’ve learned while playing GeoGuessr is that lots of important things are standardized between countries. The ISO (International Standardization Organization) exists to enforce such standards, including the two-letter country codes that are found on many Internet domains. And speaking of Internet domains, that’s another clue you need to be on the lookout for when playing this game.

A map of top-level Internet domains by country. Image taken from IONOS.

I will say that when looking at these codes, it reminds me of how much we’ve become a global society. Yes, we in the United States have “leaders” like Donald Trump who are trying to rip us apart and tear up alliances with other countries. And I don’t mean to minimize how serious things are when he’s literally called Canada the “51st state” and has referred to their former Prime Minister as “Governor Trudeau.”

But back to these codes. It maybe, just maybe, gives me the tiniest shred of hope for global unity. Like we all agree on one thing, even if Trump is sabotaging things as best he can.

Speaking of these Internet codes, it serves as a reminder of how rapidly the world has changed in just the last few decades. During my last semester at university, I was honored to take a course in Internet Geography in which the professor illustrated the numerous ways in which this technology has fundamentally altered the way we live our lives. I’d imagine that for anyone under a certain age, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without websites and information that can be at your fingertips within seconds.

It’s not just the societal impacts of the Internet that have struck me, but also the absurd amount of infrastructure that has been put in place to keep it running. As of 2015, which is admittedly a lifetime ago in today’s world, the Internet still relied upon undersea cables to transmit data signals. How the hell were they set up?

Speaking of this standardization, every country (or at least, almost every country I’ve played on GeoGuessr) has stop signs and those red triangular signs that tell you to look for oncoming traffic. The latter signs are a key element of the game’s “meta” that might tell you where you are.

For instance, say you have a “50/50” between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Since these two countries’ pastoral landscapes are fairly similar outside cities, one key difference is those red triangular signs that say “Yield” in the USA. If that sign also says “Yield”, then you’re in Ireland - the Republic of Ireland, that is. (The British ones tell you to “Give Way”, which I unironically find rather amusing). 

The obvious thing to look for are road signs. The language on said signs can narrow the country down, but once you get to the higher rankings of the game and they start giving you more difficult locations, you can’t count on having very many road signs. That’s when you start looking for other clues, such as the color of the bollards. (And seriously - prior to playing GeoGuessr, I didn’t even know what a bollard was).

When all else fails, it helps to consider the vegetation and how well-kept the road seems to be. I’ll provide an in-game screenshot.

A screenshot I took from a GeoGuessr game. The location was somewhere in South Ostrobothnia, Finland.

Take this round as an example. Based on reading a few websites dedicated to the game’s meta (such as GeoMetas and PlonkIt), I knew that within the Nordic nations of northern Europe, if you saw a gravel road with lots of pine trees on either side, you would most likely be in Finland. It probably makes me a huge nerd to be 85% sure of the country without even seeing a road sign, but it’s true.

Speaking of Finland, the Finnish language is relatively easily recognizable. It’s considered one of the most difficult languages to learn for a native English speaker, because it’s not related to most other European languages. Nope, not even Swedish. That being said, you don’t really need to know what the sign says to be able to tell languages apart. For instance, the Finnish language has lots of double vowels and very long words, so you can tell it apart from Swedish fairly easily.

That being said, there is a sizable Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, most of whom live along the west coast of the country in the Ostrobothnia region. Therefore, if you see Swedish signage in an otherwise Finnish setting, you would be wise to guess around the west coast.

Another screenshot from a GeoGuessr game I played. The location was on the island of Samar in the Philippines.

Here’s another example. This round felt Southeast Asian with all the coconut trees, rice fields, and motorcycles. Seeing that the people drove on the right eliminated Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and this area seems too rural to be Singapore. Vietnam is not on Google Street View and therefore will not show up on a GeoGuessr duel. Finally, the signage was in the Latin alphabet, ruling out Cambodia and Laos. 

The only remaining option was the Philippines, which I guessed here. I thought the location would be in northeastern Mindanao, near the popular surfing island of Siargao (which was the subject of the Red Hot Chili Peppers song “The Longest Wave”). For the record, the location was actually in the Eastern Visayas island of Samar, though I still guessed closer than my opponent. If you see brightly colored minibuses known as jeepneys, you’re in the Philippines. 

A third screenshot from a GeoGuessr game I played. The location was eastern Colorado, USA.

Finally, when all else fails, you should hope you’ve spent enough time looking at atlases. Given how spread-out everything was, the green street signs, and the grain elevators, I had reason to believe this location was in the Midwestern United States or the High Plains within the same country. But that doesn’t narrow it down much; due to its geographic area and relative homogeneity in its built environment, the USA is the second-worst country to get in GeoGuessr after Russia, which is difficult for similar reasons.

That green sign pictured above saved my sorry ass. I happened to know that there was a place called Kit Carson County in eastern Colorado. Colorado, of course, is well-known for its mountain scenery, but the eastern part of the state is largely on the Great Plains and very agricultural. That’s not the part most visitors go to. 

When I guessed this location, I was only 24 kilometers (about 15 miles) away from the goal. Like I said earlier, you cannot rely on signage to rescue you. But when it shows up, it can indeed be your salvation.

If you’ve read this far, I would like to thank you for doing so. I’m aware that it reads like the transcript of one of my hyperfixations…which, to be fair, it pretty much is. 

As of the time I write this, I am in the Gold II division in GeoGuessr with an Elo of 600 that keeps fluctuating up and down. I’m pretty good at the game, but I’m a world away from Trevor Rainbolt. The thought of playing the game while skydiving hasn’t really crossed my mind. But it has crossed his.

On Nostalgia

Whenever we’re talking about the past, romanticizing it by saying that things were better then, we’re experiencing what’s known as nostalgia. Google’s dictionary feature defines “nostalgia” as a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. Etymologically, it comes from a Latin word related to “acute homesickness.”

All over the world, there’s a common sense that things were better in the “good old days”. Not everyone holds this view, of course - there are people who continue believing the future’s bright. My mother keeps telling me mine’s so bright I need to wear shades, but I’m far from certain that’s the truth.

The fact is, the people who claim that things were better in the past have a leg to stand on. I wish I could say that they didn’t, but I’d be lying to myself, and you’d be fully justified in clicking out of this article right now.

Very often, the term nostalgia is used in the context of older media, particularly video games and TV shows. Let’s take the example of video games first. Now, I’m not much of a gamer these days, even if my current habits aren’t that much healthier than gaming might be. But I still think this is a worthwhile analogy.

If you want to read a book from decades or even centuries past, you can probably find a PDF online if you’re willing to pay enough money. Hell, you could even locate a physical copy on Amazon, not that it’s ideal to give Jeff Bezos any more money than necessary. Most music you’ve heard of is probably available on Apple Music or YouTube, with the latter covering your bases for what’s not found on the former platform.

Movies? Again, they’re mostly on YouTube (or any other streaming platform you can think of) for a small price. It’s no wonder that lots of movie theaters are struggling to stay afloat, and not just because of the general public’s reduced attention span as a result of short-form content. (More on that later).

Video games are different. As I write this article, the Nintendo Switch 2 was recently announced, even if we will not be able to pre-order it from the United States for the time being thanks to the tariffs. And I miss the days when we didn’t have to worry about the unhinged President of the United States levying tariffs and starting a trade war with our former allies, but that’s the world we live in now. See, that’s an example of nostalgia!

The Nintendo Switch 2 might be backwards compatible with the original Nintendo Switch. I’m not sure if that’s been confirmed or not - like I said, I don’t play video games that much. But if any Wii U, Wii, GameCube, or N64 games are available for digital download or not at all, you can be sure it’ll only be a limited selection of said games. 

In fact, unlike the other mediums I listed above, older video games are far less readily available. A 2023 study found that 87 percent of pre-2010 video games released in the United States “have failed to be preserved in any real capacity.” And that’s a problem. 

From my perspective, the general consensus seems to have become that video games are getting worse as time goes on, not better. I wrote a previous article about this, but that relates to Cory Doctorow’s writings about “enshittification”. Eventually, game developers run out of new ideas. Or, if you’re a socialist who believes everything’s the fault of capitalism, you might argue that it’s become profitable to release the games people will buy rather than being innovative, so that’s what the companies chase after. Indeed, the last part is hardly a conspiracy theory at all.

Microtransactions have infiltrated just about every game released today. For all that people are complaining about Mario Kart World costing $90 or whatever, keep in mind that most AAA games these days cost that much (or more) when you consider all the downloadable content that one can purchase. This stands in stark contrast to the “good old days”, when as soon as you bought a game, you were done spending money on it.

 It really is no wonder that indie gaming has gotten more popular in recent years; titles like Undertale are often considered among the best video games ever made. Is it any wonder that a title using a minimalist, EarthBound-esque design caught peoples’ eyes? It’s not made by a greedy game studio that pursues profit over all else.

So yes…games made before the current age of enshittification are popular, and those who can’t play them still pine for them. But there’s more.

Current politics is another area where people yearn for the “good old days”. Perhaps this is mostly unique to the United States, but I’ve had conversations with family members who have told me that prior to Trump, we weren’t nearly as polarized as we are now. Maybe people were still strongly Democratic or strongly Republican, but you could actually be friends with people on the “other side”. Even if you disagreed with someone on, say, what an ideal tax rate was for the highest-income groups, you didn’t necessarily hate their guts.

I want to clarify, of course, that the current situation is far more the fault of the Republicans than the Democrats. The GOP chose to nominate Trump three times in a row, and they choose to keep supporting him and enabling all his disastrous actions. This is a choice they have made and are continuing to make every single day.

Look, I’m only 24 years old. I was not alive when, for instance, the Columbine High School massacre happened in Colorado. But my mother was, and when I talked to her about how it was covered, she said it was utterly shocking. People probably wondered how depraved one had to be to bring a gun to school and slaughter random people. 

Nowadays, school shootings are just as depraved and horrific as they were then, but they’re not as shocking. I remember finishing a writing session in September 2024 as news broke of another shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’d grown used to hearing about such events. And “only” four people had died; this was not Sandy Hook, Parkland, or Uvalde, which goes to show how depraved my country has become when we’re desensitized to these horrific tragedies. 

Other countries aren’t, of course. In fact, numerous nations (including those who were once our strong allies) have put in place travel warnings for the USA about gun violence. Of course, they’ve now put in place other warnings about how you might be detained and deported to El Salvador; if I were not from here, I’d rather travel to Russia at this point. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

Besides the example of gun violence, there are plenty of non-political instances of nostalgia being justified. Take the platform YouTube, which has become the monolithic platform for posting any sort of video. Unless, of course, you’re breaking the terms of service for the platform, in which case you’re better off on Rumble. 

I’m not going to say there wasn’t plenty of brain rot on YouTube when I was a kid. Annoying Orange was (and if I remember correctly, still is) quite popular. But kids these days have it worse - just look at the series known as Skibidi Toilet. 

It’s often said that Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast and currently the most-subscribed user on the platform, ruined YouTube. Prior to his meteoric rise starting in 2017, you didn’t need so much production value to be successful. YouTube wasn’t totally innocent, of course, but if you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars and a giant production team behind you, you won’t take off. Very rarely does content go viral organically these days, and that’s a shame.

The Internet itself is becoming consolidated. We no longer have so many kid-friendly places for those under 13 who cannot yet use apps like Discord. When I was a kid, Webkinz was a huge deal, but now it’s pretty much obsolete. Instead, Cocomelon and other forms of total brain rot have taken its place. 

I’d imagine that in cities and countries where the infrastructure is less car-dependent, this isn’t as much of a factor. Kids don’t need to hang out online as much when they’ve got good places to hang out in person. But I’m in the US, where the vast majority of our built environment was bulldozed for the car. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 19, though technically I could have at 16 if I’d wanted to. I can’t imagine how lonely American kids are nowadays.

Overall, I would say that nostalgia itself can be unhealthy. It’s important not to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses when it isn’t warranted. Sometimes your preferences change over time and you just haven’t realized it yet. I know that’s true in my case; I keep feeling a compulsion to write fanfiction, but I simply can’t force myself to when I know I’ll be a lot busier again soon.

There’s also the fact that life sometimes loses its novelty as you get older. Supposedly the older you become, the faster time seems to pass. If I am fortunate enough to reach an advanced age, I might find that out for myself. But you shouldn’t spend your life just wishing.

Reflections on Europe

I apologize for my absence. The three regular readers of this blog are most likely wondering where the hell I went after being so faithful for…a week or two.

Well, now I’m answering that question. I was on vacation. In fact, as I write this post, I’m on a trans-Atlantic flight back home. It’s an eight-hour haul with a little over six hours to go, and the Wi-Fi is out. But that’s okay. We human beings weren’t meant to be plugged into the algorithm 24/7.

The reason for my trip was to celebrate my graduation from college. I was allowed to select a destination within reason, and the country I had wanted to visit ever since seeing it on The Amazing Race in 2023 was…Slovenia. 

I traveled with both of my parents. Maybe I’m a little old for that, but whatever. It was and is my first trip abroad since Donald Trump was reelected President in 2024, so I felt rather wary of how I would be perceived. After all, it’s no secret that Americans are persona non grata all over the world, but particularly in Canada and Europe. In specific terms, I don’t know exactly what I should have been afraid of given that Europe has far fewer firearms than my own country.

Even so, I bought a backpack with the Canadian flag on it and used it on this trip. This is a practice known as “flag-jacking” that originated during the George W. Bush presidency after he invaded Iraq. Canadian tourists, after all, have much better reputations abroad than Americans. I did not exactly pretend to be Canadian; when pressed I told people the truth. I just wanted to send a message that I do not approve of my country’s administration.

As it turns out, I may have been overthinking this all along. Most people I met didn’t ask me about my country’s politics. It turns out that Reddit is not real life - who would have thought?

There was one exception. While I was touring the Postojna Caves (more on that later), one of the people beside me asked me if I liked Trump. Needless to say, I gave him a resounding no and asserted that Americans who support Trump generally don’t travel to Europe very much.

So I visited two countries on this trip, Italy and Slovenia. We flew into Venice, which is not worth it. It might be the closest major airport to our next destination, but the city itself is basically a floating souvenir shop. Except that it’s not floating at all, instead slowly sinking into the Adriatic Sea. 

It’s been said before, but very few people actually live in Venice these days. The detractors who refer to the city as “Veniceland” have a point. Once upon a time, it must have been amazing given how much history is in that place. Nowadays, it feels like a Disney version of Italy. In early spring it was already a zoo, and in midsummer it’s probably as crowded as a pandemic-inducing factory farm. The locals would be fed up if there were any locals to begin with. 

After two days in Venice, my parents and I rented a car and drove a few hours northward. The first thing I noticed was just how much less traffic there was. According to urbanist YouTuber Not Just Bikes, countries with robust public transit and walkable cities are (perhaps ironically) also ideal for drivers. The reason is because not as many people there need to drive, therefore those people who do drive want to drive. 

This stands in stark contrast to us Americans, who mostly get our licenses at age 16. In America driving is seen as a right and necessity rather than a privilege. But that’s a subject for another day.

I also noticed that the roads in Italy were in far better condition than those at home. Seriously - I live in one of the most affluent parts of the United States and potholes are common. Even when there aren’t potholes, major roads are still far from even much of the time. The Italian motorways were almost spotless. 

We stayed in the ski town of Cortina d’Ampezzo. I am in fact an avid skier, having partaken in the sport since I was six years old. And let me tell you, it was the polar opposite of Venice.

Despite Cortina’s reputation as a glitzy resort that attracts tons of visitors from all around the world, the town felt virtually free of tourists. There were some, yes, but I saw plenty of locals around too. I even bought a new pair of sneakers at a department store where the employees spoke lackluster English (though it was admittedly still far better than my Italian). There’s something immensely gratifying about going somewhere locals or domestic tourists visit.

The skiing was, in absolute terms, not ideal. At lower elevations of the resort, it was very much slush season. In late March, of course, this was hardly unexpected. In fact, relative to what time of year it was, the upper part of the mountain might as well have been Hakuba. All of this, with minimal crowds!

My favorite memory from this part of the trip will likely always be the cooking class my mother and I signed up for. One of the hotel’s chefs walked us through the process of making ravioli with beet filling. Even if we paid good money to take part in it, the activity still felt like an honor.

Think about it. All of us live in a world of vastly increased globalization relative to how it was thirty, even twenty years ago. It’s a lot more common for Americans to watch Indian movies or South Korean TV shows. Conversely, American retail chains can be found all over many European cities despite some Europeans’ best efforts to boycott them.

Italy is another example of a “cultural superpower.” There’s a reason Italian restaurants can be found all over the world. There’s a reason the peninsula received more visitors in 2023 than all but four other countries. Thanks in part to mass media, most people have at least a cursory understanding of why someone would want to visit Italy. 

There is something almost spiritual about this globalization, and yet it has its downsides as well. Indigenous languages are declining, as are some languages that have official status in one or more nations as many people turn to English as a “default” lingua Franca. Some people say that cultures are all becoming the same…

…which is one reason why the cooking class felt incredibly special. At a time when some restaurants are chastised for mass-producing their food, at a time when much of the produce at my local grocery store was sourced from other countries, the people in and around Cortina have been using fresh ingredients to make their ravioli for hundreds of years. The chef aims to keep this practice alive even in an age when that might become more difficult. 

While many of us rely on AI to do simple tasks, the chef who taught the cooking class did not. My mother and I tried to revel in the manual task of rolling out the dough and painting the edges of each dough circle with water. (That is one reason my mother took up ceramics). What dough could not be used was put in a bowl, where it would be used to make pasta in the near future. No ingredients would go to waste. 

My biggest takeaway from the cooking class was this: Just because something is a tradition doesn’t always mean it’s bad. 

At the end of the class, we got to keep our aprons and were given the recipe to make the dumplings at home. We’ve promised my father that we will make them in the near future. 

We drove to Bled, Slovenia the next day. Now, believe it or not, you can’t drive directly from Italy to Slovenia. Or at least, it takes a lot longer to. The reason for this, I presume, is the mountain range along the border. Unlike the Americans who built I-70 in Colorado, Europeans were unwilling to “pave paradise and put up a parking lot”. But whatever - three countries for the price of two.

Bled is best known for sitting on the shore of the lake of the same name. The lake is probably Slovenia’s best-known tourist attraction; acccording to photos, it’s bright blue whenever it’s sunny out. Of course, the keywords are when it’s sunny out - we hardly got any sun when we were there.

Our hotel, the Rikki Balance, at least had a wonderful view of the lake even without the sun. Supposedly the hotel was named after a Swiss doctor who helped discover the health benefits of the area’s mineral resorts. Lake Bled was a pleasant place to walk around, and we even took a pletna boat to the island in the lake’s center because that’s what you do when you’re a tourist there.

That’s the other thing: Sometimes a tourist activity is popular for a reason. It doesn’t have to be undiscovered to be worthwhile. The place reminded me of Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, except that the mountains surrounding Lake Bled are much higher.

While Bled isn’t suffering from overtourism nearly to the degree of Venice, I couldn’t help but observe that it wasn’t a place where many people actually lived. Most residents were probably employed in hospitality. 

The other minor gripe I have with Bled is that for a place with as many tourists as it gets, there weren’t too many restaurants. Yes, I understand that might make me sound like an Ugly American™ - and in fact, most US towns of this size have mostly fast food joints. But we had only two days there and ate at the same restaurant twice. Indeed, if you count the hotel’s buffet as a restaurant, there were two such cases in Bled.

Bled does, however, have that famous cream cake. I’m not normally one for whipped cream, but when it was on the menu, my diet went out the window. And it was on the menu everywhere in Bled. (Why shouldn’t it be? It’s a local culinary specialty.) Even if food in Europe is generally healthier than it is in America, I still won’t be surprised if I’ve put on weight this trip.

We spent two days in Bled before driving to the capital city of Ljubljana. Now, in case you didn’t know, there’s a well-known town called Postojna that’s home to some caves. One of the longest cave systems in Europe, in fact! It’s no wonder that plenty of people were there, such an international crowd that the tour guides don’t bother speaking to the guests - instead, we were given audio guides programmed to the language of our choice.

Let me tell you: The caves are well worth visiting. The karst limestone caverns formed over a period of millions of years. When people say they travel to Europe for history, that’s not generally the type of history they think of. And yet it’s somehow even more spectacular than the cathedrals. In the time it took to build the Sagrada Familia, each stalactite and stalagmite grew about a centimeter at most. It really brings to mind how minuscule our existence on this planet is by comparison.

In the grand scheme of things, it was not that long ago that spelunkers risked life and limb to dig some of these tunnels through pitch-blackness. Nowadays, tourists from all over the world can pay to take a train down and safely explore this underrated natural wonder. There was a gift shop at the end, which had a selection of children’s books like The Dragon In Postojna Caves. I bought a sweater that I intend to wear decently frequently.

Finally we reached Ljubljana, our final stop on the trip. As European capitals go, it’s relatively small, with only about 300,000 people living there. The old town, where we stayed, is centered around the Ljubljanica River. And let me tell you: It’s hard to overstate how excellent the location of the hotel was. Thanks, Dad.

Ljubljana is known as the City of Dragons - one of the most notable bridges over the river is called the Dragon Bridge due to the green statues on all four corners of it. Legend has it that the hero Jason of Greek mythology slayed a dragon there. 

Although I’d imagine very few present-day Slovenes actually believe in dragons, the mythical fire-breathing creature still holds significant sway over the capital city’s history and culture. Dragons feature prominently on Ljubljana’s capital and coat of arms. Most of the souvenir shops dotting the old town sell dragon plushies, dragon sweaters, dragon pendants, or even dragon-themed chocolate. I’m not kidding about that last one.

Ljubljana, in my mind, isn’t “becoming” the next big thing in Europe. It’s already there. While it wasn’t nearly the zoo that Venice may have been, early spring is not peak tourist season in the Slovenian capital. According to a waiter at one of the restaurants we ate at twice (which my father claims made the best hamburger he’s ever eaten), in the summer Ljubljana is like Venice. Given that he spends orders of magnitude more time there than I do, I’m inclined to trust his word on that.

In my experience, Ljubljana was somewhat touristy. There’s a dedicated Tourist Information Center near the Dragon Bridge, and many people were taking selfies in front of a cathedral. I even saw some graffiti telling tourists to go home. 

While I’m not trying to minimize the very real negative impacts that mass tourism can have, I will say that I felt welcome. Even when people found out I was American, they treated me well. 

Now that I have a little over an hour before I land at Boston Logan, I want to gather my final thoughts about Europe and Slovenia in particular.

First of all, the café/restaurant culture is very different from what I’m used to. In the United States, many people get coffee at a drive-thru. It’s physically, environmentally, and emotionally unhealthy - that’s no secret. Everyone is in a hurry at restaurants in America. This isn’t the case in Europe, where cafés are a very common “third place” for people to hang out and linger over drinks.

Part of this is because most American cities are not remotely walkable. And even in the more walkable ones like my beloved Boston, restaurants seldom have much outdoor seating. When my local “Irish pub” reopened during the initial deployment of COVID vaccines in the spring of 2021, all the seating was outside. Yes, it was in a former and future parking lot, but I miss outdoor dining in the States. I wish that feature had continued. 

Another thing I noticed was just how green everything was. At the end of March, some buds were poking out, and I can only imagine how colorful Ljubljana must be in May or June. And it’s not just green in terms of vegetation, but also in terms of infrastructure.

You see, every year a city in the European Union is awarded the title of “European Green Capital” for their efforts against the climate crisis. Ljubljana won this award in 2016, and the locals are quite proud of it, as they should be. In the absence of an Internet connection, I can’t tell you precisely how the winner is determined, but I saw very little trash on the streets. And of course, it’s very easy to walk around the compact city - the only vehicles allowed in most of the old town seemed to be the police, presumably other emergency vehicles, and the electric tourist train. 

This extends to the country’s natural heritage. Slovenia’s coat of arms contains the country’s highest mountain, Triglav, and waves to represent its short coastline. Every sane person on this Earth understands that we must protect the environment, but this need feels especially prescient in a country with such natural beauty in such a small expanse. I mean, the place is smaller than the Netherlands, yet it has mountains that were once glaciated, evergreen forests, bright green fields as far as the eye can see, and an Instagram-worthy coastline on the Adriatic. 

As much acclaim as the nature in the United States gets, it’s a lot less accessible to the average resident. America  is massive, and internal transportation is in a sorry state indeed. It’s only likely to get worse under the Trump administration, but it wasn’t great to begin with. Slovenia is far more friendly to people with a limited amount of time - I was only there for four days and feel like I did the country right.

My last observation is that the flag of Slovenia, (which is roughly the same colors as the Russian flag except for the coat of arms in the upper left part of it) was seen frequently. Of the fifteen countries I’ve visited besides my own, Slovenes probably flew their flag more than anywhere but the USA. 

In the US, flying the flag on your property is coded as right-wing. The patriotism, nationalism, or whatever you want to call it is constantly in your face. It’s like people think you’ll otherwise forget what country you’re in. 

By contrast, Slovenia has a lot more things to be proud of. It’s a much smaller country (population only 2.1 million) that’s often overshadowed by its neighbors. They don’t bully people around like America does. Their patriotism is a lot gentler and honestly simpler. I’d even say it’s better. They’re not saying they’re better than anyone else, after all.

I’m sure that Slovenia isn’t a perfect place. If you live in Ljubljana or Bled, I have to imagine that tourism has driven your cost of living skyward. Inflation is probably higher than in the US (for now) thanks to the major war a mere two countries away. 

And yet, as I take myself back to the very pedestrian-friendly streets of Ljubljana, which have been there under several empires prior to the modern-day Republic of Slovenia, I’m convinced that you could do a lot worse.

Overall, I’m very glad I made the trip. As convinced as I am that the contestants on The Amazing Race 35 were paid to remark on how beautiful Slovenia is, that really wasn’t necessary. The scenery speaks for itself, as do the 2.1 million people who are lucky enough to call the country home. As long as you are willing to be a respectful visitor and don’t mind a connecting flight if you’re not from Europe or Dubai, I can’t recommend Slovenia enough. I might describe it as a more budget-friendly version of Switzerland.

All the photos below were taken by yours truly.

“Every Country Has Its Problems”

Rodrigo Duterte, former President of the Philippines, at his ICC hearing. Image taken from The Guardian.

Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was recently arrested and sent to the Netherlands to be tried for crimes against humanity during his drug war. Brazilian former President Jair Bolsonaro is indicted for attempting a coup in 2023. And of course, South Korea’s insane few weeks ended with former President Yoon being held accountable.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is President of the United States again. Let’s talk about why that is.

Whenever I complain about something happening in the United States, it’s very common for well-meaning people to come at me with the following refrain: Every country has its problems. No place is perfect, they say.

Here’s the thing: To a point, I agree with them. There is no perfect country anywhere in the world - even Reddit’s beloved Finland is pretty dark in the winter. 

But whenever someone says “every country has its problems” as a way to dismiss the very real atrocities currently occurring in the United States, atrocities that rarely if ever occur elsewhere, I think they’re very wrong indeed. And I’m going to dissect that claim here.

First of all, let’s consider the case of health care. Famously, it costs a fortune here depending on what you need and how greedy your health insurance company is. Consider that a few months ago, the CEO of such a company was assassinated, and much of the country is cheering on the gunman. People are even donating money for his legal defense. This is despite the fact that many Americans live paycheck to paycheck, in no small part due to these health insurance companies.

The United States does not have universal health insurance like essentially every other wealthy nation does. It’s been said before, but all you need to know about the American healthcare system is that there’s a popular TV series in which the main character turns to cooking crystal meth to pay his medical bills. It’s considered some of the best TV ever made, in fact.

Walter White, a TV character who could not exist without the American health care system. Image taken from Wikipedia.

People have always complained about having to pay medical bills, as they should. But this came to a head during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit the United States especially hard. And again, this was largely due to the country’s lack of universal health insurance. It’s profitable to deny care to people who need it, after all, and people aren’t going to get tested if it costs too much money for them to do so.

More than a million Americans perished from the virus, and you’d think that would make a pretty good case to make healthcare free. (And yes, it’s not actually free, but it’s paid through your taxes in other countries. Same thing.)

Instead, there are still many lawsuits in place to repeal some or all of the Affordable Care Act. And yes, that’s also known as Obamacare, even though a sizable chunk of Americans don’t know that they’re the same thing. But the ACA was barely a band-aid on the gaping bullet wound that is the American healthcare system, and even that could easily be repealed under the new Trump administration.

Speaking of bullets, let’s talk about another crisis plaguing this country - gun violence. The shootings everyone thinks about are the high-profile cases of school violence like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde…fuck, there are so many. Then there are others that happen in public spaces, including the deadliest of all - the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Bump stocks were banned after the latter event, but the Supreme Court re-legalized machine guns last year. 

What has happened in terms of gun control? Absolutely nothing! And indeed, Sandy Hook was the end of the gun rights debate: If you were going to write a story about an event that would get Americans to finally give up their weapons, you couldn’t do much “better” than Sandy Hook. 

This stands in stark contrast to other countries. The United Kingdom banned most firearms after the 1996 Dunblane shooting, and Australia did the same after the Port Arthur Massacre that same year. Canada has had a handful of mass shootings, but here’s the thing - most of those guns come from down here. I’m surprised they weren’t already boycotting us even before Trump!

Make no mistake, people still want gun control. A majority of Americans claim to, in fact. And yet, if anything, firearm laws in this country have become more permissive in the years since twenty first-graders and six staff members were gunned down at Sandy Hook. Couple that with the seventy percent or so of Americans who apparently favor Medicare For All, and you should realize something.

So why is that? If the majority of the population wants things to change, why have they stayed the same?

Well, let’s talk about the United States Constitution. It was written to be very hard to amend - in fact, there has not been a new amendment since 1992.

Because we’re so polarized, and because the bar to ratify a new amendment is so high, it’s my belief that we’ll never see another amendment, no matter how much we might need one. I don’t mean to draw a moral equivalence between the Democrats and Republicans here, but the two parties will never agree on anything significant enough to warrant an amendment ever again. 

Some people might wonder why there aren’t any protests. Part of it is the Kyle Rittenhouse precedent - remember how he literally got away with murdering protestors? Then again, I reject the notion that there haven’t been any protests. Remember 2020?

Massive George Floyd protests that ultimately amounted to nothing. Image taken from the Associated Press.

After the most enormous protests in American history, something would need to change regarding police brutality, wouldn’t it? And yet, the most significant legislative response has been to ban discussion of race in classrooms. That’s pretty disgraceful - we’re worse off than we were before the unrest.

Some people say that Europe is more racist than the United States. I’ll admit that I’m a white man, so I’ve never had racism directed at me, but people who claim that the previous sentence is true literally have no idea what they’re talking about.

Let’s talk about Germany, a country that has learned from its past. Symbols related to the Nazis, perpetrators of horrific crimes during the 1930s and 1940s, have been banned in Germany and several other countries. Still, some people say that Europe’s got more racism than America.

I have not spent any significant amount of time in Germany; maybe black people there are more likely to be jeered at, or even called a racial slur. But that’s typically the worst-case scenario in terms of racism in Germany. Nobody fears the police unless they’ve committed a crime.

In America, it’s quite different. Even after the absolutely massive George Floyd protests, over a thousand people are killed by U.S. police every year, and African-Americans are disproportionately targeted. And that’s not the only example; I’ve talked about redlining and its relation to societal apathy in the recent past. 

So what’s my point here? How is this related to the saying “every country has its problems?”

Well, it’s simple. Other countries may have problems, but they solve them. Whether it’s Australia passing gun control after one major mass shooting, or France amending their Constitution to enshrine reproductive rights into law, or literally every non-U.S. country committing to fighting the climate crisis, other countries fix problems when they arise.

There’s a reason we can’t be like this too.

Most Americans might want things to change here. But as soon as they’re told that “things changing” will benefit people of color too, they suddenly dig their heels in. Racism runs deeper here than a desire to improve their own lives, and that’s pretty sad.

We are a uniquely sick country, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever gets better. I think it’s more likely that we limp along until we implode under the weight of our archaic stone constitution, which might as well be toilet paper anyway.

Trump Isn’t Kidding About Canada

A border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. Image taken from the NPR website.

Well, he’s doing it. After repeatedly going back and forth on when he would implement these horrendous policies, United States President Donald Trump (yuck, I hate saying those words again) has begun his series of tariffs on Canada and Europe.

Canada and the EU have, of course, retaliated, as they have every right to. And I greatly oppose Trump’s action, not just because it’s going to make things more expensive for the average American. It reinforces to me that the U.S. had no right to elect Donald Trump due to our oversize impact on other countries.

But as horrific as the tariffs are, as disgusting as this betrayal may be, I want to bring your attention to a post Trump put on Truth Social the other day. Now, I’m not going to link to that post - we shouldn’t give him our traffic. However, embedded in that Truth Social post was a claim that the only solution for the tariffs is for Canada to join as the “51st state.”

For some, it may be trivial to dismiss that as a joke. That Trump’s just bluffing, and he isn’t brave enough to actually follow through on that threat of annexation. However, this is far from the first time he’s asked for Canada to join the U.S. - he’s been saying this nonstop since he was elected again this past November. 

Yes, Trump lies about a lot of things, and some might say that this echoes his plans during his first term to “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” Never mind the fact that U.S.-Canada relations are unlikely to ever recover after Trump leaves, if he ever leaves. But that’s beside the point for now.

In his Truth Social post, Donald Trump stated that the border between America and Canada was “artificially drawn.” If this doesn’t send a chill down your spine, I don’t know what will. And there’s only one reason for that:

He sounds just like Putin.

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin during their infamous 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. Image taken from NBC News.

Prior to launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has killed countless civilians and turned entire cities to rubble, Vladimir Putin constantly referred to Ukraine as an illegitimate state. In his speech announcing the start of his “special military operation”, he claimed that he wanted to “de-Nazify” the country. He published this essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people.”

It’s also no secret that Trump wants to be just like Putin. Look how many dictators he admires. Remember when Xi Jinping removed his own term limit and Trump said that “we should try President For Life someday”? Well, I do.

As horrific as the war in Ukraine is, a conflict between the United States and Canada would be even worse. Canada is in NATO, meaning that in theory, the rest of the alliance would need to help defend them if it were invaded. And I believe that America’s former NATO allies would fulfill their obligations under Article 5, since their security depends on it. 

I won’t come close to naming all the horrors that would occur if America invaded Canada. It’s entirely possible - maybe even inevitable - that nuclear weapons would be used by one or both sides. That’s to say nothing of the domestic resistance in the United States. While I cannot speak for every liberal, I know that I would like to defect to Canada if the U.S. launches a full-scale invasion of its former ally. The real question is whether or not they’d have me.

The conflict would be truly worthy of the title World War III, and it would be the end of the United States, as well as possibly the end of the world. 

The question then becomes: Who would stop Trump?

I don’t think there’s any way Trump will be talked down from giving the order if he’s truly determined. He has no conscience to begin with, especially since he doesn’t need to run for reelection - he’ll either be out in four years, dictator for life, or dead. Either way, he’s President right now, and his second term is all about revenge. Trump is going to invade Canada if he thinks doing so will “own the libs” who voted him out in 2020.

So, again, who will stop him?

The generals? I doubt it. He nominated Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense not because Hegseth was qualified (he isn’t), but because Trump was confident he would remain loyal. Project 2025 called for purging the military of generals who would refuse to follow orders, and that purge is already taking place. If the generals defy his order to invade Canada, he can just fire them until he reaches someone who is that insane.

There were adults in the room last time. There are far fewer this time.

Congress? No way. Even after Trump incited a mob to personally kill all members of Congress and overthrow the government on January 6, 2021, the Republicans in both chambers still remain loyal. There is no red line for them. They care about kissing the ring more than they care about their own lives, so they’ll never turn on Big Don.

January 6 Capitol attack. Image taken from Britannica.

The people? Leaving aside the fact that half of “the people” keep supporting Trump no matter what he does, it’s unlikely that the protests would be massive enough to be noticed by those in power. It’s not like the media’s been covering them very much. Besides, as I’ve written about just the other day, our cities aren’t designed for protests.

And let’s be honest: You know as well as I do that even if the protests were as enormous as the George Floyd BLM protests in the summer of 2020, they wouldn’t do shit. Those protests certainly didn’t accomplish anything progressive; if anything this country’s gotten more racist since 2020.

Even in spite of the annexation threats, however, I remain envious of Canadians.

It’s not just that they have free health insurance, or that there are a lot fewer mass shootings (and those that do occur can be blamed on American guns). It’s not just that women in Canada still have the right to bodily autonomy. It’s not just that they have better protections for the environment and LGBTQ+ rights, and it’s not just that they keep supporting Ukraine even as America has pivoted to supporting Russia.

It’s that, unlike how it is in America, I would be proud to be Canadian. 

It’s often said that Americans who don’t want to be associated with Trump pretend to be Canadian when they travel abroad; this practice is sometimes referred to as flag-jacking. Come to think of it, I might do that next time. But there’s a reason why the sane Americans do this - Canada has a far better reputation abroad than the U.S. does.

After all, when 9/11 resulted in the closure of U.S. airspace, Canada took in stranded American passengers. When Europe needed help defeating fascism in World War II, Canada joined because it was the right thing to do - we only joined after we were attacked ourselves. Don’t even get me started on the unjustified wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the former of which some Americans fled to Canada in order to avoid being drafted into. 

When the Canadian hockey fans booed the U.S. national anthem a few weeks ago, I wanted to join them. The nation of Canada reflects my values far more than this hellhole - the great white north has all the natural beauty (and more) with none of the political insanity. As Reddit will frequently tell you, politics don’t run peoples’ lives in Canada the way it does down here.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford (a Conservative) strategizing with Canadian Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney (a Liberal). Such a scene would be unthinkable between a Republican and Democrat in the States. Image taken from the Toronto Star.

Here is my stance on the invasion, which I fervently hope does not happen:

I’m not going to apologize, because to apologize means to expect forgiveness, and I don’t expect that. I just want to make clear, in the strongest possible terms, that I do not support any of these atrocities, even if they’re committed in my name.

If you’re a fellow sane American, the best thing you can do is call your Congressperson and tell them to back Seth Magaziner’s (D-RI) bill, HR 1936, which is literally called the “No Invading Allies Act”. There should be no invading allies. Period. 

Trump might be bluffing. I sure hope he is. But counting on his threats being a bluff would be an even dumber decision than Biden running for reelection. We need to act as if Trump might actually invade Canada, because it sure looks like it.

“I’m Sick Of Politics”

A grayscale image of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Johnson, and Ron DeSantis from Salon.com.

Take yourself back in time five years. Do you remember where you were, what you were doing? Maybe not. But there’s little doubt that you remember how you felt.

As of when I post this, it has been precisely five years since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The rest is history - over the course of three years, more than a million people succumbed to the virus in the United States alone. There were days when more people died than perished on the day of the September 11 attacks. 

And yet, despite losing a 9/11 worth of people a day, the pandemic seems to have vanished almost entirely from the public consciousness. If you lost a loved one to COVID, you probably still remember the pandemic, but if you didn’t, it’s easy enough to memory-hole that period. Hell, it no longer holds the same space in my memory that it used to.

We can have debates about why this is, but one thing is worth remembering. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Lots of Americans right now have decided that they are going to check out of current events. “I’m sick of politics”, they say. And honestly, I get it. Having every bit of news you hear be related to what that orange asshat said or did yesterday…it’s exhausting. The other day, I went to AskReddit, and seven or eight of the top ten questions were related to the infamous Trump-Zelenskyy press conference, a humiliating moment for the United States indeed.

So yes…you might be tired of politics. But the German people in the early 1930s were probably also tired of politics, and look where that got the world. 

In other words, we can’t afford to check out. We just can’t.

I mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic above. It’s often said that Trump is responsible for making the outbreak far worse in the United States than it needed to be. And that’s true, but what many people don’t realize is that if Hillary had won in 2016, the pandemic could have likely been averted entirely.

Look at it this way: Trump disbanded the entire pandemic preparedness team in 2018. Maybe I just want to be bitter, maybe that wouldn’t have actually prevented the outbreak from reaching US shores, but I want to be clear about one thing:

When John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, speaks out against his former boss on CNN, I don’t respect him any more than I did before. Bolton was the driving force behind that decision, and over a million Americans (and at least eight million worldwide but maybe a few times that) paid the ultimate price.

And we elected him AGAIN.

People demonstrating in support of abortion rights outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in 2022. Image taken from the Center for American Progress.

Now let’s talk about another direct consequence of Trump’s first election. The people in the above image (or at least, some of them) no doubt believed that they were doing something productive. Never mind that protests never accomplish anything in this country. 

Truth be told, however, the day to protest that decision was November 8, 2016. Hillary Clinton warned us. The President elected for the 2017-2021 term could fill as many as four Supreme Court seats, and in the end Trump filled three with Injustices. I call them Gorey Gorsuch, Gang Bang Brett, and the Contagious ACB, just because I need a modicum of levity to stay sane.

These three Injustices have gotten to work quickly. The Supreme Court is on a warpath, and it’s gonna be a bloodbath of rights dying in broad daylight.

Abortion was first. On June 24, 2022, five Injustices, including the three appointed during Trump’s first term, handed down a decision worse than Dred Scott. Women are essentially slaves to men now - how can someone be a proper citizen without bodily autonomy? I say that not because I want it to be true, but because it simply is.

I don’t need to list the number of reasons why a woman might need an abortion, medically speaking. Those are widely available wherever you get reliable medical information now that the CDC is gutted. Here’s one more qualified source.

I consider myself pro-choice, but my opinion doesn’t really matter, because I am not a woman. I will never need to bear the cross of pregnancy and all the health risks it poses. But five Injustices on the Supreme Court wanted to get in the way of a woman’s decision, and the consequences are horrific. Just ask the family of Amber Nicole Thurman, whom Trump mocked. What a depraved man.

Here’s the thing: Abortion was only the beginning. Japan might be the next country to legalize same-sex marriage, but the USA will probably be the first to take it away after previously legalizing it. What’s next? Cameras in every bedroom to make sure people aren’t having the wrong kind of sex? There’s every possibility that Trump’s election in the face of Dobbs will only embolden these theocrats to make more horrendous rulings, some of which even I can’t imagine right now.

An image, probably AI-generated, that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social to promote an invasion of Canada.

Now let’s talk about our neighbors and former allies to the north. Canada has a new Prime Minister, and his name is Mark Carney. Carney seems like a cool, decently progressive guy - I’d certainly vote for him if I lived up there. And part of me wishes I did live up there.

But you cannot ignore the fact that Trump clearly wants to invade Canada. He keeps calling for them to be made the “51st state”, and referring to outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Governor Trudeau.” And the horrifying thing is, I’m not sure anyone can stop him if he really goes for it.

I’m having a hard time being friends with anyone from Canada on Discord. I feel responsible even though I didn’t vote for this shit. But when the tanks start rolling into Toronto and Vancouver, “I didn’t vote for him” won’t be a valid excuse from my fellow Americans. 

Truth be told, however, I don’t know what American civilians can do to oppose the war. It’s easy enough for me to say I’ll defect and fight for Canada if that happens, but I don’t know if they’d have me, or if the U.S. would let me leave. What I am confident about is that if Trump actually invades Canada, he won’t lose a single supporter he currently has.

Almost nobody in Canada wants this. They. Will. Fight. Back. It’s going to be World War Three, since the rest of NATO will be obligated to come to their defense. Millions of people on both sides are going to die needlessly all for Trump’s ego, making the hockey brawls look like absolute child’s play.

But the worst part? This was all unnecessary. If some Americans had just been willing to have a black woman as President when the alternative was a convicted felon with nothing to lose, we’d still be close allies with Canada. We wouldn’t have alienated the rest of the world, and we wouldn’t be pariahs. I don’t even know if I feel comfortable traveling abroad when everyone, rightly or wrongly, associates American civilians with Trump.

But no. Harris was too pro-Israel, so we had to collectively fuck around and find out anyway. I have immense sympathy for the people of Gaza and Canada, but I have immense hatred for the people of Dearborn who sat this election out (or worse, actually voted for Trump). You have the blood of Canadian civilians and American soldiers on your hands.

The point of tonight’s post is this: After a long, contentious election cycle, you might be tired of politics. I know. I am too. But politics isn’t tired of you.

Sprawling Apathy

There are many well-documented advantages to living in a city. There’s more to do, for one, as compared to a small town that has nothing but a bar and a handful of strip malls. It’s easier to stay physically active when you live in a walkable neighborhood, which has all sorts of health benefits. It’s even considered more ecologically friendly to live in a city, in large part because the increased density of an urban area reduces emissions from transportation.

Conversely, suburbs and rural areas hold many well-documented disadvantages. There tend to be fewer “third places” at which people can gather. A “pub crawl”, or a night at a single bar, is less enjoyable when somebody needs to be the designated driver and that person cannot drink. (In theory, of course - I am a teetotaler.) Car dependency and urban sprawl is bad for the environment considering that 28 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, as of 2024, come from personal vehicles.

All of these pros and cons are widely known and frequently talked about in any discourse on city planning. I don’t mean to minimize any of these issues, but a recent Reddit post on r/SuburbanHell felt topical and worth looking into.

Simply put: It’s a lot harder to organize a protest in car-dependent areas.

A Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels, Belgium from 2020. Image taken from the Global Times website.

Take a look at the picture above. It’s from the racial justice protests of 2020, during which some of the demonstrators in Belgium called for statues of King Leopold II to be taken down. This effort was successful, by the way. That’s Exhibit #547 in why protests are far more effective in other countries besides the United States. But have you ever stopped to wonder why that is?

It’s easy enough to blame the American system of government, and you’re not wrong to think that. This is the same government, after all, that did not pass gun control even after the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And now, while Donald Trump and Elon Musk are robbing the place blind, many people from elsewhere in the world have been expressing their shock that Americans are not in the streets like the French would be.

To be clear, there have been protests. You could argue (and I would agree) that the protests are not nearly so massive as would be warranted given the current situation. But they exist, even if the mainstream media won’t cover them. Political apathy certainly exists here, but I would argue that’s not the only factor leading to the relatively small scale of these demonstrations.

Going back to the example of Belgium, their cities are far more compact and walkable - at least, major cities like Antwerp and Brussels. Even in times when people aren’t protesting, it’s a lot easier to meet up with friends when nobody has to drive. It’s a lot easier to bring lots of people together in one space at one time. Therefore, it is far more feasible to hold a massive protest.

Meanwhile, let’s look at the States. I live in Greater Boston, a city that is relatively walkable but still has plenty of cars. If I were to attend a demonstration at Boston Common today, I could take the MBTA subway downtown to Arlington Station and get off there, then join the crowd. But the T’s so damn slow that it’d take 45 minutes to get there.

Stock image of urban sprawl in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. Most people here don’t interact very much. Image taken from Dreamstime.

If you’re driving to the protest, that’s another story entirely. You need everyone to be able to park their car nearby, and yet most parking garages have only hundreds of spaces. To get the sort of crowd that might actually be noticed by those in power (which is, you know, the whole point of a protest), you’d need thousands of people in the streets, and not all of them live within walking or transit distance. This makes it far more difficult to hold a protest of sufficient size, especially given that most US cities are not like Boston.

This infrastructure-induced atomization is not an accident, either. Rather, there’s plenty of evidence, if you know where to look, that car dependency leads to a lack of societal solidarity and greater atomization, and that this was an intentional decision. 

We’re constantly told that the United States is polarized along racial lines, and that systemic racism is present in many areas of public policy. This is true. But in some of America’s most segregated cities, even the infrastructure is a reflection of this systemic racism.

Consider the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It collapsed last year, killing six people. To be clear, that was a tragic disaster that should have been avoided. However, as Common Dreams wrote at the time, the bridge was built along the Interstate Highway system so that people would not need to drive through the city of Baltimore. Additionally, other infrastructural investments could have better served Baltimore’s lower-income residents (a group that is predominantly African-American).

Take this screenshot from Google Maps. It’s out of date, of course, given that the bridge is no more. But you can clearly see that the road containing the bridge skips the city limits entirely, when it should have been just as easy for people to simply drive through Baltimore. In that case, the $141 million (nominal money in 1977 terms) spent to build the bridge could have been saved.

Google Maps screenshot of Baltimore, showing the Francis Scott Key Bridge selected. The bridge clearly goes around the city, avoiding it very intentionally.

This is hardly the only example of systemic racism in Baltimore, or even the most egregious. The Common Dreams article linked above states, for example, that there’s a twenty-year gap in life expectancy among the residents of the city’s poorest neighborhood and its richest. The latter neighborhood, Roland Park, is a well-known “streetcar suburb” often associated with white flight. I don’t have time to discuss its history in great detail; many scholars have studied this topic more than me. For these purposes, just know that it’s a major issue.

Baltimore is only one example, however. All over the United States, there exist cities zoned specifically so that African-Americans and white people rarely saw each other. Look up redlining - it’s a thing. 

It’s been said to death before, but ignorance is one of the most dangerous forces in this world. It was a lot harder for white people to empathize with African-Americans if they didn’t live alongside the latter group. And indeed, Baltimore (and many other major US cities) were designed so that white people did not have to live alongside African-Americans. 

So if you’re reading this from somewhere other than the United States, and you’re going to claim that Americans don’t protest because we’re fat and lazy, or apathetic, or that lots of us support what’s going on…well, you’re partially right. Individual choices are at fault, at least to some extent.

But to blame it solely on one of these factors misses the bigger picture. It misses the way cities were built for the car (or rather, bulldozed for the car), making it more difficult for people to gather in large enough numbers for a protest. It also misses the way our cities were designed in the first place to reduce solidarity between different racial groups.

We do not, of course, need to accept that the past is destiny. But to discount the past as a reason for the woes of the present is equally foolish. 

Leopards On Parade

I know it’s been a long time. Too long, honestly, and I don’t have a good excuse. I just didn’t feel like following the news as closely as I perhaps should have been. Here we go.

Thumbnail of Ryleigh Cooper’s CNN interview. Image taken from CNN’s website.

While I was driving with my mother today back from downtown, we listened to a segment of the David Pakman Show about Ryleigh Cooper. If you’ve heard the phrase “regretful Trump voters” (which I’m sure you have if you’re online in any capacity these days), then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here. Here is an article about Cooper.

For those who couldn’t be bothered to read that article, the TLDR version is this: Cooper, 24, is a federal worker from a rural part of swing state Michigan. Or at least, she was a federal worker for the U.S. Forest Service. 

Now, in case you’ve already forgotten (which many people have), Trump’s first term was marked by many attacks on environmental regulations and our system of federal lands. There should have been no reason to assume that things would be any different in Trump’s second term, unless “the same as before, but more of it” counts as different. But that’s beside the point.

In the month and a half since taking office, Trump has fired many federal workers. He’s done this with the aid of Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose role hasn’t been clarified yet and will probably never be. For all intents and purposes, Musk is currently President, but again, that’s beside the point.

So let’s get back to Ryleigh Cooper. And I have to tell you, while listening to her CNN interview, I felt like my brain cells were oozing out of my ears. I could not believe what I was hearing, and I don’t think you’ll be able to either. And I’ll let her explain it:

“As someone who is more of a swing voter, sometimes that’s what it comes down to. Those single issues … that are resonating with you at this moment.”

Fair enough. A lot of people in this country are single-issue voters; that’s no secret. It’s one reason Trump and other GOP Presidents were able to get Roe v. Wade overturned after a crusade of nearly fifty years. But what was Ryleigh Cooper’s most important issue?

Well, Cooper, like a decent number of women her age, was trying to get pregnant. She’s been through numerous fertility treatments in an effort to do exactly that. She voted for Trump because she wanted to be able to afford an IVF treatment in order to have a child.

Now, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: To want a child, and yet fear that you’ll be unable to have one, is undoubtedly a very difficult experience to endure. As a man who intends to remain child-free, it’s not something I’ll ever go through, but I empathize with this part of Cooper’s story.

But let’s turn the clock back four months and pretend it’s time to vote. I struggle to imagine how, if your singular issue in the 2024 election is anything related to reproductive care from the pro-choice side, you could make yourself vote for anyone but Kamala Harris.

 After all, during her brief (by American standards) 2024 campaign, Harris championed abortion rights and pledged to preserve access to IVF. Trump, meanwhile, said once that he would make IVF free, but he has also bragged about overturning Roe on multiple occasions. He appointed the Supreme Court Injustices who handed down that decision, so he’s responsible more than anyone else for it. Actions speak louder than words; or at least, they should.

This is a classic case of leopards on parade. Cooper voted for Trump thinking he’d take away opportunities from other people; she admitted this herself in her CNN interview. But she thought she would be safe from the negative consequences of electing him. Which, as a newly-fired federal worker, she clearly wasn’t.

A meme about the “Leopards-Eating-Faces Party” that looks like the Japanese flag. Taken from Redbubble.

The other thing I want to address is the broader issue at play here. David Pakman, a very wise man, once said that “millions of Americans have no idea what’s going on”, and he couldn’t be more correct about that. 

Ryleigh Cooper thought that voting Trump was the best decision to make from the standpoint of reproductive rights. It doesn’t matter how much the rest of us know that Trump’s record on these rights has been nothing short of cataclysmic. The politically engaged among us know that there’s a vast gulf between Republicans and Democrats on this issue, and that Trump’s the reason women like Amber Nicole Thurman died after being denied medically necessary reproductive care.

Here’s the thing: The important words there are politically engaged.

Lots of Americans don’t follow the news. On some level, I don’t blame them, for the news is pretty damn depressing these days. But the fact remains that a lot is going on right now, and the German people were probably sick of politics in 1933 - look where that got them. It’s hard to keep track of everything Trump’s doing to flood the zone, and I get it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Truth be told, Ryleigh Cooper is far from alone. She’s a microcosm of what Green Day would call the American Idiots. According to the Atlanta Black Star article I linked at the top of this page, Cooper voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, making her a swing voter. If you’re undecided between a party that’s centrist to center-right (the Democrats) and a party that’s completely off the rails (the Republicans), you’re either dumb as rocks or woefully uninformed. 

If you were paying attention, Trump was telling you exactly what he wanted to do. Project 2025 was available on the Internet prior to the election -  all 900+ pages of it! So if you didn’t have even a basic sense of what Trump would enact given the opportunity, that was your problem. 

However, this speaks to a far more important problem for Democrats. No matter what insane things Trump promises, the blue team has not been able to convince voters that Trump actually means it. And I say this as a Democrat: If we cannot break through the disinformation bubble, we will never win again, and we might not deserve to. 

The saddest part? I don’t know what the solution is, short of letting Trump do whatever he wants, ruining the country even more than he already has. Maybe, like Cooper, they will care once they have experienced hardship as a result of their decision to elect a convicted felon as President. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

To her credit, Ryleigh Cooper seems to regret her vote, even if only because she’s been fired from her forest service job and is on the brink financially. Most of Trump’s voters will never abandon him, so at least she has that going for her. I just wish she (and others) would have done her research before the election so that we could have prevented this mess. 

The 48.3% of us who voted for Kamala Harris, meanwhile, didn’t fuck around, but we still have to find out.

Meme taken from user “Being Liberal” on Facebook.

Political Negligence

Aerial view of Washington-National Airport (DCA). Image taken from Engineering-News Record.

Unfortunately, I come to you today with some horrific news. The news, of course, is that American Eagle Flight 5342, a scheduled domestic passenger flight from Wichita to Washington-National, collided with a military helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River.All 67 people on board both aircraft lost their lives. It is the first fatal commercial airline accident in the United States since 2009.

The blame game has started. To be clear, I am not an air safety expert, and I do not know definitively what the investigation will show. However, lots of people online (on both Reddit and BlueSky), as well as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg , have been blaming the new Trump administration for the crash. 

These people have a good case. After all, within hours of taking office, Donald Trump fired the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the head of the TSA. Additionally, he has instituted a freeze in hiring new air traffic controllers. You know, the people responsible for making sure aircraft don’t crash into each other in midair. If he replaces these people at all, it will probably be with incompetent loyalists.

So yes - they have a point.

However, I think it’s important to emphasize that if we were going to see a major drop in safety standards for American airspace as a result of Trump taking office, it would have taken a lot longer than ten days to really have an impact. And it’s not like it only takes ten days to become an air traffic controller in some of the world’s busiest airspace from the day you sign up.

Then again, according to this piece from The Guardian, the shortage of air traffic controllers in the United States has lasted for years, which is why we’ve had an increase in near-misses. We are understaffed in this department, and Trump’s decisions haven’t helped matters. But the problem existed before Trump’s second term began, so it’s not entirely on the orange felon.

The elephant in the room is Trump’s press conference that he gave about this crash. I can’t bring myself to watch it, but apparently he kept hammering home the idea that DEI has infected the aviation industry and led to a decrease in safety standards. Whether or not Trump is directly responsible for the tragedy, his rhetoric at the press conference was still highly irresponsible.

As troubling as this is, though, my main point today is not to argue that the tragedy last night at DCA is or is not Donald Trump’s fault. Instead, I want to use this case to illustrate how asymmetric our polarized political environment has become.

Imagine what it would be like if the crash had occurred while a Democrat was President. The Republican-controlled Congress (or even a Congress with a Republican minority) would demand investigations. They would summon the President in for many hours of testimony before every committee in both the House and Senate. Indeed, they’d probably be calling for the pitchforks, especially if that Democratic President had just fired the head of the FAA.

Hillary Clinton during her 11 hours of testimony over the Benghazi attack. Image taken from BBC News.

In fact, you don’t even have to imagine. That’s exactly what happened in 2012 when Hillary Clinton, then the United States Secretary of State, was blamed for the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Most Americans could not locate Libya on a map, if they’ve heard of the country’s existnece at all. Regardless, it is in fact a tragedy that four Americans perished in this attack. We should indeed have been upset about it, and Secretary Clinton should indeed have been called in to testify. This incident basically tanked Hillary’s future presidential campaign in 2016, leading to Trump’s first presidency. But I’ll get to that later.

Later in Barack Obama’s presidency, an Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa. To be clear, Ebola sounds like an absolutely horrifying illness that I never want to catch. And the two American deaths that occurred as a result of this outbreak are tragedies. However, the 2014 midterm elections swung massively against the Democrats, and Ebola is a commonly cited reason why. This enabled Donald Trump to enter office in 2016 with as much power as he had.

During the first three years of Trump’s term, we were pretty lucky. There were no major crises affecting the United States that were not of Trump’s own making. In fact, I still remember watching the RNC last year and feeling like I was watching a film adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, because they kept asking the crowd “Are you better off now than you were four years ago in 2019?”

Of course, four years prior to 2024 was not 2019, but 2020, as the archived MSNBC footage that played shortly thereafter reminded us. That was the year when we couldn’t leave our homes without wearing a mask, or were at least advised against it. That was the year when refrigerator trucks held excess dead bodies of COVID victims. Overall, more than a million lives were lost in the United States from the coronavirus. The fear, the isolation, the boredom…that was Trump’s fault after he infamously disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018.

A 2019 Twitter post from Joe Biden about pandemic threats, posted only a few months before the outbreak reached the United States. Screenshotted from Google Images.

Despite the tragic disaster that was Trump’s first presidency and COVID response, the Democrats were utterly unable to effectively saddle Mango Mussolini with this horrendous record in the 2024 election. They let him get away with claiming that 2020 didn’t happen, to the point where the pandemic was basically memory-holed. That’s why Trump won in 2024 - people didn’t remember just how much of a disaster he was. And their buyers’ remorse will only do so much good now.

Republicans never let Obama get away with two Ebola deaths, or Clinton with the four fatalities in the Benghazi attack. The fact that Democrats let Trump get away with over a million deaths from COVID-19 is absolute political negligence, and I’m almost as ashamed to call myself a Democrat as I am an American. I might even switch my voter registration to NPA at this point.

Even if Trump wasn’t directly responsible for this particular plane crash, he has far more than 67 peoples’ blood on his hands. And the Democrats let him get away with it. That’s the real story here.

Nobody Asked For This AI Bullshit

The worst feeling on the Internet. Image taken from r/Memes.

I remember the good old days when you’d go to Google Search and type in whatever question you wanted the answer to. You’d be pointed to several sites ranked in roughly the order of how helpful the algorithm thinks they’ll be. To some extent, this is still the case today.

However, whenever you Google a question, you’re presented with an “AI search overview” that basically already answers the question. This leaves aside instances where it doesn’t give you correct information, including this infamous case last year in which people were told to eat glue and rocks.

Now, at first glance, this AI may seem (mostly) harmless, provided nobody actually eats glue and rocks. Never mind that AI is apparently cooking the planet at an alarming rate. But maybe, you figure, we can find a greener way to do it. Maybe we can have more energy-efficient data centers, or run them entirely on renewables the way Iceland already is. And for the sake of argument, I’ll grant you that.

But think about this for a moment: Google’s AI search overview basically removes the need for websites. Nobody’s going to provide traffic to a small website like my own if you’re already given the answer to your question. This is how what some call “late-stage capitalism” works; greedy corporations are going to take over the market, and then they’re going to choke out the competition. There will eventually be no competition. 

Probably the most infuriating part about this AI “revolution” is that nobody really asked for it except the tech companies.

Now, I’m not saying that every scientific breakthrough should need to be voted on democratically. If anything, that might be a bad idea in a country where Donald Trump won the popular vote. Besides, some innovations just happen organically. However, artificial intelligence is going to make life so much worse for the vast majority of the population that I can’t help but feel this “innovation” is forced.

Let’s talk about AI “art.” In many ways, I miss the early days of this era, the halcyon era that was spring 2023. Back then, the most prominent use of AI online was to make public figures play video games. And for the record, the videos of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden trash-talking one another over Wii Sports remain some of the funniest content I’ve ever seen. I’ll never forget this exchange:

Obama: Donald’s in the bunker.

Biden: Bunker? Wait, what happened?

Obama: Bunker in golf, Joe.

Even in those early days of artificial intelligence, there were constant warnings about the nefarious purposes for which this technology could (and inevitably would) be used. The first anti-Biden attack ad of the 2024 campaign (before Biden dropped out of the race) was generated by AI and featured a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Given that Trump’s now selling out Taiwan, the acronym GOP once more stands for “Gaslight, Obstruct, Project”.

But let’s move on past the geopolitical implications of AI and deep-fakes and talk about the fine arts. We keep hearing stories about AI-generated novels and maybe even movies. In fact, during the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, which went on for nearly five months, one of the key issues at play was related to the use of AI in Hollywood. As the linked Associated Press article notes, the humans won - for now. 

Still, that was a temporary victory. Humans and the movement for creativity must win every time, whereas our AI-pushing overlords only need to triumph once. On some corners of the Internet, AI has already won.

Take the once-popular website DeviantArt. At one time, it was the go-to platform for anything creative. You could (and still can) post digital artwork, photography, or even fanfiction there. However, as of 2025, it’s fallen out of favor among many artists. The reason? According to this online forum, the site is using submitted artwork to train artificial intelligence. Plus, it’s populated with so much slop that you can’t tell what artwork is genuine and which wasn’t actually produced with a human mind behind it. Consider it a warning sign - a cautionary tale, if you will.

Imagine a world where nobody wants to be creative anymore. Yes, we might still enjoy the AI-generated sitcoms and whatnot (hell, they might already be out there), but on this issue I’m very much a purist. The late science fiction author Harlan Ellison put it best. At one point in the linked 1995 interview, Ellison states that it should cost you something to produce art; otherwise, it’s not art. 

And I agree with this. Even if what we might consider our “souls” is ultimately just a product of our brains, we still need to cherish it. It’s what keeps us human.

Maybe some people will still want to write novels or film movies. However, human-made art may pale in quantity to the AI-generated garbage that’s sure to flood our screens and bookshelves (if bookshelves still remain, that is). Why would anyone go to the trouble of writing a genuine novel when they’d get far more royalties from something a computer wrote for them?

Finally, let’s look at the fields of academia. There’s been a lot of talk about DeepSeek (an open-source Chinese AI model) and ChatGPT lately. Since I’m based in the US and have never been to China, I’ll just talk about ChatGPT here. And if my adventures on Reddit are any indiction, we’re in a lot of trouble.

To share my personal experience, I took a course on Middle East Politics in the fall 2023 semester (an eventful time to be taking such a course, to be sure), and the professor kept harping on to us that we were not allowed to use generative AI to write our essays. Each of us needed to write three essays that semester, and each paper was meant to be turned into AI-detecting software before the professor would read it.

Now, I never used ChatGPT to write my papers, because I have at least a modicum of academic integrity. But I can’t know if any of my classmates did, and apparently the software meant to detect plagiarism or the use of generative AI is far from perfect. It’s none of my business whether the other students honestly wrote their papers, but I know I did. 

My university is far from alone; and indeed, this problem is far from unique to the postgraduate level. All over the country, and probably in other countries as well, teachers are having to adjust their curricula to reflect that some students may be turning to AI to write their assignments. But the AI will keep getting more effective, as ChatGPT and other platforms update, and the teachers will struggle to keep up. 

Most importantly, there are some jobs in which you can’t just look at your notes when you need to do something; being a heart surgeon is one commonly cited example. Medical school is already very expensive in the United States, which could lead to a shortage of such professionals; imagine if the existing surgeons cheated their way to their MD?

Fortunately, there is hope, though not a lot of it. Back in November 2024, an AI-generated ad for Coca-Cola caused a lot of controversy and ridicule. We need to have more backlash like this, keeping the many dangers and disappointments of AI in the spotlight. That’s how we might stand a chance at keeping as much of our humanity as possible.

To the tech companies forcing this on us: None of us wanted AI to take over our lives and destroy the planet. Really, we didn’t. So go fuck yourselves. 

We will take back the human race. We will not be force-fed your dangerous, destructive technology like the duck pictured below. 

A meme of a cartoon character force-feeding a duck AI. This image was found on BlueSky, posted by one Marcus Hutchins at Malwaretech.com.

We Are All Digitally Divided

A PSA comparing social media algorithms to addictive drugs. Image taken from Hot In Social Media Tips & Tricks

Much has been made of the term “digital divide” in academia. It’s been well-documented, after all, that countries in the Global South tend to have less access to digital technologies such as the Internet. Given the ubiquity of the Internet today, inability to enter the superhighway of information we know as the World Wide Web has become pretty much a deal-breaker if you wish to participate in the global economy.

With the advent of social media, anyone can have their 15 minutes of fame. You can be famous for writing book reviews, famous for playing video games, or even just famous for being famous. If you don’t believe me, this 2024 CNBC poll suggested that over half of Gen Z-ers wanted to be influencers.

You can show off your personal life to anyone who wants to see it. You can live-stream for hours every day, regardless of whether anybody else is watching. In many ways, this world is more connected than ever before…or is it?

I’ll offer a paradoxical thesis: Despite the popularity of social media, human beings are more alone than they have ever been.

Here’s an example. I’m not going to romanticize the age of cable TV - it was all too easy for the TV companies to screw you over with high prices. Of course, it’s the same way with streaming services where you can pick what you want to have access to. But still, in the cable TV era, it was common knowledge what shows were on at what time. Like so many other things in life, you don’t fully understand what you’ve got until it’s gone.

Kids had their Saturday morning cartoons, during which they’d get up at the ass-crack of dawn and bound down the stairs to binge-watch their shows while binge-eating endless bowls of sugary cereal. Adults had their soap operas in the evening that they might watch with their romantic partner. Finally, anyone who couldn’t sleep (possibly including the aforementioned children who lived on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs) would have infomercials at 3 AM.

Calvin telling us how amazing Saturdays are. Taken from Reddit.

I probably sound like a boomer saying this, but I remember when the Boston Globe published TV guides in all of its papers, telling you when your favorite shows would be on. Chances were good that at least some of your neighbors would watch the same things, and you’d bond further with these people over what insane plot twist had just been unveiled or who’d won Wipeout last night.

That’s not the case these days. If I’m at a party with a neighbor, and they recommend a TV show for me to watch, I first have to check to ensure it’s on one of the streaming platforms I pay monthly to remain subscribed to. In all probability, I’ll forget about their recommendation, simply because I’m not interested in the show and it’s not on a channel I prefer. Gone are the days when we bond over shared television series. We’ll never again have a show with as much cultural relevance as Seinfeld or whatever else was popular in the 1990s.

Now let’s talk about the news. Obviously, “the news” has varied from time to time, and it’s very often depressing these days if you’re at all sane. Overindulgence in the media can be harmful to your mental health - that is no secret. But think about this for a moment: When was the last time you saw anyone under age 60 reading a newspaper?

A slide from a presentation I gave a few months ago about how the news used to be, versus how it is now.

I’m not talking about the digital editions of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, or whatever local news outlet is still limping along and breathing like Steve from Amazing Race (if you know, you know). I’m talking about the physical newspaper. The kind that got delivered to your door every day for a small fee.

Now, my mother still gets the Globe, but guess what? She’s 60 years old, and even among people her age, she’s in the minority. My grandmothers also get the physical paper, but they’re obviously much older than sixty. Most people I interact with on a day-to-day basis outside my family get their news from social media. And that’s a problem.

As I write this post, it’s been one week since Donald Trump became President again. Despite being convicted of 34 felony counts, despite having promised to implement tariffs on other countries and tank the economy, and despite Sleepy Joe Biden having dropped out and been replaced by a far more energetic candidate, he still won. In my mind, David Pakman said it best: “Lots of people in this country have no idea what the hell is going on.”

Think about that for a moment. Google searches for terms like “did Joe Biden drop out” reportedly spiked on the day of the election. I don’t know about you, but it was a pretty big news story in my (admittedly liberal) circles. I remember lying on the front porch with COVID, enduring endless coughing fits, when I received the Discord ping that President Biden had withdrawn from the race. 

Once I was no longer testing positive, I joined my family inside to watch Biden’s primetime address from the Oval Office. It was an important occasion, but apparently not for much of the country. That’s because 8 PM is no longer “primetime” for so many people. Instead it’s just another time when you might be watching TV, or, more likely, aimlessly scrolling through social media. 

Many people in the United States are just prisoners of the algorithm. The right-wing echo chambers kept attacking Joe Biden, making the red-hatted Trump supporters think their opponent was the 81-year-old Biden instead of the then 59-year-old Kamala Harris. They were blindsided by their ballots when they discovered their options, because they never learned that Harris had replaced Biden more than three months prior. 

The last thing I’ll address here is the bookstore. Now, even if I’ve been reading a lot lately, I’m well aware that this hobby is falling out of favor among the Generation Alpha crowd. They’d rather play Fortnite for hours on end and watch Skibidi Toilet videos in class.

One reason I prefer to purchase my books from the local bookstore is because I want to support small businesses as opposed to Amazon whenever it’s realistically possible. And yes, I like the human element of entering the building and asking for recommendations from the staff. But there’s an underrated reason why I prefer the physical store.

There’s no algorithm.

If I look up a book on Amazon, there’s always a section on the buy page saying people who bought X also searched for Y, or something to that effect. In the long term, I’ll end up reading largely books of the same genre and similar themes, rather than getting a well-rounded array of titles like I might at the bookstore. Ultimately, if I’m going to keep doing these book reviews in the long term, I want to read a wide variety of novels.

I know this analysis largely comes from an American perspective. Some of the problems I’ve talked about on this blog, such as expensive health care and gun violence, are unique to the United States. And some of the loneliness is brought upon us by car-dependent infrastructure, which is not as pervasive in, say, Western Europe. 

That being said, the U.S. is not the only country where social media algorithms have been deployed. And I’m not even going to say that the algorithms are all bad; there are too many videos on YouTube to know what the average user might like without any data.

However, anyone who values personal interaction should be wary of these algorithms. After all, technology is not neutral, no matter how much we’d like to think it is. 

We Need To Talk About Elon

Elon Musk jumping in the shape of an X onstage at a Trump rally. Image taken from NPR.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. As of the moment I write this post, his net worth is well over four hundred billion dollars, and it’s rapidly growing to boot. 

To put that into perspective, imagine that you had $400 billion USD. In practical terms, you could never spend all that money in a human lifetime, unless you’re about to become immortal. Which is far from impossible given just how much technology has advanced in recent decades. Even so, that’s an insane amount of money, and Musk is evidently using it to buy the U.S. government.

Given his close alliance with now-President Donald Trump (as much as it pains me to utter those words), Musk has been in the news a lot lately. And, given just how much Trump’s mind has been going over the last few years, Elon Musk is effectively already President of the United States. It doesn’t matter that he’s technically ineligible to be commander in chief - he is Trump’s “puppet master.”

During the “celebrations” surrounding Trump’s inauguration the other day, one moment in particular has captured the Internet’s attention. Given just how taboo the gesture is in a civilized society, I will not put an actual picture of it in this article; to me, it’s equivalent to using the N-word with a hard R. But yes, I am referring to the moment when Elon Musk gestured at the ceiling with his right arm slanted toward the heavens.

The New York Times, in their infinite anticipatory obedience, have described “speculation”  being drawn over the gesture. Quite frankly, I struggled over my decision to even include that link there, because the New York Times has arguably enabled Trump more than any politician. A broken clock is right twice a day. The media is indeed the enemy of the people, because their sane-washing of the MAGA movement helped them return to power.

The other claim I want to address is that Elon Musk, who is autistic, was merely stimming. I want to be clear about one thing: I’m on the autism spectrum myself, and I remember rocking back and forth a lot as a child. Even now, I love rocking chairs and hammocks. These days my stims are mostly vocal, but I do rock and flap on occasion. Sometimes it weirds people out; I get it.

But let me make one thing clear: You don’t make that gesture by accident.

The salute Elon Musk made at the inauguration is one with a very dark past. The people who popularized it were responsible for one of the most horrific events of the last few centuries. The Nazi salute is now associated with the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” in Europe. And no, another visit to Auschwitz is not going to make us believe Elon isn’t anti-Semitic.

Indeed, Germany, the country whose government spearheaded these atrocities, is now among the most progressive countries on Earth. It’s far more progressive than the United States, at any rate, when it comes to bigotry in all its forms. There are in fact laws against Holocaust denial, and if you make that salute in public, you will probably be arrested. Here, we let Elon get a pass.

I’m not saying Elon Musk is going to commit genocide against six million Americans, but what I am saying is that he knew what gesture he was making, and was happy with how it would be perceived. Or at least, he wasn’t so unhappy that he would decide not to make it. And I know that the neo-Nazis and white supremacists seem to love it.

Another moment I want to touch upon is the one pictured below. It’s from the “Victory Rally” Donald Trump held the night prior to being sworn in as the 47th President of the United States.

Donald Trump at his “Victory Rally” on January 19, 2025. Image taken from ABC News’ website.

During this event, Trump claimed that Elon Musk “knows computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we won Pennsylvania by a landslide.” Now, if you call a 1.7% margin of victory a landslide, sure. It was a landslide. It was even enough to narrowly drag former three-term US Senator Bob Casey Jr. under the line. But that’s not the most important moment from this speech.

As much as I hate Elon Musk, he’s an incredibly tech-savvy individual; I’ll give him that. He manipulated the Twitter algorithm to prioritize hateful content, to the point where the site is virtually unusable except by users who love such content. Trump’s right about this.

Yes, on its own, the passage above is a non sequitur. But if you replace “and” with “so” in the last sentence, Trump appeared to state that Musk helped him cheat in the 2024 election and steal Pennsylvania from Kamala Harris.

There are two options here: Either Trump got confused again just like he did about whether or not there were airports in 1776, or he admitted to election fraud. And to be clear, I think the former option is more probable. It’s still not the sort of thing to joke about, even if Trump most likely got every single vote that was counted for him. Then again, Trump won’t tone down the rhetoric, not even when it almost got Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapped.

The most important thing to note is that Elon Musk is, right now, the most powerful person in the world. He has more power than Trump, Vladimir Putin, or even Xi Jinping. His power may not end with the United States. While I think other countries’ voters are smarter than Americans, only time will tell, and Musk has endorsed far-right parties all over Europe, something German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has acknowledged and condemned.

An image the Democratic Party posted on social media. Where was this energy from Democratss during the election? Image taken from the People’s Party website.

Some people think the bromance between Trump and Musk will be short-lived, that we’ll run into “trouble in paradise” early on in the administration. I hate to say it, but I believe this is likely false.

Remember, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world by far. He might even be a trillionaire in two years. If any Republican member of Congress waffles a bit on Trump’s legislative agenda, Musk has the wealth to single-handedly fund a primary challenger to that disloyal Republican. Even if incumbency is difficult to overcome in a primary, Musk can bully sitting Congresspeople and Senators into submission via the mere threat of a primary. As long as Musk offers that to Trump, I don’t see these two breaking up any time soon.

So what can we do? 

Well, the obvious answer would have been to not elect Donald Trump as President, but that ship has unfortunately sailed. Failing that, it makes sense to boycott the platform Xitter (X/Twitter, pronounced “shitter”) as long as Musk owns it. It’s become a far-right, hateful cesspool that no decent person should support. 

Furthermore, though he’s not quite as evil as Musk, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, deserves condemnation for blocking his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. When possible, we should aim to support local retail businesses as opposed to Amazon. All the books I’ve reviewed so far were purchased at small bookstores. To be clear, even if Harris had won, we should still have been doing this - Trump’s policies just make it more urgent.

So if you want to support journalism and book reviews, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. It would mean a lot.

A Rant On American Culture

Facade of the Boston Public Library. I took this photo myself. Aren’t this many flags a bit excessive?

Whenever I rant about the state of the United States and feel like running my fist through a wall or yelling something I’m going to regret, people often claim that “all countries have their problems.” And maybe they do, but I feel like that statement is a cop-out.

 Not only are many problems not unique to a nation, but problems are not equal in their scale or scope. Some flaws in nations are worse than others, but the worst national sin in my opinion is the inability to solve problems when they arise. The thing I hate most about America is that no matter how many people protest in support of a policy that’s taken for granted in another country, nothing ever changes for the better. This stands in stark contrast to other countries, where demonstrations do lead to social change. 

Let’s talk about gun violence first of all. Among wealthy nations, the United States is a major outlier on this issue. The United Kingdom had one school shooting in 1996, the Dunblane massacre, and then they issued a buyback program. Like the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in the United States, an elementary school was targeted. It’s horrific that Dunblane happened at all, but at least something was done, whereas it’s often said Sandy Hook was the end of the gun control debate on this side of the pond.

Australia also had a high-profile mass killing in 1996, the Port Arthur massacre, and then they issued a gun buyback program. Port Arthur, Tasmania was and is a tourist destination, so you might compare this to the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. Nothing was done after Vegas except the banning of bump stocks, which was overturned in 2024 by the Supreme Court. And nothing will ever be done.

Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service tending to a patient. For free, as Reddit will love to remind you. Image taken from r/Pics.

Now let’s talk about health care. The United States is famously the only country where health care costs any significant amount of money, to the point where there’s a popular TV series where a man resorts to cooking crystal meth to pay his medical bills. And let’s be real: Just like with gun control, if nothing changed after the COVID-19 pandemic, nothing will ever change. Instead we elected a President who just rescinded Biden’s executive order to make prescription drugs cheaper. So if anything, it will become far worse.

I’ll be honest: I’m a bit of a pessimist by nature, but even I never thought that the loss of over a million people to COVID would have been memory-holed so easily. If we couldn’t make healthcare cheaper, then at least we could maybe not elect the man responsible for those million deaths to hold the highest office in the land again. 

But that’s exactly what we did. We forgot about COVID just like we forgot about mass shootings, only on a far greater scale. That’s how depraved this country is.

And yet, it still gets worse. 

Climate change is upon us. The year 2024 was the hottest year on record globally, and we’re sure breaking a lot of records, aren’t we? The day after the most recent election, it was in the upper seventies in Massachusetts, in November, and I felt like the weather was mocking us for electing Donald Trump.

Oh yeah, did I mention that we elected Donald Trump? He literally just withdrew from the Paris climate accords last night when nobody was watching. In 2017, this was a major spectacle during which Trump gave a laughable speech about having the cleanest air and cleanest water. This time, crickets. The only three other countries that aren’t in the agreement are Iran, Libya, and Yemen. Look at the company we’re keeping - two failed states and a theocratic dictatorship. The best people, the best.

Now, in practical terms, I don’t know how much the Paris agreement matters given that it’s non-binding even for its remaining signatories. Private companies are still reducing their emissions (for now). And let’s be honest, most other countries aren’t doing quite enough either, even if they’re doing far more than the United States in terms of switching to renewable energy. But if nothing else, it’s bad PR for the USA and makes us a major pariah globally. Which we should be. 

Climate disasters are not unique to the United States, but again - they’re doing more to mitigate them elsewhere. As Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and others ramp up their renewable capacity, Los Angeles is ravaged by fires. The most significant U.S. response to these increasingly intense wildfires is a mediocre CBS TV show about conventionally attractive firefighters. Just look at it

Official CBS promotional image for “Fire Country.” Image taken from Kate Hamberger’s website.

In my mind, the biggest problem with the United States is the culture.

When I visited downtown Boston the other day, I walked past the Boston Public Library (pictured at the top of this article). It wasn’t the only building with an American flag on it, and I think that’s really quite telling.

Look at this way: In my mind, if you are American like me, there is nothing to be proud of. This is the worst country in the world, at least in terms of what we do to other countries, and we should be ashamed of our flag. But even in countries that are far greater nations by any objective standard, “flag worship” isn’t a thing to nearly the same extent. Redditors from outside the United States are always very proud to tell you that they hardly ever see their own country’s flag flown, even in front of government buildings. This thread is a great example.

Furthermore, the Pledge of Allegiance is pretty fucked up as well. There’s an American flag in almost every public school classroom, whether its community may be black or white, urban or rural, rich or poor. Every morning, students put their heads on their hearts and face the flag, saying a series of lines about pledging allegiance to the flag. Like, it’s just a piece of fabric! If you saw it in another country, or even in an evangelical church here, you’d probably think it’s a brainwashing ritual.

And yet, in many ways, the United States is like a cult. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, we tell our children stories about how we’re the greatest country in the world. And maybe we were at one point - putting a man on the moon first was pretty neat. But no longer. And if we want to be that great nation again, we need to make it that way.

Now, there’s a famous saying “Your freedom to swing your arms ends in my face”. In other words, you can do whatever you want as long as you’re not harming anyone else. 

If electing Trump only impacted the United States, that would be one thing. I still wouldn’t have voted for him, but it wouldn’t be such a crime against humanity to make Donald Trump President. However, the fact is that we remain among the most powerful and influential nations on Earth (even if we’re not the greatest). Progress against climate change was at stake, as were the nuclear codes amid existing wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And that assumes Trump doesn’t start new wars by invading Panama, Greenland, or even Canada.

In other words, it’s going to be a very long four years.

Why Gaming Sucks Now

A Simpsons meme about the gaming industry taken from r/Memes.

Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and all-around tech nerd, popularized the term “enshittification” in November 2022 to describe the decline in the quality of online services over time. I won’t use Doctorow’s own words here, simply because I think my readers want to know what I believe as opposed to what someone else does. If you want to know what Doctorow thinks about enshittification, you should read his blog, not mine.

We’ve all been acquainted with this concept in recent years. After Elon Musk purchased Twitter and made it virtually unusable for anyone who’s not a wannabe fascist, the platform has been upheld as an example of decay. In many cases, of course, the enshittification is more gradual than this, but it’s still a big problem. 

It’s not just limited to social media either. These days, whenever you ask a question on Google, there’s an AI search overview for your very question. That’s right: As AI cooks the planet, you’ll receive whatever some higher-up at Google thinks you should see. This really takes the wind out of smaller websites like mine. And sometimes the AI overview isn’t even factually correct! 

Possibly the most infuriating thing about this Google AI is that nobody really asked for it. That being said, you can turn it off with this extension called “Bye-Bye, Google AI”. And no, I’m not sponsored by the developers - I just love their extension.

However, today’s article is not about the Internet, but rather about a medium that’s increasingly tethered to the Internet - video games. It’s been said before, but I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that video games are getting worse. 

Let’s go back to the good old days, the bygone ancient time period we know as the 1980s. Back then, you’d go to the store, find an NES cartridge that looked appealing, and fork over however much money it cost. And the best part? Once you handed over the green stuff, you were done spending money. You just got to enjoy the game.

Nowadays, it’s different. Games have found new ways to get your cash. They’ll make you fork over small pockets of dough at first for a new Fortnite skin, and you’ll think: It’s not so bad, I’m only paying $5 for my character to look like Sonic the Hedgehog. But then you just keep spending, and before long you’ve given them enough dough to start a bakery. Here’s a humorous yet infuriating video about microtransactions.

And that’s before we even talk about DLC! I swear, developers these days have realized they can make more moolah just by releasing the initial game in a half-finished state. On launch day, all too many long-anticipated AAA titles are plagued by numerous glitches and generally don’t work. In the words of Kyle Justin, “they rip you off and don’t care one bit!”

Another aspect of enshittification in the gaming industry is the lack of innovation with new titles. Now, part of that isn’t the fault of developers. At a certain point, there are only so many ideas that can be experimented with, and graphics can’t get more realistic than real life. (Personally, I don’t think a game has to look realistic to have “good graphics” - there’s a reason Okami is considered one of the best games ever made. But that’s just me.)

But I think it speaks to the modern economy that nobody wants to take risks anymore. If a AAA developer has determined that it’s more profitable to pump out endless cookie-cutter titles each year as opposed to coming up with a fresh idea, then they’re going to select the option that nets them more currency. Companies want to make money. In other news, water is wet and the Pope is Catholic.

Anyway, I literally had to search Google (with my AI-disabling extension) for how many Call of Doody: Brown Plops games there were! And guess what? There are six. SIX! And that’s not even counting Modern Garbage. Garbage in, garbage out - that’s the story of the mainstream gaming industry these days.

If the current era of AAA gaming is the Great Depression, indie titles are the New Deal. There’s a reason why so many of the most beloved games of the last decade, like Deltarune, were made without the support of giant, greedy studios. Because small developers have less to lose, they’re willing to take risks and experiment, giving us masterpieces. But the indie scene is struggling in the current economy, and even when it succeeds, there’s plenty of trash. You’ve just gotta find a few gold coins amid the hundreds of Call of Doody: Brown Plops titles - did you really think I was done making fun of that franchise?

Finally, let’s talk about the format of modern games. I want to be clear that not all current games are like this; there are still plenty of story-driven titles being released to critical acclaim. However, let’s be real: ESports scholarships are not going out to players who speedrun games like Okami that have actual plots. 

Instead, today’s biggest hitters include Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, Hell Divers, and of course Minecraft. None of these games have any story whatsoever. Very often, you’ll need a Battle Pass in order to actually play them, which costs you additional greenbacks. And don’t forget the microtransactions!

A Toy Story meme about microtransactions, taken from the Vulcan Post.

Most games that are widely played by my friends on Discord are online games, matching strangers up against one another based on some Elo system. They’re highly competitive, and I’m not even saying that competition is inherently bad, but some kids take it way too far. I remember being ten years old and getting very frustrated trying to stay above 7,500 VR on Mario Kart Wii, to the point where it was affecting my mental health. I’d either be relieved or frustrated upon finishing a match, and in the latter case all I’d want to do is play again to regain points (or potentially lose more). 

But here’s the striking thing about it: Even if you are massively successful in the game and attain a Platinum rating, nobody cares.

That’s it. Being a master at League of Legends isn’t going to gratify you if you have no friends in real life (COVID and maybe bird flu pandemics notwithstanding), if you don’t read books, and if you don’t take care of your physical and mental well-being. You’re not accomplishing much in the real world other than bragging rights, and nobody who doesn’t play the same mind-numbing online game as you will set any store by it. They likely won’t even know what you’re talking about.

I’m not a particularly religious person, but one thing I’m pretty confident about is that humans were not put on this Earth to sit in front of screens all day raging at some Fortnite griefer from halfway around the world. We’re meant to produce art. We’re meant to connect with people in real life. We’re meant to have real experiences instead of crafting intricate worlds to avoid reality.

I rarely play video games these days. Simply put, it feels like a chore now, and upon spending some time in the StopGaming community on Reddit, I’ve learned even more how addictive it can be. Excessive gaming can destroy lives, in some cases literally, but many people simply can’t play in moderation. 

 I’m not going to say I don’t have my own vices - we all do - but after reading the story of one Cam Adair, I’m very glad I don’t game for hours on end anymore. It just isn’t as fun as it used to be, and there are so many better things I could be doing with my time. You only get so much time on this planet, after all. 

This post was admittedly all over the place at times, but if even one person reads this and decides that they’ll put down the controller, at least for a brief time, and think of something more productive to do (even for just 30 minutes), it’s worth it to me. 

American Idiots

A Pink Floyd meme about double negatives taken from Flickr.

People often say that children are our future. This is in fact the case; today’s children are going to one day be adults, and they will have to keep our society going via the wide variety of jobs that must be done. We will need future doctors, future construction workers, future custodians, future air traffic controllers…you get the idea.

Despite the importance of training current children to be prepared for adult life and the workforce, K-12 teachers are notoriously underpaid, at least in the United States. The average American public school teacher made just under $70,000 during the 2022-23 school year. Maybe it’s more in other countries, but in one of the nations with the most “hard power” globally, this is a crisis.

Teaching has always been a difficult, demanding job, but it’s only become more so in recent years with both the rise of school violence and the increasingly-unhinged school board Karens. It’s gotten a lot worse since 2021 or so…more on that later.

Now, it’s commonly said that the Republican Party wants students to be dumb. If kids don’t know how to think critically, if they have no idea what’s going on, they will vote for the GOP because they don’t know any better. That’s what they say.

For what it’s worth, I agree with that assessment.

As a progressive myself, I agree that education is incredibly important, and that teachers should be paid more. I’m disturbed by the increasing number of school boards that have promoted the teaching of falsehoods like creationism or the idea that systemic racism has never existed in the United States. To be clear, I was only taught about creationism in the context of “here’s what some people think, and here’s the evidence that they’re wrong”, and I graduated high school prior to the critical race theory panic. 

But then again, I live in Massachusetts, considered to have some of the world’s best schools (if you don’t get shot, that is). Forrest Valkai, on the other hand, is from Oklahoma, where the educational standards are more…questionable. This video of Valkai’s, for instance, claims that only 28% of American students are properly taught evolution, which is just insane. If students aren’t even taught basic biology, perhaps it’s no wonder so many adults here deny climate change. 

However, the creation-evolution “controversy” is just the tip of the iceberg. I think even a lot of progressives, who by and large value education, don’t fully appreciate the crisis that’s barreling toward us like one of Japan’s bullet trains.

First, let’s talk about the dumbing down of educational curricula. I graduated from a pretty small high school in 2019. In 11th grade, we read classic American novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Grapes of Wrath. They’re considered contenders, in fact, for the title of Great American Novel, and even if you don’t personally enjoy them, you can appreciate that they’re well-written and contain complex themes. 

In 12th grade, my English course was about British literature. I had to read Pride and Prejudice and conduct a research project on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. During both my junior and senior years of high school, there was a lot of writing involved, as should be expected of a course on literature. Even beyond what my educational institution required of me, I started writing fanfiction around my sixteenth birthday and continued off and on for a number of years. 

The point is, I knew how to write. And the sad truth is, lots of kids these days don’t.

More than that, however, is the fact that today’s students don’t even know how to read. According to this piece on the Education Trust website, the “nation’s report card” found that less than half of U.S. fourth-graders (43%, to be exact) scored at or above a proficient level in reading. For what it’s worth, this number was considerably lower for students of color or those with disabilities; given the aforementioned systemic racism, that shouldn’t be much of a surprise.

Author Jeff Kinney with Pope Francis, who is reading one of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books. Image taken from the Wall Street Journal.

One of America’s foremost literacy advocates these days is Jeff Kinney, the author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Given that those books aren’t the most intellectually stimulating fare out there, Kinney may appear an unlikely face of this movement. But he apparently runs his own bookstore, and the efforts of Kinney, a practicing Catholic, even caught the attention of Pope Francis some years ago.

Even though my brother and I are both in our mid-twenties, we still think Wimpy Kid is the funniest shit ever. It’s basically a realistic dystopia told in the most hilarious way possible. And hey, if it gets today’s children reading, then that’s awesome.

However, Kinney himself stated in a 2018 BBC interview that he “couldn’t get his kids off Fortnite”. He was able to save other peoples’ children from the brain-rot, but not his own. And indeed, Fortnite, theoretically one of the most addictive video games ever developed, is not the only obstacle to making kids read.

There’s also TikTok. Earlier today as I write this, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the social media platform could be banned in the United States. To be clear, this is a worrying case of censorship, and something else will fill the void of brain-rot like Skibidi Toilet or whatnot. 

That being said, I’m not going to shed too many tears for TikTok, because it’s a cancer on society. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s reduced the average attention span, which makes sense considering how that platform really emphasizes instant gratification and entertainment. 

And hey, I get it - I’m autistic. I still adore rocking chairs and hammocks. Even now, I need stimulation sometimes; it just takes the form of vocal stims and off-key singing these days. But we need to be able to tolerate boredom sometimes, something I’ve learned the hard way all too often. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, a time period during which many of us were on our screens constantly.

Now let’s talk about the horrifying implications of declining attention spans and dramatically reduced academic performance. 

Imagine a world where a heart surgeon needs to consult ChatGPT in order to know how to perform a bypass operation. Imagine an architect who’s unaware which construction materials are most resistant to hurricanes, an ever-increasing threat in an age of climate crisis. Imagine a shortage of pilots because students can’t study for their exams. 

And picture a world where there aren’t nearly enough teachers to instill a work ethic in modern children. Given the difficulties and dangers I’ve highlighted above, I don’t blame any individual for not wanting to go into the field of education. However, someone’s gotta do it. 

Ultimately, this is why I read. Yes, it keeps me from doomscrolling and gives me something to do whenever I just want to run my fist through a wall at Trump’s threats to invade Canada or Greenland. 

But I also want to keep my mind sharp and resist the brain-rot. I’m going to maintain my intellectual curiosity and academic integrity, because the alternative is that society will get…

Movie poster for “Dumb and Dumber.” Image taken from eBay.