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Politics: Rock and a Hard Place

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2024/07/11
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Stipulated:

  • Biden is too old. He was too old last time.
  • Trump is too old. He was too old last time. (And will be as old as Biden is now before the end of a second term, which somehow never comes up in the age discussions.)
  • Trump is obviously in worse mental shape than Biden, and no one with the power to drive the conversation wants to talk about that.
  • If Biden’s weakness was apparent before the primaries, he should have not run. If its been rapid onset since the primaries, he shouldn’t be fighting to stay in. If it really was just a bad day they should be doing a lot more to show that.

So what do we do? Replace Biden? Stay the course?

Obviously, Biden’s pushing a very large rock up a very steep hill at this point. Can he do it? Can the people around him make it look like he’s doing it? Fuck if I know. And unless there’s some time travelers who can also see down alternate reality paths to check the results of different decisions, no one else knows either.

If Biden’s going to be replaced, how do you deal with the mechanics of it? The party is already having to do slight of hand because the Ohio legislature wasn’t being helpful. (To be fair, that’s not a surprise. Come on guys, check state filing deadlines when trying to schedule the convention. Yet another unforced error.) UPDATE: Apparently Ohio Republicans did stop playing petty games and moved the deadline. Still a stupid move on the party’s part.

If you’re able to do it, who do you pick? Harris is the obvious choice. If you pick someone else, you justifiably piss off a couple key constituencies in the party. The elephant in the room is that there are people who will vote against her because of her race and gender. Some of those people might be staying home because they can’t quite stomach one of Trump’s flaws, but they’ll be back in a second when a black woman is running. No way to tell how many of those people aren’t already voting for Trump, but obviously the margins are already razor thin. And ignoring that sort of response is why we have Trump around in the first place.

(Hillary Clinton was a fatally flawed candidate. When she was running for President she had spent roughly 25 years as the personification of and target for all of the right wing’s hate and conspiracy theories. It doesn’t matter that it was manufactured and exaggerated and played for effect. The baggage was immense and it outweighed everything else. Any other Democrat could have beaten Trump. Probably any other Republican would have beaten Clinton. Harris isn’t weighed down as badly, but we’re in a scenario where every bit of margin is going to count.)

And if you don’t go with Harris, who do you pick? Lets say you engineer a situation where Harris refuses the nomination “in solidarity” with Biden, in an attempt to blunt the backlash to her being passed over? The old guard of the party is just that, old. Even most of the middle ranks are the cautious sort that believe it’s a good idea to pretend politics is still reasonable people making compromises. Who do we have who can unite the party and meet the moment?

Yeah, I can’t think of anyone either.

Personally, I don’t have an opinion on what should happen. Not only do I recognize that I don’t have enough information about the scenario to have a meaningful opinion (though I think Josh Marshal at TPM has an interesting view), I would vote for a desiccated corpse over anyone who’s made a meaningful attempt at the Republican nomination for President since Ronald Reagan.

Ultimately, that’s the most frustrating part of this. Donald Trump is an utter narcissist. His sole motivations are his ego and his personal gain, in that order. I can’t even say he’s evil; evil people have principles, even if others find them offensive. Trump is completely amoral. Defeating him should be trivial. He should do it himself.

But the American Right Wing, which has largely shifted from an improbable coalition of Ayn Rand fanboys and fundamentalist churches into a Christian Nationalist organization, has found him to be a perfect vehicle. They latched on to his ego, they feed him adoring crowds that are all but ready to anoint him as the second coming, and they pour money into his bank accounts (and are probably shoveling it out the other side just as fast.) And so he becomes their useful idiot. I honestly believe him when he says he doesn’t know what Project 2025 is, and that he doesn’t agree with some of what he’s heard. I also believe he’ll put those people in power if he gets a second term, without a first thought, let alone a second one.

But instead of attacking Trump, the institutional Democratic Party is doing what it does best. Walking on to stage, getting everyone’s attention, and then shooting itself in the head while trying to shoot itself in the foot.

Why Am I Still On Twitter?

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2024/06/10
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: . Leave a Comment

Why, am I still on Twitter?

Am I still on Twitter? Why?

Still, why am I on Twitter?

Why, I am still on Twitter!

Twitter (I won’t call it that other thing) is obviously getting to be more and more of a cesspool. There are people openly and proudly advocating for Nazism, racism, and sex/gender/orientation violence. Every day there’s another new low. The fact that it comes through as a screenshot with a well crafted debunking and/or dunk is getting less and less helpful.

I’ve tried fighting the good fight but it feels like the last remnants of people who might have been persuadable have all either picked a side or left. The sane political voices that used to provide good news, or a good argument to refute the assholes, are at best fighting a holding action at this point. Most of the creative people I followed have left, and the most that are still there are only posting marketing materials and not seriously interacting. (Not that I blame them.) Of the people I actually know, the vast majority haven’t posted in months, and in some cases, years.

But there’s a handful of people that I don’t communicate with anywhere else, that I don’t want to lose all track of. Despite there finally being hints of an end to the long dark tunnel of my wife’s health issues, that’s still a ways off at best, so almost all of my social contact that isn’t with coworkers or store employees is through Twitter. There’s a handful of news sources that still occasionally provide legitimately useful and hopeful news.

But it’s rare. So now I scroll farther and more often searching for a bit of positive reinforcement, when there’s less and less to be found.

But what are the alternatives? I’m on Mastodon, but that didn’t seem to get a critical mass. With Jack leaving BlueSky, there’s less worries about that turning into “Twitter, but Crypto”, but do I really want to start this addiction over? Reddit has some interesting stuff, but it’s speed running the enshitification cycle even if it is keeping the assholes slightly better contained so far.

I think for now, I’m going to remove the app from my phone and tablet, to cut down on the doom scrolling. I’ll keep it on the desktop for a bit, and see what it does if I just hit it less often. And I’ll try (again) to write more here. Not that I’ve had much luck with that the last five times, but hey, you never know.

I miss Usenet so bad.

Treading Water, Part One: House

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2022/12/12
Posted in: Rants. Leave a Comment

So this is Christmas / And what have you done….

At the start of November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I packed up our old apartment mostly by myself and moved us to a little college town apartment. It was a short term solution–we were working on buying a house, were well into a mortgage application process for a first time buyer program, and there were lots of places available in town. It meant putting even more stuff into storage, where most of our books have been for over a decade at this point. It meant squeezing in to a college town apartment. But it would only be for a couple months.

This is our third holiday season in the place.

The mortgage program was bogged down with people, and it took far too long for us to get over the last couple hurdles. (That’s the very short version.) And then the housing market had gone from lots of quick turnover to houses getting all cash offers and waiving inspections. We’ve put six offers out over more than a year. Two went to all-cash no-inspection offers below our offering price. One we just lost out on. One (that we loved) the seller decided at the last minute they weren’t actually going to sell. The fifth one was actually accepted, but then the home inspection revealed that the guy that had done some major work on the house had *almost* known what he was doing and it was falling down in slow motion. The latest was a place that would need a lot of work, and the current owner…well, lets just say they haven’t accepted the most recent adjustments in the housing market and thinks he can still get prices that were flying around this time last year.

And now here we are at the holidays again. Last year, there were no new houses up between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, just a couple of very expensive ones that were out of our reach. There’s a a little activity in town this year, and two magnificent houses that I can’t afford (both updated Victorians) and a handful of places that are just…too awkward for one reason or another.

Another year over / And a new one just begun

An Introduction To Modern Web Development

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2013/09/23
Posted in: Reviews. 1 comment

The Modern Web
REVIEW: The Modern Web
(Peter Gasston, No Starch Press)


The Modern Web by Peter Gasston is a series of quick, concise summaries of new and upcoming features that are part of the HTML5 standard, as well as several new browser features like CSS3 that are often lumped in wth HTML5 (a shortcut I will use for this review in the interests of brevity.) The book opens with a review of the basics of the HTML 5 spec; there’s nothing new here for an experienced HTML 5 developer, but it’s an excellent introduction for a new web developer or one who can (and still is) writing the 4.01 DTDs from memory.

From there, the book breaks the components of HTML 5 into several general topics, such as document structure, CSS3, and the new HTML 5 APis, and talks about the new features of each, as well as discussing the competing standards where they exist. While the author certainly doesn’t hold back from expressing his opinion, particularly when there are competing standards, he’s very diligent about separating technical information from his views.

The book’s mosts useful sections are probably the chapters that deal with the mobile web; chapters on device-responsive CSS design, accessing device apis like battery status, vibration, and camera functions, and a quick review of the different strategies behind developing applications for mobile devices will give any developer the basic knowledge necessary to start making decisions and writing code.

Structurally, each chapter of the book is self contained, with a quick introduction to the topic, details about the feature, a summary, and resources for further reading and links to related content. It’s formulaic, and the introduction and summary blocks get awfully repetitive (and so the summary feels like padding) but it also means you’re not flipping through the book when you need some quick information on a given topic. While a book like this is often out of date before it even reaches the printers, much less by the time it reaches readers, Gasston has done a good job of discussing the main paths that future development could take, which should increase its shelf life as a useful book. If you’re looking to get started in modern web development, The Modern Web is a great book to read.
I review for the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program

So much for the experiment that was the United States Of America

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2013/07/19
Posted in: Not The Onion, Politics, Rants. Leave a Comment

Judge ‘Troubled’ by DOJ Position in Drone Strike Case

The government argued the court should dismiss a lawsuit brought by the families of American citizens killed in Yemen in 2011 by targeted missile strikes. Justice Department lawyers argued the court was barred from hearing a case that would require an assessment of sensitive military and political issues far outside its purview and ability to review.
U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer repeatedly expressed concern that the government’s position would essentially strip U.S. citizens abroad of their constitutional rights. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian Hauck argued there was a difference between having a constitutional right—which he said could be protected by the executive and legislative branches—and being able to make constitutional claims in court.

I am appalled.

The government’s argument here is basically “you have whatever constitutional rights we decide you get to keep.” Given the administration’s history of dodgy answers to the “would you strike at US citizens on US soil” question, that statement can’t even be qualified with “when overseas.”

Lets be clear here: all the evidence points to Anwar Al-Aulaqi being a very bad man, and for all I know the two kids with him were to. But all I know is what the administration has agreed to talk about *after* they blew them all up.

The US “War on Terror” has become an exercise in terror, killing people we don’t like without warning, without due process, without an imminent threat.

We have to be better than our enemies. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?

I Love My Country….

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2013/07/04
Posted in: Politics. Leave a Comment

I love my country
By which I mean
I am indebted joyfully
To all the people throughout its history
Who have fought the government to make right
Where so many cunning sons and daughters
Our foremothers and forefathers
Came singing through slaughter
Came through hell and high water
So that we could stand here
And behold breathlessly the sight
How a raging river of tears
Cut a grand canyon of light

–Ani Difranco, Grand Canyon

Your Daily Awesome: Why Austerity is bullshit

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2013/06/26
Posted in: Daily Awesome, Politics. Leave a Comment

This video is just over an hour long, but well worth every second. He makes it understandable and funny enough that you don’t cry.

“Democracy is asset insurance for the Rich–don’t skimp on the payments! That’s what was going on in the 20s and that’s what’s going on today. Redistribution and debt is reinsurance for Democracy and austerity is anorexia for the economy. That was what was learned by 1940. Oh how we forget.”

Good Idea/Bad Idea: Science edition

Posted by Joe Helfrich on 2013/06/25
Posted in: Not The Onion, Rants. Leave a Comment

Good Idea: coming up with a drug to help women with sexual dysfunction, even if it’s inevitably going to be branded as “Viagra for chicks.”

Bad Idea: doing it with a drug designed to make women horny and lower their inhibitions. Because that won’t ever end up spiking someone’s drink.

But that’s what some idiot is trying to do, according to this article. Better yet, said idiot decided to make drugs because he got dumped. “The breakup inspired a lifelong quest to comprehend female emotion through biochemistry and led to his career as a psychopharmacologist.”

There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I don’t even know where to start. But somewhere, there’s a woman torn between knowing she got out while the getting was good and thinking maybe she should have taken one for the team.

Even better is how they want to make sure that their drug to make women want sex and not care about the consequences only works so well. “Companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering.”

Because it’s OK for women to want sex, but they can’t want it too much.