Tag Archives: right wing

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Self doubt. I’ve never considered myself plagued by self doubt. My ego has always been big enough to generally just assume I’ve made the right decisions. Every now and then, though, I’m intensely bothered by the “what if” of things. It’s not especially helpful way to spend any significant amount of time. I’d very much like to get back as quickly as possible to implicitly trusting my brain to make the right bloody calls. It’s another once of those situations where patience is probably a virtue… and that being the case is always vaguely annoying all on its own.

2. The social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Twitter, X, or whatever we’ve collectively decided to call it now is becoming increasingly unusable due to the amplification of right-wing advertisers, conspiracy theorists, “entertainers” pretending at journalism, and flat out misinformation being propagated has definitive truth. I’m finding I have to increasingly curate my list of “follows” to weed out nonsense and even then the algorithm seems determined to deliver content I have no interest in and refuse to engage with beyond smashing the “block” button… for all the good that does. 

3. Concerts. I have a concert coming up at the end of the month. It’s an artist I’ve been looking forward to seeing for a long time, but I’m troubled by one thing. The timing. I just happened to notice that the openers aren’t scheduled to kick off until about the time I’d usually be thinking about heading to bed. That quickly brought about a dissatisfied sigh. Look, I’m absolutely going to be there, barring unforeseen issues between now and then… but knowing that when the show ends and the lights come up, I’m going to be two states and at least 90 minutes from bed already has me feeling entirely worn out. If Broadway shows can put on Sunday matinees at a reasonable hour in the afternoon, maybe aging rock stars should take a page out of that book.

The bullshit culture war…

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I have no idea why members of a certain segment of the population expend so much time and energy worried about how other people want to live their lives, what they want to be called, or who they want to fuck. I’ve barely got time to tend my own business without jumping eyeball deep into anyone else’s bedroom, pants, or pronouns.

Here’s the thing… I don’t give a damn one way or another if Adam loves Steve. Whether Katie wants to be called Ken. Or whether Bill keeps his dick tucked between his legs. I just assume people who have the kind of free time it takes to give a shit about this sort of thing are some unpleasant combination of sad, angry, and bored to absolute death.

I can’t fathom how bored I’d have to be to spend any time at all worried about a complete stranger’s orientation, preference, gender, or any of a host of other bullshit “culture war” issues that wackadoodle right wingers have decided to latch onto. If you’re happy – or moving in that direction – I say god bless. Good luck. If you can carve out a little joy or peace in this absolutely beshitted world, good on you.

There are enough honest to god issues knocking around to be dealt with without a bunch of chucklefucks creating new ones out of their sadly overactive imaginations.

If you’re bitter or hostile because someone chooses not to live their life exactly the way you do (or at least how you tell the world you live your life), well, that’s just the cost of the liberty you claim to value so highly. Unless, of course, what you really mean is you value liberty only as long as everyone else lives and does and behaves exactly the way these self-appointed “guardians” of truth, justice, and the American way want them to. Sorry gang. I’m a busy guy with a lot going on at the moment. I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with your narrow-minded, bigoted fuckery.

If you’re really, truly troubled about this stuff, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe get a hobby or something. Go out on the town, have a drink or two, get laid. Maybe you’ll feel better – or at least slightly less inclined to spend your life worked up about things that don’t impact you in any way.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Elon Musk. My general feelings about Elon are, at best, complicated. In some ways he’s a visionary who sees deeper into the future than should be possible for a mere mortal. In other’s he’s a genuine crackpot, wading in to offer “expert” advice in areas where nothing in his background could reasonably be construed to give him standing. It’s the current version of “Elon the Peacemaker” that really has me wishing someone could get the guy to focus in on his lane and leave the serious work of international diplomacy to serious people.

2. Sleep, interrupted. I’ve been sleeping like dog shit for a few weeks. It’s not a problem falling asleep or lying awake all night, but rather tossing and turning and barrel rolling the sheets into a tangled mess and generally not feeling rested when morning comes.  I don’t usually get a lot of sleep – six hours is about standard – but with very few exceptions the sleep I typically get is deep and restful. It appears I’m currently getting the opportunity to enjoy one of those periods of exception to the rule. I hate it.

3. The willfully ignorant. Some people are always going to be stupid – hanging out there on the left edge of the intelligence bell curve. I don’t love it, but short of extreme measures, it’s one of those conditions that simply can’t be helped. Willful ignorance, being incurious about the world, however, is entirely within the individual control of most people. This group, the willfully ignorant, is where I place the principle blame for why blatant hucksters like Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. They’re intelligent enough to know better, but there they are, tuning in on a regular basis and giving credence to nonsense spouting charlatans. They’re the only reason such fuckwits are anything more than an internet sideshow streaming live from mom’s basement. I can, if pressed, forgive the stupid for something they can’t help. I can’t, however, forgive people who have a working brain for not exercising it with a little bit of critical thinking from time to time.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Twitter. Like so many other sites I’ve already abandoned, Twitter is quickly climbing the list of platforms that aren’t improving my life in any meaningful way. In fact, over the last few days I’ve noticed that I’m happier at the end of the day when I don’t check in periodically with Twitter. As always, the far right wants me to be outraged over A, B, and C while the leftists want me to be outraged by D, E, and F. I’m left to sift through the ginned-up outrage to find the nuggets of history, books, and sundry other content that I’m interested in. I really do like the concept of Twitter, but I’m increasingly less interest in endless social outrage and those who seem to thrive on it that are cluttering the space.

2. Anti-vax. I would love to see a Venn diagram of people who vocally won’t get vaccinated against COVID-19 because “who knows what it’ll do to my body” on one side and people who smoke, drink, or use/sell “nutritional” supplements and essential oils on the other. I don’t think It would be a perfect circle, but I have a hunch there would be some considerable overlap. 

3. Court packing. It seems there’s legislation drifting around the halls of Congress that would add four seats to the Supreme Court. I have to ask, if this new court packing scheme is allowed to move forward, what’s to stop the next Republican administration and Congress from adding four more… and then four more the next time Democrats hold power, and so on indefinitely into the future? Aside from the obvious – that it’s a blatant attempt by Congressional Democrats to change the rules purely because they don’t like who the previous administration nominated – it sets a dumb precedent based on the assumption that their party is going to hold all the levers of power forever. Based on the historical record, is a patently ridiculous assumption. I suspect that once the consequences of treating the size of the high court as something that should be changed at will are fully realized, we’ll find that this legislation, if passed into law, simply created another battlefield where the issue will never fully be settled and there will be no end to the self-inflicted turmoil that ensues.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. National Whatever Day. Yesterday was allegedly “National Dog Day.” Are you serious? There are somewhere between 70-80 million dogs in America. In 2015 the American pet industry as a whole is estimated to take in about $60 billion. Do you think we’ve somehow collectively forgotten about dogs? As if the 1/3 of American households who have them came home suddenly and wondered what this 4-legged furry thing was that greeted them at the door? Look, I’m fine seeing everyone’s dog plastered all over Facebook. If I can be frank, it’s a nice change of pace from the usually endless parade of baby pictures, first day of school snaps, and instas of what’s for dinner. Still, I think we can give National “Whatever” Day a rest.

2. The Wackadoodle Right. I read an article a few days ago wagging the specter of another government shutdown. Except this one isn’t because we’ve actually run out of (pretend) money or haven’t been able to pass a budget (or at least a continuing resolution). This impending shutdown will come because a couple of right wing wackjobs have decided that no government at all is better than a government that might accidentally fund an abortion. If I’m going to be thrown out of work, I’d appreciate it be for a reason other than a handful of politicians who think they have a “special relationship” with the Almighty. I’m not going to get sucked into a discussion on the virtues of Planned Parenthood versus the right wing of my own party, but there are enough actual real world dangers we can worry about to knock this one way down the priority list.

3. “Ten Years Later” Coverage of Katrina. Without grinding through the details, let’s just accept that Hurricane Katrina is a topic I know a little something about. I lived 1000+ miles from landfall and the bitch still consumed just about every part of my life for months. She’s also the reason I know the media are well and truly idiots when it comes to reporting the facts of a complicated story. Unless it boils down to a three second sound bite (like “Being stuck on stupid”) or lets them take a few jabs at a favored punching bag, they just miss the big picture. The moment that small portion of the story goes over the air it’s accepted as received truth, but it’s only ever just a very small slice of the real story.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Semantics. Listening to the news over the last few days, I’ve been surprised (shocked and appalled), to hear the talking heads from the party of fiscal responsibility saying that even if the debt ceiling is not raised, the US Government won’t technically be in “default” as long as it continues to pay the interest and principle on the existing national debt. And while it’s true that in that sense, the government won’t default on its sovereign debt, it would absolutely default on a host of other payments – to include veteran’s benefits, Social Security, salaries, and contracts for goods and services. I’m the first to admit that words and their meaning are important, but to say that the government will not be in a state of de facto default if the debt ceiling is not raised is a little like making a differentiation between dying of dysentery and dying of the dehydration caused by having dysentery. Either way you shit yourself to death, the rest is just semantics.

2. Obamacare. I’ve never pretended to be a fan of this first step in the headlong rush towards nationalized healthcare. While having access to affordable medical care is definitely a good thing, I’ve always been of the opinion having the federal government step into the fray adds nothing more than unnecessary layers of bureaucracy between a person and their doctor. Despite the best efforts of the right wing nutjobs, we’ve got it now, so c’est la vie. What really annoys me more than having this program foisted on the taxpayer is the fact that they had three years to design a website and couldn’t manage to do that correctly. If I were launching the capstone initiative of my administration, you can be damned sure I’d make sure it worked properly before it saw the light of day. The fact that the average guy with a “Websites for Dummies” book, a DSL line, and rented space on a server can set up and host their own website and my kindly old Uncle Sam can’t does not fill me with an abundance of confidence when it comes to letting him help me make decisions about my health. I’m screwing that one up just fine on my own, thank you very much.

3. Sports talk. I don’t know quite how to phrase this other than being blunt. If you come at me talking about last night’s baseball game or this weekend’s football lineup, you’re going to be met with a blank stare and a fairly blunt, “I don’t follow sports.” Then I’m going to disengage from the conversation. I’ve tried being a good trooper and faking my way through these conversations, feigning an interest, but I think I’m over that now. If you want to have a conversation about technology, science, history, current events, or occasionally the foibles of pop culture icons, I’m your huckleberry. You want to talk batting average and passing yards, you’ll need to look elsewhere. In this one, small segment of life, I’m just tired of pretending to care which group of millionaires are better than which other group of millionaires.