One More Time?

Posts here on Blogger can have Labels, and I give at least one Label to every post I publish. Some of those Labels I don't use very often, like "Stories" or "Identity." Others are pretty much obsolete; I don't plan to go back to "The Origin of Species" or "The Republic" anytime soon, if ever.

One Label, "Rampant Idiocy," has been retired. I decided that it was more uncharitable than I really wanted to be... calling people out as stupid is demeaning to people I didn't know, and insulting to people who honestly have better things to care about than what some random blogger thinks of them. So, on balance, I'm glad I stopped using it.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't occasions that I want to bring it back...

The House is set to vote as soon as Tuesday on a four-page resolution that "condemns and denounces socialism in all its forms, including the Democratic Socialists of America and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States."

House Democrats fume about GOP's anti-socialism bill

Really? This is what Republicans in Congress think is important? Big picture, I get it. Donald Trump, with no end of assistance from the Republicans in Congress and other offices across the country, has done a bang-up job of tarnishing the Republican brand in the eyes of the public (most importantly, the low-propensity and only marginally partisan voters that Republicans will need to turn out for them) and are hoping that Red-baiting (I note the irony of this) will help rescue their chances of retaining control of the House of Representatives.

Now, had they happened to consult with me at the beginning of the 119th Congress, back at the start of 2025, and asked how to put a stop to the spread of "socialism" in the United States, I would have suggested something simpler: Make Capitalism work for more people.

Maybe it's just me, but if Socialism is honestly gaining ground in the United States of 2026, it's because people are neither convinced nor hopeful that the current "free market" is working for them. And they want to try something different. It's no different than how the nation ended up with Donald Trump being President for a second term, the Biden-Harris administration did so little that people who weren't ardent Democrats could point to that the electorate decided that giving someone who had already shown he didn't give a lick about actually governing another shot was their best option.

And now Republicans in the House of Representatives want a pointless vote simply so they can try to hang it around Democrats' necks come this November. Because this is the best they can do, given their unwillingness to stand up to the President, and their inability to keep their voters in their corner. Making America Great Again, at its very best.

And so I find myself plunked down in front of my keyboard, when I really should be in bed, doing my level best to contain the impulse to dust off "Rampant Idiocy" and allow the part of me that revels in being snarky and snide to run free.

Calling people out as stupid, however, won't solve anything. Speaker Johnson isn't going to read whatever takedown I could come up with, and then pledge to do better by the citizens of this country. He'd simply write me off as a partisan hack, and go back to whatever it is he does on a day-to-day basis. And the people in Louisiana who voted for him would likely think him correct in doing so. Because they don't think the problem is a failure of governance; they, like Republican voters around the nation, are much more likely to think the problem is a bunch of immoral and/or irrational people whose dire economic straits are solely their own doing.

So here we are, with Congress looking to gin up another Red Scare. Because virtue signalling is a less expensive way of getting votes than actually working to solve problems. 

The Less Things Change

When I was growing up, I lived in a distant suburb of Chicago. One of the most distant, actually; out past the city limits and one was considered to have exited Chicagland entirely. It was about 90% White when I lived there, and as a result, I tend to talk like, and have the same interests as, a White guy from the suburbs. This caused something of a problem when I went away to college at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). For many of my classmates, my accent and hobbies weren't simply artifacts of a life spent out in the boondocks, they were a deliberate repudiation of both them, and being Black.

And this was my introduction to the idea that many people in the United States are quite sensitive to actions, attitudes or lifestyles that can be construed as a rejection of themselves. As time went on, I came to understand that this could be a very sore point for people, even rising to the level of a perceived attack on them; something to be retaliated against. Which brings me to this:

Many locals interviewed by the USA TODAY Network declined to speak publicly, citing concerns about potential political retribution if they were quoted picking one name over the other.
The Gulf of What? Has Trump's name change caught on?

With Freedom Fries 3.0 being the newest thing to hit the new cycle, I decided to check if 2.0 was still in effect. And, as far as Google Search is concerned, it is. And so I came across the USA Today article that I quoted above. While I'm sure that some of the fears of retribution are overblown, that leaves others as perfectly reasonable. Not that seeking to punish someone for going along with President Trump's pretty executive orders comes across as remotely reasonable to me.

But then again, I see the President's executive orders, and people's willingness to take sides on them, as being less important than whether it might rain again tomorrow, or whether traffic will be bad. I certainly don't see it as either a rejection or, or an attack on, myself. Sure, the President has a greater inclination for performative childishness than I might prefer, but he's hardly the only person for whom that is true. And so this can be nothing other than a pointless sideshow, rather than a rationale for sharpening the knives.

While I think I would have been surprised by this turn of events back when I was in college, part of that is due to the fact that I was a young person in college, and just learning about how the broader adult world worked. Now, having been a resident of said world for the past few decades, it's more evident to me that there's nothing new to see here.

And None For All

Much of the public outcry over data-center construction has centered on electricity costs, water consumption and noise. [...] Unions and construction trade groups are now entering the fray from the other side, warning that such actions endanger thousands of building-related jobs.
Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight

People who understand that they will benefit from building datacenters are unhappy with people who understand that they will incur costs from living near datacenters. I think that about sums it up.

And it's a microcosm of the bigger debate over datacenters: Who will benefit, and who will pay the costs? It's a given that it's more profitable to do something when the costs of doing it are shared, but benefits are concentrated. And, as Dario Amodei has pointed out, businesses generally have a poor track record of living up to: "It'll be great! You'll see!"

Construction unions versus communities is a bit different, as it comes across more as a zero-sum game; for one side to get what it wants, the other has to lose out. But it's still the sort of contest of competing interests that boils down to a fundamental disconnect between who benefits from a given set of developments, and who bears the costs for them, with both sides feeling that they're being called upon to subsidize gains for someone else.

And this is a bigger societal problem that's going to have to be addressed: when people feel that they're left holding the bag for benefits that accrue to someone else, they stop supporting initiatives where they're unable to see any tangible, direct, benefits to themselves, even when that creates hardships for others.

It's Not Everything

It's difficult to find a television these days that isn't "smart;" meaning that it's connected to the Internet, is sending information about what one watches on it to someone else and is designed to be a conduit for targeted advertising. And now this same mindset is, unsurprisingly, coming for computer monitors as well.

Near the end of the Ars Technica story I was reading on how LG had been pushing advertisements into monitors, and what this could mean for smart monitors, the author makes the following point:

Ads and OSes [Operating Systems] could one day help drive down the price of monitors, as they did TVs.

I get it, but this presumes that price begins and ends with the amount of money one pays for something. If a monitor, or a television, for that matter, is set up so that I have to engage with advertising for some amount of time before I can do what I set out to do, that's also a price to be paid. The fact that it isn't a monetary cost doesn't change that.

A number of services and whatnot on the web are described as "free," because they don't require uses to open their wallets, or grant access to their bank accounts in order to use them. But money is not the only measure of price, despite that social convention. The whole idea behind the concept of the "attention economy" is that attention has value... generally speaking, it's only organizations that are seeking attention without offering anything in return that actively promote the idea that it's valueless.

But a lot of people passively promote the idea. I don't Scharon Harding, for example, doesn't see attention as having no value, but casting trading attention for monetary payment as a way of driving down the price conveys that idea. Which gets in the way of people understanding that they are, in fact, paying something, and can make the same sorts of cost-benefit and value for value calculations they would for anything else. After all, it's well understood that businesses place a dollar amount on the time they can get (or require) that people watch advertising for things they likely don't want. Why shouldn't the public at large?

Year One

I received my first digital camera as a gift in 2001. Since then, I've developed the habit of taking a camera with me everywhere I go, to the point where if I forget to bring one along, I think of myself as not having a camera, despite the fact that my cellular phone has one built in.

Every so often I go out and around specifically to take pictures, for one reason or another. In 2004, the BBC was having a photo contest, and I was looking from something interesting to shoot, and recalled that there was a weekly anti-war protest over in Lake Forest Park.

So I went over and shot some pictures. Didn't win any prizes, or anything. But it was fun. I'm reminded of all this due to World Photography Week, and was talking a walk down memory lane, courtesy of my store of digital photographs.

Other than the name of the President, the current Lake Forest Park protests aren't much different than the old ones; if the call to "Impeach Bush" were gone, it might not be evident that I hadn't taken this in the fall of 2025.