Politics

I was really into punk rock music in high school. As such, I was extremely interested in politics at a young age. Eventually, I deduced that politics was a sewer, and I quit paying attention (while I was still too young to vote). Then, however, George W. Bush was elected, and I was like, “Somebody better do something!”

Nobody did.

Instead, the folks who elected Bush learned _nothing_, and they proceeded to elect Trump. Now, we’ve got Trump running again against Joe Biden, who was running back when Bush was in office (and I think once before that, too).

My first blog entry was back in early 2003, and it was indirectly about politics (I just remembered I wrote a few posts before that, but I digress). Now, over 20 years later, we’re dealing with the same nonsense with no end in sight, and the country is in worse shape. Moreover, far more people care now, as they see politics as an extension of their identities.

I’m working on a new theory (which probably means this is a whole dissertation somewhere):  the Internet has people customizing everything. The lingua franca is customization, so it’s expected that people are very specific about all their tastes. However, electoral politics offers only two major parties. Correspondingly, Americans — the people who have extremely nuanced tastes for everything else — choose team D or team R. This entails voting against swaths of their own interests to achieve some greater good, which is _always_ TBD.