Things that are Peeving Juan, Part II: Featuring Politics, Social Media, and More!

"Anger Controlls Him" by Jessica Flavin via wikimedia.org

My Rationale

The fundamental question I return to when I think of generating content is what I have to offer potential readers that's of value.

I'm not sure I have anything of value to offer today, but I do have a short list of things that are in the business of goat-getting, and have gotten mine recently.

Politics

I've always been something of a political junkie, so at first, unprecedented acts of lunacy perpetrated on the United States by our current and most appalling leaders were amusing and diverting. There was something magnetic about the zany nature of the daily outrages. "Haha!" I used to say, more or less, "another crime! Another disaster! Another breach of protocol! But of course, normalcy will reassert itself inevitably."

Normalcy, along with a group of candidates so numerous that, like the descendents God promised to Abraham, no one could count them, disappeared permanently after the Republican Convention. And now the implications for the future that our political leaders have been stacking up for generations are starting to cast a shadow across my future and my son's future, and I'm over it.

This is all well and good of course--we're all perpetually disgusted with politics, because it's such a quagmire and a bother--but disengaging because we're sick of it is a function of privilege at best, and the easiest way to make things worse at worst. As an idea, ignoring politics ranks somewhere between throwing away credit card statements without reading them, and throwing away subpoenas; it'll cost you one way or another.

This reminds me of the second thing I'm peeved about this evening:

Conversations about Politics on Social Media

New technology that introduces paradigm shifts into human existence tend to have associated wonders, and also associated terrors. The rise of nuclear technology is a pretty obvious example of that effect at play--we got almost exponentially better at producing electricity, but we also figured out how to build a completely genuine, 100%-guaranteed doomsday weapon, and thanks to section 1 (politics), we're now living in a world where an increasing number of power-mad lunatics have said doomsday weapons at their disposal.

Anyway, social media is a paradigm-shifting technology, and so is the interaction of humans with increasingly-sophisticated algorithmic systems. These two come together in ways that have, recently, more publicly encouraged the horrors than the wonders.

Specifically, algorithms designed to learn what we prefer, and lead us to it again and again have preyed on several weak points of human psychology with the result that most social media users live in echo chambers where they're relentlessly drawn to news and analysis from sources that share a bias, are susceptible to fraudulent posts, see posts from like-minded friends, and are encouraged to watch, read, and listen to shocking, horrifying, and untrue content.

We all know that social media has had a corrosive effect on political conversation and face-to-face friendships, but the idea that it's in a more general way damaging our society seems way too much like something a fundamentalist pastor would say to be true. But it seems increasingly likely to be true.

Like politics, of course, my disgust is deepened by the recognition that disengaging with social media is--again--hoping my problems will go away if I close my eyes hard enough.

Finally, our third entry in this evening's trio of things that make me grit my teeth in helpless fury:

Misplaced Nostalgia/Chronological Snobbery

"Make America Great Again" is a perfect ball-cap slogan. It's catchy, it fits, and it's a wishful, fraudulent, and vacuous sentiment. No one has successfully explained to me when, precisely, America was so great, and who it was great for, and no one will. I find the whole thing to be an attempt to prey on the fear of various groups that they will be replaced or marginalized, and that America being great is synonymous with Me and My Friends Being in Charge and Getting the Lion's Share.

Similarly, I have little patience for sentences expressing shock that some horrifying thing which has happened (typically some great act or expression of bigotry) happened, despite the fact that it is 2018, now. This seems to suggest the opposite of #MAGA. In other words, while the scarlet ball-cap brigade is shuffling about in the delusion that things used to be good and are just getting worse and worse as a function of nothing but the passage of time and the inevitable approach of death, so do the "It's 2018" folks seem to think that each revolution of the globe brings with it an improvement in the social and ethical behaviors and thoughts of all human beings. Notably, "improvement" here means thinking and acting more and more like the person expressing outrage over the bigoted action.

It's 2018, and human brains work pretty much the same way they did in 1950. Which means we disagree about a lot of things, but share the same failings.

Anyway, the fourth thing that bothers me right now is:

This Morning, My Son Somehow Grabbed his Diaper as I was Changing It and Yanked it All Over the Changing Table In Consequence of Which, My Hand Got Poop on It.

It was awful.