I don't hate tech, but MAN I hate tech bro CEOs

 So...this is a bit of a rant post. So, I went out the other week. Took my bag with my I put my tablet/gaming handheld in when I go out. Had some earbuds in one pocket. I still used wired earbuds because I have a strong dislike of wireless for a variety of reasons I'll get to. Long story short, my bag flipped over at one point, and I lost my wired earbuds. Thankfully, my dad bought some wireless earbuds for himself and my mom, and my mom didn't really want them, and he offered me them a while ago, but I largely declined because I hate wireless earbuds. Well...now I'm using wireless earbuds. And it got me thinking about the state of the tech industry and the world right now. The predicament of us all having to use wireless earbuds now is a lot like modern AI trends. The reason we gotta do things this way is because some tech bro CEO with a god complex who thinks he's a "visionary" basically forced it on us. And that's kind of what I wanna talk about.

Once upon a time, most earbuds were wired. Earbuds were never a great option, but they were portable. If you had one of those old anti skip CD players back in the day, earbuds actually did a relatively good job at complementing them. I never got into the ipod era. Too expensive and given I listened almost exclusively to like...4 Rammstein albums back in the day, kinda pointless. But eventually, I did modernize and start using tablets and all. And Tablets and phones...used to feature 3.5 mm headphone jacks. And I could use like $5 earbuds from five below with them on the go. It wasn't intended to be the best quality, it's just a cheap, portable option. I got better options for home. But if I go out, ya know, I need something cheap and lightweight that's easy to carry and just stuff in a bag, and if I lose them, like I just did, it's not the end of the world. Eventually, the $5 kind kinda stopped being made at decent quality, so last year I got a slightly more expensive but still affordable $15-20 ones...which are the ones I lost. 

Anyway, at some point, Apple decided to kill off the 3.5mm jack. You know how apple is. They're the epitome of the whole "visionary" tech bro CEO types. They sell overpriced products with proprietary blah blah blah, and it seemed obvious that the reason Apple was doing this was so they can sell you their fancy $200 airpods or whatever. After all, Apple is relatively anti consumer, they got their fanbase by the balls making this closed operating system that only works with their proprietary blah blah blah. it's the reason I hate them and why I've never bought their products. I'm purely a windows/android guy, and while I have problems with windows and android, I never saw a reason to go apple. Their stuff is expensive, the value questionable, and it just reeks of anti consumerism.

Unfortunately for us all, apple is considered the "industry leader" in the smartphone and tablet industry, and when apple does something, all these other wannabe tech bro CEO visionaries copy it. Monkey see, monkey do. They think it makes them money, and over time, they've been waging war on the 3.5mm headphone jack, removing it from phones and tablets, to the point it's darned near impossible to get newer devices that have them. Still, I manage to patronize the companies that do. My razer edge handheld has a 3.5mm jack in the razer kishi controller attached to it, and my samsung tab a9+ also features it. So I'm good to go for the immediate future, and I dont wanna do wireless.

Why do I hate wireless btw? A few reasons. First of all, while yes, wires are annoying, you wanna know what I hate more? Having ANOTHER FRICKING THING TO CHARGE! My earbuds going dead because they havent been charged. I have enough devices to charge, i dont need more peripherals to charge. It's a pain. Bluetooth is a pain. I just want to plug something in and have it work. Not go through pairing, unpairing, blah blah blah. Third, price, earbuds are more expensive for the same level of quality. The point of earbuds is them being a cheap, lightweight, and disposable option. I just want something cheap where if i lose it its not a big deal, and i can stuff it into a bag. Not only are earbuds typically more premium, but the case these new ones come with are super heavy and bulky, far more so than my wired ones were. And for some reason it charges using...microusb? Why? Why would it use such an outdated charging standard? I've been on USB-C since like 2020. Again, pain in the butt. More complicated, blah blah blah. I thank my dad for them, but still, my complaint aint about him, it's about the way we do things now.

Some jack### decided he wanted to make money fleecing his customers by making them buy into expensive proprietary peripherals, and then the entire industry decides to copy the guy to the point that it's darned near impossible to get headphone jacks in mobile devices any more. I HATE it! I didn't ask for this change, but these tech bro guys don't care. They just decide "well this is how things are now, and you have to get with it, blah blah blah, look at my genius, muahahaha! look at my money! how dare you peasant not be happy with the way I made things, dont you understand that this is how we do things now? now fork over all your money to us for something you dont want, but you have to buy because what you actually want to buy no longer exists!"

Like, really. All this crap is, is the downside of consumerism. Consumerism is nice...in moderation. It's nice...when it's actually consumer driven. But the problem is, it's often business driven. Rather than appeal to customers based on need, you got these stupid CEOs with a god complex trying to make our lives harder to force us to buy more stuff. They do planned obsolescence. They literally expect you to constantly replace perfectly viable products by either making them break before their time, or just flat out reducing their functionality. They remove the ability to say, replace the battery, which used to be a thing in early phones and tablets. They try to take away your "right to repair". They update their apps where they dont work on the older versions of the OS, even though they used to. They design things to keep us on a never ending cycle of spending and consumption so number on chart goes up. 

I guess this is kind of adjacent to my big topics of work and capitalism, because consumerism is the alternative the powers that be came up with instead of working less. As we know from the benjamin kline hunnicutt books, we couldve worked less, but instead we implemented consumerism to keep people spending and people working, because people feared a world in which we no longer had jobs and businesses could no longer make money. So they designed a system in which we constantly have new needs to keep us spending, to keep us creating jobs, to keep us working. It's absurd, and when framed like this it's completely counter to a system based around actual human wants and needs. it's just a system designed to artificially keep us on a treadmill so that people keep working, businesses keep making money, and line on chart keeps going up. 

Like, if this were my ideal system, products would be made to last. Maybe some progress would be slower, but honestly, when it happens it would be more meaningful. We'd improve things because the improvements actually benefit people. We wouldnt be taking away the headphone jack standard that people like to force something new on them whether they want it or not. We shouldnt do planned obsolescence just to create more jobs, that's insane. We'd work to meet our actual wants and needs, and to improve things because the improvements actually matter. I'm not advocating for never ending stagnation. I'm just not advocating for constant change and never ending consumption either. You should buy something, it should be yours. And you should use it until eventually it either breaks (not because of design flaws, but actual age), or becomes genuinely obsolete. 

But instead we live in a world where rich people write articles yelling at you if you dont replace your phone often enough because youre ruining the economy...for rich people. Well, F the rich people and F the tech bro CEOs.

And it's not just headphone jacks or smartphones in general that has this behavior. It's this AI nonsense too. Look, I'm mixed on AI. I think it's an interesting tech, but I'm not really sold on it as this end all be all of everything. And once again, it's an industry run by the tech bro CEOs with a god complex. I reported on this in 2023 when I just got my i9 12900k. Suddenly new CPUs were gonna use NPUs meaning they'd have AI on board. But why do I care about that? I don't care, quite frankly. My main use case for having powerful hardware is gaming. That's all I care about. But suddenly they're trying to obsolete old CPUs with new ones that have an AI processing unit on it? And yeah. Ever since then, everything is AI, AI, AI. AI is the solution to everything. AI has to be shoehorned into everything. Every site needs an AI bot integrated into it. My fricking PDF reader (adobe) got taken over by AI nonsense. You realize most of us non professionals just use acrobat reader to read PDFs, right? I mean...I DONT CARE about AI, and I was very pointed with them when I uninstalled acrobat reader and they asked me why I did so. It was because the app no longer did what I wanted it to be. It was made overly complicated and taken over by all this AI bullcrap that I don't care about!

And here we are with talk of windows 12 being an AI centric OS with ridiculous system requirements because, again, these corporations don't care about making a good user experience. If anything they make things inconvenient for you to make you spend money on them. Subscription based everything? AI hardware required? No sideloading? Oh, speaking of no sideloading, let's go back to something I've ALWAYS hated about apple. All of their closed garden BS. Needing to use their apple store, and buy their stuff, at their prices, to get a user experience I can get for a fraction of the price elsewhere. But now with the internet going nuts over android clamping down on sideloading, and windows 12 possibly doing it too, guess what? That's the future! And what are you peasants gonna do? 

Honestly, at this point I might consider linux/steam OS in the future at this rate. It's so ridiculous. These companies are trying to ruin and monetize everything. There's a term for this. it's called "enshittification", or because I try to avoid the curse words, let's call it encrapification instead. These companies are making stuff worse to extract more profits from you. And it's not just some of them. if it was the userbase would fight back, probably leave en masse, and these guys would go out of business. but because we have so few options at this point, and they're all doing it at once, we really dont have a choice but to go along with this stuff. They're ruining the open internet, the open operating systems. In the future it's not gonna be open anything. "You will own nothing and be happy" as a lot of people covering this issue are saying.

Hell, in the future, it's being speculated that the same will be true of PC hardware. Because these same tech bro CEOs with a god complex are why PCs are so fricking expensive these days. They're all buying all of this hardware to build AI datacenters...to force AI on us...because it's supposed to make them money at some point, even though it's not profitable because everyone hates it.....but hey, in the future, if you wanna game, maybe you wont be able to because no one can afford a PC any more. So...guess what? You can just do game streaming. All future computer needs will be run through these massive servers they're building which they own while you get some locked down peasant device with anemic specs where you have to pay for subscriptions to LITERALLY EVERYTHING. That seems to be the future these guys want. They want to kill tech as we know it, to replace it with their apple like walled garden BS, and consumers have little choice in the matter. because like 3 companies control everything, you gotta go through one of them, all of them suck about as bad, and if you dont like it, screw you! What are you gonna do? They're forcing us into their bullcrap ecosystems one way or another?

Again. I'm a tech nerd myself. But Im kinda old fashioned. I like my gaming PC, which I built myself. I like my open OSes like android and windows, I like my fricking 3.5mm headphone jacks. I like being able to put whatever software i want on my stuff, and use it as I want. And I don't give a flying fudge about AI. Honestly. At this point, give me the 2000s back. Things were better in the 2000s. Even the 2010s are looking great compared to the modern 2020s hellscape at this point. I used to think the future was gonna be cool. We'd have flying cars and robot maids. But instead because of capitalism's excesses, we have the death of traditional computing and OSes, and being forced into walled gardens because it makes some tech bro CEO with a god complex money. F this decade, F the tech bro CEOs. I want nothing to do with this, and I'll resist trends to get on board with it for as long as humanly possible.  

Reacting to Andrew Yang's "The Last Election"

 So I'm a bit late on this one, but Andrew Yang wrote a fictional book about his vision of how the 2024 election would play out. It's not as good as The War on Normal People or Forward, and it's an entirely different kind of book. Rather than being a nonfiction and fact based book, it is a fictional novel set during the 2023-2024 election cycle, ending in early 2025 with the next president being elected. The names of the candidates are changed or left out altogether, although they seem based on real people. The third party "Maverick Party" candidate is basically an analogue to himself, running on things like UBI and human centered capitalism. The republican is very clearly Donald Trump, and the democrat seems to be based on Jared Polis, based on the contextual clues in the book (white male Colorado governor who happens to be a billionaire, all the primary candidates seem based on real figures too). It follows the Yang like character and his campaign through the election cycle, with different days being different pivotal moments. He faces scandals, there's talk of extreme political violence, a plot by the military to seize control and to call for a contingent election. Public officials are assassinated, party conventions erupt in violence. and it seems like America is breaking down at the seams. 

 Given Andrew Yang has been talking about America heading toward a civil war, it makes sense, but it really does express the worst case scenario of his fears. The fact is, he seems to "both sides" things too much. On the one hand, I admire his emotional distance from the democratic party. Even if I hate the dems and kinda have the same views as him, I still believe we should stick by the democrats, and that, ultimately, change needs to come from within them. And given that we do face threats to our democracy, we need to rally around the democrats to prevent America from descending into the worst case scenario. He looks at the democrats from the outside in, viewing leftists as figures who eat their own and can't be pleased, while seeing the liberal democratic establishment as being completely and utterly worthless. if theres anything I agree with him on, its his portrayal of the democratic party and figures like chuck schumer, who are quite literally going down with the ship as it sinks. The republican party he seems to ascribe as being more violent and more authoritarian, and let's face it, even if he doesn't say it, we all know the republican candidate is trump, and that many points in the book are very similar to how trump would act. From pardoning J6ers, to inciting violence and undermining faith in the election system, yeah, it's trump. 

Of course....again, he both sides it in a way. He acts like this breakdown of America and its norms and faith in democracy and the polarization is a both sides issue. It isn't. I blame the republicans FULL STOP. They've been constructing an alternative reality for their officials and voter base to live in, a "post truth world" if you will where many people no longer know what's up or down, left or right, and quite frankly, I fully blame the disease of modern partisanship, polarization, and loss of faith in our institutions and elections on them. Yes, democrats are worthless and complicit. And maybe they're shady with their primaries, but those are the worst things I have to say about them. If America IS in a civil war, it's one where one side is fighting and the other is refusing to fight back, for the sake of those institutions. 

Still...despite the greatly exaggerated takes on political violence, there are some events that werent all that different from the real world. Like in the book some guy tried to assassinate a SCOTUS justice. In real life, a similar figure took potshots at Trump but failed, and many of the same forces of polarization and the blame game happened. We had Charlie Kirk get shot last year by a sniper. We had Luigi Mangione shoot a heathcare exec. So yeah, we are in a period of political violence, just not as extreme as indicated.

 **SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT** 

Ultimately, Yang's character, who was named Cooper in the book, basically ran as an independent against the republicans and democrats, taking it all the way to election day and screwing up the vote in a way where it did force a contingent election. No candidate secured the popular vote, no candidate secured an electoral college majority, so it was thrown to congress and the republican candidate won because most states are red leaning. Our contingent election procedures are basically a vote by geography, not people. And the result was very undemocratic. While all 3 candidates all won roughly 1/3 of the vote and won 1/3 of the electoral college, the republicans won because they controlled the legislatures. And they defended it in traditional fashion. "Well it's a republic, not a democracy." Yeah yeah yeah. Weasel words of weasel people who have disdain toward the will of the people. That is, by the way, how the contingent election would play out. Doesnt make it right, but it is the system. I agree it should change in that regard. 

But yeah, that's why it's considered "the last election", the republicans win, undemocratically, and it's wondered if we even will have future elections. The country is so divided, again, there was a plot by the military to take control of the country, and it looks like the country is so fractured and no one trusts the institutions that it's unclear if there will be elections. ANd it is assumed that the republicans probably won't let there be anyway. They consolidate power, and yeah, that's the end of the system. 

Im not sure if this yang scenario is better or worse than what happened. In the real world, the violence was significantly less. Yang's third party run didn't happen (and i wonder if this book is why it didn't happen....he knew that if he did run it would screw things up and split votes), but due to low voter turnout on the democratic side, a democratic president whose mind turned to jello, forcing harris to step in last minute, and a general malaise surrounding inflation, immigration, crime, gaza, etc., Trump won. I know he didn't have to win. I even considered the race a tossup on election day, and I already dramatized my reaction to the results as they came in. And I myself wondered if this was the last election. After all, Trump is a danger to democracy. He's been so since January 6th. He was the one who undermined american faith in elections in Yang's book. HE did. By making up fake narratives of it being rigged and inciting his followers to attack. And in the real world, we tried to hold him accountable, but failed because the legal system didn't act fast enough. He talked about how if you vote for him "you'd never have to vote again." He had that project 2025 ready to go. The American people shouldve known what they're getting into and they didn't.

To some extent, I do blame the democrats for this. Their complacency and internal problems are responsible for this mess. They forced Biden on us without much resistance, covering up his mental decline. They were the ones who pushed party unity so hard that we never had a fair and open primary process. And when Biden stepped aside, it was Harris. To be fair, even I supported Harris. She was the best for the job on such short notice. However, all of this comes back to the democrats core problems. Even now, democrats like to make Biden out to be a scapegoat. But let's face it, the rot of the democratic party went deeper than that. They were supposed to stop trump, and unlike in the book, there wasnt a third party insurgent mucking everything up. The closest thing was RFK Jr and Trump disarmed that threat by bringing him into his administration and letting him do his MAHA thing, to the horror of thinking Americans with at least a high school level understanding of medicine.  And...btw....if you ARE gonna run a third party campaign, THAT is the end goal. It's a pressure campaign to pressure the party closest to you to give you concessions. if Yang ran on UBI, it would be to pressure the dems into supporting UBI. In RFK's case, he ended up appealing to anti vax cranks and Trump basically brought him into his administration, giving him a prominent position with real world policy concessions to keep him happy. Arguably it helped win him the election, because those RFK voters went to MAGA. Again, if you're gonna go third party, that's how you do it. You ideally dont take it to election day. And if you do, you do it in an election year where the consequences of that isn't the system imploding followed by a republican coup. You do it where the assumption is "oh well, the dems lost, maybe they should listen next time." But if it really is potentially the "last election", and 2024 very well could have been....that's suicide. So basically, democracy committed suicide at the hands of Andrew yang's character in the book. In the real world, again, we didn't have that insurgent campaign, and what happened instead was that Trump just outright won the election. In some ways i guess the real world scenario is preferable, after all, the results were so straightforward that they were called the night of, and they were largely beyond (reasonable) dispute (I add the word reasonable because if Harris won by similar margins Trump would've thrown a tantrum and probably incited more violence). 

Either way...idk. I kinda feel somber either way. I mean...here....we lost, it was straightforward, but it does have a weimar germany feel to it. There are questions of whether we will have fair elections in 2026 and 2028. I've covered a lot of the screwery Trump is trying so far. One story I didnt cover that I probably should have (I guess I'll mention it now) is how Trump trying to seize voter rolls in stuff in states like Georgia could be dry runs for him attempting to seize the ballots come election day 2026. After all, it's not the voters who decide who won, it's the person who counts the voters, to paraphrase Stalin. And Trump is a lot more like Stalin than many of us would like to admit. So can we come out of this mess that is Trump's second term? Well the history books arent written yet and it feels like reality is its own thriller novel. 

I guess I'll end it there. All in all, was it a good novel? Eh, it was okay. Quite frankly, the real world version of what happened is far more interesting and realistic. Mainly because its real. Yang's version is kinda just him playing out a hypothetical 2024 where he runs and his forward party splits the vote screwing everything up. Many elements are greatly exaggerated and unrealistic, compared to the real world version. 

All in all, I will say one more thing though. If Yang does run in 2028...he should run as a democrat, explicitly to stop this from happening. Will he win? Probably not. But honestly, I would like to see him try. I still believe in his vision of UBI and human centered capitalism. I just recognize that things are so screwed right now we gotta fight to preserve democracy first, and that means siding with the democrats and getting Trump and his goons out of office. Like, that's priority #1 for me. Even above my UBI crap. Third party protest votes make sense when democracy isn't on the line, but when it is, you gotta protect democracy first. Sucks, but that's how it is.

So yeah, yang 2028...but hopefully as a democrat, not as an independent third party splitting the votes. Unless your plan is brinksmanship with dems to get them behind UBI and election reform....don't even try it.  

If you thought Kristi Noem was bad, look at this guy

 So...I didnt actually cover this, but Kristi Noem is out at DHS. And it should be a moment of celebration. I mean she oversaw ICE locking people up into detention camps unconstitutionally and shooting people in the face, so that ain't good. Anyway, she's gone, but before you celebrate, get a load of her replacement. His name is Markwayne Mullin. The first time I mentioned him to anyone, I got a response like "oh that ###hole who challenged a teamster to a fist fight. And i was just like O_O what? Yeah....

But it gets worse, he's said things like he understood why Rand Paul's neighbor wanted to beat the crap out of him. He supports bringing back dueling. He even challenged a senator to a fist fight on the senate floor until Bernie basically shut that crap down. He seemed to romanticize the caning of Charles Sumner. So let's face it, hes a very violent psychopath. He's so bad he makes the puppy slayer look good.

Look. What we should want from the next director of DHS, who is also in charge of ICE, is someone who can cool down the temperature and bring a sense of levelheadedness to the situation. Someone who isnt going to advocate for wanton violence against protesters. This guy wants to throw down with anyone who disagrees with him, imagine what ICE will look like with him in charge. He will ramp up ICE's violence against Americans with that attitude. He's a bomb thrower, not a bomb defuser. I mean, what the fudge?

I mean, it is the trump administration, they dont give a crap. The cruelty is the point and this could just be a passive aggressive pick of "oh you didnt like Noem? Let me find the loosest possible cannon to serve as her replacement!" I mean, that's what this feels like, if this were intentional. Im not even sure if it is, because while Trump is cruel, he's also an idiot who puts comically incompetent people in important positions of power. It's hard to tell at this point.

Either way, this is a terrible idea. I will lose all faith in humanity if this guy is confirmed. Because holy crap this guy is insane. There's no way he's qualified for this, and his demeanor is so bad it's like putting Kristi Noem in charge of animal welfare. Just a terrible idea.

What we could have funded instead of this Iran war

 So...that discussion last night got me thinking. We've spent over $11 billion in the first week of this Iran war alone, and long term costs are looking to be $200 billion over the next year, if not higher. So let's be honest, $200 billion is the lowest estimate, with it possibly costing as high as $400-500 billion on the high end. That's a lot of money. And you know what? We might as well have set it on fire. I mean, in a way we are. Because a lot of it is going into fancy fireworks that blow up oil fields. We're literally setting the money on fire. 

So...say we didnt decide to set a bunch of money on fire as a giant F U to that middle eastern country who we hate. What could we have funded with this money instead? Obviously UBI and Medicare for all are off the table as they cost trillions a year, but there's a lot of other stuff that we could have funded for this instead. 

Build Back Better- $240 billion

I think the most poetically just choice we could have made for this money would have been build back better. After all this is an oil war. Trump wanted the oil, and now....oil is going up...because of the war. Been to the gas pump likely? Trump did that. "Iran your gas prices up", as the stickers now say. But you know what? We could have funded build back better with this money, which would have cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and made us carbon neutral by 2050. 

And this bill did more than just that. If you look at the estimate, it includes childcare, paid family leave, universal preK, an EITC expansion, and a Child Tax credit which acted like a little UBI for kids and would have cut child poverty in half. This is what Biden wanted to do for us, and I admit, relative to my TRILLIONS of spending with my UBI, its a little barebones on the social program front, but that's still a pretty progressive bill. 

But hey, we couldnt have that because "entitlement society" (F U, Joe Manchin), and republicans are against it for similar reasons. They always scream about how we're broke and cant afford anything and what about the national debt, but they're sure putting this war on Uncle Sam's credit card. How come we always have money for stupid wars in the Middle East and tax breaks for billionaires but we never have any for stuff like this?

Because they dont want to fund it, and they're waging a class war against you, that's why. This is just one of many proposals that could have been funded instead of this stupid fricking war. 

Free college and student debt forgiveness- $220 billion

And I'm not talking about Joe Biden's dinky plan either here, I'm talking the full Bernie. Bernie's plan would come out to $2.2 trillion over 10 years, or $220 billion a year. It would have forgiven all student debt and made college free. We could have invested money to make our next generation of young people smarter, but instead we're sending them to die in the Middle East. What a F-ed up sense of priorities we seem to have...

7.4 million new public housing units- $250 billion

Another Bernie idea, but yeah, Bernie's public housing plan would have produced over 7 million new homes that, at 2.5 being your typical household size, could have housed 18 million people. We have a housing crisis. A lack of affordable housing. While I dont doubt that we need more than this (and tbqh I think it could be done cheaper under the right circumstances, meaning more housing units), it would have helped secure more affordable housing for more people. 

A baseline public option- $200-300 billion

So, as you guys know, Im kinda iffy on Medicare for All these days due to the sheer costs and the fact that funding it on top of a UBI is quite....iffy. As such, I've looked into public options instead, and I'm quite sympathetic to the Medicare Extra for All model, or Medicare for America as it was introduced to congress. While I would say nowadays $300 billion is likely the entry point for the bare minimum option, back when it was proposed in 2018-2019, it cost closer to $200 billion. This isn't the full version of it. Just the most basic bare minimum part of it. The high end version is likely $450-600 billion, but to be fair, the $200 billion being requested to congress for this war is likely the bare minimum version as well, with costs possibly being that high if this war proves to last longer and be higher intensity than we thought. 

Instead, we actually cut healthcare through medicaid cuts and cuts to ACA subsidies. Man, we sure got our priorities straight. F U and your healthcare needs, we gotta set the money on fire in the middle east instead. 

A UBI/tax cut of $1,000 to every adult American - $250-270 billion

We can't fund a full UBI with just a few hundred billion. BUT...we could give every adult in America $1,000...given there are about 250 million of us who would be eligible (the actual number is a bit higher, but my last plan assumed 250 million eligible so let's go with that). Yeah. Who wants tax cuts? or UBI? They're kinda the same thing when you think about it, given I tend to fund my UBI through an NIT style benefit structure. 

Conclusion

I mean these are just some ideas. I honestly think of these proposals, I'd likely choose build back better in part because of the scope, but also because of the poetic justice of actually funding alternative energy sources to get us away from oil, making wars like this less necessary in the future. We invaded Iran partially over the oil, the oil markets are going out of control in response, and we could have instead invested in alternative energy that would make us less dependent on the stuff. 

Honestly, this administration is a joke. Not that it cares. Its priorities are way out of sync with where they should be. This war was unnecessary and its very costly. A huge reason I'm so against it. But it just strikes me as hypocritical that republicans always have money for stupid pointless wars but for things that help YOU? Nah, we're broke, what about the national debt? DOn't let them gaslight you. I dont ever wanna hear that crap ever again. We CAN fund nice things for the people and we should. A big criticism I heard against Biden is we spend so much on foreign stuff, why not invest in the people? While I think Biden's priorities were straight (as evidenced by Build Back Better), okay, where are these Trump voters saying this now? Still believe he's the no new wars guy? Wanna invest that money here at home? Vote democrat. Not saying they're perfect. I can assure you they're not. But they're a whole lot better than this. 

We canceled the green new deal to start a war that raises the price of oil

 So...yeah, we never had a full green new deal, but Biden did try to do build back better and we got some good things out of the inflation reduction act. The point of these efforts were move us out of our dependence on oil, and onto renewable energy. Not only would this have reduced climate emissions, reducing the long term effects of climate change, but it would have made us safer from a national security perspective. because most of our decisions are made because of, you guessed it, oil. It's what drives US foreign policy. It's the lifeblood of our economy and without it, everything grinds to a halt. It's why we're so imperialistic. If anything, shifting to renewables would make our foreign policy more benign since it would be one less natural resource to carve up the world over. 

But....republicans seem to have a weird kneejerk hatred for green energy. maybe it's because they're bought out by oil lobbies, but some of it is because it has become a weird culture war issue, and the right wants to see us suffer and remain on oil because F those libs, man. So, one of Trump's priorities coming in was to axe Biden's legacy on the subject. And instead, what do we get? Well, now we're spending like a billion a day on this war with Iran. Or $365 billion a year. And gas is now $4 a gallon and projected to rise even more. 

With $365 billion, we could've funded Biden's entire build back better agenda. Instead, we're using it to blow up oil fields, poisoning Tehran under an oil rain, and bombing little girls' schools. And for what? This war is, once again, so pointless. Iran wasnt a threat, the whole WMDs thing was just rehashing Bush's poor reasoning and anyone with two brain cells to rub together could see through it. And now oil is UP because Iran closed the strait of hormuz. And that's driving oil up to an insane degree. We're about to be like the 1970s again in all the worst ways. I thought Biden was this generation's Jimmy Carter, but Trump is about to be it, except his stupidity literally caused this situation in the first place. I dont normally blame presidents for the economy or the price of gas, but when you F up this bad, yeah, we can squarely say this is Trump's fault, and this wouldve never happened if we didn't attack Iran. Trump got us into a war he wasnt prepared for, because the dude doesn't think things through and fires anyone who actually does. And yeah. Now we're all suffering for it.

But yeah, one hell of a time to destroy our programs for clean energy. What makes us less dependent on oil? All those windmills and solar panels he doesn't like. Bravo, Trump. Bravo. *slow clap* 

The deevolution of my support of Israel

 So...given previous support for Israel, I figured I'd explain how I've shifted over time, and what caused me to sour on supporting Israel, ya know, for future reference if anyone asks how I got from my 2023 position to my 2026 one.

Ideological presuppositions

So...I'm basically a post Christian with a reddit atheist vibe despite not really being a hardcore atheist any more. And my position on the issue is similar to many new Atheist types. Kyle kind of covered this and how a lot of us went in this weird direction in which we began opposing radical islam at all costs because, well, those guys are absolutely nuts, but to be fair, I have gotten more nuanced with religion over time, recognizing extremists are the big problem, not all adherents (although leaving religion is still beneficial0. 

On the Israel-Palestine conflict, I've generally remained somewhat pro Israel. Post religion, it's less about ideological similarities or sympathies with zionism, but more just...well, they're our geopolitical allies in the middle east and seem more civilized than the Palestinians, and more ready to negotiate. 

These opinions tinged my initial reaction to October 7th, 2023 btw, where I was sympathetic to Israel because Hamas launched this horrible attack on them. And as I saw it, Palestine tends to do this stuff, and when they do, it's basically FAFO. They F'ed around, so now they find out.

The history of the conflict

 Israel in a modern sense was founded in 1948. Yes, it was an act of colonialism by the major superpowers who colonized the region but post WWII divested from those areas and gave them more sovereignty. Basically, they gave half of the land to Israel and half to Palestine. Palestine found this unacceptable, and declared war. And then they got their butts kicked. And because wars have consequences, well, the Nakba happened, and Israel had the upper hand since. In 1967, the Arab powers tried to gang up on israel, and we had the 6 day war where they basically kicked butt and came out the victor again. And...again, wars have consequences, and by that point, Israel owned it all.

However, this displaces the Palestinians, so eventually under international pressure they gave some land back and established some agreements. And...neither side fully abided by the agreements. Israel would do illegal settlements in the west bank, Palestinian terrorists would attack Israel, tensions remained high, and while we had several agreements since then, these guys didnt abide by them because they both want all the land for themselves and dont wanna compromise. 

Generally, I supported a two state solution to the conflict, recognizing israel needs to stop the settlement crap but Palestine needs to stop committing terrorism. The goal for me was to deescalate tensions, although I largely stayed out of it, taking pot shots from the side and posting this video whenever the topic came up. As a secular American, I dont think the conflict is my business, and while I typically saw Israel as the more reasonable of the two and the lesser evil, again, it's not like I sympathize with zionism. 

Initial response to October 7th

I honestly was very sympathetic to the Israelis. I mean just the month before I considered traveling to virginia for blue ridge rock festival to see Till Lindemann. I didnt go because logistics, but I seriously considered it. Im glad, I didn't. It was a nightmare. Till cancelled and the whole festival was...shall we say, a hot mess. There was extreme weather, people got sick from the porta potties being blown over, half the bands didnt play, there was a shortage of resources, it was a disaster.

But hey, at least it wasn't a bunch of terrorists paragliding into the festival and shooting everyone. So yeah, F hamas for doing that. And, of course, I was sympathetic to Israel initially for wanting to declare war on Hamas and eliminate them. And...let's face it. War is ugly. I knew there would be civilian casualties. Like when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, it wasnt really clean. I knew civilians died. But the difference is Bush seemed to make it clear the objective was to HELP those people, and even if our help wasnt really...helpful, at least Bush seemed to have relatively good intentions. So...yeah, I kinda defended Israel initially, suggesting that they weren't trying to necessarily kill civilians, but war is messy and crap sometimes happens.

My opinion sours 

But...over time, it seemed obvious that Israel wasn't putting a good faith effort into avoiding casualties. As the war dragged on, it became increasingly apparent that Israel WASNT trying to rein in casualties. And support soured as a result. it got so bad eventually Netanyahu was accused of war crimes by the ICC and states were legally required to act on it. They didnt, and if anything, the US shut them down. 

My initial response to this stuff happening was that I didnt like it, but I also kinda figured well what else are we gonna do? Israel was basically our ally in the middle east, and while I didnt support this behavior, eh, I wasn't gonna upset international relations over it either. I kinda just soured on supporting Israel and wanted to stay out of it.

Response to anti war protesters and the 2024 election

Now, from the get go, there were a segment of leftists who got hyper mobilized over this issue and did all these stupid symbolic protests and acted obnoxiously self righteous over the issue. And I generally condemned that. To be frank, I dont care about Israel much. I really dont. This isn't our conflict and I generally dont care that much about it in the grand scheme of things. So I kinda opposed those guys. I kinda thought the left was doing the irritating thing that cost democrats the 1968 and 1972 elections where anti war protesters scream and disrupt things until they're heard, while most would oppose them. I didnt want Biden or Harris to go down over their support because tbqh, they seemed to be trying to moderate Israel somewhat, even if they were "complicit", and honestly, I REALLY didn't want trump to win. As I said, I had 99 problems and Israel isn't one. I cared more about most other issues. So I was trying to maintain party discipline if anything. 

The Trump Years

And...as we know, Trump won. And Trump just gave Netanyahu the green light to finish the job. So they basically went full genocide, with Trump talking about building casinos in the gaza strip and turning it into a crappy middle eastern version of atlantic city. And by this point, even the veil of a good faith effort to minimize casualties was gone. It was just, kill them all, let god sort them out. And by this point most liberals turned hard on the subject, including myself. 

Of course, we could've warned the 2024 protesters this was gonna happen. Harris wasnt a perfect candidate, and I get that people hate lesser evilism but she was the lesser evil here. Honestly, there is no "good" outcome for palestine and the sooner we all realize it, the better.  

Massive political influence

Something that's become increasingly apparent to me in recent years is just how deep Israel's influence in US politics goes. AIPAC spends MASSIVE amounts of money lobbying politicians for Israel support, and also spends massive amounts on destroying their enemies. Much of congress is explicitly bought out by Israel, with them running campaigns against any holdouts. The same goes with commentators. Between Nick Fuentes and Guy Christensen, it seems obvious that they do the same there. They pay generously to commentators who support Israel, but also seek to destroy those that don't, often to disgusting degrees. And I wanna make it clear. Im not sympathetic to Nick Fuentes, guy is practically a neonazi, but I will say this: he went in that direction because in his villain origin story, Israel's lobbying efforts tried to destroy him and they ended up turning him into the monster he is. When Israel turns any legitimate criticism against them into "anti semitism" and tries to destroy peoples' careers, eventually you're gonna get legit antisemite types rising out of that. I don't support those guys, but I understand why it happens.

But yeah, let's be honest. if this were Russia, or China, or anyone else, we'd basically consider this to be a hostile act against our country. It's the kind of crap we pull on third world countries in trying to depose regimes we dont like and get ones in that we do. And it shouldnt be acceptable. And I myself have turned quite anti Israel in response to this. Because I want my politicians to represent actual Americans, not Israel. Again, I dont care about Israel. 

The Epstein connection

 While this isnt entirely proven to my knowledge, there's reason to believe even the Epstein thing is a Mossad operation to get blackmail on politicians. You know, so they toe Israel's line. Epstein is speculated to be Israeli intelligence. And one of the reasons Trump is so willing to go along with Netanyahu is because, as we know, he was a big player in Epstein's operation. And if you read the Epstein files, you know how depraved that is. Like holy crap we're talking child sex trafficking here. And Israel helped set this up to blackmail US politicians? Wow....

The war with Iran

 This brings us to the current crisis. Israel wanted to go after Iran. Trump does whatever netanyahu wants, in part because he's a psychopath, but also due to the epstein blackmail stuff I mentioned. And now WE'RE getting in a war with iran...FOR ISRAEL. And...again, at this point, this is getting so unconscionable that I'm just like. NO. HEEEELLLLL NOOOOO!!!!!! I dont want us to send our kids overseas to die in a pointless war that didnt need to happen, for fricking Israel. F Israel. We should cut off all ties, declare them a rogue state, and let nature take its course. We should be doing to them what Europe is currently doing to us. Sitting there and staying out of it while we make ###es out of ourselves. Except we should also be on the sideline letting Israel find out. As I said before with palestine. Wars have consequences. If Israel wants to F around, let them find out. And if they lose...well...that's the way things should be. But now WE'RE getting involved, and WE'RE getting ruined for them. And it sickens me. I dont support this war. F this war. Whatever happened to "America first?" 

Conclusion

And yeah, that's how I went from being relatively pro Israel to now seeing them as public enemy #1 as far as foreign policy goes. They speedran our fall from grace after 9/11. We started out with widespread sympathy and public support and because we abused that support, we ended up alienating our allies through the Bush years. Obama rebuilt some of that trust again, but now Trump has trashed it. Netanyahu did that too. I went from being relatively sympathetic to seeing them as genocidal warmongers with WAAAAY too much influence over our government. Im to the point I wanna cut off all diplomatic ties with them and let them fight their own war. And if they end up losing, well....maybe they shouldn't have F-ed around. This was totally avoidable. But because we seem to be governed by literal monsters in moral terms, well....we all gotta suffer from it.

Idk how this war will end. It's possible this could lead to the unraveling of the entire US led world order, tbqh. We are coming off as weak and a paper tiger, we've alienated our allies, and this could be the stumbling block that destroys our empire. And that's not good, because if anyone replaces us, it's China. Way to go, America, way to go *slow clap*. 

Andrew Yang 2028?

 So...Andrew Yang is doing the rounds doing book signings and what amounts to town halls for his new book "Hey Yang, where's my thousand bucks?" I havent read it yet, but he's been posting these sessions as podcast episodes and he addressed 2028 in his most recent episode. He hasnt formally declared that he's running or anything, don't get me wrong, but he's floated it, and did mention if he runs on it, he's still for UBI and human centered capitalism.

Well, if that's the case, ANDREW YANG 2028! I mean, this is about as much of an endorsement as his podcast is a declaration of intent to run. But I'm floating it, much like he's floating running. On the one hand, no one else has ever run on my ideology. So...yeah. He gets major points for that. On the other hand, Yang kinda makes poor tactical decisions in my view and sometimes lacks the right temperament for the job. 

Is he what we need in 2028? Yes, but also kind of no. Again, dream candidate on the UBI and human centered capitalist front. But again, we need a fighter. We need someone who is gonna take the fight to the GOP. Who isnt gonna back down and be mr nice guy. And im not sure yang is that guy. Love his ideas, but we also need a fighter. Hence why Im on the fence here.

Still, given Greasy Gavin and Kamala Chameleon are the top democratic candidates, well....Yang is easily preferable to them. At least Yang has the right ideology and policy positions for the most part. And given alternative politicians that I would support DONT support UBI, although are stronger on other fronts (like AOC having a relatively strong progressive platform and Ro Khanna being fully on team prosecute the pedophiles), well...Yang does make it into that top tier.

It really depends how his hypothetical campaign develops. Does he support universal healthcare still? How does he ramp up his UBI policy (since even he acknowledged $1000 a month isnt enough any more)? What are his positions on hot button issues like Iran, the Epstein files, Trump in general? Like really, we do need to slam the door on trump for good. Admittedly, UBI would address the economic rot that does that, but we need someone who actually will fix our democracy. Well...I guess yang has ideas on that too. I dont fully agree, but we also need someone who will address trump himself, like....legally...judicially....hell, i'll say it, prosecute the guy and lock him up for his severe crimes. Idk if Yang has the temperament for that. To be fair, do mainstream dems either? No. But Yang...again...hes his own worst enemy at times. I love the guy but he also makes me cringe on occasion. 

Still, were never gonna get a perfect candidate, and the standards are so low right now that hey, yang still pops up in my top 3 candidates for 2028. Again, AOC and Ro Khanna are the other 2 there. We'll see what else happens. But yeah. Let's just say, I'm very interested in Yang running. And let's see how this develops through 2026 and 2027.