Man, I got in this huge, flashy debate with people on the left and the right on Bluesky last night...

Look, here's the deal.

I wish they had voted.

Nothing in life is simple. We want there to be easy, straightforward, singular reasons for the awful mess the planet and America are in. Unfortunately, the reasons are complex, based in psychology, sociology, technology, education, money, and the list goes on and on. And there's a hell of a lot of blame to go around. The entire ludicrous, racist MAGA movement, the greedy GOP and their gerrymandering and voter suppression, narcissist billionaires, weak and out of touch Democratic leadership, a culture of corruption and money-making in our senior levels of politics.

Then there's the voters. The ones who would sell their mom or kid before giving up being racist or homophobic. The ones who meant well but were so stuck on one issue that they they were willing to burn society down in multiple countries instead of compromising for a lesser evil. The massive, massive percentage who just couldn't be bothered to care enough to vote at all.

Yeah, it's the last two groups that hurt me the most as I watch America crumbling. I can understand -evil-. I can understand bigots who are so brainwashed in a bigoted, angry cult that it will take formal religious deprogramming to reach them. I grew up surrounded by them. I understand monsters. Okay, that's a problem to add to the pile.

But the people who still, even today haughtily defend not voting at all, or voting for a third party -for a general election president-, in what was visibly quite possibly the last free and fair election in American history... but have emotions, independent thought, care about issues. Those ones broke my heart more than anybody else.

Don't you dare accuse me of not caring about what's happening to Palestine or Ukraine. Don't you dare accuse me of not caring about trans rights. I'm marching and donating and phone banking shoulder to shoulder with everyone else. I've certainly been outspoken about Democratic party leadership's (especially the old guard's) weakness on geopolitical and social issues.

But this was it. 2024 was kind of the last chance. Gerrymandering and voter suppression is at unprecedented levels with few remaining checks and balances. A lot of government infrastructure and knowledge has been dismantled chaotically or even pushed out of the US. The supreme court is partisan now for a whole generation. Corporations and billionaires have gained money and influence.

The idealists who think we'll just spring back into a socialist paradise if we buck the man enough... IDK, guys. I spent a long military career across two miserable wars and a lot of natural disasters seeing just how quickly and horribly a healthy modern society can crumble. And the -cost-. The horrific human cost. The cost to infrastructure, health, education, science, art...

Revolutions are ugly and messy - and most in history haven't involved nuclear superpowers which over-equipped militaries and militarized police. They're not a cute teen dystopian novel. They're not Le Mis with nice costumes and a cocktail. We rely on incredibly complex critical infrastructure. Transportation. Just in time logistics. Do your plans include how to live without sewage in a city for a month? Where you'll get medication? The boring stuff.

I really hope I'm wrong and America has a fair election in 2028 and it's like Newsom Buttigieg or whatever you guys want, and we're able to force the democratic party to take on AOC and Sanders' excellent talking points and replace the old guard. That would be super duper. I just can't see this ending with the utopia you want. Ukraine and Gaza are still starving and burning. Our neighbors are being taken to camps. Trans rights are being stripped apace. And now we have no influence at all to help them via a government. And rich politicians are still safe as houses.

I wish they had voted.

As I get advice on how to look for work I'm struck with how far removed the human element is from this process. I'm being taught how to game the system while not being obvious about it. But if my submission and resume are not JUST right then I'll never even surface to a talent agent/recruiter.

I ask...is this the intended consequence of leveraging automation to sift through the mountains of resumes? Is the candidate you are looking for the one who knows how to play the ATS game? To regurgitate in my resume what's on your job.posting? Is this what produces "good candidates"? And is the automation needed because, at face value, anyone but the hiring manager isn't really going to be able to look at the submission and determine a good candidate? When did hiring managers abdicate their responsibility vetting and sourcing the best talent?

I'm told to use AI to augment my resume but then don't get caught using AI cause that would count agains me. Are you fucking serious?!

Help request. My brother has Stage 4 colorectal cancer.

His life insurance has refused to pay out on a technicality, meaning he and his loved ones cannot afford the mortgage on their home.

I've never asked for anything in return for infosec stuff, but if you have anything spare, please chuck it this direction instead:

https://gofund.me/b9a0d8f4

In case you needed a playbook for responding to would-be dictators. From the NYT:

"The funny thing is that there’s a playbook for overturning autocrats. It was written here in America, by a rumpled political scientist I knew named Gene Sharp. While little known in the United States before his death in 2018, he was celebrated abroad, and his tool kit was used by activists in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and across Asia. His books, emphasizing nonviolent protests that become contagious, have been translated into at least 34 languages."

“I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb,” a former Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp’s writing."

"A soft-spoken scholar working from his Boston apartment, Sharp recommended 198 actions that were often performative, ranging from hunger strikes to sex boycotts to mock funerals."

“Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” he once said, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

"The Democrats’ message last year revolved in part around earnest appeals to democratic values, but one of the lessons from anti-authoritarian movements around the world is that such abstract arguments aren’t terribly effective. Rather, three other approaches, drawing on Sharp’s work, seem to work better."

"The first is mockery and humor — preferably salacious."

"Wang Dan, a leader of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy demonstrations, told me that in China, puns often “resonate more than solemn political slogans.”

"The Chinese internet for a time delighted in grass-mud horses — which may puzzle future zoologists exploring Chinese archives, for there is no such animal. It’s all a bawdy joke: In Chinese, “grass-mud horse” sounds very much like a curse, one so vulgar it would make your screen blush. But on its face it is an innocent homonym about an animal and thus is used to mock China’s censors."

"Shops in China peddled dolls of grass-mud horses (resembling alpacas), and a faux nature documentary described their habits. One Chinese song recounted the epic conflict between grass-mud horses and river crabs — because “river crab” is a play on the Chinese term for censorship. It optimistically declared the horses triumphant."

http://nytimes.com/2025/05/21/opinion/authoritarianism-democracy-protest.html