Following are some assorted musings from today.


Continued Work Nonsense

The "Cultural Marxist" garbage is being relentlessly pushed in my workplace under the guise of being what the literature calls "anti-racism" and being an "ally", to the point where I literally can't go a single day without it being thrust into my face somehow.

The problem is that whenever I'm confronted with something that's morally wrong, I have to sit down and re-process the topic, which kills my productivity. It's extremely difficult to focus on my actual job, especially when combined with so much of my mental energy being forced not into career development or technology, but into contingency planning and risk mitigation: learning about homesteading; cryptocurrencies; asylum processes; and so forth.

Thankfully, lots of other people have already put in the leg work for me regarding this topic. Click on the chart for a larger version if you're having a difficult time reading it:



Think of all the assumptions-stacked-on-assumptions my workplace is making: that there is a huge racism problem at the company, with zero evidence; that the racism is happening one way (towards blacks); that the best approach to handle the problem is not with liberalism, but with more racism; etc.

But HR and the company's leadership don't ever discuss these assumptions, or how their conclusions were arrived at: they shove the assumptions, the conclusions, the "resolution" methodology, and the directives at you all at once as a pre-packaged deal, and literally tell you that you will be punished by HR if you criticize any of it.


Cringeworthy

It's always hilarious to watch mis-usage of words become common place in the public discourse. Some of my personal favorites:

• Redundancies such as "NIC card", or "LCD display".


• Prefixing web sites or systems with "my": "my internet is working fine", or "I can't log in to my Facebook."


• Confusing systems with their usages or component parts, like "I sent you an email".

Most recently, a new breed of re-defining words altogether has caught my eyes and ears. For instance, for hundreds or thousands of years "performant" referred to an actor or some kind of performer-- it's a noun, not an adjective! Yet people commonly use it today as the latter, instead of simply saying something "runs fast" or "runs well", to the point where dictionaries have given up and added this new ridiculous mis-usage.

Another one is the term "quality of life", or "QoL", which has always referred to nutrition, fitness, yoga, and so forth. In 2014, Nintendo said that they were working on some kind of gamified "QoL" medical device-- but for some bizarre reason, people started using "QoL" to refer to things inside a video game, like a HUD getting larger fonts, or having configurable button commands!


See Something, Say Something

When I was riding the school bus as kindergartner, the bus driver loved handing out candy to the kids, so they'd stand up by the front of the bus near him. I certainly didn't understand "sex" or "molestation" at that age, nor to this day do I have any proof that he was doing anything untoward-- but the whole thing smelled fishy to me, and I was the only kid on the bus who declined his overtures, even after his repeatedly hounding me.

In junior high, I had a crush on a girl named "Emily". There was a janitor at my school who went by the bizarre and comically adolescent nickname "Scooby"-- a full-grown adult!-- who used his personality to ingratiate himself to the kids. One day I noticed him hovering around "Emily" inappropriately, a process which repeated over days and weeks. This culminated in him being the only adult sitting in the student bleachers-- next to her!-- during a "pep fest", followed by him sitting behind her giving her a back rub in the hallway, right out in the open.

To be clear: this was a grown man in his twenties or thirties, giving a back rub to a thirteen year old girl. And in his place of employment, to boot!

None of the school leadership did anything about it; all of my fellow students continued to kiss the "cool" janitor's ass-- except me. The janitor would routinely mock me, or make sideways comments towards me, in front of my peers: but I never relented.

To my powers of observation, I was the only person in the entire institution who not only saw that it was wrong, but actively went out of my way to both ignore the predatory janitor, and to speak out about it, raising the issue to both my parents, and to one of my most-trusted teachers. A thirteen year old was the "adult" in the room: the only one with a moral compass, and a pair of balls.

In my private Catholic high school-- "Totino Grace", named after a family which gave them cash in the 1970s (foreshadowing)-- the teachers would very obviously gossip behind the students' backs in the lounge, as "teacher A" would magically know something which happened in "teacher B's" class. In that same school, the classrooms were not named after Saints or religious figures, but after the rich donor surnames. The richest family bought the two closest parking spaces to the front doors, for their kids' "his and her's" custom painted (black and pink, respectively), brand new "Dodge Ram" pickup trucks.

The school spent a fortune getting stained glass windows installed in the chapel-- not of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, but of Jim and Rose Totino: the donors! In a place of worship!

There were two teachers who were having a very public extramarrital affair with each other. The school refused to fire them. One day, the woman held me after in math class, and started dumping her personal life on me-- one of her underage students!-- because my father had disclosed to her during conferences that I was uncomfortable: "Well, she was no saint either! You have no right to judge!"

None of this bothered the other kids: they just happily went on their way. Me? I went from a 4.0 GPA kid K-8, to a 3.7 GPA in 9th grade, to a 3.2 GPA in 10th grade, to a 2.7 GPA in 11th grade, to a 2.5 GPA in 12th grade-- this from someone who tests at a nearly 130 IQ level. I grew a huge beard, ended my eleven year football "career", and essentially stopped bathing.

I'm not someone who can just sit by, and ignore when bad things are happening: I never have been, and I never will be. I don't know why I'm wired this way, and I'm not sure whether it's even a good thing, considering my expressed concern has never had any positive outcomes, and only negative personal ones.

But I can't ditch the habit. And now the pattern is repeating in my career. Except this time I'm trapped: I can't speak out because my kids depend on the salary, and because getting a new job would require me to wear a WuFlu Burqa-- which is another moral concern, where I'm one of the very few people who is willing to stand up for principle.


On Burqas

Minnesota's governor, Kim Jong Walz, wrote an edict on a piece of toilet paper, and with a swift stroke of his pen has denied me access to healthcare and the ability to go grocery shopping. So, I've been making use of "curbside" grocery delivery, where you place your order online, and an attendant brings the goods to your car.

Problem solved.

Until today, when I had the attendant repeatedly push me for my "opinion about 'face masks'", even after I told him three times that I didn't want to discuss politics with him. I finally relented, this is verbatim what I said:



He then went on a sort of meandering reply: "Well you know, people have different opinions about this...", and "I think we should trust the doctors who do this for a living", and "you know we're always going to be controlled...".

Translated in order: a lecture about how I should "be respectful"; a blind "appeal to experts", even though half of them think masks are worthless, including Fausti himself in March when he was still being honest; and "there are two constants in life"-style defeatism.

He then went on a monologue about how he recently got into a "debate" with someone, and they started "shouting" at him: I'm not sure if he was projecting his own urges in that moment, if he was thanking me for not having done that, or what.

Minnesota is the ultimate "passive aggressive" culture: everything needs to be "translated", and it's very tiring.

In any event, now I can't even stand in an open air parking lot without being questioned as to why I'm not adorned with a WuFlu Burqa.

The burden of proof should be on the people who are wearing one: what part of their psychology or mental illness makes them feel compelled to dress like Michael Jackson in public, terrified of germs, while blindly following edicts from politicians-- edicts which change and even contradict from moment-to-moment ("no really, we've always been at war with Eurasia!").

Pour me a drink.