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Politics is for loosers 🤡

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – politics is for losers.

Often, I see people posting on social media about politics. People are angry; they want change, they want their voices heard. But they are just shouting into the wilderness – yelling at their television or leaving snarky Facebook comments won’t change a thing. It might feel good to be morally virtuous, but it’s ultimately a self-defeating behavior.

Now, it’s not to say that one shouldn’t pay attention to politics in the sense that one should always be gleaming for ways to advance their own interests. Government has a lot of money and offers a lot of little-used services, often a bit hidden. It’s always good to look at new angles to see how you can maximize your own advantage. But it’s not a big piece of legislation that will make your life better or a specific party winning a political office. It’s the little things that you can exploit for personal advantage.

When your not a loser, your focus is about manipulating the system in small ways to make your life better. Maybe it’s a patronage job that brings home the big bucks. Maybe it’s the zoning or permit you get by developing a relationship with the planning or zoning board. Or the one denied to your competitors, giving you a strategic advantage. There is a lot out there in the system, if you know how to play it.

People should stop thinking about how they can improve their community, and focus more how they can improve their own lives. Maybe more people need to ask the question, not what can I do for my country, but instead, what can for my country do for me?

The Wonder Years

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The other day up at camp I was listening to the Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help from My Friends which to a certain generation in the early nineties is remembered as the theme song for the Wonder Years.

I honestly don’t remember much about that show except for the opening credits full of shots made on grainy 35 mm film of a mid century home and 1960s cars but I think the gist of the show was a bygone era that was somewhat troublesome but also simple compared to the modern times we are currently living in today.

Rain Soon

I sometimes wonder if I’ll look back at these days with the same kind of rose colored glasses that the Wonder Years looked back at the sixties. The seemingly simple world of the past, with the bad parts discarded into the bin of forgotten history. I’ll remember the good times but not the bad. I’ll think back on the stupid things I’ve done, winch just be glad I’m still alive.

Distant

But alas nostalgia is just a colorful imagination of a world that never really existed. There is no time but the present and things really are better in nearly all ways compared to the past. I might not be a fan of all the changes but with time we must accept both the good and the bad.

The Politics of the Downwardly Mobile Professional Class – The New York Times

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The Politics of the Downwardly Mobile Professional Class – The New York Times

At the outset of her ultimately doomed primary campaign against Platner, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, had a habit of saying she knew almost nothing about her opponent, “other than that his dad was a prominent attorney and his mother a successful business owner,” according to The Portland Press Herald.

Conservatives have gone even further, insinuating that Platner has been cosplaying as a working stiff in order to sneak his woke agenda past voters. The historian and commentator Victor Davis Hanson highlighted past social media posts in which Platner identified as a communist and, separately, said that rural white people “actually are” racist and stupid. (Platner later apologized for many of his posts.)

Such skepticism reflects how much class has become a political fault line in America. As President Trump has built a following among voters without a college degree over the past decade, his success has heightened the political competition over who best represents the working class, and has exacerbated an already bitter debate over who belongs to it.