West Roxbury: The Trumpiest of Boston neighhborhoods

The Fonz (Henry Winkler) tapping the jukebox.

Sometimes I feel like all of this is being spearheaded by someone outside the country and is happening in other countries too. (Think Brazil, UK).. just seems to be a higher force trying to break up the world's governments via misinformation and chaos.

See: Putin, Vladimir

I think a lot of the shit is being stirred up by a few foreign governments who realized how easy it is to twist people's emotions when there's no accountability plus a few corporations (Facebook, Fox) who found how profitable conflict can be.

I gotta figure this is how the world felt in the 1930s, shortly before WWII.

There was an account on twitter that I saw kept getting retweeted with some funny memes, so I followed and saw something amazing. This account (from a guy who considered himself an "anarchist") was mostly funny memes about pop culture and everyday life, but 25% of them were anti-government, pro guns, anti-cop, anti tax, stuff that actually kind of fascinated me because I didn't know the extreme it could come to. This account had 25k followers and many of them had the same ideas. If you go further down the twitter wormhole you see many large accounts like this sharing their ideas.

The funny thing about a lot of the "followers" though, is that they seemed to be doing it for social media attention, and not for the cause (anarchism in this case). It was a way to gain more followers. You have women showing cleavage and putting anti government memes in front on it in text, people retweeting mask fights in gas stations, or school choice meetings were things got out of control. Add in a snarky comment and the likes and retweets start to come in.

Of course these groups are all anti-vax, with "government" being the enemy. Bring up the conspiracy theory that the government invented Covid and private companies invented the vaccines to combat it (as good of a conspiracy theory as any right?) and the anti government logic can't fight it. But the social sense of belonging remains. How many followers can I get? How many hearts (likes) do I get? Did I get these likes because of my memes or my boobs? Does it matter?

I've thought about doing this.. but where?

Besides which, who would take you?

Well-to-do Americans assume they can just go to some other country and be welcomed with open arms. Look at how we treat others who come here because they don't like it here, and you probably have a better idea.

Also gets much shorter if you don't speak any other languages.

Being solely Anglophilic and the very concept of nation-states are more powerful jails than Leavenworth.

You've got some pretty elderly kids there, pops. The demographic most likely to bleat "Vote Blue no matter who!" and consider their civic duty done if they show up every two years to flip a lever is solidly middle-aged.

We don't even have to like each other or get along with each other to act reasonably and rationally!

Do we as a people learn nothing from watching Curb Your Enthusiasm? Two things stand out from 11 seasons:

1) Larry telling Richard Lewis "(Expletive) you, and I'll see you tomorrow!" Both men recognize that they're still friends with common interests who are simply shutting it down for the day.

2) Whenever someone goes off on someone else, it's over a breach of etiquette, or a breach of morality. I can't recall during the entire run of the series a character assailing another character's intelligence.

Curb is, oddly, the picture of a utopian society: People who fight (because we're going to do that to entertain ourselves at a bare-ass minimum) over the etiquette of parking spaces and toilet paper hoarding because they have no serious problems with their wealth, education, health, or shelter.

If you think that nothing is better than something, I'll gladly hand you the knife to cut off your nose.

Easy to say when "something" is good enough to get by. It isn't, always. Throwing a ten foot rope to people drowning 50 feet from shore is arguably "something", but the people in need of help will still drown. For 40 years now, "something" policies have resulted in more and more people simply not having what they need to survive. Should they cheer and vote for that "something"?