As promised Saturday, we voted. Armed fascist vigilantes are watching ballot drop boxes in Phoenix, but we didn’t see any here in Tucson, and we were looking for them. Maybe that’s because the drop box by our neighborhood library wasn’t there on Saturday — do they lock it up inside when the library’s closed? We wound up taking our ballots to the post office, and now it’s up to Louis DeJoy to do his part for democracy.
I’m chairing a meeting of our homeowners’ association board tonight. We’ll set up January’s annual general meeting and figure out how many new board members we need to recruit for 2023. I’ve been president of the HOA board the last three years and plan to quit in January, along with Donna, who took over the HOA accountant role after the previous accountant quit. I know at least one other board member plans to quit, so we’ll have to find three new volunteers, and I bet we’ll need more than that. Fun times.
I’m checking in on Twitter. I’m told blogs are now passe. My old web site has been a dinosaur for years. Where is this all heading?
— Paul Woodford (@paulwoodford) October 26, 2008
Fourteen years today. Huh. Still blogging on the same website (web site then, website now). They’re saying heavy users are drifting away from Twitter. Heavy users, less than ten percent of its membership, are defined as those who log on six or seven days a week and tweet three to four times a week. Hey, that’s me. You’d think they’d offer me a blue check to hang around, but no, I may be heavy but I’m still a rando.
Oh wait. They also say heavy users account for fifty percent of its revenue. I block most ads, refuse to click on the rest, and have never given Twitter a dime. No wonder I don’t have a blue check.
Gotta say, the Twitter feed is no fun these days, but I chalk that up to the mid-term elections and some fellow called Ye. The first few times I saw Ye in my feed I thought they were talking to me in King James, but eventually figured out it’s a person. And not a very good one, it seems. Bet Ye has a blue check, though.
A reader took me to task in the comment section of my previous post, a review of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” I think he must be a regular, because he called me out on an older post about Libs of TikTok, in which I expressed reservations about taking children to drag queen story hours at public libraries, saying that makes me a fellow book-banner even though I can’t admit it because it violates the libertine left wing doctrine I embrace to be seen as enlightened. Wow.
I answered by pointing out that personal discomfort with drag queens and wanting to ban books are not the same, and signed off with an ironic “Hail Satan.”
Which was a mistake, because he turned sea lion on me, first advancing the old argument that since books aren’t officially banned in the good old USA, taking books out of classrooms and libraries isn’t technically banning, but then launching into a rant about medical experimentation on transgender children, the media’s lack of respect for climate and vaccine deniers, Doctor Fauci, abortion, LGBTQ+, critical race theory and BLM, the Green agenda, foreign policy, states’ rights, free love and free drugs and the street hell that is San Francisco today. I’m not only a Satanist but a fifth columnist for the clique of pseudo intellectuals trying to reshape our cultural world, which I take to mean he thinks I’m a Jew as well.
I might not have made that last assumption had he not left a third comment, in which he asserted that oops, certain books are banned in the good old USA after all, namely a series of Holocaust-denying books by a revisionist Nazi historian named James Bacque, and although I’m allowing this comment to appear on my blog I will no longer engage the guy.
Funny, isn’t it, how wanting to ban books carries with it a whole set of associated beliefs, all of them equally repugnant?
p.s. The title for this post is taken from yesterday’s Instagram post by actor Sarah Michelle Gellar, reacting to the photo of Ye’s friends on an I-405 overpass in Los Angeles earlier this week.
“How?” she asked, “How is this 2022?”
How, indeed. Please vote!
I agree, personal discomfort with Drag Queens entertaining children is certainly not the same as book-banning. (Unless you had direct decision-making over the hiring of said Queens.) I can’t say I understand it at all (personally I’d ban clowns…. Period!) but you do have a right to your opinion.
I remember the pronouns comments too, and always wonder if we (the great plural “we”) have any right to tell people who’ve specified how they would like to be called or labeled, that we don’t care for their choice, and so will call them whatever we decide to, regardless of their feelings. (Well of course we have the “right”, but why would we? Where is the kindness in that?)
I remember back in the 1960s, black people were telling us they didn’t want to be called “Negro” or “coloured” any more, and preferred “black”, and/or “African-American”. There were folks who said that was silly, just words, not even accurate, and so they kept on with the old words.
Is that a fair comparison? I’m not sure, though it strikes me that it is…
Ann, I thought I was careful to say that I would never use him or her pronouns to refer to someone who prefers other ones. But I’m too old to start using xe and eir. I think I’m still verbally deft enough to avoid personal pronouns altogether when referring to someone who doesn’t want to be a him or a her … I would use the person’s real name, for instance, or variations of “you.”