Have you tried rebooting it? A political observation

Last updated on March 22, 2017

I realized this morning just exactly what went wrong with our political system.

I shit you not, the computer illiterates – the grandpas and crazy uncles and weird cranky great-aunts, the Jethros and Jim-Bobs who don’t know or trust them new-fangled machines spying in people’s gosh-dern houses – installed a fucking ransomware virus in our government.

Think about it:  Ransomware consciously freaks you out with a false claim.  It gets your panties in a twist over porn or bank statements or something, and then it says that if you send it a little bit of cash (comparatively), it’ll get it all fixed – sort of.  You actually have to keep paying, over and over again, because the most sophisticated ransomware is really, really hard to get rid of.

Most IT people know that there are really only two ways to get rid of it (and one of them isn’t guaranteed to work).  You can scrub the machine down to the bones, praying that you have a recent backup that’s not infected, and install the original or newer version of the operating system.  You might end up with the virus hiding in an innocuous file, though, and at the end of the day, you still have a crappy old system that could be harboring that mess – not to mention that if your habits don’t change, you’re going to end up with the same problem, maybe worse.

Ooooor, you can get a shiny brand new machine and educate yourself on how to use it best.

I’m for either option right now, because fuck, man.

We’re facing a political crisis of literally apocalyptic proportions.  Anyone who thinks that political machinations don’t really affect the “Main Street” person 1) does not understand politics, 2) doesn’t have dark skin or a vagina, 3) doesn’t know anyone with dark skin or a vagina, and/or 4) is already stupidly rich and doesn’t live anywhere near “Main Street” in the first place.

Remember that thing about Marie Antoinette quipping that the peasants, who had no bread, should just eat cake?  It’s because she really did not understand that they didn’t have cake, either.  That’s just ignorance on the part of the rich.  This is not that.  This is willful and deliberate malice based on world views that are inherently dangerous and backwards.

I could go on, but I’ll save that for another rant.