#to port over the tweet verbatim

[b4kuch1n]

hey. just woke up and drank a giant cup of milk&coffee.

[irarelypostanything]

Everything seems stupid to me sometimes

Yesterday I tried plugging an external monitor into a Macbook Pro - it didn’t work, even after installing a driver, and instead just mirrored...the problem was related to the operating system, and underlying software, and why in the name of everything good and pure would this Macbook not just have a port to begin with and be plug and play.  I was angry, and I thought this was the stupidest problem for anyone to face in the history of existence...but in reality, there’s a reason for it.  The thin design of the device.  Profit, maybe.  And software issues can be terribly complex.

The world of IT and software is a massive spider web of complexity, but it’s several orders of magnitude easier to comprehend than political issues.  In our little self-contained software world, the things we grapple with were invented by us and follow designs made by humans.  Biology is more complex - instead of dealing with things invented by humans, it deals with things “invented” by nature - but in matters of politics and policy, nothing is contained at all.  In biology, we can run very controlled experiments.  In biology, we can easily make control cases, keep things stable, reduce the probability of leakage.  In politics, things are messy.  Things have ethical weight.  Proper science is hard to carry out because of the confounding variables.  And there are some things we may just never know - like how strict of a gun control policy it would require to reduce the number of homicides, or how many more or fewer people would have died, had this country not dropped the two bombs.

And yet, in the world of politics, there are so many knee-jerk reactions.  There are people reacting to things within seconds of them being announced, and social media posts of events that we discover a few days later had never occurred.  Maybe the problem is in how information is disseminated.  Maybe the problem is in profit-driven media or in us, the consumers, for only wanting to click things that incite strong feelings of rage.  Maybe the only thing to blame is human nature itself - we need to have strong opinions.  We ground ourselves in opinions.  I’m writing this now, on opinions, and I can’t escape the irony of having an opinion on the matter.

*****

A school board member in San Francisco was stripped of her title because of Tweets she made in 2016.  One Tweet said that Asians use “White supremacist thinking,” and another referred to Asians as “house n******.”  Literally.  I think it was an ‘n,’ followed by asterisks.

Do I think she should have been fired for this?  Opinions on free speech vary, but I think that firing someone over this sort of thing is a slippery slope.  The rules of what people can and cannot say on social media seem to change, constantly - today it’s okay to say a racially disparaging thing, as long as the target is our own race; a few years ago, some terms that are not okay today seemed to be acceptable.  

But do I think it was intelligent for her to post that?  No, because her tweets were lumping a group of people together solely on the basis of race.  One Tweet said that Asians were not vocal about being anti-Trump - many Asians were.  Intention matters a lot, and it seems to me her intention here was to call out one group of people, on the basis of race, in favor of another group of people, on the basis of race.  It’s problematic at best and dangerous at worst.

Critics said that her comments made people seem weak and ignorant.  She herself said that the words were taken out of context: The context was that her son was the target of racial slurs in middle school, carried out by Asian students.  It still seems stupid to me that she, a mature adult and then an elected official, would feel the need to post this on the Internet.  She stands by it.  She is now suing the school district for more than $10 million.

It seems stupid to me that she would sue for this amount, given everything the school system is facing.  It also seems kind of stupid to me that she would argue in favor of changing the name “Lincoln High School,” calling Lincoln a racist, but still write something like this.  It seems stupid to me that their solution to Lowell High School not having enough diversity was to move the entire thing to a lottery system, instead of establishing some sort of quota by which to increase diversity.  And it seems stupid to me, somehow, that the entire thing seems like a strategic move to restore Lowell to its former glory by making a show of this, ie. an ulterior motive.  It seems stupid to me now, but maybe in a decade or so I’ll look back on all this, realize her tweets were absolutely necessary and I was wrong, and that I deeply regret writing my opinion on the matter.

Instagram was invented for pictures of corgis, YouTube was invented for cat videos, and Facebook was the result of a hack by Zuckerberg against the Harvard Edu that went down EXACTLY like how the movie had depicted it, almost verbatim.  You can actually find Zuckerberg cataloging the hack on his blog to this day.

Maybe bringing politics into it at all was a mistake.