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yahooeny · 5 years ago

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All That I Know

## I'm really quite stupid. I've been told that I'm a smart kid but as far as I'm concerned a dumb guy who makes rash decisions driven by spite and what's in front of me more than thinking about the long term. I say this upfront not to beat on myself but to say, this is not written from the perspective of a know-it-all educating the public. I'm just a dumb guy scared of the world I live in. I think a lot of us are just scared, dumb guys. And I'm just trying to take stock of all that I know to take a second to think. ## [I know the police were created to serve the wealthy.](https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1) Yeah I dunno man, all that "protect and serve" stuff seems like nice PR to me. The earliest organization that resembles modern policing in America were the slave watches, first formerly organized in South Carolina in 1704. And like it sounds, their express purpose was to round up escaped slaves and terrorize slaves to scare them into conformity. So the subjugation of black populations is built into the foundation of the police force in America. But of course it's not just about black people. It could've been anything valuable to the wealthy class that held power in the South. It's just that black slaves happened to be the most valuable property of the upper class. Jump forward a century and police forces are being used to silence labor organizers like during the [Haymarket Riots](https://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/the-haymarket-affair) in 1886. A bomb was thrown at police trying to subdue the protests, leaving seven policemen and four workers dead by the end. But what is often left out in the retelling of the Haymarket Riots is that the reason workers had organized for protests on that was because a couple days ago a peaceful march in support of the eight hour workweek (which was already the law of the land but was blatantly unenforced) was silenced by the Chicago Police who opened fired and killed several protesters. And this keeps happening in history. 1934, a union strike of dockworkers is attacked by San Francisco police and the National Guard in what becomes known as [Bloody Thursday](https://www.upte.org/laborhistory/bloodythur.html). 1979, San Francisco police retaliate at protests and riots sparked by anger when Harvey Milk's (the first openly gay American mayor) murderer, Dan White, is found guilty of voluntary manslaughter instead, by clubbing protesters and deliberately destroying the legendary gay bar Elephant Walk in what becomes known as the [White Nights](https://www.sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/SF-s-White-Night-riots-40th-anniversary-13865164.php). Twice, [once in 1874](https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/27/opinion/l-police-and-protesters-have-clashed-before-in-tompkins-square-276588.html) and [again in 1988](http://projects.nyujournalism.org/streetsofnewyork-northtompkins/2017/04/18/tompkins-square-park-riot-1988/), cries for the city to do something about the employed and the homeless were met with clubbings and beatdowns. In a chilling flash to the present, many officers concealed their badge numbers with tape. ## I know the police force was engineered to retain power and protect it. As protests form around the country- even around the world, it becomes clear that many would be peaceful demonstrations have been [escalated by the police](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.html).

Here is the overhead... pic.twitter.com/US6Qqhkz3O

— Rob Bennett 🤠 (@rob_bennett) May 31, 2020

I don't know how you look at police brutality being documented online and think any of this brutality is necessary. People being run over by police cars, reporters being arrested and brutalized by cops.

Minnesota police arrest CNN reporter and camera crew as they report from protests in Minneapolis https://t.co/oZdqBti776 pic.twitter.com/3QbeTjD5ed

— CNN (@CNN) May 29, 2020

In a shocking big dick move, the SBA doxxed the daughter of NY mayor Bill de Blasio after he made the most cowardly "both sides" statement about the NYPD car running into protestors pictured above. I guess even that wasn't enough for the unions

Oh I guess that brings me to the unions. Police unions are the most powerful labor organizations in the country. Congratulations, except you're helping cops kill us by protecting them as much as possible. Unions help bad cops get back on the job. They are on the frontlines of obscuring the misdeeds of cops from the public eye as much as possible, leading to "gypsy cops" that can shuffle around from department to department because their misconduct gets erased. Remember how mad people were about how long it took Derek Chauvin to be arrested and questioned? Oftentimes delays between police misconduct and questioning is built right into labor contracts, so that offending officers can take a few days to "get their story straight", a privilege rarely given to civilians and fought for by unions. Protect and serve the public? Fuck you, got mine. Police unions are engineered to protect cops-bad or good from any retribution and they will fight to the teeth for their survival. And because so...

I know police reforms have so far done little.

Often in the aftermath of police violence the topic of "police reforms" is brought up and difficulties encountered with having reforms enacted, but you don't hear often discussions of whether or not the reforms that have managed to pass have worked. Like bodycams. There was a lot of talk about bodycams after the shooting of Michael Brown with advocates claiming that wide use would dissuade officers from using excessive force or that at the very least they'd be caught on camera and would result in swifter justice. But six years later results are a wash. A study focusing on the Orlando PD found that officers that wore body cams were 53% less likely to use force and have 65% less civilian complaints levied at them. Meanwhile a study in Washington DC resulted in little difference in the use of force between those who wore body cams and those who didn't. As for whether bodycams brought an increase in justice, they don't seem to have brought any more convictions than before bodycams were in wide use. What about procedural reform? After the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the Obama Administration laid out a large list of recommended reforms to proceedings like embracing "a guardian mindset to build public trust and legitimacy", "initiating positive nonenforcement activities to engage communities that typically have high rates of investigative and enforcement involvement with government agencies", and having "comprehensive policies on the use of force that include training, investigations, prosecutions, data collection, and information sharing." The reforms were enacted in Minneapolis and after almost $5 million they clearly didn't work. None of these reforms solved the underlying foundation of the police force that encourages officers to retain power and serve the upper class before the public.

I know people have been suffering for too long.

Let's count the numbers. It's been an year since federal charges were dropped for the police officer that killed Eric Garner. Six years since Eric Garner died from a chokehold while unarmed, gasping "I can't breathe." It's been four years since Philando Castile was shot and killed in his car by an officer who allegedly thought Castile was reaching for a gun. There was no gun. Three years since the officer that killed him was acquited. There was a dash cam. It didn't matter. Also six years ago, Tamir Rice was twelve years old when he was shot to death by a police officer that thought he was reaching for a gun. It was an airsoft. The officer was not charged. Also six years ago, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot twelve times by a police officer. The police officer that killed Michael Brown was not charged. Seven years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement was founded following the acquittal of the watchman that killed Trayvon Martin. Trayvon was seventeen. There is no national database of police violence. But one database has recorded at least 1000 deaths a year by the hands of police since its inception in 2013. In 2015, almost 20% of those killed were unarmed. 2018 was the most violent year by 1143. Black people made up 24% of those killings despite comprising 13% of the population. 52 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The FBI considered him a radical and closely surveiled him as a national threat.

[380 years ago the Virginia General Court sentenced a black man to slavery for the first time].(https://www.americanevolution2019.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/PDF-The-John-Punch-Court-Decisions-and-the-Advent-of-Slavery-in-Virginia-Full-Lesson.pdf)

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yahooeny · 6 years ago

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#The Year of the Linux Desktop is Further Away Than Ever Before ##An incredibly long diatribe of my struggles moving back to Linux I'll say right off the bat that Windows is the not the ideal OS. I recently set out to put a Linux distro back on my laptop after growing frustrated with my Windows install, mostly stemming from the GTX 1050/Optimus setup on my Asus FX53D. GeForce drivers have been incredibly buggy, Photoshop and other Creative Cloud software would crash multiple times an hour after switching back and forth between the Game Ready and Creator Ready driver lines. Also even when it is "inactive" the 1050 seems to stay engaged at all times even though the iGPU is supposed to be the main composite, so battery life is often little more than an hour which is too low even for a gaming laptop. Obviously there's nothing on the open source side that could replace the Creative Cloud suite so I'm stuck with the Windows install but the general instability with Optimus was enough for me. After several years I was going back to the Linux desktop. But what distro? Last I used Linux regularly I was using a combination of Ubuntu and Chromium OS Lime (RIP) so obviously things would have to change. I was opposed to vanilla Ubuntu because even back in the day the amount of bloat in the default install drove me away from the distro. And while the goal of this install was to have a light desktop for mostly web browsing and messaging, just a lone web browser was a little too far for me. I was interested in Manjaro but decided an Ubuntu-based distro was going to be more familiar territory. I wanted to run Linux, I didn't want to fix Linux. I've heard good things about Linux Mint, uh sure let's go with that.

Except Linux Mint never booted for me. I couldn't get the install flash drive to actually make it past a black screen. And I coulda sworn I was able to boot into GParted when cloning my SSD so it's not like this thing refuses to boot to any Linux distro... Uh I dunno. Maybe Pop OS will work better. It *is* maintained by a system builder so it's gotta have better hardware support than the competition...

...Hm. Still black screen. So after hours of smacking my brain it turns out this was my problem.

So I guess in the intervening years since I last used Linux UUI has become complete bunk. I don't know if it's because the way install ISOs are formatted have changed, I don't know if it's because UEFI has introduced new incompatibilities. I was able to put a Windows 10 ISO on a flash drive fine with this so who knows what its problem is but it's no good anymore. People recommend Etcher... *Why?* This thing runs on Electron. Why the hell would you want a system utility to be run on Electron? Last time I tried Etcher it couldn't even detect that my flash drive ran out of space and left me with a broken install. Don't use Etcher. Rufus is pretty good though. Pop OS's installer tries to simplify some things about Ubuntu's installer but there is one giant deal breaker...

Where the hell is the dual boot option? Your average user is not going to get rid of Windows. I'm certainly not going to get rid of Windows, not so long as Adobe has me by the balls. The "Custom Install" is not self-explanatory at all. *I* managed to resize my partitions but I also messed up and didn't properly turn on disk encryption. How is your average user supposed to figure out how to manually repartition their drive for multibooting. (We'll get back to the topic of partitioning and idiot-proofing later...) So finally we're installed. Hey man beyond partitioning that was pretty painless. I wasn't trying running around installing my NVidia drivers, I wasn't stuck on my ethernet adapter because I have to separately install my wifi drivers. And with a lot less bloat! Ok, some bloat. Who actually uses Libreoffice? I've been using nothing but Google Docs for the last eight years. At this point Google Docs' only real weakness is that nothing will ever compare in power to Excel. Certainly not Libreoffice. But that's easy enough to uninstall it seems like it's smooth sailing from her- ##GNOME 3 Sucks. I have some questions for the designers of GNOME 3. I'm sure they tried their best to modernize GNOME. Anything's better than Unity (according to the majority consensus, I don't necessarily agree but I can't exactly install Unity anymore so oh well...) and it's not all bad. However... * Why does the Super key take me to an exploded view of all my open applications instead of something useful? If I need to switch between applications I'd rather use alt-tab or the taskbar. Moving the applications dashboard to Super+A is a terrible idea because I'm going to use the dashboard a lot more often than I'm going to need this Win+Tab exploded view. * Why is the taskbar useless? 99.9% of all applications I use are not going to show me any useful options in the taskbar dropdown menu unlike in Windows where developers disciplined themselves around Windows 7 to put quick actions in the taskbar. So if I don't even get that, then why does by default the taskbar only show me one application at a time? There's so much unused space at the top that could be used to show all my open applications instead of me having use up even more space at the bottom for some extension that gets proper taskbar functionality back. *Where is 150% zoom? I guess this complaint is more towards System76 since other friends have assured me that there does indeed exist a level of application scaling between the puny 100% and the ginormous 200% but on this install I ain't seeing it. I'm also not seeing a way to control application scrolling per-monitor like in Windows. *Notifications are a boondoggle. Well, they're bad in Windows too but that's no excuse. I don't know who both at Microsoft and GNOME decided "oh yeah, applications should be allowed to keep a notification on screen indefinitely that's totally good UX and not abusable at all" but they're morons. And so is whoever worked on Chrome that thought the same thing. Chrome, Google Hangouts in particular, is the #1 abuser in indefinite notifications. It's incredibly annoying, I don't want have to stop what I'm doing to wave off a toast. GNOME however gets the slight edge because for some god damn reason Windows disables interacting with anything from about a 10 pixel radius around the toast. And also won't let you move the toast away from the bottom right which is *right where a bunch of apps tack on really important buttons!*

Alright this is a big one.

Why is the mouse so god damn awful?

Maybe this isn't a GNOME problem but it is a big fat problem. Using a mouse or touchpad is just a pain in the ass in Linux. No, specifically scrolling with a mouse or touchpad is a pain in the ass. I use a Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 3000. Maybe not the best mouse but it's ergonomic and nice to use. Except in Linux.

See the Microsoft Comfort Mouse has an optical scroll wheel with smooth action instead of a traditional scroll wheel with discreet clicks across the wheel. Bad for games, sure but for web browsing it is a dream. I can fly through webpages without losing tracking accuracy because Windows' mouse driver tracks the scroll wheel at a higher resolution.

Scrolling is a giant pain in Linux. For one it's slooooooooow. There's no way to change scroll speed. Well, not elegantly, at least.

imwheel is a mouse service you can tack on top of the existing mouse server that lets you change things such as how many lines one wheel click scrolls through. But there's limitations to this. For my purposes, I can't figure out how to change the resolution of the mouse scroll itself for mice like mine that are linear instead of discreet clicking wheels. Worst of all...

It breaks the trackpad! Pop OS does get trackpad scrolling mostly right (except for the lack of scroll inertia) but imwheel completely breaks it because the trackpad scrolling and mousewheel scrolling are operating on completely different tracking resolution. (By the way, this is what trackpad scrolling should look like.)

(...But trackpad scroll inertia does work in a bunch of system GNOME apps. Why in the world would such a fundamental part of the user experience be application dependent? Why aren't other applications implementing scroll inertia?) I'm not the only person to make these observations on Linux's deficiencies in its mouse input. There's a great blog by Pavel Fatin called Scrolling with pleasure that goes into much much greater detail into the ways mouse I/O can be much better. It's from two years ago and the fact that many of his observations haven't been implemented yet is a shame. It seems with some sects of the Linux userbase, using a GUI or desktop manager as little as possible is some point of pride and elitism. As if people who use mice and need graphic interfaces are noobs who just aren't smart enough for Linux. This sect is really small but they are vocal nonetheless and it contributes to the air of elitism around Linux. Ah speaking of graphics... why am I getting a black screen again?

Well that's not good. Far as I can tell the last time I booted up my Pop OS partition it wanted to upgrade the NVidia drivers among other packages but ran out of space. See, I was under the presumption that 10 GB of space was enough room for a light Linux install in 2019. Clearly I was wrong. I don't know why being unable to upgrade packages due to disk space should brick a system. If I run out of disk space, shouldn't apt stop trying to upgrade it and leave it be? My system shouldn't die on me just because I can't upgrade to the latest packages. Ah well no more bitching. Let's install this thing again...

The installation process when making a multiboot partition should really be a lot more idiot proof. It's not unreasonable for a user to want a light install especially when they are using Linux only as a secondary OS and want to keep as much space on their drives as possible for the Windows install. Maybe the installation should soft-enforce a minimum size for the /home/ partition, or at least when I tell it I want /home/ to be 10GB it should tell me "Hey dumbass! Your install is liable to break from updates if you make it this small!" It also really should not be this hard to encrypt a multiboot partition. I tried to get my /home/ partition encrypted this time around but when I made it an encrypted partition in GRUB the Pop OS installer kept complaining that it couldn't decrypt the partition, even after I gave it the decryption key. I give up, any information I need securing is already file encrypted or on a cloud account I don't care anymore. Hmm... Maybe I didn't make the install light enough. I mean I made it as light as possible, downloads were going to my Windows download folder instead, I removed a shitload of apps including the mail client which I have no use for since I use GApps. But maybe GNOME is not light enough... And also I fucking hate GNOME. What's even lighter...

Oh yeah I should install xfce instead since it sips memory and disk space. I've used lxde before back in the day when PC manufacturers were desperately trying to make netbooks a thing, this should be easy to slip back to!

...What? I had to reinstall Pop OS for the second time because for whatever reason installing lxde broke my install. I don't know how. I don't know why. I tried to follow System76's guide on installing additional window managers... Now here's a problem, the guide says to choose lightdm on Ubuntu 16.04 and not to use gdm or sddm. It says it's fine to choose those on later versions. I don't think the lxde installer gave me a choice of using lightdm and why is this article talking about Ubuntu anyways. isn't this guide specifically for Pop OS? Clearly there is documentation that needs to be revised. So I guess I'm stuck with GNOME 3 now. It's not... horrible. But it took some elbow grease (and a lot of extensions) to get there.

Too many actually. A lot of these things shouldn't be extensions, they should be default. Desktop icons should be default, otherwise why even still have a desktop? The Window is ready notification is the most annoying thing on earth. Even Windows 10 has a clipboard history by default now, that shouldn't have to be an extension. While I'm still bitching.

How hard is it to disable an audio device once it's disconnected? I connect my laptop to my monitor and speaker system through HDMI and whenever I disconnect it I'll move out, try to play some video, get confused as to why no audio is playing, and discover it's still trying to serve audio to the HDMI device. * I disabled the login screen since I'm the only user of the install but how it logs you into your session is so slapdash it makes me actively worried for my security. The keyring popup is often the last thing to show up once GNOME is loaded. The desktop, Teamviewer, and Discord, all load *before I'm prompted to login. In the process of recording video for this blog I logged into Pop OS and managed to open Chrome and browse to a tab all before the keyring prompt finally took its time to stop user input before I ever logged in. What? This is incredibly stupid. The login prompt should be the first thing to load before anything else. In fact, nothing else but GNOME should be able to load before I've logged in. Sure I could re-enable the login screen but that's to me unnecessary steps added to booting up to a single-user install. Why even have the option to begin with? * Can Pop OS please stop moving my NTFS mounts between /dev/ and /media/? Stop that. I can't use my Steam install folder without readjusting it every time I reboot. * I have no idea why the disks in my external USB enclosure keep spinning even when they are connected but unmounted in Pop OS. It freaks me out to the point I keep the enclosure powered off until I actually need it. * I don't get why Pop OS's auto timezone detection seems to think I live in LA. I don't. I live in Atlanta, three hours ahead of LA. When I turn off auto timezone detection and manually change it to EST it's messed up my BIOS clock so that whenever I open back up Windows I'm three hours ahead.

Going back to Linux has been more of a pain than a solution to my existing problems in Windows. Every time I boot it up it seems I find one more frustrating thing to nag about or one more part of the system that breaks out of nowhere. Some people find constantly tinkering with their OS appealing and it does to me but not anywhere to this extent. GNOME 3 has numerous UX deficiencies compared to Windows 10 and Mac OS, many of them regressions compared to predecessors like GNOME 2 and Unity (RIP). It is so frustrating to use I cannot recommend it despite its more mature device and software support. It's been years since the meme of "The Year of Desktop Linux" first became popular that I'm skeptical that this mythical day that Linux on desktop becomes mainstream will ever arrive- even with exciting initiatives like Proton for software compatibility and relatively easy to use distros like Pop OS. I mean, I can't even get Proton to work on my Steam install because it doesn't seem to like sharing the same install folder as Steam for Windows. Ugh. Does this mean I'm removing Pop OS from my drive? No. I get that I've spent 2.5k+ words bitching about it but there are things it does that I cannot live without.

Being able to remove my 1050 from the equation entirely means I get a (still kind of pathetic) three hours of battery life instead of the measly one hour I've been getting lately. *apt-get is godlike. Updating is so fast, so easy, and often doesn't require a reboot. apt-get is what every auto-update OS function should strive to be. Windows Store has got jack shit on it.

Guake is so good man!!! I love being able to pop open the terminal anytime and hide it quick. It's such a giant productivity boost, someone should have the balls to make default in a distro.

Disk and partition management is still leagues better on Linux than on Windows. Drive recovery is a cinch, being able to bypass the permissions system on NTFS is a godsend, imaging partitions is a snap. Of course ext4 isn't and probably will never be natively supported in Windows... A flash drive with GParted should be in every technician's toolbox.

For all my headaches, Linux is still much leaner than Windows. It sips battery, it changes less stuff behind your back, and it's usually easy to know how something broke even if you often can't fix it without reinstallation. But is it the Year of the Linux Desktop? No. It probably will never be.

#The #An #GNOME #Why

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yahooeny · 8 years ago

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011100110110111101110101011011100110010001110100011001010110000101101101 http://ift.tt/2j5Ymxs

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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From the forthcoming album ALL THAT IS LOUD WILL REACH THE STARS BEYOND - coming March 26th (for real this time) Uses archival recordings from @NASA http://ift.tt/2hVAkVV

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing #Jungle #Techno #Hardcore

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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happy 20, november DIGI___012 http://ift.tt/2g9HhQz

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing #werk #house

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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happy 20, november DIGI___012 http://ift.tt/2fH9Iqx

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing #werk #house

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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http://ift.tt/2dZtnhh

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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hey @skrillex @diplo whattup released on Sounds of Summer: Volume 2 w/ @shelf-2 + @amblis-records http://ift.tt/29zVSjh http://ift.tt/29PTedc

#Soundcloud #stupid audio thing

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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Popuko is a sweet innocent child.

#reblog #pop team epic

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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vine

What IS THIS

#reblog #holy shit

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yahooeny · 9 years ago

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a long ramble about the pulse shootings

I've been avoiding the subject but I feel cowardly for not addressing so here goes.

There's a lot about the Pulse shootings that I'm trying to find the means to express my feelings about. These feelings are not simple and they are for the most part pretty muted but one thing above all remains intense and clear in my mind. The thought of dozens of queer lives being taken in one night is horrifying. Upsetting. Unbelievably awful. It's a feeling of intense sorrow that fuels my impulse to be defiant and outspoken towards society. I don't often promote that I am queer as often as I promote my identity as an asian and this has left me guilty of my ability to stay in the dark. I hope one day I will be resolute enough to be confident in my queerness. But for now I only have the resolve to be honest. And call out on some bullshit. The fact that media around the world was hesitant to call this a hate crime is bullshit. There's a really amusing clip out there of a UK Sky News anchor blabbing about how the shooting may have been a hate crime but that it wasn't necessary because the victims were gay while a guest panelist walks off the set in disgust. Thankfully this has stopped being too egregious a thing after a few weeks but the fact that media was so cowardly that they couldn't spout the very obvious fact that a shooting in a gay nightclub targeted queer people was absurd to the point of aggravation.

The fact that so many politicians sent their "thoughts and prayers" was utter bullshit. I don't want to hear noted homophobes Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, etc. spout the most cynical, thinly-veiled attempt to fake empathy on their Twitters while having in the past actively promoted legislation that have made our lives a real pain in the ass. And that's still better than Donald Trump who makes no attempt to act sympathetic, immediately heading to his social media manager so the poor guy can transcribe his rants that amount essentially to "I FUCKING CALLED IT". Fuck Trump. The threats of other wannabes to go out and do their own shootings is bullshit. If you thought yourself to be clever to tweet about having your own shooting you're a cowardly motherfucker. Bitch, you coulda picked any other day to shoot some gays but you do it after this other guy? What a poser. You don't deserve my fear.

So that's all easy to dismiss as bullshit but the Pulse shootings was just the perfect storm of divisive, polarizing messiness that is not at all easy to untangle and that's what's made this so hard to talk about because these opinions are not as easy to declare loudly but I feel I still needed to talk about them.

Omar Mateen is a complicated, divisive, tragic subject. But one thing that should be addressed is that Omar was an American product. He was born and raised in America, and he is a victim and at the same time perpetrator of a distinctly American problem. I see Omar and I see a man constantly troubled by his identity. Maybe he was gay, maybe he wasn't, but there are so many other pieces of his identity that he couldn't reconcile. He was a proud male yet he manifested a large amount of toxic masculinity. He proved his strength and superiority in beating women and starting fights, with a father who enabled and perpetrated his behavior.This is something so rarely addressed in society. The power balance between men and women is impossible to ignore yet we never address how to practice positive masculinity. Strength in will and physicality should be commended, a willingness to support the weak should be prided upon, proactiveness should be respected. Yet this has all been perverted into lust for superiority, ignorance of the voice of the weak, praise for acting on impulse and without thought. Who will promote those who empower boys to bring positivity to our world? Their spotlights are instead taken by sadist bullies who act in an never-ending war of aggression on television.

And what of religion? I'm atheist yet I personally don't want religion to go away. You can't make religion go away. Religion is not hoping that some otherworldly being will whisk you away to some never ending paradise. At the heart of religion are powerful stories that resonate with others and will them to change their worldview and morality. The story of a being that has selected a forsaken minority group as being blessing is powerfully resonant. The story of a being who is so graceful as to forgive us for our horrible deeds in life is powerfully resonant. Even atheism is a religion with a powerful story. The narrative that there is no higher being, that we are the masters of our destiny, that there is no second chance, that it is our duty to somehow leave this world even a little bit better than how we found it. That's an incredibly moving worldview. And Islam? A deeply moving story of an incomprehensible being that chose a lowly human as his messenger to give us a guide so that we may find meaning in our daily lives.

Religion can be a narrative worth devoting your life to fulfil.

ISIL is not a religion, but a perversion of it. My theory of terrorism has always remained the same. ISIL's goal is to so deeply frighten and anger the world that it will be irreputably be split in two, so they can conquer the other half. They exploit the dual feelings of Muslims' ostracization by the rest of the world so that may join their cause. You cannot be a member of the Islamic State and still reside in Western Society. You must disconnect yourself entirely from it. Case in point, ISIL leadership continues to be frustrated by those who do nothing but post ISIL propaganda but does not join them in the war. Get off Twitter! Grab a gun! You are either in or out, there is no middle ground.

This must've resonated with Omar Mateen. Frustrated that his family practiced a moderate form of Islam yet he was still ostracized by his peers, yet still deeply American and proud of that. He couldn't come to Syria, whether because he never had the resolve to do so or because he was barred from leaving. The next best thing was to forcibly tear himself apart from America while never leaving it, and leave America itself deeply divided in the aftermath. No middle ground. You're either in or you're out.

I refuse that sort of black and white worldview. Omar may hate me for doing so, but I can't help but feel utter despair and sympathy for the tragedy that is Omar Mateen. The product of the worst parts of the American psyche, yet rejecting of some of the best parts of it. Diversity, compassion, fearlessness, pride. These are also distinctly American. Why do we not express these? The actions of Omar are still disgusting. A revolting reaction to a world that he could've learned to comprehend but instead decided to share his confusion and anger with.

And to that point Omar has for the most part won. Queers still cannot donate blood, Muslims still have to fear some orange puppet promising to ban them, and the wigs in charge can't make up their mind about what they stand for.

You really want to fight ISIL? You really want to spite Omar? Don't hate, love. Reach out to your Muslim neighbors, don't push them away. Be kind to each other, no matter your race, sexuality, or worldview. Fight against ignorance and hate. Don't be passive, call out on people's bullshit. Stand up for others when you see them pushed down. We are all humans and we all belong together. Nation, race, culture are all just artificial boundaries - fences. And jumping the fence is a little hard at first but it takes some practice before it gets easy.

(Thank you Manar for leaving some input on this)

#me #blahblahblah #sorry for this long thing

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