On Last Weekās Incident in the Capitol
It isnāt often that I write a long, detailed opinion piece, but I feel like this time in particular is a time in which it is my patriotic duty to speak up.
Sometime late in 2019, I remember coming across an op-ed by a political commentator whose name I cannot remember.Ā This opinion piece highlighted the growth of extreme movements within the United States - namely AntiFa and The Proud Boys and related groups on both sides of the political spectrum - and how theyād become more bold in their violence in recent years.Ā It then dug back into the kind of messaging that was being boosted by Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies on social media during the 2016 election - and in this piece, the author discussed something that is often overlooked:Ā the social media messaging portion of Russiaās efforts during that election werenāt focused on boosting a single candidateās campaign or even with reaching on side of the political aisle.Ā The messages they were boosting were, across the board, pushing rhetoric to inflame and provoke the extreme elements of both sides of our political divide and to widen that gap.Ā The author finished the op-ed by offering his analysis that these efforts had been effective, and that our country was in the process of being torn apart by divisive and hateful rhetoric - that Americans had been turned against Americans, and that this was going to have a destructive effect on our democracy.Ā
I remember reading that op-ed and being skeptical.Ā Sure, things had reached a fever pitch in 2016, but in 2019 it seemed like everything was calming down.Ā The economy was doing alright, there hadnāt been as much chaos or violence in the news, and the doomsday of Americans turning on each other over political differences seemed far-fetched.Ā I came away thinking that the Russiansā efforts to divide us had been in vain, and that our country was past the pains of that particularly fraught period.Ā We would elect someone other than Trump in 2020, and our troubles would pass.
I didnāt have 2020 vision.Ā I didnāt forsee the economy tanking due to a virus, streets erupting in protests over racial disparities once again, AntiFa and Anarchist elements openly looting and rioting in the unrest, and then, following a chaotic election, Trumpās supporters taking to the streets and getting violent, and then eventually descending on the capitol, fully invested in a conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged.Ā I didnāt forsee QAnon getting an outsize following and inserting themselves into this whole storyline.Ā I didnāt forsee a large portion of our society swallowing an outright lie about election fraud and refusing to believe that our democratic system worked.Ā I didnāt forsee any of this, and I feel like Iāve awakened in the midst of a national nightmare.Ā Ā
Put simply, the situation is dire.Ā The potential consequences are dire.Ā Our nationās population has large factions that actively believe that their opponents are *Un*-American.Ā The diehard Trump supporters believe that Democrats do not have the best interests of the country at heart, and most Democrats (and most Independents that arenāt leaning right) believe that Trump supporters are fascists, Nazis, traitors, and bigots.Ā The political rhetoric coming from both the White House and from those with large media followings has stoked these tensions and gotten them to where they are today - with a little help from Russian Social Media operations way back in 2016, which seems like a distant memory now.Ā
Making matters worse, these factions seem to have adopted separate realities with separate sets of facts- in one reality, the election was rigged: Covid-19 was either fake or not a serious threat: thereās a cabal of pedophiles orchestrating our government, and some guy named Q is an inside guy telling us the truth when the media wonāt; Trump is either not a racist, or is only as racist as their lovely grandparents and their grandparents canāt be *that* bad. Ā In the other reality, the election was thoroughly secured, had a verifiable paper trail, and has been investigated to death -- and Joe Biden won by a large margin; Covid had the capacity to overwhelm hospitals and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths if we didnāt take the proposed measures seriously; A Pedophile ring running our government is as patently ridiculous as the day is long; And Q is an obvious bullshitter who moves the goalposts every time his predictions and āinsightsā fall flat; and finally, that Donald Trump is demonstrably racist and bigoted.Ā
Working on these separate sets of facts, both of these factions have come to believe that the other is everything wrong with their country - that their opponents (including everyday working-class people who support their opponents) are not patriots, are against what America stands for, and are worth lashing out at violently in the streets.Ā
These factions arenāt leaving with Trump, and they proved it in the Capitol last week.Ā They threatened for weeks to unleash violence on the Capitol.Ā They posted detailed plans about how they were going to intimidate our representatives - our elected voice in Congress - with violence, well in advance.Ā They repeatedly used phrases on social media before the attack, and shouted these kinds of phrases during the attack:Ā āWe will not go quietlyāĀ - phrases that all but indicated that they werenāt done just because pesky Democracy had denied their candidate a victory.Ā Ā
What, then, is our course as a country as Trump leaves office in a couple of short weeks?Ā How will our leaders unite us?Ā Personally, after much reflection, I believe our elected leaders do have a duty to attempt to unite us - or to at least refrain from provoking these tensions - but I believe the real duty is upon all of us.Ā
It is incumbent upon all of us to remember that our fellow Americans are not our enemies - they are our neighbors, and most of us all share the same kinds problems and burdens in life.Ā We all look to some political philosophy that tries to meet these challenges and address them, and seek political leaders who espouse these pet philosophies.Ā If someoneās going through the same struggles as you and has a different idea of how to fix those problems for his or her country, they are not your enemy.Ā Sure, certain things arenāt up for good-natured debate - racism, xenophobia, and bigotry can be excluded.Ā But we should be able to discuss our problems as a country with our neighbors, and discuss differing ideas of how to solve them, without descending into vitriol and animosity.Ā We should be able to understand each other.Ā I feel that the only way to fix that is to make the effort to reach out and talk to those we disagree with.Ā I have neighbors, family members, and coworkers who hold vastly different political ideologies from me, and for too long, when I hear them discussing politics, I shy away from joining the conversation, because I feel like Iād be inviting that kind of vitriol and bickering into my life.Ā It can be uncomfortable and awkward to arrive at that stage of a conversation, where someone things you a radical leftist or a bigot simply because you dared to offer a slightly differing opinion from theirs.Ā Social media amplifies this, because thatās the kind of response it has conditioned us to expect - the kind of response that would come from anonymous shitpostsers on the other side of a keyboard.Ā But Iāve found that when I do, in good faith, step in and have those difficult conversations - and really have a conversation, rather then try to insert my opinion over their - when I sit down and listen to my friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors tell me about their issues and what they care about politically, and I then carefully consider their ideas and offer my own - Iāve found that experience vastly rewarding.Ā Iāve found myself able to identify with people who Iād otherwise completely disagree with, and Iāve even found that those conversations can end with a mutual understanding and even a slight change of heart on one side or the other, or simply a mutual respect.Ā It turns out, weāre all (the vast majority of us) interested in seeing our country and all of its people flourish and thrive, safe and secure, and passing on a better country to the next generation of Americans.Ā
Therefore Iām making an effort to get out of my shell and have those awkward conversations again.Ā Weāve all allowed ourselves to wallow in echo chambers, neither exposing ourselves to differing opinions or exposing our opinions to others.Ā This pandemic, combined with social mediaās tendency to be a ābuild-your-own-echo-chamberā kit, has amplified this in 2020.Ā But in 2021, letās all resolve to have those difficult conversations and to really listen to each other.Ā If you do it for no other reason, do it to save our Republic from being destroyed from within.Ā
Iāll finish this opinion piece with a quote you may be familiar with, one that I heard repeated on the radio recently and that has resounded infinitely with my soul in recent days:Ā
āWe are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our natureā
-- Abraham Lincoln
That is from Lincolnās inaugural address in 1861.Ā We, as a country, failed to listen to Lincoln then.Ā The Civil War occurred, and it took our country centuries to recover.Ā You might argue that it was necessary to eradicate the institution of slavery and that slavery, as an institution, could not have been eradicated as quickly without the civil war.Ā I will not disagree.Ā But I will disagree on the idea that a coming civil war is necessary or beneficial - if we come to that point now, History will remember us as violent and shortsighted fools who destroyed their country, the global bastion of liberty and human rights, from the inside out.
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Success!
It took a lot less time than I thought to get that JS+jQuery+JSON solution mentioned in my last blog post to work.Ā My next steps will be to build up the website around that script.Ā The website will incorporate three blogs:
This one, for my thoughts, opinions, and basic microblogging and announcements.
One dedicated to my lyrics (hadenodom-lyrics, which was just created and doesnāt have any posts yet)
One dedicated to my stories and fiction/prose writing (hadenodom-stories, also doesnāt have any posts yet)
Thatās basically going to be my site.Ā These three blogs, plus a page with social media links and such.
Iāll also need to create a post page, so you can click the header of any post and view it on the site.Ā The page will need meta tags for search engine visibility, and will need to display it as though itās content on the site, without a tumblr frame or anything.Ā Itās doable, but for now Iām going to focus on the site as a whole, and drill down to this function once everything else is built up.Ā
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The Third Post:Ā Using Javascript, jQuery, and JSON to Pull Down a Tumblr Blogās Contents
Thatās todayās experiment.Ā Using a Gist I found on Github (here: https://gist.github.com/interstateone/6744507), Iāll be trying to pull down the raw html of posts from my blog and insert them into a webpage.
I havenāt played with javascript in quite some time, have very little knowledge of jQuery, and next-to-no knowledge of JSON, so this might be a wild ride.Ā I hope I learn something about JSON, because it seems to be used everywhere (pretty much every major website API seems to lean on it, and it seems very useful), yet none of the curriculum in any of the programming courses Iāve attended has ever taught it.
Anyways, Iām mainly telling yāall about it because I need a third post on my blog to properly test it.Ā This is that third post.Ā
Why do I need a third post?Ā Well, the thing is currently only pulling and displaying one post.Ā I inspected the JSON content being pulled down, and it contains one post as well, so itās not a parsing error.Ā Iām hoping itās an off-by-one error, that itāll display two posts now that three posts exist, and I can adjust something minor like āiā to āi+1ā³ to correct it.Ā Pro-tip for all you beginner programmers out there:Ā if your script is supposed to return two objects, but only returns one, add a third object to the mix.Ā If the script still returns one object, then your script isnāt counting objects at all, and will always return one object.Ā If your script goes to returning two out of the three objects (or three out of four, four out of five, etc), then youāve got an off-by-one error and you need to trace out how your script is counting and iterating through objects.Ā Usually, the fix is as simple as changing:
Ā Ā Ā i = 1
to
Ā Ā Ā i = 0
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The Plan for My Domain
Since Iāve decided to stop using GoDaddy hosting, Iāve went absolutely mad comparing hosts and have decided to use AWS.
Part of it is because of practical reasons, like having scalability, saving on hosting, and the wide array of services and tools available on the platform.Ā The other part is, I get to learn AWS.
As of today, Iāve created an AWS account, stood up an instance with āAmazon Linuxā, installed a basic LAMP stack on it, and successfully tested hosting a basic phpinfo page from it.
Next steps are to build a simple, functional website with basic info about myself, a blog (probably this blog, but embedded in the site), and a simple portfolio.Ā Then, Iāll upload it to my AWS instance and point my domain to said AWS instance.
I wonāt be using AWS just for this site, though.Ā Iām planning to transition to using NextCloud for my personal document storage solution, hosting everything from records in an encrypted format to my eBook library.Ā Iāll also be using a NextCloud plugin to offer web-based document editing as a replacement for Google Docs.
The only thing I wonāt be using AWS for is hosting an email server.Ā I tried using an email address tied to my domain name and administering it myself before, and *never again*.Ā You canāt, as a self-hoster, beat the reliability, spam filtering, uptime, etc that an experienced tech company can offer you.
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