Michael Spavor, one of the two Canadian men who was arbitrarily arrested in China as retaliation for Canada detaining Chinese executive Meng Wanzhou, has been freed as Canada released Meng Wanzhou from house arrest and she returned to China.
I am not interested in discussing the nuances and politics of the issue right now, but here's what I know:
Michael Spavor is a good guy who didn't deserve this. I've met him a few times, and a few of my friends consider him a close friend. He's just spent 1000 days unfairly detained.
Michael's life has been horribly disrupted. whatever he had going on at the time of his arrest, who knows what the future holds for him, but I hope he finds something brilliant.
You can hear some of Michael's friends talking about him here on The Seoul Podcast, and what it means for him to have been imprisoned for so long.
Well, some people write earnest pleas when they are upset, sad or annoyed about something. I make jokes.
As we watch Covid 19 take a second pass at the USA, extracting catastrophic hospitalization and death counts almost exclusively from unvaccinated americans, and that is somehow still not reason enough to convince people to get a free needle, it struck me that perhaps the problem here is that getting the vaccine basically means admitting your over-earnest libt**d coworker was right, and if anybody knows anything about a culture war, it's that you can never back away from a position once you've taken it.
But if you think about it, the anti-mask, anti-vaxx side of this culture war is getting a really raw deal: sure, the people on Fox News and the Truth About Demon Biden Facebook group call you brave, but the cost -- increased risk of flippin' death is just unreasonably steep just for scoring a few points and pissing off the libs.
So I've come up with a way to own the libs without backing away from the culture war a single inch!
Let's get on this! If a little re-brand is what it takes...
Listen. I get how weird, hard, and unpleasant this culture war is. I understand what's at stake. I actually really strongly don't think mockery is our way out of this, and those thoughts might show up on this blog sooner or later, because if we don't find a way out of this, we're screwed. But until then, if you're in the mood for a little black humor, I hope you like this. And whether you're in the mood for a little black humor or not, go get vaccinated if you haven't already! Take care of the people around you. That's the very least we can do.
The nightmare is over. The nightmare is not over. It's OK to celebrate a little before getting back into the work of it. Things do not automatically go back to 2016, but still.
I made this playlist of music that makes me happy. Be happy for a bit before we get to the next part.
If you've been listening to the podcast I've been doing, you know some of my positions on US politics. I have opinions, y'all!
So far, my favorite take on Trump's Covid diagnosis has got to be Jake Tapper from CNN.
CNN’s @jaketapper: “Sick and in isolation, Mr. President, you have become a symbol of your own failures. Failures of recklessness, ignorance, arrogance. The same failures you have been inflicting on the rest of us ... Get well and get it together" #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/XXA5uC91Ea
"You have become a symbol of your own failure. Get well, and get it together."
I have a feeling few minds are actually changed by these videos (before the videos, it was webcomics, and/or SNS text blocks) where one side of one of our culture wars has their position crystallized into a concise, clear expression. I understand that the function of viral clips like this is probably mostly just preaching to the choir so that they can nod along, pound the desk, shout "Heck yeah!" and feel right about their position. I even know that pickling in self-reinforcing content exacerbates the echo chamber/information silo effect and makes it harder for dialogue to happen across political alignments. I know all that, but still... that was well put.
If Mr. Tapper wasn't enough for you, I also made a thing that I'd like to share.
If you would like to know my thoughts about Donald Trump's performance at the September 29, 2020 presidential debate (jackass trying but failing to score a knockout punch, so combining the worst traits of a drunk uncle and a hyper toddler instead...but for understandable reasons, given who we're dealing with), the conceit that debates are supposed to persuade undecided voters (4:50), the thing we learn from his behavior by reading between the lines (7:24), his subsequent Covid 19 diagnosis (8:52) (so frustrating that there is so little good faith or trust that even a White House health bulletin has people asking 'What's the angle here') what some of those angles might be (9:23 and 11:20), the way this distracts from what we should be talking about right now (10:27), the tough guy image Trump's cultivated (12:04), whether Trump even could pull off a con like a fake Covid infection (13:10), or the people gloating (14:30) or wishing Trump ill online (14:58) and how that plays into what happens to Trumpism next... go ahead and watch this!
And... if all that political stuff was too much, here's a video of a street performance that I keep coming back to.
A fellow in the UK has started a Youtube series during his Covid 19 stay-at-home quarantine, and by sheer coincidence, he came up with the same name for his series as I made for my plague film series!
His name is Rob, just like mine, so naturally I agreed to be interviewed for his YouTube channel.
I'm fond of his channel and quite enjoyed this interview, so everybody, please check it out!
