Call it what it is.

A lot of the media has been saying that the last election turned on what they’re calling “Moral Values.” But what moral values are they talking about? Value of life? Making decisions based on integrity and honor? These are not things that the Bush administration values. They rushed to war on lies, they’ve pushed explicitly discriminatory legislation, and have been so utterly incompetant in their execution of anything even remotely resembling anything “moral,” that I don’t believe that morality or values are what they’re really talking about.

What brought Republican voters to the polls? Gay marriage. “Safety” from terrorist by way of destroying the Middle East. Not equality, not freedom. Bigotry. Fear. Hatred.

So let’s call it what it is. Moral Values is not what this election turned on. This election turned on homophobia. It turned on fear. It turned on hatred, and bigotry.

Every time someone calls these things “moral values,” it demeans real morals, and real values. And somehow, these miserable fuckers have taken over not only the media, but the *language* we use to discuss their bullshit. So let’s take it back, and call a miserable homophobic, bigoted, misogynistic fucker what it is.

If I were a member of the Bush administration, and I was trying to figure out how to do my job, based on who was making gains now that the election’s passed, I would expect that the only conclusion I could come to is that the more incompetent I was, the higher I would rise in the ranks. Condolezza Rice to succeed Powell? Purging the CIA of people who were “disloyal” to the President? It seems like anyone who had even a modicum of credibility (I’m not talking about Powell – he has none), or intelligence, or even competently executed their duties is getting fired or leaving, and they’re being replaced with people who have been demonstrably *incompetent* during the last four years.

It’s like Bizarro world or something. Name five people you’d expect to have been fired for incompetence? Hm. Ashcroft, Rice, Rumsfeld, Bush, Wolfowitz. Of those, the only one who’s not employed by the administration anymore is Ashcroft, and that, bizarrely, is because he thinks he’s accomplished the goal of defeating crime and terrorism! Holy shit!

It’s weird. I mean, not just sort of odd, or politics-as-usual-is-kind-of-fucked-up, but scary, fascist, really-fucking-up-the-future kind of weird.

What have I been doing? I ask that because I’ve been poking around friends’ blogs/journals/whatever, and have been thinking to myself, what is it that I do, when I’m not at work, when I have free time? I haven’t read a book in about a month.

But I guess I have been doing stuff. Cooking, some – made some shallow-fried chicken last week that was pretty tasty, and easy enough to do that it could be a “regular” recipe, as well as braised some baby back ribs that turned out well, but could have been better with some tweaking to the sauce. Both were Alton Brown recipes, and both were easy enough that it reminds me why I like cooking, and why I like home-cooked food. It’s fun, essentially, assembling food and turning it into something else, and even more fulfilling when you can make changes to it that you feel improve things, and get other people to enjoy it, as well. The sad thing is, though, that both those recipes take planning, and though frying the chicken only takes about an hour of actual time, that puts dinner back to something like 8:30pm if I try to cook on a *regular* night back from work. The ribs were a four and a half hour process – most of which was sitting there while the oven did its thing, but the point being, I can’t make that recipe, except on the weekends, ever. Which sucks.

Other’n that, been brainstorming on design ideas for work, despite the fact that my input counts as much as any other schmuck peon – still, might as well have *good* schmuck-peon input as anything else. And working on the art assets for a GBA game I’m developing with some of my peeps, for a contest whose deadline’s in December.

Also been playing Halo 2 – despite a lot of derision over the single-player campaign, I’m enjoying it as much, if not more than I thought I would, and the multiplayer is absolutely phenomenal. It introduces a whole new paradigm to online play – one that I think will be adopted by the Live service in general – where the “party” is the central unit around which games are created, and not individual players. There’s also an excellent ranking system and matchmaking service, that provides almost uniformly well-matched, and challenging opponents for a wide variety of game types. It’s great stuff, extremely high quality, addictive, and really goddamn fun to boot.

Oh – and in case anyone’s wondering – the Roomba is awesome. It’s not a particularly powerful vacuum, but the ability to run it when you’re not at home, and for it to run for two hours solid lets it clean up the house, passively, much better than I’d have expected it to. I used to sit there and ball up little bits of Mobius’ shed fur, but all I need to do now is run the Roomba, and it’ll pick up 90% of it for me passively. To get the *real* dirt out of the rug will require a vacuuming with a real vacuum, but the contribution the Roomba makes to our quality of life was definitely worth the $140 it cost.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/

This journal got put into the mill yesterday. The one below is from an ex-coworker of mine. I didn’t know him too well, but I did interact with him periodically, and I believe every single thing in it is absolutely true.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/joestraitiff/368.html?view=6000#t6000

How do I feel about the two of these things? Mixed, for sure. Why? Because my *personal* experience hasn’t been nearly as terrible as either of these two journals would suggest. My crunch time was relatively limited, I generally feel like the people above me are looking out for me (until it gets to the project lead, whose priorities and treatment of his team members is abhorrent). But I’m insulated from that by the two layers of bosses I’ve got between him and me, so I don’t feel it nearly as much as I would otherwise.

I’ve had a reasonably good year at EA. I’ve learned a lot about the process of making games, I’ve got a game on the shelf, and I didn’t have to totally sacrifice my life to do it. I had to learn to say, “no,” to a lot of things, and it’ll probably hurt my upward mobility in the company. But as long as I’m learning, I’m ok with that. When resistance to life-sacrificing stops my ability to learn/grow/be challenged, it’ll be time to move on.

The problem is that my job doesn’t exist in a vacuum. As much as I’d like to say I work for Maxis, which I still hold in high esteem, the simple fact of the matter is that I work for Electronic Arts. And though my personal experience hasn’t been bad, clearly Joe’s was, and easpouse’s spouse’s was awful. Awful beyond reason. And the issue is that I work for the company that supports those practices.

So, what does a person do? The game industry is hard to get into. EA exploits that fact, knowing that demand for game industry jobs is high enough to support tremendous turnover. If I leave, will I be able to get a job anywhere else? Will it be better? EA’s way more organized than Sega, for instance, and I prefer working here to working there. I’m at least paid closer to what I’m worth. But then again, I’m also disposable, in the company’s eyes, where at Sega at least I felt some notion of honor and/or loyalty. I know others felt differently.

Again, though – I suppose I feel like a Log Cabin Republican. Maybe my personal lot in life isn’t awful, but the organization I support supports making the lives of people like me awful. Can I work for a company like that and retain a sense of honor and integrity? It’s hard to see because I work with a bunch of really bright, fun, talented individuals, who are a blast to work with. It makes it hard to see the ugly corporate entity we support, in effect.

Go see The Incredibles. Whether you’re a fan of superheroes or not, it’s definitely worth seeing. Probably one of my favorite movies in a good long while, and one of my favorite “fun” movies of all time. Brad Bird is a genius.

So, there’s a lot of talk about who’s to blame, for the disastrous election results we saw this week. A lot of Kerry supporters are blaming Kerry, or saying that we need to appeal more to the center, or that we need to tap into religion, or we need to have some wedge issues or ballot provisions or whatever bullshit excuses they can think of.

Here’s the problem, as I see it.

It’s easy to be lazy, and most people, most of the time, are lazy.

Laziness in many senses of the word. Not that many people care about politics. They’re too lazy to vote. They’re too lazy to understand what the candidate’s positions are. They’re too lazy to sort what the media tells them into truth, and fiction. They’re too lazy to draw their own connections between what’s happening in the world and how policy affects that world. It’s easy.

There are a lot of people out there, for instance, who believe that Bush being anti-abortion is good. Bush tells them that he is against abortion, and it’s easy to say, look, he’s against abortion. It takes effort to see that abortion rates have actually gone up under Bush’s presidency. It takes effort to make the connection between increased poverty, decreased education, decreased availability of contraception to those who need it most, and the rise in abortion rates.

So the problem is that it takes effort to discern the difference between what someone says, and what they do. So if Kerry was going to do the right things, and I think he was going to, he failed by not being able to say them in a way that was easily understood, and sounded good. Too much nuance, too much detail, too much of an adherence to trying to communicate information. People have shown that they don’t want information. They don’t even care about truth. What they care about is an easily digestible message that sounds good, that they don’t have to think about.

Get the Democrats to create a message like that. We should be able to. Our messages, fundamentally, are better. They’re better than “ownership societies.” They’re better than “a culture of life.” They’re better than “tax relief.” Our ideas are better than theirs. We just need to learn how to communicate them without shirking from the things that make us better than them.

I’ve seen this exact phrase: “moral values” on every news organization that I know of, since the election. It’s been on cnn, sfgate, salon – hell, it’s even on Google News. It’s being widely spread that Bush won the election on “moral values,” but I’m wondering whether this is just an RNC talking point that no one’s attributing to the RNC.

First of all, Bush didn’t win on “moral values” – here’s a guy who lied about taking us to war. He’s an ex-coke head, he’s been convicted of a DUI. Abortions have been on the rise, poverty’s been on the rise, the number of uninsured people is on the rise, the environment’s under assault, we’re killing thousands of innocent people, and discriminating against millions at home. This is not the legacy of a president who believes in moral values such as say, the sanctity of life, helping the helpless, loving thy neighbor, etc. I don’t know what sort of “moral values” favors the CEO of Enron over the people he victimized, or believes say, that Martha Stewart is more guilty than Bernie Ebbers, or that invading a sovereign nation that’s never invaded us, and killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens is moral, but whatever that system of belief is, I daresay that calling it “moral values” is as Orwellian as the Clear Skies Initiative.

What bothers me the most is that the media – even outlets like Salon, are simply parrotting the phrase “moral values” without defining what it is. Why? Because the people who supposedly voted for Bush based on his “moral values” don’t even know what moral values are. Are his moral values the same moral values you hold? Seriously? How do you know? His actions clearly speak otherwise.

Anyway. I would have thought after 2000, that our media would grow a sense of fairness, and responsibility. I would have thought that after botching the coverage pre-Iraq War, they’d have gotten more careful, and thoughtful. Ha. Silly fucking me.

Consumerism:

Bought two things – one a little while ago, and one yesterday, as something to take my mind off the disasterous election results.

From a while ago, we bought a Roomba Red. This is a purchase I’ve been mulling for months, because fundamentally, I’m not going to vacuum every day. I was vacuuming about once a week, but Mobius was shedding like a madman over the last month or so, and it was crazy. He’s also tracking dirt into the house, when the ground outside is wet. So we’d end up with hair everywhere, and little dirt clods that would fall out of the gaps in his paws. So, the notion was either we’d need to vacuum on a more regular basis, or buy a robot to do it for us.

I’d heard good things about the Roomba from a friend who’s roommate has one, and I thought, well, this sounds like the thing for me. There’s a new, cheaper, and better model out now with the second revision of the hardware, and the Red seemed to fit the bill at ~$140, with a coupon, at Sears.

So far, it’s been quite good. As a vacuum, it’s pretty powerless, but the flip side is that you turn it on, and it runs around for two solid hours, and you can use it every day with essentially no effort. So, while it’s not gonna tear up all the pet hair on the first pass, on the twentieth, the house will be, and has been, pretty clean. It’s noticable, and it takes essentially no effort. It gets stuck on rug tassles sometimes, and if you fold them under the rug, it gets stuck on the bulge. So that’s the only issue at the moment. But otherwise? Not a problem at all. It sucked a *ridiculous* amount of pet hair up from under the bed, where we tend to say, never vacuum ever, otherwise.

Great little thing, and if your floor isn’t covered in cords, I’d highly recommend it.

The other thing, which I picked up yesterday, was a cast iron griddle. Not a griddle pan, but it’s a double-sided griddle/skillet that spans two burners. It’s *BADASS*. The stove gets it ripping hot, and the grill side of it’s got nice, raised thingies, to properly grill steaks and such. It’s insane, and once hot, takes like ten minutes to cool down to a reasonable temp. Crazy stuff.

John Kerry has asked that we put aside our differences, and unite behind the President. To that, I respond simply, “no.”

He is still not my President, and I will never, ever, ever unite under his banner of incompetence, hostility, bigotry, homophobia, and hatred. We share virtually nothing in common, ideologically, morally, or by any measure. I have never hated anyone as much as I hate George W. Bush, and I would sooner die than “unite” under that bastard.

America, you let me down. I am ashamed and disappointed.

When Bush hadn’t been elected, I could believe that we would right ourselves, that we would show the world that we are better than we were. That this morning, I would wake up from this long nightmare, and we could begin to work to correct our mistakes.

Now, we have a President who has been legitimately elected, supposedly (I still have genuine suspicions that Diebold gave Bush the election). Even after Iraq, even after his utterly incompetant mishandling of every single piece of policy he has touched, we elected him. And when I say “we,” I don’t include me, I don’t include my friends, and I don’t include any educated, rational, thinking individual with a conscience. But apparently, there’s not enough of us out there to counter the irrational retarded fucks who turned out in droves this time.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that now, we have shown the world our true colors. We have shown them that we are a nation run on blind ideology, fear, hatred, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry, and zealotry. We are, in effect, no different than the religious ideologues of the Middle East. Except we’re better armed.

I don’t understand what happened. I’ve been grappling with it all morning, but I’m no closer to a conclusion. Part of me thinks that Diebold has this grand and very clever scheme of sneaking fraudulent votes into appropriate places – popular vote swings in California, which would go unnoticed because the state would end overwhelmingly Kerry, while critical votes would change to Bush in Florida, and could go uncontested because the popular vote margin had been jiggered in such a way that would make such a result believable. And with no paper trail, no one would ever know. I don’t doubt that this happened. I can’t prove it, either, so I can only hold on to this hope that this election is the actions of a few truly evil people – it’s the only optimistic outlook I have at this point.

We can’t be a nation that’s comprised of 51% intellectually and morally vacant idiot. We just can’t. And yet, here we are. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I’m sitting here with a plate of shit stew in front of me, with nothing left to do but chow down. I don’t even know what to do now. The democratic machine *worked* this time. Voter turnout was tremendous. People were energized, they were on the ground, volunteers who’d never been interested in politics before were moved to get involved. *I* got involved. Everyone I know – literally *EVERYONE* I know got involved, in some fashion or another, even if it was just actively talking about the issues at hand. Sure, we’re in California, where people are actually relatively sane, in the metropolitan areas. But still. The rest of the country can’t be that ignorant, can it?

It would seem they can. It would seem that fear is stronger than hope, that willful ignorance is more powerful than knowledge. It is harder to be smart than it is to be dumb, and it is harder to change, than it is to stay the same. I just don’t know what to do. Can we educate the masses? Can we force the media to be *responsible* again? Can we convince more than forty million people that it’s worth it to think? I don’t know. I don’t think so. People want to just live their lives, for the most part, and people who haven’t learned to think simply aren’t going to change. How did we get this way? How can we change?

And then there’s the question, is it worth it? It’d be so much easier to live somewhere I can be proud of. It’d be so much easier to write off America as a nation of ignorant, lazy bastards that isn’t even worth considering anymore. But I was born here. I grew up here. I love this country as much as anyone else, and it’s my right as much as anyone else’s to want to be proud of this country. Just because a bunch of ignorant fucktards have stolen my country from me doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to fight back.