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The internet broke my brain

David Colborne
David Colborne
Opinion
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Digital internet and security graphic

It was a good run while it lasted. I lived nearly four decades without the internet breaking my brain. 

Then this week happened.

Have you ever tried to stare into a bright flashlight and make out a shape in the distance behind it? Have you ever tried to look for something in a dark bedroom after using a brightly lit bathroom? That’s what it felt like trying to make heads or tails out of this week’s news cycle. 

Let’s start at the beginning.

Bernie Sanders is sexist now because he said he didn’t say that women can’t win the presidency in a country that has yet to successfully elect a woman president even though Elizabeth Warren claimed he did. Also, he’s racist and classist, because his campaign may or may not have used a walk script that claimed that Warren’s supporters are more likely to be highly educated and affluent than his supporters (that’s true, by the way) and that implicitly erases the lived experience of poorer, less educated Warren supporters of color. 

On a related note, now I know that misogynoir is a thing. 

Well, more accurately, I now know that the term is a thing. The idea that black women have historically received a particularly raw deal in American society, of course, long predates all of our lifetimes. In my admittedly weak defense, my biggest act of teenage rebellion involved getting baptized as a Latter-Day Saint, so it’s actually almost personally impressive that it took less than a decade between black feminist graduate students coining the term and my learning of it. 

Having said that, deflecting all criticism of a politician, real or perceived, as social injustice is a fractally bad idea, in that it’s a bad idea no matter how closely or remotely you look at it. Elizabeth Warren, like Bernie Sanders, is a politician. Politicians lie. Elizabeth Warren in particular has been caught — let’s be charitable and call it embellishing the truth — more than once. Depending on who you ask, she might have done it again. 

To be clear, that’s not unusual nor even necessarily malicious behavior from a politician or anyone else. Memories drift and change over time. We’re not fleshy data recorders transcribing reality in our heads one neuron at a time. It’s also absolutely necessary to point out when we’re holding a woman accountable and not holding men accountable for behavior that is perfectly human, regardless of gender. However, the purpose behind doing so must be to hold all politicians accountable for their mis-remembrances, their exaggerations, and their lies, not to remove accountability from politicians merely because they’re women. 

People misremember. People exaggerate. People lie. Which brings me to Tuesday. 

While CNN was asking Sanders and Warren about their latest Twitter feud and Tom Steyer was saying hi, news came out that Rudy Giuliani, in his official capacity as President Trump’s personal lawyer (note: this is not an official capacity), recruited someone to spy on Marie Yovanovitch, our ambassador to Ukraine. Much to everyone’s surprise, perhaps even including their own, Trump’s associates were actually effective at what they were trying to do and successfully tracked her movements closely enough to create a potential security risk. 

In retrospect, President Trump is probably wishing Giuliani just tried to organize a burglary of the national Democratic Party headquarters instead. 

This, somehow, brings me to Wednesday, but only because time moves linearly and independently of human agency. 

On Wednesday, the Clark County Education Association dropped the second of two petitions designed to strongly encourage the Legislature to fund education, in much the same way “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” strongly encouraged the Japanese to hurry up and issue articles of surrender already. Trouble was, while the atomic bombs were dropped at a time in the war where everyone, even in Japan, knew it was over, the CCEA dropped their gaming and sales tax hike referenda before candidates even get to file for office, much less finish their campaigns. 

Which brings me to Thursday.

Thursday was the first day we got to see the year’s first campaign finance reports. We learned that, as has been the case for over a decade now, the “official” GOP chapter in Nevada remains a vestigial organ that exists solely to launder money and influence to people that deserve neither. We also learned that, despite that handicap, Republicans do surprisingly well at decentralized self-organization when the occasion calls for it, at least when the occasion calls for fundraising. Considering how Republicans in Nevada have been routing around the “official” state Republican Party since at least the 2012 election, I’m not surprised they’re getting halfway competent at it - they certainly have had enough practice.

Which brings me to Friday, at which point I just gave up entirely.

Are the Democrats going to wokescold their way out of the White House against the least popular president in decades? Are Republicans in the Senate actually going to hold President Trump accountable for literally anything, ever, just once, if only to see what it feels like? Did the CCEA make a mistake by dropping two potential tax hikes into a pivotal election on an electorate that gets angry over a $30 per year fee hike, to say nothing of increasing sales taxes by another 1.5 percent? Will Republicans in Nevada be able to spackle over their persistent organizational deficiencies with campaign cash? Does Betteridge’s Law of Headlines apply to sentences in a concluding paragraph?

I don’t know. I feel like at least one of those questions could be answered in the affirmative. Maybe if I refresh Twitter one more time, I’ll find an answer…

David Colborne has been active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he has blogged intermittently on his personal blog, as well as the Libertarian Party of Nevada blog, and ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate. He serves on the Executive Committee for both his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is the father of two sons and an IT professional. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].

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