I recently quit my job at Linode and started looking for something else to do. For the first time in my career, I’m seriously considering opportunities abroad. Sorry for the politically charged post - I promise to get back to tech stuff right away.
On November 8th, I’m going to step into the voting booth and will be presented with the following options:
- A criminal who cheated her way into a spot on the ballot
- An egotistical racist maniac
The next president of the United States will probably be Hillary Clinton. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how ridiculous this is. This is a person who has pulled all of the stops to get her name on the ballot, including voter fraud and disturbing amounts of corruption within the Democratic party. Not to mention that she’s probably going to start a war with Syria, mess with the already fragile geopolitical relationship we have with Russia, and likely deserves to be incarcerated for mishandling classified information. Say what you will about the Republican party - at least Trump won his nomination fair and square. Bonus: not voting for Hillary is sexist.
Not that I’d prefer it if Trump wins. I have a free sandwich waiting for me at the deli nearby if he doesn’t win. He got his nomination fairly, but that doesn’t mean he deserves it. This is a guy with little political clout who is incapable of handling international relations or commanding our military. He staunchly advocates committing war crimes to deal with ISIS. He makes racist, sweeping generalizations about anyone different from him. He’s a misogynist. Even worse, he’s all of these things and seems to actually represent a fair portion of his supporters.
Neither of the independents are serious contenders, so I won’t bother with why I don’t like them. They haven’t earned my vote, either.
Congress is composed of many of the same sort of people. Corrupt politicians who answer to the checkbooks of lobbyists who work against the interests of the American people for the sake of their own. We’re facing climate change and our politicians are taking money from rich fossil fuel lobbyists and damning our species to extinction. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor grows deeper and deeper as absurdly rich people get absurdly richer at the expense of the poor and middle class - through the support of the politicians whose pockets they’ve greased. Their excess wealth could pay for programs to improve our failing infrastructure and provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in doing so. We could provide free healthcare for all Americans too, if it wasn’t for the ongoing debate about whether or not being alive and healthy is a fundamental human right - many thanks to the pharmaceutical interests for shaping this debate to maximize their profits. It’d be less of a problem if many companies weren’t getting rich off of the ever widening waistlines of Americans, too.
Mass surveillance remains in full effect even years after Snowden’s revelations. The ridiculous war on drugs keeps putting people behind bars for lifetimes for victimless crimes to support the financial needs of private prisons and local police departments, who themselves are now better armed than most militaries, based on drug policies that have no basis in reality. 97% of trails end in plea bargains instead of justice, and minimum sentences ensure these people spend ridiculous amounts of time in prisons that punish them rather than rehabilitate them into productive citizens. A judge will hold a defendant indefinitely in prison without a conviction for refusing to disclose their disk encryption password in accordance with their 5th amendment rights - though if many political players had their way, encryption would be illegal anyway.
There’s a word for what America is: corrupt. What the fuck is going on in this country? We aren’t a representative democracy by any stretch of the imagination. We have become an oligarchy. We are ruled by money.
I love America, honestly. My whole family is here and I connect most with the American people. We have an incredibly rich land and great cities full of great innovators and interesting people. I hate that it’s become what it is today. I don’t expect anywhere else to be perfect, but we should be ashamed of how we look next to some other countries out there.