2024

We Gotta Do Better Than this.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 5 Comments
Joe Trump, effectively the main presidential candidate in 2024.

I don’t know how we got here, with Presidential Candidates like Donald Trump and Joe Biden as presidential candidates.

Well, actually, I do have an idea, but I don’t know that it’s right or true. What I do know is that both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are not attractive in any way. I remember a similar time with Gore and G.W. Bush, and look how well that turned out – we invaded Iraq for no good reason, the manufactured consent being about weapons of mass destruction and the only ones we found were the ones we brought with us.

Many of we veterans were against that. Nobody really listened. Look how well that turned out.

Trump is… well. An ambulatory legal disaster. Biden is… at best, conflicted. Both candidates can’t keep things straight because they are old. There’s a line somewhere between experienced and old that they have both crossed some time ago. One harnesses the anger at an establishment that doesn’t work for them while doing nothing about it, even making it worse, while the other is running on not being the other guy.

Reproduction rights – oh, who are we fooling, they’re women’s rights – will be a part of the campaign. The overturning of Roe vs. Wade does not make sense to me. If you’re religious, you believe in God, and God is supposed to sort out things at a personal level according to a variety of scriptures. Legislating away choices that are supposed to be between a person and their deity of choice or lack thereof seems peculiar to me. I don’t have to agree with someone else’s choice that doesn’t affect me.

In fact, that particular choice regarding abortion only impacts taxpayers when there is no abortion. That’s where we then have the need for social programs for humans that one day will become adults for at least 18 years. Do I agree with abortion personally? Sometimes, sometimes not, but it boils down to it not being my choice and I won’t force someone to have a child they don’t want or cannot support. That just sounds like a bad mix. So in my mind, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade seems… stupid. Meanwhile, in Alabama, things got really weird.

People do things I disagree with all the time. I’m not special enough to dictate to anyone else how they should do things. I wouldn’t want to be. My own life is weird enough. And how is this an election issue?

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has no real oversight, which is just astounding when you see how much lobbyism impacts the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is hardly ‘supreme’ unless in a Taco Bell Burrito sense, with similar effects to the dietary tract.

What else is there. Oh, growing socioeconomic divides that neither candidate speaks to in a meaningful way.

We have the “I wish Israel would listen” issue with 65% of Americans against what Israel is doing to some degree. Neither party wants to take on that, and when most decisions cannot be explained in politics it usually becomes about money. Around the world where the wars are, we see corporate needs. Ukraine – oil, minerals, and farmland. Where the Palestinians are – were, hopefully still are – oil. Let’s not forget what’s going on in the Congo.

I like capitalism. I do. The system we have now, though, is overreach without a reach-around. There do not seem to be checks and balances. The masses, upset, are told what the issues are, the candidates are told what the talking points are, and the lobbyists keep everything lubricated to get the interests of those with more free speech than others to center stage.

Dystopian fiction doesn’t have a market when we live it, so unless you plan to do some time traveling to sell your book, forget it.

There are third party candidates. The major parties will have people decrying them about splitting the vote, but I have something to tell you. Voting for a bad candidate to win is just that. That is a wasted vote, and if you don’t like your candidate, you’re telling your political party of choice that you’ll keep taking it. That you like it. And they won’t change.

I know the blind followers of political parties. The rhetoric is the same, the names and issues changed or inverted to just keep the herds going on the paths chosen for us. I do not like their choices, but like abortion, it’s not my right to tell them how to vote and in the same vein, it’s not their right to tell me how I should vote.

Somewhere along the way, people might vote for their interests again rather than playing a fabricated tug of war on issues that goes out of it’s way to dehumanize the ‘others’. ‘Trump Supporters are stupid’, ‘Libtards’, etc – not the way to have a meaningful discussion about the future of a nation, and implicitly, the world – a world that is watching, with enemies that are probably laughing at the whole thing.

They should. It’s idiotic.

Whatever part of the political spectrum that you fall on, all I have to say is that you should do better with your candidates – and I’ll throw the third party candidates in there as well.

If you can’t be critical of all the candidates, you’re not a voter. You’re a sheep.

That’s what I have to say about the 2024 Presidential Election. I don’t expect to write about it because I’m not interested in politics, I’m interested in doing better, and it doesn’t seem like politics is a part of that.

Being Human in 2024

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

There has been a lot going through my mind these past few weeks as I attempted to get the pitter-patter of the fingerprints across the keyboard.

I gave up for a while and decided to just be a human being for a while, not someone who has been writing books that became other books that sat while other books have started and others are just waiting for that magical ending that has not coalesced.

One of the things that haunted me was trying to figure out what’s next in a world where anything I write might be in a training model for an AI. I wonder if people who have been using Grammarly realized they were training AI. I doubt it, but WordPress.com is not immune and is something I’ll be writing about today on KnowProSE.com.

I’ve lived a bit over half a century. I grew up with 8 track tapes, vinyl records and reel-to-reel, only to have that upended by cassettes, only to have that upended by CDs, only to have that upended by MP3s and FLAC (the latter being better). At each turn I bought the music again not because I didn’t have it but because I didn’t have it in the format that my stereos could play it in. The music industry alone leeched probably tens of thousands of dollars from my income because I like my music. This shift in technology is something newer generations bypassed, but my generation did not have the opportunity. We bore the financial weight of such changes in technology.

With video, we went from VHS and Betamax to laserdiscs to bluray to… well, I’m not that much into movies. Computer use in my time went from actual floppy discs that were 10″ across to the USB sticks we have now that have exponentially more memory than the computers we once had.

Phones went from per minute charges on landlines to mobile phones with rates for text messages (SMS) and voice calls by the minute that we have now.

A lot has happened. I have a 53″ flat screen television that wouldn’t have worked in the 1970s because my mother couldn’t put stuff on top of it.

All I wanted to do at this age was sit around and write books and this new AI technology has distracted me from it, as well as made me wonder if it’s still a good plan. Amazon gets flooded with book summaries that rip off what others have spent years researching.

This was all sufficient enough to take some time to consider because that’s a lot to consider. The self-inflicted leaders of technology don’t really give a shit about my existence other than as a revenue stream. I don’t matter to them. This I know. Should I matter to them? Should you?

I wondered for a while if I had become a Luddite because it does bother me that what I have spent a lifetime learning is what I write about, each sentence and paragraph a distillation of decades of being a human being. Generative AI spitting out text for people who ask it questions is competition now, in a world where genuine human content is as surreal as the best written fiction. Is it dystopian? Is it utopian? That really depends on how we view the world, and how others in the world view us.

It is important that we keep being human, I think. I’m just not very certain what that is supposed to be. Fortunately, I just have to be myself, but I do have to know where the boundary is between who I am and what people do with what I create.

When A Comedian Is a Trusted Source.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment
Getting an AI to generate Jon Stewart as a superhero was tricky. Fortunately, you can tell it’s AI by the hands that… well… let’s go with ‘moving really fast’ or something.

The return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show made me smile today. It will be good to have him around through elections.

I started watching The Daily Show in the early 2000s and really appreciated the satire of things going on in the world. When outside of the United States, I found ways to watch it because it not only informed, it entertained. This was a team effort but the delivery by Jon Stewart never disappointed.

He openly criticized the media, as someone needed to, and the platform of being after cartoons and/or puppets really made the point. He was like a news anchor with the spirit of George Carlin.

In these times, we need people like him, we need teams like that. Often, for me, it was a way of realizing that I wasn’t crazy because when I spotted idiocy being reported, I began to question myself. Is it just me? No, it wasn’t, no, it isn’t, and no, I wasn’t alone in silence wondering whether I should write about it, or even if I could in an engaging way. Watching it be done right and comprehensively while being pretty politically agnostic allowed the issues to come out of the mayhem of the media spin doctors.

When Trevor Noah took over, it didn’t feel the same. He’s a funny guy, and he’s closer to my shade of skin tone, but it just didn’t feel the same. I lost interest. Maybe I’m not ‘woke’ enough despite being sentient for longer than most ‘woke’ people.

Having caught up on his “The Trouble With Jon Stewart”, it’s apparent that he’s kept up his skills and further refined them. I loved how the episodes started with the team spitballing the show beforehand. I imagine working on ideas with him would be fun. Much of what he has done before keeps coming back, too, like George Carlin’s quotes and videos.

The world doesn’t make sense. It’s completely appropriate that he’s a trusted source because he earned it.