tony - The Clever Shark

On the passing of Scott Adams

Scott Adams passed away earlier this week. He was the author of the Dilbert cartoon strip which used to run in newspapers everywhere who, once the heyday of his creation started to fade, let his life spiral into a cesspit of bigotry and hate so awful that it completely ruined his reputation and, to some extent, his existing work.

Sometimes success goes right to someone’s head and causes an interesting feedback loop — “if I am successful then it must be that I am much more intelligent than everyone else”. I mean, we pretty much get told all our lives that the reverse is true, so it’s not necessarily outrageous to believe that. The problem comes when that person then uses that logic to validate beliefs they have for whatever reason, but which are extreme and socially unacceptable in nature.

Most successful people would take a cue from the social reaction and see that there’s a problem with the beliefs. But some of them do not. Some of them think that no, they’re right and society at large is wrong. Not only that, but because they’re clearly so intelligent — society has already validated this by making them successful! — they see it as their duty to reform the world, to set them on the right path by being as open and offensive as they can be.

And boy did Scott Adams take that duty seriously. His descent into racist, sexist, transphobic madness is well documented here if you’re not already familiar with it:

That I think is what happened to Scott Adams.

And it basically caused his death as well — he was too smart to go to an ordinary person doctor. Those people treat losers! No, he was the vanguard, the illuminati! He was too intelligent to get chemo and radiation or maybe have a tumectomy or whatever else was possible medically. No siree. He went straight to the old panacea, ivermectin, a veterinary dewormer. It was just as effective for prostate cancer as it is for anything but getting rid of worms.

Scott Adams lived by his own rules, and he died by his own rules. Truly he was the architect of his own downfall.

An expensive job to accept

Part 1 here

Everyone’s lost a job before. I’ve lost a few. So why did this time feel like a kick to the bollocks?

Well, the story kinda begins at the end of April 2025 when I was laid off following a reorganization at my then workplace. That sucked, but whatever. This was more of a normal job, where I got actual feedback on my performance, and things that needed improvement were worked on.

I applied to Bombardier via Linkedin. I got a call to set up and interview and I was very, very keen. In recent years I had developed a taste for aviation so I was already pumped for that, but also to find a job in this industry for a Canadian company that’s got huge cultural importance in this country and province… it seemed perfect.

The interview was… short. Very short. I got the impression that the interviewer, who would become my boss, either didn’t really know what he wanted to see in a candidate, or maybe he knew EXACTLY what he was looking for and I had ticked all the right boxes. When I got the offer I decided to believe it was the latter.

Now there was just one thing (there always is). I got offered the job in late July, but could only start on September 22nd, two months away. At that time I didn’t think too much of that, since my daughter was on a visit which was getting extended due to other things coming up, so it worked out for me. Still I asked if maybe it was possible to start earlier, but my now-boss said that I would be working with someone who was on vacation until September 22nd.

In hindsight I should really have seen this as kind of a red flag. This is an aircraft manufacturer. You’d think that it would be possible to train someone to do a vital customer service-related job, that the jobs themselves and the processes involved would be well-documented. You would think that. And if this were to happen now I would have questions, but between my relief at having found a job so quickly, my joy at being able to hang out with my girl — we went swimming every other day pretty much — and my enthusiasm at this new job, I decided to trust the process. When waiting for the first day I get a notification that starting in January we would be required to be at the office for at least 2 days a week. I don’t particularly like this, because it’s a pretty major change from the work conditions I was told about when I was interviewing (as well as another red flag I ignored), but I think “ok, whatever, I can get there by transit” and don’t give it much thought.

Late September comes around and I show up for the first day on the job. This is my first partial on-site job since the pandemic, but again I just accept things as they are. On the first day I just get my gear and am given time to set myself up, and my boss says I can go and asks me to come back to the office the next day. By sheer coincidence this happens to be during the transit strike in Montreal and I end up stuck in St-Laurent for a couple of hours until the Metro starts running again. It’s just bad luck. The next day I return, expecting to meet the guy I’m supposed to work with, but he didn’t show up. In fact I would never actually meet this guy face to face. While every non-manager was technically still working remotely, we were requested to be in the office one day a month (this will be an issue later) and the next office day is the next Monday. I come in on that day… and am the only there from my team, besides the boss.

This is probably where I should have clued in that the company has some serious internal communications issues.

Back on my second day, there was a little information session covering things like the company history, including the recent business focus. To give a very, very brief overview — this is a company that grew and grew until it became unmanageable (some 15 years ago), but has now refocused its operations to concentrate on their core business (high-end business jets) and sold off a lot of its divisions and products, which allowed it to become profitable again. Yay!

When we introduce ourselves to the group one thing stands out to me. Half of us are new employees, but the other half are returning employees. And we’re talking about people who had worked there for 10-15 years. I think this is great, because clearly this is a company that must treat its employees well, otherwise they wouldn’t return, right?

So I am studying the materials that have been shared with me. There’s a call with my boss and the coworker I’m expected to learn my job from, things seem to go well. He says he doesn’t expect me to start taking over the tasks until 2026 which tells me that the expectations are reasonable. However I can’t help but notice that after this initial meeting he’s not really talking to me. If I have questions he answers them, but otherwise there’s no “let me show you the ropes” moment from him. Eventually I bring up getting trained for the job, and he starts telling me. Kind of. I get hooked up with access to a resource I need, start analyzing things contained in said resource (I have to be really vague to respect NDAs), but then the radio silence resumes.

I never got a good idea of exactly why that was happening. If I had a question he would answer it, but there was still a big problem, which obviously only became clear in hindsight. Everyone else who was a full-time employee on the team had worked at Bombardier for 15+ years, and they had all been in their jobs for many years already. And we really did not have the level of internal documentation that should have been a given for a company our size in our industry.

Now, there is a pretty famous standard out there called ISO-9000. This should be the basic standard for publicly-traded companies. The part of ISO that I want to talk about is the need to have specifications and documentations for internal processes and roles. It’s admittedly an annoying process to go through, but it provides the company with a way to be able to answer “what does this person do here”. It’s very useful to have this information when onboarding people. If nothing else you’d have a list of what the new hire will do in terms of tasks, and the resources they need access to in order to start doing the job. In fact, with most of the companies I worked at before, the access issues would have been taken care of even before my first login. For example, if I needed access to a mailing list account, that access would have been granted and the lists would already have been added to my Outlook. There would have been an email sent to me with at least a pointer to existing documentation as it relates to my group/job. That’s how you onboard people quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

However, Bombardier really, REALLY doesn’t know how to onboard people. I mean there’s a cute little corporate write-up, and they would like their employees to set their linkedin profile to have a Bombardier-supplied background, but there isn’t that much else. That means that the knowledge is in people’s heads and has never been meaningfully turned into documentation. But with a workforce with an average tenure of 15 years, that’s a big problem. The processes and jobs are things that were established many years ago and have undergone changes over these years, but no one really remembers how to start as a new employee in the role. Once I know enough to know that there’s something I’m missing, yes, I can ask about that and get an answer. However in the long term I’m constantly begin expected to ask details about what Donald Rumsfeld once called the “unknown unknowns” — stuff I don’t know that I don’t know. Something we could have resolved so quickly had process and role documentation existed, as it should have. But no, I was effectively set up to fail. Two days before my last day I found that I should have been subscribed to an additional mailing list (besides the one I subscribed to), but get this — I found this out double-checking something with an external contractor, who checked the detail and said “I think you’re not on that distribution list”. Seriously, WTF?!?

Frankly I wonder if there was ever another possible outcome to this disaster. Because (again after much reflection) I’m fairly sure it was coworker feedback — which had, again, never been discussed with me — that resulted in my losing the job, but that’s mostly because our manager was not involved with the day-to-day details of my job, and so he depended entirely on said coworker for my assessment. And as I said, the coworker didn’t seem interested in talking to me much. Now I was always under the impression that the team was intended to go forward with the same number of people, and I was replacing someone who had left to go to another team. However, the more I think about it, the more it sounds like my boss told my coworker that he had to train his replacement (me), and that he was clearly not pleased with the idea.

But the onboarding problems exist not only in the job-specific areas, but also at the corporate level. It took over a week before I got any information about registering for health insurance and other benefits, for example, even though everyone reassured me that I was covered. Every single company I’ve worked for in the past had all that stuff ready to go on day 1, and I don’t think it was unreasonable for me to think it would be the same at Bombardier. I mean, they had almost 2 months to get the paperwork ready.

The other surprising thing about losing this job is that from a 12 person team 1 (me) has been fired, 1 is leaving due to his contract being up, and 3 are retiring in the first two quarters of the year. INCLUDING THE MANAGER. Maybe his apparent lack of interest in things was down to his imminent retirement and just having checked out already. It’s a customer service-related team, and while we weren’t always rushing, I really don’t know how the work’s gonna get done. However at this point it’s just not my fucking problem and I really don’t give a shit how they resolve it.

That being said, I’m sure the situation is not unique to my team. There will be very serious problems related to this that will come up in the next few years and inevitably product and customer service quality will suffer.

Well, that’s it. I’ve run out of things to say and I want to put everything aside and never thing about that damned company again. Oh by the way they did screw up my last pay by not paying for unused vacation and personal time, which I just reminded them about. All in all Bombardier is not a company you can trust as an employee.

What I got for Christmas

Fired. I got fired.

That’s one hell of a “present”, let me tell you. And I think the story needs to be told, partly to get things off my chest, and partly to warn people about my former employer, because frankly it may look like a dream job — it sure af did to me — but being involved with Bombardier has been nothing but a catastrophe for me, and I wouldn’t want anyone to waste several months of their life on that company.

And I wasn’t even fired in an up front way. That Wednesday, December 17th 2025, seemed like it would be an ordinary Wednesday leading up to Xmas. I’m finishing up a development task, get a meeting invite for my regular one-on-one scheduled for the next day — normal since the company basically shut down from the 24th to January 5th — so I RSVP and continue my work, then noon comes around and I take the dog out for a walk.

Something important to know: at this point my initial 3-month milestone would be coming up the next Monday. I had already received an invite to complete a survey, which I was planning to do the next Monday. I had really not been given a set of objectives to achieve for this particular date, had never received much any feedback on my work, and I was in the middle of doing some Python scripting for my group. We’d had a meeting about that task the previous day and things were proceeding along.

When I come back I have another meeting invite for my one-on-one, which seems weird because I already accepted the other one. I look at it and it’s for Friday, which is weird because my boss was supposed to be off on Friday. Then I open it.

Suddenly my boss would like me to come in to the office for this meeting, and bring my equipment.

Tell me I’m getting fired without having the balls to actually tell me I’m getting fired.

So at this point I reply “Tell me honestly, am I getting fired?” Which was answered by a Teams call. Yes, I was being dropped after 3 months. I got no other feedback. I got the official letter letting me know I was shitcanned, and within a few minutes got that “please sign in again” notification from Outlook that confirmed that this was not some kind of sick joke.

I went in the next day to hand in my equipment. Didn’t even page my former boss at this point. Went straight to IT, gave them back the equipment, and left my ID badge with security on my way out.

So yeah. 54 years old and now jobless in the IT industry. Merry fucking Christmas to me. And in such a galling way. No discussion of performance or anything. Just a big “fuck you” a week from Xmas. And a decision that was taken between 10 and 12:30 on a Wednesday.

I’m just getting over the shock of it now. But Bombardier wasn’t quite done fucking me over. They still owed me pay as well as unused vacation time. That was supposed to come in the next Wednesday, but when I checked my account the deposit was, shall we say, very light. In fact it could not have been more than my vacation time. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that my former boss just didn’t even bother taking care of the timesheet. We all have to file a timesheet, but since my last day was a Wednesday I had not filled it out for that week. If I didn’t have some money in savings I wouldn’t be able to make the January rent. Again, thanks for that Bombardier, which apparently can’t be arsed to fix its own mistake before next week.

There is so much more to say about this awful work experience, but that’s it for today. “I’m tired, boss”. My daughter is over for Xmas and my priority is keeping myself together until she gets on her flight home, for her sake. I’ll continue this story when I have the energy.

Part 2 here

My daily bread

I haven’t contributed a recipe in a while, so here’s something I make almost every day.

Naan. I didn't take this myself but these look just like mine.

Print Recipe

Fluffy, tasty naan

Naan so delicious you'll want to just eat it by itself

Prep Time2

Cook Time15

Total Time2 10

Course: Snack

Cuisine: Indian

Keyword: bread, butter, naan

Servings: 3 people

Author: tony

Cost: $5

Equipment

1 Cast iron pan

Ingredients

Yogurt mixture

1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
1 extra-large egg
1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Yeast

2 tbsp honey
1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
1 1/4 tsp yeast

Dry ingredients

3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
2 tsp table salt

Other ingredients

1 tsp Avocado oil
1 tbsp melted butter

Instructions

Blooming the yeast

Add the 2tbsp of honey into a small bowl.
2 tbsp honey
Add the hot water to the honey and mix well to dissolve.
1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
Sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix it into the honey solution.
1 1/4 tsp yeast
Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes while the yeast blooms. The yeast will rise to the top like foam.

Mix the other wet ingredients

Pour the yogurt in a separate bowl.
1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
Add the egg and mix together.
1 extra-large egg
If you added the yogurt and egg straight from the fridge, you will need to bring up the temperature of the mixture to room temperature. This will prevent the butter from re-hardening into clumps when you pour it in.
Once your yogurt mixture is warm, pour in the melted ghee/butter and mix.
1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Prepare the dry ingredients

Put your flour in a medium-large mixing bowl.
3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
Add the 2 tsp salt and mix well.
2 tsp table salt

Mix the wet and dry ingredients

Once your yeast has bloomed, pour its contents into the yogurt mixture and mix them well.
Pour the wet ingredients into a little "well" in the flour mixture.
Mix everything together. Use a spatula at first, but when all the liquid has been absorbed just knead the dough with your hands. You need to get the point where the dough ball is slightly moist to the touch without sticking to your hand. Add additional flour if needed.
Put the avocado oil on top of the dough, just enough to make sure it stays moist. If it's very humid where you live you may not need to do that, but in my well-ventilated Montreal apartment in the winter it's needed. I use an avocado oil spray for this.
Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.

Divide the dough

After the dough has risen, knead it lightly again to get the excess air out.
Divide the dough into individual pieces. How many pieces is really up to you, I used to make 8 pieces but now I make 6 because I like my naan relatively thick and chewy.
Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.
Warm your cast-iron pan while the dough is resting. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is done at a fairly low temperature, on an electric range use 3/10. My range uses a weird system that goes from "low" to 7 so I use small element setting 2.

Stretch out and cook your naans

For each of your little balls of dough, stretch and roll it out as large as your pan will accept. It's never going to turn out exactly round, but that's the beauty of naan.
Put the naan in the pan and let it cook for 90 seconds.
Flip the naan over and cook it for 1 minute. As a tip, I usually use that minute to roll out the next naan, it's pretty much perfect timing for doing this.
Brush the melted butter on the top side of the naan and let it cool for a couple of minutes.
Put your naans away into a container that doesn't let moisture escape. Your naans will be good for about a day, after that they tend to dry up and not be so good.

Notes

This is not a diet naan. I deliberately use butter because of the taste and texture. The original recipe called for vegetable oil which would be healthier but not as delicious. Any oil with a neutral taste should do the trick, I would recommend avocado oil if you're made of money. You may be tempted to use hemp oil figuring that its nutty taste will complement the bread taste, but I tried using it just to keep the dough moist and I found it distinctly unpleasant for reasons I don't quite understand.

I got the idea of using honey to bloom the yeast one night when I wanted to add a little sweet taste to the bread, and it worked so well I never bloomed the yeast with just sugar again. You will taste a difference between different honeys.

It's important to use fine salt in the flour, as opposed to coarse salt or kosher salt. Fine salt distributes evenly through the flour with mixing, but larger grained salt doesn't, and that makes naans that have weird salty spots.

Rosemont Montreal Whisky

I’m no stranger to doing things “for a bit of a lark”, especially when alcohol is concerned. I don’t drink much anymore but I do cook, and it so happened that for about a week now I’ve wanted to make Poulet Vallée d’Auge but needed some Calvados as the recipe calls for it. Of course my local spirits store didn’t have it, so I thought I’d check out the web site, and it turns out that calvados is pretty expensive. Cheapest I found was something like $84 a bottle, and I didn’t feel like spending that much, so I looked for an alternative. I could have settled for a mickey of Cheminaud brandy but that didn’t tickle my fancy. I started to look at whiskys and this one caught my eye.

Of course as someone who tends to like all things Montreal, this had my curiosity.

Surprisingly for a Canadian whisky, this is not a rye. It is made from 80% corn, 10% wheat and 10% barley from St-Constant, on Montreal’s South Shore. It’s not a single malt, it’s a blend, and it’s a bit pricey for a blend ($48.25 for a 750ml bottle). However, at this point I felt it was worth a try for the curiosity if nothing else. Frankly I was only picking up booze for cooking, and if this is sold at the SAQ it can’t be so bad that I couldn’t use it for cooking. The 3 years barrel aging had me a little skeptical, but again I felt it would probably do the job for the dish, and, well, a native Montreal whisky was worth trying. If only for a bit of a lark.

Buying this kinda reminded me of April 2013. On March 31st I had begun to walk the West Highland Way with my great friend Jay. I had spent months preparing for this, as much as I could do after my fire-related accident and skin graft. In fact I had prepared for this walk so well that I had greatly weakened my right heel, to the point where at some time during the hike it fractured. We weren’t able to do the whole walk and used a combination of a train and a lift from a very helpful man we met at the bothys near Ardlui who took us to Crianlarich to remove 30km from the route and, to be honest, compensate for my bad planning. The estimations I had made to determine where we were going to stay along the way were horribly, horribly off for the first two days of the hike. We took a train from Crianlarich to Tyndrum to shorten the trip and the 3 remaining days of walking went as scheduled… but the whole time my right foot kept getting more painful. I had picked up some diclofenac in Switzerland on the way in and I was taking triple doses just to deal. By the time we reached Fort William I could barely walk, but we were done with the hiking and heading to Ireland for a car tour so I just dealt with it.

Anyway, one thing we hadn’t done while we were in Scotland was visit a distillery (!), but there is one in Fort William at the end of the Way, the Ben Nevis distillery. At the time for some reason they weren’t doing tours but we went to the shop and I saw bottles of Loch Lomond Scotch Whisky. I knew I had to get a bottle of that. I taught myself to read at 5 with Tintin comics, and if you’re also a fan you’ll remember that Loch Lomond whisky is Captain Haddock’s drink. He’s always drinking the stuff. I wasn’t impressed by the “8 years aged” marking but it was quite cheap. And it was a bit of a lark. Well it was pretty awful and just tasted unfinished, but that didn’t stop Jay and I from drinking the whole bottle a week later in Belfast the night before we flew back to our homes.

What’s the point of this whole story? To be honest I kinda lost track of that early in the anecdote. This whisky (Rosemont) has me “feeling ways about stuff” and I feel that’s an important quality in a decent whisky.

And, well, Rosemont is a decent whisky. It’s quite smooth even when drunk neat. In fact, if I’m quite honest, it tastes a little light. However it does not have that “unfinished” taste that I detected in the Loch Lomond. It is not peated and reminds me of a highland kind of whisky. Strong hint of vanilla with a caramel finish, no unpleasant aftertaste. It has a relatively dark robe.

This one has my seal of approval. This is not a mind-blowing whisky, but it’s also not priced like one, and if you’re looking for something Canadian that tastes pretty good and won’t break the bank, I encourage you to give it a try.

Montreal, QC

Further thoughts on the trade war

A few additional thoughts on the trade war.

First, we should simply send the US Ambassador back home and not approve any replacement.

For some reason people don’t seem to be keen on the idea of placing export duties on goods. It is a good idea because Donald Trump will just give exemptions from tariffs to companies linked to himself and his friends. By using export duties we make sure that there are no exemptions, and that we get the money. It sends the message that if Trump is going to hold tariffs over everyone’s heads, we’ll make sure that they hurt Americans first.

The money from export duties can be used to fund economic support measures that may be necessary to prevent economic harm for us Canadians.

One other measure I didn’t mention is that the federal and provincial governments should be forbidden from doing any business with American companies associated with Elon Musk — Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, etc. as Musk appears to be looting and pillaging the US Treasury at this time, so any exposure to the entities linked to him may open us up for eventual ICC liabilities.

The pause in energy exports should be implemented soon, or subject to large export duties. This would ensure that we can still profit from trade with the USA without conceding anything, because that’s how you need to deal with a two-bit wannabe mob boss like Trump.

While we’re at it, we should also add Elon Musk to the list of “persona non grata” in Canada. We already have to deal with our own billionaire assholes, we definitely don’t need to import more.

How Canada can win the trade war

So Donald “frontotemporal dementia” Trump has decided to launch a trade war on Canada.

He is using fentanyl as a pretext in order to avoid having to involve Congress in this action, even though for the past 3 years US seizures of fentanyl coming in from Canada have added up to a few kilograms of the stuff. There is far, far greater cause for Canada to take action against the United States for the thousands of firearms that cross the border into Canada yearly. But that is neither here nor there.

There’s a trade war and Trump is imposing 25% tariffs on Canadian goods coming into the USA, except for oil which for some reason is only subject to 10% tariffs. This essentially cancels the previous North American free trade agreement which was negotiated by… Donald Trump.

Trump is a chaos agent who’s good at two things: breaking stuff, and running businesses into the ground. In other words, we’re not dealing with a rational force here. The doddering old fool has already said various times that he wants Canada as the 51st state. But of course that won’t be happening, and certainly not under Trump. I will personally pick up a rifle in anger to defend my country against Americans if it comes to that. And this country will fight until the last bullet has been fired. We would expect Americans to do the same if we invaded them.

Anyway, the point is that Donald’s goal is completely insane, and therefore we cannot rely on the tools with which people usually “fight” trade wars. You cannot negotiate with terrorists like Donald Trump, period. They are neither honest nor sane.

Therefore we, as Canadians, need to approach this with the idea that we need to squeeze the American economy until the Yanks do something about their crazy old fool. I don’t know, “regime change” or something.

Prime Minister Trudeau has already declared targeted retaliatory tariffs concentrating on goods manufactured in red states, which is smart, but is nothing near enough.

We need to go on the offensive and use our knowledge of current events in the USA to better target those industries that most need Canadian goods. And we need to pull the rug from under Donald’s feet.

As such I would suggest a multi-pronged approach to strike America where it would hurt the most, and make money doing it.

1- fight the US import tariffs with Canadian export duties. Trump figured that politically he can instantly kick inflation up 25% and survive. However if we impose 25% export duty on things going to the United States they will effectively rise in price by 50%, which is not tenable for the US economy. Also we get the first 25% of tax revenue, not the USA.

2- stop all energy exports to the USA. That includes electricity and oil.

3- implement 100% excise duty on any and all goods and services from companies where Elon Musk is CEO. That means Tesla vehicles, Starlink service, anything spent on X in terms of ad campaigns, etc. There are plenty of other EV manufacturers out there, and unlike Tesla they can build cars properly.

It’s only by fighting aggressively and proactively that we can defeat Donald and the Oligarchs. Let’s not waste this opportunity.

The emperor has no clothes

Dr. Philip Low, a former friend of Elon Musk who would seem to know him very well, says it was definitely a Nazi salute. But he offers a more nuanced explanation as to why.

Dr. Philip Low on LinkedIn

Elon Musk has always been a Neo Nazi.

Elon Musk “is aligned with the German neo-nazi party, opened the faucet of anti-semitism on the platform he purchased, follows neo-nazis, collaborates with neo-nazis openly, highlights neo-nazis, agrees with neo-nazi sentiment”. This has been made clear BY ELON in the posts that he’s made in Xitter, by his the moderation “policies” he’s brought to Xitter, and by his constant messing with the accounts of anyone who dares disagree with his fourth-reich ideas on the platform.
So why is anyone surprised by Elon literally doing a Hitler salute at the end of his speech on inauguration night? I’d like to say the signs were always there, but they’re not just signs, they’re fucking billboards.

Well, fuck.

Not sure what else to say really. Unless someone comes up with an explanation involving the very clever disappearance of literally millions of ballots from several states, “it is what it is”.

At least in 2016 you could argue that the people didn’t know what they were getting with Trump. That’s just bullshit in 2024.

Funny that I have a very American anecdote to illustrate what this feels like, but it’s 100% true. When I moved to the USA in 1999 (Fairview NJ) a buddy of mine came along to help out and visit New York. The day after we unloaded we get out early to go to the city, and my neighbor introduced himself. Now we both had beards at the time, and the guy opened by asking us if we were “from the House of David”, which I didn’t get right away… not wanting to antagonize the guy who lived above me I mentioned we were heading to the city, he said “what do you want to go to the city for, it’s full of [n-word]s and [sp-word]s!” I froze a little bit and realized that I really, really wasn’t in Montreal anymore and that this was the kind of new reality. I don’t remember much of what went on after, besides my handling it in my socially-anxious way of being very polite and then just kind of leaving. I vaguely remember the k-word popping up at some point in the advice he gave us. It felt almost unreal TBH. The guy was very friendly to me — he saw me as a fellow white guy — but clearly our world views were divergent, to say the least.

Today I feel largely the same way about this election as I did about that introduction to my upstairs neighbor. I really wanted to think that Eddie (not his real name) was of another generation (IIRC he was in his mid-60s) and that this kind of shocking social attitudes would change over time, But judging from the campaign that we’ve seen from Trump, the vote tells us that no, there hasn’t been any progression. There has in fact been a huge regression. And it’s not “just” a racial thing either. It’s also a victory for misogyny, transphobia and hate in general.

It’s like if you visited a friend of the family you think you’ve known all your life, but then you find out that he was secretly a klan member the whole time.

Is there a silver lining to all this? There is for me, and it’s that I’m not an American. I know that the culture will cross borders like a metastasizing tumor, but at least I know that as of January 20th my life is not likely to change in a very direct way. If nothing else, I don’t have to look on my neighbors with suspicion, although that may well come here as well along with the culture.

It’s a pessimistic view, but a realistic view. But, what do I know? My take on things as expressed previously was so wrong it’s practically embarrassing (but I’m leaving it up).

i want to believe poster, seen in "X-Files". — Me too, Mulder. Me too.

I really wanted to believe that America was better than this.

Author: tony

On the passing of Scott Adams

Like this:

An expensive job to accept

Like this:

What I got for Christmas

Like this:

My daily bread