Hopefully, this will torch any dreams of getting me to run for political office.

It happens roughly every 2-4 years, but someone (sometimes from both major parties) gets the idea to ask me about running for political office.  The difference in this particular election cycle… I genuinely entertained it.

But as I sit here in a Zoom meeting listening to experts and consultants trying to give their advice to all the prospects entertaining running, it becomes increasingly clear to me that politics and political office could never be my domain without significant changes, changes that are not likely to ever happen in my lifetime.

To begin, I am not a salesman.  Anyone who has seen me trying to sell my books knows that.  Unfortunately, a massive part of the current political environment is about selling yourself to donors and to specific people.  Then it involves being a general annoyance calling people or visiting them at their homes unsolicited.

I simply can’t do it, and unfortunately, it’s a necessary and essential part of getting into office.  You need to be a door-to-door salesperson before you can be a politician.

How many out there actually like door-to-door salespeople?  But perhaps it is necessary because of the second problem, and one that is definitely a “me” problem.

See, any political campaign I were to be a part of would have to reckon with my publicly stated contempt for the “Average American Voter.”  I think the “Average American Voter” is, to be entirely blunt, an amoral, dithering idiot, and I am not willing to handwave it away by blaming our media or influencers or social media or whatever.

I’m going to dial back the clock to a memory of my early life, as I was waiting for a parent/teacher conference with my mother and father (one of the few times my father actually went to one of those meetings).  Anyway, my parents strike up a fascinating discussion with another family waiting, one that involved them angrily talking about that “uppity [insert racial slur that starts with an ‘n’ and ends with a hard ‘r’ here] taking all their money and giving it to the other [repeat racial slur here].”

Now, you may think, “Well, of course!  Fox News poisoned the well for Obama in 2008, and those anxious voters were merely repeating those talking points!”

Which might be true… if I wasn’t talking about Rev. Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984, which predates Rush Limbaugh’s prominence and Fox News by about a decade.

See, I know better.  Fox News didn’t make us this way.  Leftist cranks on YouTube didn’t make us this way.  Twitter or TikTok influencers didn’t make us this way.  We have always been this way; the only thing our media did was realize that the money wasn’t in telling us what we needed to hear.  The money was in telling us what we wanted to hear.

At least, for the politically invested.  The rest of us never wanted to know how anything works, don’t want to know how anything works, and frankly never will want to know how anything works.  Even better, we will get righteously angry at anyone who tries to tell that it’s kinda important to at least have a rudimentary understanding of how things work.

That is the “Average American Voter;” an incurious dolt that either by inability or unwillingness, has barely any clue what they are voting for except for the “vibes” they get, which often have no attachment to reality.  Damn near every single one of us in that “average” class has constructed an absolutely nonsense world where shadowy secret cabals are warping society to self-serving ends… while the people actually warping society work in broad daylight to the cheers of the masses that would rather blame Jews, or Muslims, or trans people, or centrists, or communists, or lizard people, or [insert whatever conspiracy you wish here].

I… simply can’t play to that.  I don’t have the temperament or the patience.

So how would I want to run a campaign?  You mean… the way that will never work?  Simply put, it would be a completely low-pressure campaign.  I wouldn’t robo-call, I wouldn’t go door to door.  I’d have weekly “town halls” if you will in whatever place would want to host me.  It would all start years in advance, not months, building the trust in the citizens so that I wouldn’t need to robo-call or knock on doors, interrupting people’s family time or dinner or whatever.  It wouldn’t be tied to any party, at least not initially. 

The goal wouldn’t be appealing to any partisanship initially, it would be finding out what was important to the people, learning and teaching how to go about changing it, and then once I knew what the people wanted, had their trust as a good faith actor, then I’d appeal to a party that best fit those desires meshed with what I’d be willing to pursue.

It would never work because that’s not what people want.  We want this mess of a reality show that we’ve had since the turn of the century, and I’m tired of listening to the griping of people pretending they don’t.

https://defector.com/resonate-podcast-festival

The article itself chronicles the rise and inevitable fall of the Podcast Boom, as defined by the Resonate Festival, and how ironically it is perhaps in a better place now that all the big money interests are gone and they are allowed to simply be themselves.

I drew a different lesson from it, though. I saw a collection of people desperate to find some handhold for their passion project to make money and allow them to continue doing it. Podcasts have merely become the latest creative venture where people are reckoning with a depressing reality of humanity and the societies we build around themselves.

“Podcasts are dead?” The average human asks. “But I listen to Joe Rogan every day!”

That is the painful truth that quite literally every creative medium faces eventually. Just like books. Just like artwork. Just like movies. Just like television. Video games are right in the middle of that devastating sorting. Streamers are getting beaten with that reality right now like it’s a mafia shakedown.

It happens to all of us.

The discovery that the average human being could not give one single solitary fuck about creative work, with the exception of a handful of rather generic, unchallenging examples that they can nod their head to, not require a terrible amount of thought, and give them a momentary distraction before they jump back into the rat race that is their daily lives.

It is nigh impossible for anyone other than those few examples to ever make a living solely on creative work, and often times the people that do are more lucky to get that critical opportunity than simply being so good they can’t be denied the spotlight. Sure, about twenty gazillion people listen to Joe Rogan. A million billion people will happily read something from John Scalzi or Stephen King. They’ll gleefully line up to watch the next big film starring one of the Wilson brothers (I actually have forgotten just how many of them are in Hollywood right now). Hideko Kojima could be the producer of “Kojima Shits on a Plate” and have approximately seven million people desperately asking if it comes with a “Smell-o-Vision” feature.

(I want to be clear that I’m not attempting to particularly drag anyone I’m naming here. Another harsh truth that the desperately creative don’t like to face is that there are very, very few genuinely awful creators who don’t know their craft at the top of any given heap. They are more than great at what they do, even if they rose to prominence due to things outside of their creative skill set. Time to cope and accept it, Mr. I Got 17 Subs via Spotify.)

But 99.9% of the people who try their hand at creativity are simply never going to make enough and get enough of an imprint for it to their path to a comfortable life. That’s the reality, and no amount of social or economic upheaval is going to unlock more slots in the collective interest of human kind. It’s an exclusive club, and you are overwhelming unlikely to ever get an invite. That simply has to be okay, because that’s not going to change.

Now, I’m not trying to deter anyone from creating. That would be… (looks back at his bibliography) rather hypocritical. If you are willing to tear yourself apart to scream into a void, go for it. Just don’t expect anyone to listen. Don’t expect anyone to particularly care. If you get lucky, get that shot, and find a hand hold to build from, go for it, don’t look back, and don’t apologize for your good fortune.

But don’t spam social media with your links. Don’t be a nuisance trying to advertise yourself to a public that doesn’t give a fuck. Don’t be a shit heel trying to drag down anyone you think “got lucky,” thinking that it’ll help you advance in any tangible way.

And get off my lawn.

Metaphorically, of course. I don’t have a lawn. I live in a moderate apartment in a suburban commercial district.

So, it turns out that the price for the new Kirby Air Riders has been released, and boy, are some people on social media not very happy that it clocks in at the $70 price point. This is not at all surprising to me. In my almost five decades on this earth, I have seen this unique Five Stages of Grief play out specifically twice (to the former Blizzard developer that snarled at me about it, no this isn’t some “nostalgia” speaking, I was no snot-nosed kid the last two times this happened; I was a grown ass man paying for my own stuff and my memories are very clear).

From the era where games were literally all over the place (those Super Nintendo ads from the early 90s that have game prices anywhere from $35 to $90+ aren’t fake folks, they are very, very real), to the early days of standardized prices, to the bump to $60 in the early aughts, to the now $70 bump… gamers have always bristled when the prices went up. Hell, this current grousing isn’t even particularly worse. So, if I seem dismissive of it to some small degree, it’s for a reason. This isn’t new, and there’s nothing particularly “fresh” about this current age of protest that tells me it’s going to be particularly different this time around.

At least, not specifically in gaming. Economic pressures as a whole are a different tale that has yet to be fully told.

It’s also a big part of the reason why “taking a side” on this isn’t as easy as both “sides” want it to be, because there are legitimate reasons on both sides, in a way that wasn’t exactly true the last few times this happened.

Let’s start with how the industry’s price increases are valid. Yes, it is very true that games and game hardware has not kept up with inflation over the last twenty-some-odd years. Just like with the bump to $60 as the industry standard, there comes a point where a static price point simply becomes untenable, and the industry probably held out longer than it should have.

And I say that because it is very clear that there’s a degree that the complaints are empty. Contrary to what gamers want to believe, people are willfully spending more than they ever have on their games, even adjusting to inflation, thanks to how “free-to-play” games are happily fleecing gamers far more harshly than up front prices ever did. The same community complaining about $70 cover prices generally has no problem dropping $100 a pop on a gacha system slot machine (though they don’t hesitate to complain about it).

They also gripe about $80 games… yet happily spent $60, then $10, then $15, then $20 on increasingly robust DLC packages. This isn’t economic uncertainty speaking here… it’s mere sticker shock, and I personally don’t find that a particularly compelling argument from people who absolutely have the means to pay the extra cost (which I would suspect is a significant majority of gamers).

There is also the simple reality that hobbies are expensive, and gamers honestly get off pretty close to the easiest on that score. Name any hobby, of any slant, in any area of interest, and hoo boy, if you think the prices of games are problem…

Just ask any avid hiker about the costs of just being able to fucking walk through the wilderness. If you are going to be invested in something to the point that you want to genuinely enjoy that experience, it’s simply going to cost you a lot of money. There is a massive degree that it is, to put it bluntly, unavoidable, and a reality that said hobbyist has to accept.

Now, with all that said, there’s no small degree that the arguments of the industry are more than a little bit of bullshit as well. While it’s true that gamers ask for more than they ever did, game developers and studios and publishers overplay that desire.

“Gamers want 8k/120fps with photorealistic 3D effects… etc. etc.”

Do we, though? Do we really? The biggest hardware hit of the last generation didn’t even have 4k capability. Hell, it couldn’t even run a lot of its games at its stated max performance of 1080p. And the “most powerful console of its time” finished in such a distant third that its publisher now is trying to sell their software subscription service to anyone willing to host it.

“Games require so many more people and take so much more time that prices have to reflect that…”

Does it though? One of the best games of the year sold for $50 with a team of (if I recall correctly) 30 developers, not including the contracted work by voice actors and whatnot (which most publishers don’t count in their employee roster anyway).

While I am dubious that smaller teams producing smaller games with less development time sold for less is a replicable answer across the entire industry (play time became a selling point in the “golden age” of gaming because gamers rejected that idea in the 90s and 2000’s), it is certainly possible to deliver a premier experience with less overhead, and its been done fairly frequently.

And finally, there is the reality that the purchasing power and disposable income for a lot of gamers hasn’t meaningfully increased over the years. I am not convinced that group is a majority by any stretch (again, people are genuinely ponying up despite the increases), but its a group that certainly exists, and doesn’t like the idea that the industry is leaving them behind. They can see the writing on the wall here, and that they are being priced out of the games they loved as children as those companies chase the disposable income of those higher up the purchasing ladder.

Yeah, all those words to say… I don’t know if there is a simple answer to this problem. I’d say that there really can’t be a solution until the Great Revolution overthrows this late-stage capitalist world… but considering how poorly communist governments tend to treat games (or any artistic expression, for that matter), there might not be a particularly satisfactory solution on the other side, either.

There’s a degree that this obsession is understandable. We are desperate for an answer. Something we can do that will sway enough people in our direction. That we must have made a mistake, and that if we just do [x] or [y] different, that will be enough!

But let me offer this possibility: What if “messaging” and “strategy” don’t actually matter as much as we want it to, and all these beatings we’re giving each other (and ourselves) aren’t going to really make that much difference?

Strategy and messaging is fine and all, but it all hinges on a potentially dangerous assumption. That the units in play are actually competent enough to understand the message, and cares enough to take it to heart. It is not the slightest bit clear that the “Average American Voter” is either of those things.

Imagine sitting down at a chess board, and you discover that half of them are Monopoly pieces, another seven are actually glued to the board, the two bishops are both on black squares, and four of the pawns are actually on the other side of the board.

At that point, any strategy you might have had needs to go out the window.

Oh, and every five turns, the rules change into an entirely different game. The “Average American Voter” is not only dreadfully incurious, they also have the object permanence of a demented goldfish that had meth sprinkled into its tank. What they care about now is likely not what will matter to them five weeks from now. And frankly, all it would take is one squirrel with its tail on fire running past them, and all your carefully crafted “messaging” will matter slightly less than fuck all.

So, my advice? Take a deep breath. Don’t hurt yourself or others. There’s a degree that you can do “everything right,” and it’s just not going to sink into the heads of a good chunk of people. Worrying too much about messaging right now is a fool’s errand. We don’t have to do this to ourselves.

If Charlie Kirk wanted people to speak kind of him in death, he probably should have tried not being a worthless, vile, antagonistic, miserable, deplorable piece of rancid pig shit in his life.

I’m not even going to pretend to mourn the death of a man who up until the day he died held the belief that people dying to gun violence was an “unfortunate” acceptable cost for the right to bear arms. Though I suppose one could say that he died for his beliefs, I guess. That’s more than most of his ilk can claim. So, I guess he has that going for him.

And I’m certainly not going to mourn his death when other far more deserving victims that damn day were shot in a school in Colorado. I also think there was another shooting incident elsewhere, but my short digging couldn’t find mention of it thanks to Charlie Kirk burying pretty much all other news outlets in horrible pandering to some sort of comity that he absolutely did not deserve.

I’m also not going to try and shame the reaction from a growing number of the left celebrating the monster’s demise. I really don’t give a shit how uncouth “polite society” might think it is. The amount of political violence aimed towards the left is so tilted against them, that I am not at all surprised that a relatively large segment is going to cheer it finally turning the other way.

This is the world that the right wing created, so the idea that they are appalled that the left would finally start pushing back with the same sort of bitterness and bile should not be the slightest bit surprising. Patience and understanding runs thin over time, and this has been an environment that the political right wing in America has been shaping for a very long time.

Though I strongly suspect, like most of these amoral cretins that perpetuate these shootings, we’re likely to discover that trying to plot their political leanings will be a lesson in futility. The sort of person that decides that shooting someone dead is the next rational step in their lives likely holds very little rational beliefs at all, with the only consistent trait among them of being shaped by the cult of violence that is increasingly finding purchase in every corner of American life and society.

So no, I neither celebrate nor mourn the life and death of Charlie Kirk. He doesn’t deserve my, or anyone’s sympathy. He doesn’t deserve mine, or anyone’s, sorrow. To put it more crudely, fuck Charlie Kirk, the horse he rode in on, and the casket he leaves with. Good riddance, and rest in piss, asshole. You, at least, got exactly what you wished for; which is something I can’t say for most of the victims of gun violence in this country.

If there is one thing that I mourn beyond those who did lose their lives tragically yesterday (it’s actually not entirely clear if anyone in Colorado has died outside of the shooter, because even trying basic current updates for that gets Charlie Fucking Kirk news spit back out by the goddamn AI algorithms), it’s that I already know where this political violence takes us, and it is nowhere good.

As satisfying as it feels to learn that the vile gun advocate died due to gun violence, absolutely no one is going to have the epiphany that all of this is heading towards a massive cliff, and once this train flies over the edge, it’s going to lead to a whole lot more people across all walks of life, winding up dead with their blood flowing in the streets.

The tit-for-tat has only started. Now begins the escalation.

Good luck, America. We’re gonna need it.

Maybe.

Possibly.

At least, according to right wing rumor mills. But that rumor is all that left-leaning social media needed to get lost all up in their feelings, and reveal more about themselves than they realize.

Now, as far as Chelsea Clinton goes, I know next to nothing about her. I don’t know anything about her politics. I don’t know if she even has any intention of actually running for any office, much less Jerry Nadler’s seat in New York. I also don’t care. I wouldn’t care if she was running for office in Michigan (the state that I live in).

See, I’m not afraid of names. My view is that anyone who wants to run for office should run. If Chelsea Clinton has problematic politics (the fear of which seems based entirely on her last name than anything she has ever said), and the primary voters select her anyway, that tells me we have a problem with the electorate.

But I suppose I can be flippant about that because I already know that’s true. The electorate of the United States of America (and honestly pretty much anywhere) is filled with profoundly shitty people who hold extremely shitty views of the world around them. I also know that these people aren’t “brainwashed” or “manipulated” or “misled” or “distracted” or whatever. People aren’t empty vessels in which shitty content is poured into and mixed. Humans, in general, are broken in so many ways that it can be relatively easy to weaponize them for whatever cause you want.

And that is what has my fellow left-leaners scared. Deep down, despite all their bluster, they know they are a minority. They know damn well that they don’t represent more than a significant minority of the public no matter how much they claim that there are a legion of closet socialists just waiting for the right message. We just hate admitting it to ourselves, because that admission would require there is long-term work to be done, and if there is one thing the trust-fund babies who fuel the leftist and progressive themes on social media hate more than liberals… it’s work.

That’s the “Progressive Problem.” It has nothing to do with our message. It has nothing to do with the spats with “libtards” and “dirty centrists.” It’s that we don’t want to do the ground level work to make our minority a majority. It’s because then we’d have to accept there are, in fact, good faith criticisms of the model we propose. We’d have to acknowledge that things could go very wrong with our model, and actually do the fucking work to address those problems. We’d have to acknowledge that (gasp!) an all-or-nothing approach is a terrible approach to pretty much anything in life!

It would also require us to acknowledge that we fall victim to the exact same flaws of personality that we scoff at others for falling for, and that a cadre of very loud “fauxgressives” with bullhorns posting breathless screeds about Chelsea Clinton on BlueSky are probably really poor figureheads for any sort of political movement.

Now, let’s get this out of the way. Empires fall. Nothing is forever. Societies and power structures collapse. That much is inevitable. Sometimes, it even needs to happen. There is no such thing as a benevolent empire, and sometimes for the good of greater civilization, an empire simply has to be torn down.

But, contrary to what Mr. Kemp wants you to believe, they are never particularly “good” things for those within the empire except for a small cadre of people who wind up seizing power, and they sure as hell are never “good” for the common folk.

See… there’s a reason why the people who live to tell the tale of the collapse of an empire tend to be the “1%” as he calls them. Because they are the ones with the means and privilege to survive said collapse. It’s not because history is written by the victors in this case… it’s because the victors are merely the ones who can write the history.

“Anyone could have survived the house burning down,” says the man who just emerged from his fireproof bunker. “I did it, after all! These corpses were merely unlucky or didn’t do what they needed to do!”

The sort of people who could tell the truth about the collapse are either dead, or struggling even harder to survive because the infrastructure they counted on has vanished entirely. They don’t have the time, means, energy, or opportunity to chronicle the disaster all around them. The archaeology of ancient empires frequently note how much worse their lives become in the aftermath.

And there’s another reason why you never see glorious socialist societies emerge from the wreckage of great empires… and it has nothing to do with the 1%. It has to do with the fact that humans in general simply don’t behave the way we think they should.

In times of great stress… people don’t turn to each other. They don’t turn to the commune. They don’t rally around themselves, share and share alike. At least, not in any meaningful numbers. They turn to the strongman. They turn to the “great leader.” They turn to the master manipulator who tells them what they want to hear; that they don’t have to change, and gives them a target of revenge for their despair.

It’s why the most common government to emerge from an empire… is well… another authoritarian empire (and often several). If they wind up “better,” it’s more by accident or that diminished power from the fragmented societies means they simply can’t do as much damage as their predecessor.

Listen, I get it. I understand that there is a desire to look at the crumbling American Empire, and dream that some greater society will emerge once the walls tumble down. History, and human nature, suggest that it will not. If a better, more equitable, and more socialist society emerges from the remains of the United States, that would be a far greater example of American Exceptionalism than anything in the nation’s history.

I strongly suspect if the “Epstein List” had anything particularly salacious beyond what had already been leaked… someone clout-hunting would have leaked it.

As for the entire “Epstein was murdered” angle, I have yet to see anything particularly compelling about the evidence that can’t be explained by “shitty prison doing shitty prison things.”  Would I be surprised that a shitty prison doesn’t exactly have the best surveillance?  No.  Would it surprise me at all that they still use crappy equipment from the 90s?  Nope.  Would I be astonished that the guards wouldn’t exactly be invested in making sure a pedophile in their midst stayed among the living? Not at all. Am I surprised that Trump is trying to cover this all up because all of it makes him “look bad?”  Not in the slightest.

At the end of the day, I have to believe one of two scenarios.  Either a secret cabal of wealthy and powerful individuals who could have offed Epstein at any number of opportunities decided to choose the worst possible time when he was under the biggest microscope of his life to kill him and guarantee exactly the sort of scrutiny that they spent literally decades trying to avoid, going through an elaborate scheme that would inevitably involve people outside their cabal that had no particular reason to stay silent…

… Or a dude used to a billionaire’s lifestyle was looking at a lifetime in a shitty prison with all his allies, clients, and associates now pretending they never knew him, and decided to check out early while creating exactly the sort of chaos and scrutiny his clients sought to avoid.

I dunno, the most likely scenario seems pretty obvious to me.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have some thoughts on this.

On a purely straightforward, taking solely on its face sense… sure?  There is a lot of truth to this… but there’s also a lot of problems with this stance.

Something I like to say about Democrats is that we aren’t particularly a majority in a traditional political sense.  We are a majority of minority interests.  And yes, there is a degree that Democrats must have a very big tent to have the numbers in order to enact anything.  Yes, such a coalition is going to have a very broad swath of interests, and more than a handful are going to wind up mutually exclusive of others.

(See also: the Gaza and Israel conflict; even in completely good faith, that is a fault line in which what one side wants frequently requires you to outright dismiss the wants of the other.)

But…

There are some groups that some of our caucus want to bring in that have not been shy about what they want from the Democratic coalition, and frankly, what they want should be an utter dealbreaker, even if it means we don’t have the numbers to win elections.

Case in point, every time a politician says we need to court “the white working class?”  Fuck that shit.  The “white working class” hasn’t exactly been secret about what they want.  Sure, they make mouth noises about how they could accept “Democratic Socialism,” but you better not be giving anything to those “people who don’t deserve it,” ya know… like black people, or trans people, or gay people, or unmarried women, etc.

Or when a politician talks about “courting moderates.”  Yeah, we’ve already fucking done that.  The right flank of the Democratic Party are people who would be conservatives if it wasn’t for the outright vile bigotry and deplorable vileness of the current GOP.  Anybody worth poaching from the center right has already been fucking poached.  You’re looking at a rounding error number of voters at this point.

And there’s a degree that I get it. The nature of such a coalition is going to lead to most of us being largely unsatisfied with the end result of all the jockeying and pandering and compromise.  The problem is rather than accept that, a critical mass of us would rather embrace conspiracy theories and that a minority of the party has somehow managed to seize the levers and are using it solely for their gain at the expense of everyone else in the coalition.

And it’s not just “one side” that does this, either.  There is just as much centrist bellyaching when a “progressive” wins (just listen to some of the whining in the aftermath of this NYC mayoral primary… or how AOC deviously uprooted an establishment Dem by… (checks notes)… actually interacting with constituents of her district and earning their trust ) as there is when leftists insist that “centrist Dems” like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders twice with the nefarious scheme of… (checks notes)… getting millions more primary votes than Bernie Sanders.

A lot of the times when I hear talking heads mumble about “expanding the coalition” what I hear is, “I would rather waste my time looking for some mythical silent majority of secret socialists or secret liberals than try to work with the people already in the tent.”

Nintendo doesn’t give a shit about continuity, and frankly they never have. Hell, they slapped a Mario skin over an already existing game and made it all an elaborate dream sequence, because why the fuck not?

More recently, they declared “All Zelda timelines converge on Breath of the Wild” with no reason or explanation given. Anyone who gives one tenth of one shit about how any given Nintendo IP fits together has already given about a tenth of a shit more concern about it than ANYONE at Nintendo.

So if you think they give even an angstrom of concern about how a young Pauline fits into the “currently established Donkey Kong lore,” then boy do I have a surprise for you.

They don’t. And neither should you. Relax and enjoy yourself, you goddamn dweebs. And get off my lawn.