My Political Views

I DON'T HAVE AN OPINION.

Having an opinion about politics is a good way to lose friends. Even if you are right and they are wrong (and who doesn't believe themselves to be right?), no amount of arguing will ever get them to see it your way, so just give up trying. No matter how much you appreciate the person and enjoy their friendship, they will always have that flaw, and one day they may suddenly and unexpectedly turn it against who you are, resulting in a falling out.

"I've got great news!", she said, "my best friend's daughter is transgender." Awesome! "Yeah she calls herself Mike and wants to date women and be a boy." 'Uh-oh, problematic language,' the very desperately trying-to-be-woke me of the time thought. "My friend won't let her transition while under her roof. I talked to my friend's daughter and she was all sad! Isn't this great?????" No, no it isn't. "So you're telling me your friend is abusing her transgender son." "What? No! She doesn't have a son, she has a daughter! My friend would never abuse her kids! WTF kind of monster are you for asking!" "What you described to me is abuse. Your friend is forbidding her son from transitioning, and you went to your trans friend to announce this and present it as 'great news'. Don't be surprised by the response you get." "You're just telling me how to vote! You're no different from the myriad friends I fell out with in the past!" I'm obviously paraphrasing - she's nowheres near smart enough to use a word like "myriad". But as sad as it was to block her, it was the right choice.

I've learned it's usually better to just shut up and take it, wait a while, and then unfriend people like that without giving a reason.

Having an opinion about politics is a good way to lose social media privileges. Just ask a certain former President. When the whole "MAGA" movement started, it seemed like a great opportunity to redirect it away from hate. "Why exclude people because of which rock they were born on? #MAGA by keeping open borders!" that sort of thing. People even started adding me to conservative groups - whether to invite me as a target for cyberbullying or they didn't read my tweets, I don't know. But then one day, guess what happens. The birdie logo social medium suddenly tells me I can't advertise with them anymore! Nor am I allowed to register a new account. Nor is there any contact info to bring this error to their attention. This is my punishment from a progressive website for making progressive posts: silenced without recourse. So I deleted my profile from that toxic website. Twuck you Fitter and everything you believe in.

Technically it's balanced out by the fact that I was fortunate on another website to not have my account silenced or deleted despite my breaking the rules by creating sock puppets and trolling the right wing. Anagrams of "I am not real" and "clearly a shill" took to the conservative groups, the former making posts full of blatant spelling errors and the latter posing as an old fashioned conservative who thought the GOP had gone bonkers and wanted to return to good old mid century traditional conservatism. Can't say either fake account achieved its goal, but "I am not real" got one person to angrily reply "WILL YOU PLEASE USE A SPELL CHECKER." It was pretty funny. In the end, though, the socks left a bad taste in my mouth, and I didn't want to get in trouble, so I threw them away.

Here's another scenario, suppose you take an interest in an ancient language, join its revival movement, and, seeing an opportunity to create some better resources, you write your own website about it. and then you're informed that it has attracted some shall we say less than admirable characters. Not wanting your website or the language you are enthusiastic about to be overrun by idiots, you create a statement to the effect that no one will be excluded based on their heritage, gender, sexuality, class, disability, or any other protected category. You want to make sure the wrong side of history types will actually read it and not just gloss over the link to the statement, so instead of a boring link text such as "our statement of inclusivity" you reverse-dog-whistle it something like "our statement about white supremacy" with grammatically correct capitalization. Then years go by, you haven't been active in the community lately, you never really finished the website, but the notice remains there, still designed to catch the attention of the bigots.

Now suppose you're looking for work, and suppose you happen to be a software/web developer. You want to show off some of what you can do, so you include a few of your websites in your resume. Yup, guess what happens next. Not everyone will click on that link, so in effect you've just marked yourself as a piece of crap by standing up against pieces of crap. Now the headhunters drop you like a hot potato after asking for your resume, and staffing agencies send you a "thank you for applying to 2983476529837 jobs but we're rejecting you" email. You've just been made to suffer the punishment for bigotry because you spoke out against bigotry.

Now some say that it's admirable to suffer for what is right, even to die for it, and maybe that's true.
But in my case, breaking my silence means being rejected by both enemies and friends.
No one wants to hear from a retard who will always send the wrong message.
Even if acting with good intentions, I would still dismally fail.
The mistake always deserves to be silenced.
So no, I don't have an opinion.