The 2024 election made me suicidal for a few days because I didn't want to live in a country so fundamentally rotten that it would choose someone like the orange taint as its leader, let alone twice. (My mother's response to this was, and I quote, "You could move to Costa Rica.") I still don't, and the destruction that the orange taint has wrought on crucial government institutions, human rights, human quality of life, and the economy has more than validated my futile warnings to the dipshits who voted for him. (I predict that in a few years, most of them will mysteriously forget that they ever supported him, but fortunately their Facebook and Twitter posts will set the record straight.) Even though his human rights abuses haven't affected me yet, and I can cope with him making everything more expensive because I've spent my entire adult life in poverty and have a semi-ascetic lifestyle, the last year has been hard because I suffer from a disorder called "empathy." I don't know why. It's not hereditary, that's for damn sure.

But at the same time, I've really enjoyed protesting and connecting with people who share my values and don't support Nazis, and my cautious optimism has grown as it's become clear that the orange taint and the ass-kissers he surrounds himself with are far too stupid to win in the long term. I've wanted to be optimistic all along, but I didn't want to delude myself. I don't subscribe to the delusion that the United States can't become a dictatorship because it's inherently superior to other countries. Naturally, I had a much more positive response to the 2025 elections, in which the orange taint's preferred candidates got hammered like Pete Hegseth at a 10 AM meeting. I believe this proves that Americans are finally done with his shit, and I believe it foreshadows a blue tsunami in 2026. Democrats obviously suck in their own ways, but because they meet the very low bar of not supporting Nazis, I'm rooting for them to curb-stomp Republicunts back into the 1950s, which is where they want to be anyway. Republicunts will, of course, try every voter suppression and gerrymandering tactic they can think of, and it will take hard work to overcome that, but they don't have the power to rig or cancel elections altogether. We now have proof.

I also believe Zohram Mamdani, the new democratic socialist mayor of New York City, foreshadows the Democrat Party being dragged kicking and screaming to the left and forced to actually fight for normal people and address the rot that runs through this country. Voters chose Mamdani over a mainstream Democrat, Andew Cuomo, first in the primaries and then in the general election when the latter ran as an independent and got endorsed by Trump and Musk because they knew the Republicunt didn't have a chance in hell. Cuomo previously served thrice as governor of New York even though I've never heard of anyone who likes him, he forced nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients and then intenionally undercounted the resulting deaths, and he resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations, which probably helped Trump and Musk accept him. ​On the other hand, Mamdani is a socialist with scary socialist ideas like checks notes free public transportation. You know, I experienced free public transportation for over a decade in the socialist hellhole of Logan, Utah. I don't know how I ever survived. The buses were always exploding, and people who owned cars were always complaining about having to pay taxes so that lazy freeloaders could get to work. Just kidding, Logan is very proud of its free public transportation, and when the city council considered charging fares, they dropped the idea after an overwhelmingly negative response.

Anyway, yeah, I know nothing is "free." I'm not stupid. I have to pay taxes regardless, so I'd much rather pay for socialist programs like free public transportation than for bombs that are used to murder Palestinian children. Most conservatives, excepting the most extreme nutcases who want to defund everything, have a double standard between existing programs and proposed programs. I don't hear them complaining about paying taxes so that other people can borrow library books for free, but if someone suggested that idea today, they'd lose their shit. But the narrative has shifted a lot within my short lifetime. When Obama (who's center-right by the standards of normal countries) was accused of being a socialist, it was an attack that he had to defend against. Now people come out and identify as socialists, and young people who are tired of being raped by our current system love them. I don't identify as a socialist, but I'm tired of being raped by our current system too. I'll take a socialist over a fascist every time.

The only position I got to cast a vote for was the mayor of Midvale. To my delight, Salt Lake County has ranked-choice voting, which should be the standard everywhere. Brandee Boyer was my first choice because of her focus on the needs of renters. Incumbent Dustin Gettel, a gay man who defied a bullshit state law and refused to remove a Pride flag from his office, was my second choice, and I wasn't upset when he won (though I was a little irked that all the incumbents won, which suggests to me that people didn't take this election seriously). David Fair was not a choice. With the option to vote for multiple candidates, I took pleasure in not filling in a bubble for him at all. At the very beginning of the candidates' town hall, it was a red flag that he wanted to expand the police force, and later, he was the only candidate for any position who said that he would have the police cooperate with ICE. Fuck ICE. The other six people basically said "Fuck ICE" in polite, professional ways. Anyway, I'm sure 2026 will continue to suck, and democracy will not have an uninterrupted string of victories, but there is hope. I believe I came to this Earth at this time to help at this critical juncture. I'm doing my best, dang it.

After I canceled my Spotify Premium subscription, I earned the right to encourage other people to boycott platforms that run the racist ICE recruitment ads. I did so in a Reddit post. I acknowledged that boycotting them all completely may be unfeasible; for example, I don't see how I can cut YouTube videos out of my life, but I do feel even less guilty now about using an adblocker. Monica Torres of the Huffington Post then messaged me and asked if I'd be willing to use my real name and talk about my boycott plans for an upcoming story. I agreed, but she never got back to me, apparently because she decided to use someone named Caroline Eddy instead. Oh well. I loved this line: "The company declined to answer questions about how many people have canceled their subscriptions over this ad." That means a lot of people have canceled their subscriptions over this ad, and the company is embarrassed. The article explains why these boycotts are unlikely to be as successful as the Disney boycott that saved Jimmy Kimmel's job, and that sucks, but at least willing collaborators with secret police who kidnap people, shoot priests in the head, and tear-gas children aren't getting my money.

Speaking of fascism, I watched "Truth and Treason" this week. It's an Angel Studios movie about Helmuth Hübener, the Mormon teenager who (spoiler alert) was executed for sharing the truth about Nazi propaganda. Of course, as an ex-Mormon, he's still one of my heroes. The LDS Church deserves very little credit for his heroism. Its strategy in Nazi Germany was to appease the government and avoid drawing attention to itself. Just as Mormons in the US today support the MAGA movement with no cognitive dissonance, some Mormons in Germany then supported the Nazi Party and saw no contradiction with their beliefs. In both cases, I believe this represents an abysmal failure on the part of the church. My current religion, Unitarian Universalism, is also neutral on party politics, but nobody would think for one moment that they could accept its teachings and support Trump or Hitler. As a Mormon, I was supposed to be okay with worshiping alongside racist twats because "people aren't perfect" or some crap like that, but as a UU, it's literally not an issue at all.

So of course, the movie had to include Arthur Zander, Helmuth's fanatical Hitler-loving bishop. His character can even be framed as a powerful lesson for believing Mormons, as long as they lean fully on "people aren't perfect" and ignore their belief that God himself calls every bishop. The movie ends almost immediately after Helmuth's execution, so it doesn't cover the part where Bishop Zander posthumously excommunicated him for his treason against the government. I will say that it annoys me when critics say "the church" excommunicated Helmuth. It was literally just this Nazi bishop acting on his own. After the war, the First Presidency reinstated him. I really think that whole thing should have been mentioned in the credits where, in the typical vein of historical films, we get text blurbs about what became of the main characters. It also wouldn't have hurt to mention that after the war, Zander moved to Utah, coached youth soccer, and hid when historians showed up at his house.

In the movie, Helmuth talks about his hopes that when he shares the truth with people, they'll share it with more people, and eventually everyone will refuse to comply with the Nazi regime. That obviously didn't happen. It's difficult to see if his actions had the slightest effect on the regime. But he fought and paid dearly for his principles, and 83 years later, people are watching a movie about him and getting inspired. He reminds me of my own ambition in resisting my own fascist regime. I can't say whether my individual actions are making a tangible difference in this world  - I certainly hope so - but at least they're ensuring that I can live with myself when I die. Helmuth was also brilliant and full of potential, and I wonder what he would have accomplished if he'd grown up. It's tempting to think he would have deconstructed his way out of the LDS Church, but it's just as likely that he would have rivaled Hugh Nibley as an apologist and been the token German until Dieter Uchtdorf came along.

I set a goal over ten years ago to publish a blog post every week, thinking that a regular schedule would help me build up a following of people who would then buy my books. To say that strategy hasn't worked would be an understatement. Between that and me being busier than I used to be, my motivation to keep writing these things has dwindled, and I put them off to the last minute and then write anything just to have something. Last Sunday, I put it off so much that I straight-up forgot. Then I decided to give up on my original goal and stop posting altogether, at least until something came up that I had to write about. Then I changed my mind because once I broke the streak, I couldn't un-break it. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.

So today is November 2, but I'm actually going to set the date to October 31, last week, and write a post for Halloween, then write something else later today, or maybe tomorrow. And by "write a post," I mean share a YouTube video. I could introduce or describe this YouTube video, but I just don't feel like it.

I said last week that I wasn't strong enough to give up Spotify despite my misgivings about some of its behavior, but it crossed my red line when it started running ICE recruitment ads. These ads, which claim that "millions of dangerous illegals are rampaging the streets," sound like dystopian propaganda written by a first-grader, which means the pathologically stupid, fearful, and racist people who brought this regime to power in the first place must love them. The Department of Homeland Security claims that they've already led to 175,000 applications and 18,000 tentative job offers. I'm very skeptical of that. Everyone in the United States is very aware of ICE, and I highly doubt that hearing an ad for it would be the determining factor for someone to become a Gestapo cosplayer, even if they are offering bonuses. Regardless, I canceled my Premium subscription yesterday. I'm going to die someday, and how much I stand up for my principles during my limited time is more important than how much convenient music consumption I get. I'll keep using Premium for the rest of the month that I've already paid for, and then I'm not sure what I'll do. See if I can get an adblocker for the free version, possibly.

I went to a No Kings protest yesterday, of course. I think I'm going to gouge my eyes out if one more braindead MAGAt says, "If we didn't have a king, you wouldn't be allowed to protest." First of all, that's not even true. Second, the orange taint is trying very hard to stop people from protesting. Third, yes, we know he isn't a king, but he clearly doesn't. Anyway, this protest at the Salt Lake Capitol was at least as big as the last one, and I think it was bigger. I'm not sure because this time I showed up early and stood on the steps, and I couldn't see the entire lawn. I was concerned that fewer people would show up because of the accidental shooting last time, but logically, since shootings happen all over this country every week, that wasn't a good reason to be scared of protesting. The march after the rally was canceled because the organizers didn't have enough safety volunteers for the size of the crowd, but a few hundred people decided to march anyway, and instead of arresting or shooting them, the police diverted traffic for them. (I say "them" because I wasn't initially part of that group, but I joined it when I came across it.) That gave me a lot of hope, since we'll almost certainly reach a point where asking the government nicely to give our rights back won't be enough. (And no, I don't care that we inconvenienced drivers. A permitted march would have inconvenienced them too, and protests are supposed to be inconvenient and disruptive.)

I didn't take any pictures this time. Some people don't feel safe being photographed at protests. Myself, I don't care. I want everyone in this regime to know the depths of my contempt for them and everything they stand for. I would tell the orange taint to his face exactly what I think of him, after I spat in it. I'm grateful for the opportunity to participate in the largest protest in American history. I was born for this moment. I've never believed that anyone from my parents to the president was entitled to my deference merely by virtue of their position, and my parents' attempts to beat my "attitude" out of me only magnified it. My dad tried to invalidate my worldview as an adult by mentioning for the first time ever that I was diagnosed with "oppositional defiant disorder" as a kid, which I'm positive is a bullshit disorder, but I'll wear it as a badge of honor if it gives me the ability to stand up to fascism instead of voting for it like he does. Anyway, good job, patriots! Keep it up!

Oh, I forgot there is a picture of me after it ended.

Most of the thoughtful post I was writing got deleted when Weebly logged me out, so I don't feel like it anymore, and it will have to wait while I write about something simpler to fulfill my weekly obligation to myself.

I haven't been strong enough to stop using Spotify despite my moral disagreements with it. I seriously considered transferring to Tidal or Qobuz, which pay artists slightly more, but their playlist size limits are even smaller than Spotify's, and that sacrifice isn't worth the essentially nonexistent impact that my boycott would have on Spotify. Anyway, as messed up as it is that Spotify's CEO has millions of extra dollars to invest in an AI military technology company instead of paying artists, I'm not opposed to AI military technology if it leads to more precise killing with less collateral damage and fewer civilian casualties. So I periodically check Spotify to see if some of the songs I wish were on it that weren't on it are on it now, and usually they're not, but sometimes they are. This year, I was surprised by the appearance of "The Ballad of Bandito Chinchilla" from one of the minigames in "Thrillville: Off the Rails."

Yes, I am embedding YouTube videos instead of Spotify links. Ironic. Anyway, it seemed like a long shot, but some hero had uploaded EPs of the original songs from both Thrillville games. I've never played the first Thrillville game, so I wasn't familiar with those songs, but "Emo Skater Girl" still packs some nostalgia because it's so 2006 that it sounds like a parody of 2006.

Just the other day, I squealed with delight when Harlow's underrated self-titled 1990 debut (and only) hard rock album showed up. I trawl far and wide for music, but I probably would be unaware of this album's existence if my dad hadn't owned it. I mean, I never asked which of my parents it belonged to, but I'm 99% sure my mom wouldn't have bought it. Anyway, I don't see eye to eye with my dad on much, but I like his taste in music. (It's also thanks to him that I'm so into Roxette, the Beatles, and New Age music, especially but not limited to David Arkenstone.) Harlow's obscurity is one of those cruel twists of fate that plagues this unjust purgatory in which we live. Every song on this album is a banger or at least a bopper. As is often the case, the opening track is the ultra-banger.