Have you ever heard the phrase “like minded individuals”? I’m sure you have. It’s become a sort of buzzphrase. Anytime someone wants to join a group, they say they want to meet like minded individuals. Why do you want to go to see the sports team? “I want to meet like minded individuals.” Why do you belong to that Facebook group? “I wanted to get to know like minded individuals.” Who are you looking for on this dating website? “Sexy like minded individuals who like The Office.” When I see this, my brain automatically translates it to “closed minded individuals”.

Depending on the success or failure of President Trump’s legal cases, Joe Biden is set to be the next president. During a speech recently, President Elect Biden mentioned that we need to consider the other side of the political spectrum as our opponents, not our enemies. This mirrors what I’ve been saying for years. We need to debate ideas, not people.

I was raised in a very conservative family, in a very conservative town. I grew up listening to how the Republicans were the adults. The party of principles. The law and order party. My parents would say that the older I got, the more conservative I would become. Time, however, has shown that the older I get, the more I despise the Republican party.

Many people talk about the political spectrum. I’ve been meaning to address this for months, but never got around to it. Recently Bill Maher offered his thoughts, and pointed out that the “left is the same as the right” is a false equivalency. While I agree with him for the most part, I think he (and most pundits) have left out one important fact. We are far more alike than it seems.

There’s something that has bothered me for a while. It isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a societal issue. It’s the idea that words should fit a narrative, instead of the narrative being built on language.

A few days ago, I posted a rant that mentioned how nerds don’t like change. To prove that I truly can complain about anything, I’m now going to rant about the exact opposite position. Today, I’m going to talk about how a certain subset of nerds need to embrace change.

How the fuck did the Republicans in the US go from “watch out for the reds” to “hey, Russia’s not that bad”, in less than one hundred years? Seriously? We spent decades in a Cold War stalemate with the Russians, which was a giant chess game where the world was our chess board. Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy became infamous for hunting down suspected Russian sympathizers, because he saw them as potential threats to our national security. Yet now, our president surrounds himself with people who aren’t just sympathetic to the Russians, but who actively worked with them. What the fuck happened?

Earlier this month, I posted an article about how I thought Christianity and Conservatism were contradictory ideas. This time, I’m going to talk about two more antithetical ideas. Those ideas would be patriotism and revolutionary… ism.