politics ⁽²⁾

A day after the election a coworker stood outside my office and exclaimed "They're putting up riot fences in Chicago!" with a palms-up shrug and "just say'in" smirk.

He didn't return later to follow up: "A few hundred people protested. No riots. No attempts to overturn the election, even though a certain candidate was adamant that the result couldn't be trusted..."

I do not know if his media diet puts blinders on reality for him, or if he just wasn't interested in parsing that the precautions taken weren't causally linked to a mandatory riot.

So far I haven't responded to any office banter with my own thoughts on what it means for a self-described aspiring dictator to be given an opportunity to execute on his stream-of-conscious whims. I hope that it stays that way, since I like working with this group in spite of the proudly ignorant hot-takes in the office.

Chatter from outside my office door today: "Their whole pitch was he's literally Hitler, get some better material." "We saw what Trump would do for 4 years and it wasn't bad, so we already know how it'll go haha." And a silver lining quote from…