Yes, I love America, and I love being an American. Best country in the world, bar none. And our history is mostly pretty damn glorious, to be honest. I’m not saying America is a perfect nation. We have our problems, yes, but I’ve never believed in the possibility of a utopia this side of heaven. So I’ll take what we have. Gladly.
When it comes to what the Pope has to say to reporters on planes, I really don’t care. I’m not a Catholic who places much importance on papal one-offs. And I certainly don’t place any importance on whatever the agenda-driven pundits want to make of off-the-cuff papal sound-bites. Btw, same thing goes for presidential sound-bites from Air Force One. With the Pope, I pay attention to encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, which are highly edited and intentionally nuanced documents that must be digested slowly and in context. It’s a different way of getting information, completely alien to the way people process the disposable “content” from YouTube and social media and talk radio and “The View”.
Here’s some techno-babble: I’ve used Linux for a couple of decades now. I love Linux. I used to run Arch Linux, but when the AUR got hacked recently I decided to migrate back to MX Linux (the lazy man’s Debian). I recently tried Nixos, but I couldn’t get it to do all the things I wanted, and I just didn’t have the patience to figure it all out. Maybe some day. I still use X11, but I’m keeping an eye on Wayland development. So for now, it’s MX Linux (the tried and true) with sysvinit.
Am I a Linux expert? Naw. I know just enough to use the terminal and write bash scripts that do all sorts of useful things. I actually prefer a highly customized Fluxbox WM (no, really) to all the eye-candy DEs and WMs (minimalism, baby). And I do everything with custom keybindings (including tiling and workspace switching). So I’m not really a nerd yet. I’m still just a nerd wannabe. Even so, I love Linux. It’s all about choice and control. I mean, it is MY beloved obsolete, low-spec laptop, after all. Yes, I bought a super-cheap HP laptop at Walmart fifteen years ago, and I’m still using that laptop today.