It’s a sad truth that most of our lives are pretty boring, geographically speaking. Live in one place long enough and you will develop routines, walking the same streets and patronizing the same coffee shops and generally making it easy for a simulation, should one exist, to anticipate where you will be at any given time. Randonauts hope to use this tedium to their advantage, by introducing unpredictability. They argue that by devising methods that force us to diverge from our daily routines and instead send us to truly random locations we’d otherwise never think twice about, it just might be possible to cross over into somebody else’s reality. “New information and causality can pull you out of the filter-bubble and change your life,” writes The Fatum Project, the online team responsible for the technological and philosophical framework of the movement. Even if you don’t buy into the dense thicket of theoretical quantum physics underpinning the logic of it all, going on a Randonaut-style adventure can be a lovely way to spend an afternoon.
Out of the 4288 posts across 16 sources in the 25 years since March 2000, these 451 posts were published on write.house between May 2019 and August 2019.
Toward the end of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey there is a discussion of life in the Anthropocene under the threat of the climate crisis that features a paragraph which surprised me for reasons unrelated to any of the Anthropocene, climate crisis, or even the actual subject of that paragraph.
Most of us are familiar with the story of the Democratic Leadership Council and its successful push to bring the party to “the center” in order to reclaim voters in thrall to Ronald Reagan. This was a fizzy period in Washington in which wonks debated terms like “centrism” and “third way” that would later become widely accepted “truths.”Some say this was a low point for liberalism, and there is something to be said for that. This was, after all, a period in which Clinton went out of his way to prove to white voters that the Democrats were not a black party. (Case in point, welfare reform).
“You’ve likely read me whining about the relative absence of bloggers referring to each other in these parts,” notes Inquiry. “But while typing the above bit expressing my tmo-presence-happiness, it suddenly hit me that such commenting potentially constitutes a sort of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in blogging contexts?”
“The final season of Mr. Robot starts airing Oct 6,” writes Dan Barrett. “This means that if you’re planning on rewatching the show in the lead-up to the new season, you’re advised to start now.” Way ahead of you, there, Dan: I started my full Mr. Robot rewatch on Amazon immediately upon finishing my full Humans rewatch, and I’m just about to finish up the first season. What am I waiting for in its fourth and final? I’m waiting to see which character other than Elliot Alderson is going to break the fourth wall.
There are so many terrific bits in this Slate interview with David Karpf, the professor of media and public affairs on whom New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called the manager, but the best might be when Karpf describes his reaction as, “Oh my God, this guy’s never heard of the Streisand effect. What an idiot.” There’s also some great stuff (also in the interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education) not just about Karpf acknowledging his own privilege compared to the abuse other people receive but discussing the privileged power dynamics Stephens was trying to leverage, enforce, and wave in Karpf’s face.
While I get where Dave is coming from, I can’t imagine you could call yourself a news operation if you’re running around flatly stating, “For example, it’s obvious that Trump is a Russian oligarch.” He’d have better luck starting an opinion site called Occam’s Raiser. Neither “Trump is a Russian oligarch” nor “[Mitch McConnell] is owned by Moscow” is reportorial. It’s characterization and commentary.
Likely the best thing that happened today was that Alex Zielinski reported for Portland Mercury that fascist propagandist and provocateur Andy Ngo had witnessed preparations by Patriot Prayer to commit premeditated criminal acts of violence against antifa and did nothing (other than laugh about it), and within hours of the Mercury report Ngo lost his job at the nonsense website Quillette.
After months of gaffes on the 2020 campaign trail prompting even his brain surgeon to chime in and defend his mind, Biden made a pointed comment about the state of his brain over the weekend. “I want to be clear, I’m not going nuts,” Biden said during a campaign rally in New Hampshire—a comment that surely extended beyond the confusion he was trying to clear up at the time, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Thomas O’Leary says, “I was on a WordPress blog w/ 350K visits a month and making $150 per week.” Back when I was doing the widely-read Portland Communique, which ran from 2002 to 2005, I never made anything like that from reader contributions. There was no advertising on Communique, except, I think, for a brief period attempting to roll-my-own. It’s the only blogging effort of mine that should have been “monetizable” but never got there.
Since the tweet that led me there used the phrase “mediocre men”, I was hoping that this Harvard Business Review article on incompetent men becoming leaders would show me precisely how I’ve utterly failed to capitalize on my own mediocrity quite so profoundly. What I did learn was that the article itself is written by a man who works for something called the “ManpowerGroup”, and I just can’t even.
Blogs are journals, not sites. They are written, not built. The best ones have a heart that beats daily or faster. The writing itself is more conversational than homiletic (which is how I’m behaving here, in a print publication with a monthly heartbeat). That means its authors are speaking, and not just “creating content”. They speak to readers and other bloggers who speak back, through e-mails, comments or on blogs of their own. That means what each blogger says is often incomplete and provisional. Like all forms of life, blogging remains unfinished for the duration. (Site content, on the other hand, is finished at any one time, then replaced with other finished content.)
Here’s another problem with the context-free instant indication of social media engagement through likes and retweets: unless you’re liking or retweeting something posted by someone you know, you could be boosting something by an abuser, asshole, or racist. Who’s going to spend five minutes checking out a user’s history first? This sort of thing sometimes gets attention when the issue is misinformation, or even disinformation, but not so much when the issue is the overall character of the poster you don’t know. So, again, it comes down to social media needing more friction, and fewer tools designed to be innately “now”.
It seems perfectly consistent to me that someone who disdains caring and supports suffering would disagree with the contention that absolute power corrupts because “that’s only true if you aren’t capable of wielding and respecting that power” and, really, if it did corrupt “we wouldn’t have people like Elon Musk”.
Geoffrey Cain’s deconstruction of fascism for The New Republic is frustrating because he argues that circumstances today are more merely fascistic than outright fascism but the only thing from his own elemental lists that he seems to think is missing are paramilitary militias roaming the streets beating up leftists.
Dave Winer wants an E-ZPass for news sites (why the hell is it E-ZPass rather than EZ-Pass?) to make navigating multiple paywalls easier: “Collect the money if I decide to read a New Yorker or LA Times piece, even though I have’t got a subscription with either.” It’s an interesting idea that identifies one problem with the needs of both writers and readers to make sure good writing is paid for, similar to my earlier concerns that things like individual paid email newsletters (which wasn’t yet a business seem unsustainable absent some way to cross-pollinate, because who’s going to subscribe to five different email newsletters for $25/month when you frequently can get all of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Medium for less than that, especially when many of those newsletters thesmelves might be commentary sparked by Times or Post stories?
“People are coming into urban areas and they cannot be stopped,” says Chandana Mitra, an associate professor of geosciences at Auburn University, who studies the impact of heat on cities. Mitra has experienced the impact of climate change in her hometown of Kolkata, India, and is now observing it in Auburn, Alabama, and nearby Birmingham. “Everyone aspires to be in an urban area and there is chaos.”
Lots of corporations (mostly Google) have competed with Facebook for the social media colonies, and their attempts aren’t missed; but Facebook’s monopoly also beat out the divey-er venues and communal spaces which elevated their members to five minutes of fame and triple platinum albums without sponcon. Their obituaries tell us what we already know–that your feed could look a lot more interesting, more avant-garde, joyous, local, intimate, kinky, weird, and hilarious–and yes, scarier and even more hateful than it does now–thanks to varying degrees of censorship, cross-platform embeds, aesthetic customization, technopanic, and algorithm-free zones. It’s not to say that without Facebook, the whole internet would be more like a local farmer’s market or a punk venue or an art gallery or comedy club or a Narnia fanfic club, just that those places are harder to find these days.
For the last eight months, though, Twitter has largely checked out, according to some council members. In a year that has seen the company embark on a major redesign, Holmes said Twitter hasn’t solicited much advice from the very experts it asked for help. Nor was the Trust and Safety Council consulted when the company rethought a much-hyped policy on dehumanizing speech—ultimately limiting the rule just to religious groups, when the original scope had been much wider. The council has only had one scheduled call with Twitter all year, which took place recently and had no senior employees participating. “We were disappointed,” Holmes added.
A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart. They know what they know, and they don’t need to know anything else.
The reality is that there’s no actual connection between the Dayton shooter and antifascist organizing, other than the possibility that the shooter went to a protest and expressed progressive views on Twitter—something millions of people have done since Trump’s election. At the same time, the El Paso shooter left a 2,300-word manifesto that clearly outlined his goals and motivations, which were expressly white nationalist, while the Dayton shooter offered no formal insights into his motivation. The best clue as to what fueled the latter’s rage may end up being the lyrics from his “pornogrind” band, which were laced with misogynist venom and align with the ideology of the Men’s Rights and “Incel” communities.
In a sense I want to go back to the early 90s, when blogging was still a twinkle in the eye, an intuition that if we created easy ways to publish, people would do it. The power of tech is that it becomes invisible and the message of the writer, the artist comes to the front. I see the combination of art, tech and protest being a powerful thing. We’ve been here before.
Not a soccer person? Not even a sports person? You should read Abe Asher’s dispatch from last night’s Timbers game and its 33-minute protest against Major League Soccer’s ban on the Iron Front anyway. I’m not a big reader of sports reporting, either, but this sort of coverage of not just sports but context, to my understanding, is how the best of it is done.
Nate worries about not noticing the absence of a “first-rate friend” because large social networks bury us in “third-tier friends”, and wonders if the answer simply is smaller social media (although I do wonder if any platform has toyed with algorithms which prompt you to see what’s up with someone who hasn’t posted in awhile).
I’d never heard of the “land value tax”, in which the land itself is taxed at a high rate while buildings are taxed at a much lower rate or not at all, until this J. Brian Charles piece for Governing, and why the hell aren’t we all doing this? Tax lands that are lying fallow and unproductive, while lessening the burden on properties that are producing societal value in other ways, e.g. by attracting business, or providing housing and neighborhood amenities.
For what it’s worth, CJ Eller, you, of course, can follow my blog wherever it ends up; just fire up ye olde RSS reader. As for where it will be moving, I’m still torn, although as I talked about last night on Twitter, it’s not clear to me whether I’m actually conflicted or simply restless. That said, if Matt would implement date stamps on posts, which remains an absolutely baffling bit of neglect given that WriteFreely/Write.as URLs also don’t use a date-inclusive format, so there’s literally zero way for a reader to know when a directly-linked post was written, I’d be less inclined to listen to restlessness for the time being.
The only way in which “in hating on influencers” am I “hating on ourselves” is in the acknowledgment that I, too, am utterly mediocre but haven’t yet figured out a way to monetize that at the expense of fools. To quote the Leslie Knope paraphase I coined: “You’re ridiculous, and influencers is nothing.”
Ward added, “I’ve been in many a protest. I’ve been in some amazing community mobilizations against bigotry. I’ve not in my 30 years seen such an organic alignment, that was so celebratory, as Saturday. People felt empowered and not disempowered. And the fact that Joey Gibson and Joe Biggs are spending Monday working so hard to convince media and their followers that they were successful tells me how much they’re scrambling. They’ve never had to scramble to declare a win before. They ran out of gas in Portland. And I think it’s significant and I think other cities should take note of it.”
As I wait to see if Knock Knock WHOIS There is going to let me register a reserved domain for my (triumphant?) return to blogging like it’s 1999, I’ve been doing due diligence again on IndieWeb blogging platforms. The presumption is that I’ll simply move from my aborted Write House instance of the WriteFreely platform over to Write.as itself, but I’m spending some time checking up on the current state of Micro.blog. In the process somehow I ran into this fascinating thread about second-person versus third-person responses from one blogger to another.
So what’s behind the “historic” defense? “Neighborhood change can be frightening to longtime residents,” CityLab’s Laura Bliss writes. But saying “I find change scary” isn’t likely to get you very far in city halls. Instead, pleading the cause of historic preservation can become a way for residents to oppose things like new bus lanes or housing, without having to resort to self-serving arguments for protecting parking spots or cherished views. Ultimately, people too often invoke history to defend a very narrow interpretation of it: their own recent memory of a place.
The actual psychic toll on our mental health is crippling. The lost sleep, the grinding anxiety, the escalating fears don’t just represent squandered time. They start to chip away at your health and at your soul. The healthy response would be to tune it out altogether, but since actual people are actually suffering the brutal consequences, we cannot. And so here we are back in the narcissist’s loop, fueling his need to be at the center because, well, there he is at the center.
“Oregon has a history of white supremacy. We were born from a—as a white homeland. That’s how Oregon got started. And so, we have our own homegrown white supremacists. But when we have people on a national stage encouraging people to come and create violence in our community, that’s when the community must stand up and make sure that we draw a line in the sand and say no way. Again, the difference this time between some of the other protests we had is that there were clear lines of command, who was in charge, who was making decisions about who would move where, and there were also enough law enforcement and community members who were willing to deescalate situations as they arose. And that was one of the things that, really, I was thrilled about. And so, it is unhelpful to have the president or anybody else encouraging people, mislabeling antifa as the problem, when the problem is really white supremacists trying to take over our streets.”
Trump shouldn’t be living rent-free in progressives’ heads any more than he should be living rent free in the White House. When there’s so much work to be done, cooking up schemes to “drive Trump crazy” doesn’t seem like a great use of energy. What will we do with a Trump that has been driven “crazy” (to use the kind of mental-illness-stigmatizing language that he’s into)? Will we be able to tell? Will that protect immigrants? Raise wages? Save the environment? Give people health care? Secure reproductive rights? Register voters? Stop fascism, racism, misogyny? Build out the field teams that will help a Democratic campaign actually win?
The coalition’s goal of inclusion, combined with the strategies commonly associated with “antifa,” gave the groups a unique toolkit that allowed the coalition to build bridges and increase the number of participants. The success of this method could be a game changer for communities looking to deal with similar far-right threats.
This breakdown isn’t included in the poll results as released (and I don’t have access to The Wall Street Journal story) but according to John Harwood only 24% of Republicans, 27% of non-college white men, and 37% of rural residents are worried “that the United States will experience another mass shooting or attack by white nationalists, targeting people based on their color or country of origin”.
While searching for why Lilly Wachowski isn’t involved in The Matrix Repetitious or whatever it’s going to be called, I remembered that she also wasn’t involved in the end of Sense8, and somehow I ended up finding this Naveen Andrews interview in which he calls Sense8 “something that’s totally unique, and is a direct ‘fuck you’ to what seems to be happening all over the world now, in terms of fascism”, and I just needed to note that here for both posterity and general relevancy.
A useful example was given to us in June when a group of 30 “gender-critical” (read: anti-trans) academics, led by the philosopher Kathleen Stock, published an open letter in The Times about how having to respect the pronouns of their trans students and colleagues was somehow compromising their freedom of thought; they were then met by a petition, signed by more than 5,000 university professionals, forcefully decrying their bigotry. It is relevant, when considering an issue like this, to consider both the arguments and rhetorical tone of anti-trans philosophers in relation to their willingness (as Stock’s open letter makes clear) to treat certain of the people they will most likely encounter every day at work almost as test subjects for their own abstract thought to ride roughshod over; in relation to the fact that one of the names attached to Stock’s letter was that of Stuart Waiton, a lecturer at Abertay University who also was a candidate for the far-right Brexit party in Scotland. Transphobic philosophers often want to insist on the “merely” philosophical nature of their inquiry—but for the minority groups their thought most affects, its political force cannot remotely be avoided.
FogCam’s 25-year run has meant that it outlasted another of the web’s earliest webcams. Cambridge University’s coffee pot cam came online a year earlier in 1993, after one scientist who worked at the university wanted a way to check the status of a coffee pot remotely, rather than risk turning up and discovering it empty. “It didn’t vary very much,” the scientist, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, told BBC News back in 2012, “It was either an empty coffee pot, or a full one, or in more exciting moments, maybe a half-full coffee pot and then you’d have to try and guess if it was going up or down.”
I wish I understood enough about the science to consider the connection between “too little inhibitory activity” in our autistic brains (“Autistic people’s brains switch between the images more slowly than those of neurotypical people do, the study found.”) and “hypervigilance” and the persistence of stimuli in the autistic brain, because there disparate studies sure seem to be chasing different heads of the same hydra.
Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.
The next step is to embed smart technologies in the urban environment to collect information about how well a place is performing against human metrics and, more ambitiously, enable it to reconfigure itself to perform better. That might mean dialling down visual stimuli such as advertising or street clutter if the inhabitants are exhibiting signs of stress, adding opportunities for play when children are likely to be present, or stimulating social interactions among older people.
Popular Mobilization (or PopMob), a coalition of leftist groups that organized the counterprotest, distributed flyers in Portland this week that stated: “If you oppose racism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and the xenophobic, ultranationalist ideologies of the far right (and our current administration), you are an EVERYDAY ANTIFASCIST.”
Unbeknownst to me until tonight, there is a coffee place in my neighborhood that’s open into the evening: Affogato. For the nine and a half months I’ve lived in St. Johns, I could have been getting the hell out of my apartment in the evenings if restless to have a latte and read a book and had no idea.
Captain America was a recruiting poster, battling against the real Nazi super-villains while Superman was still fighting cheap gunsels, strike breakers, greedy landlords and Lex Luthor – and America was still equivocating about entering the conflict at all. No wonder Simon and Kirby’s comic book became an enormous hit, selling close to a million copies a month throughout the war. But not everyone was a fan in 1941 – according to Simon, the German American Bund and America Firsters bombarded the publisher’s offices with hate mail and obscene phone calls that screamed “Death to the Jews!” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a real-life superhero, called to reassure him, saying: “The city of New York will see that no harm comes to you.”
“And that brings up a question,” writes CJ Eller, “is there a need for notifications?” These exist, of course, and have for a very long time, in the form of trackback (and later pingback), and these days the attention and work seems to be going into webmention. As for whether or not technology is better than serendipity, that’s always going to be subjective.
In a OneZero piece that highlights the hateful through-line “that’s been hanging around since the days of Waco, that found its home on Breitbart, that was mainstreamed by the Tea Party movement, and that was weaponized during Gamergate”, Colin Horgan makes a revealing rhetorical connection between GamerGate and the right’s push to bastardize Section 230 that hadn’t occurred to me: “For Trump, it’s all about ethics in content moderation.”
There’s something in one of Nate’s Thoughts that speaks to the idea of introducing friction into social media, especially the sort which produces context in a way that, e.g., reflexive hitting a like button (or obsessively checking one’s likes count) doesn’t: “Context is something to be built and protected.”
There is too much television. Outside of whatever I’m watching live during the week (e.g., tonight, Killjoys), my Netflix backlog is beginning to pile up with Leila and Street Food, which I’ve started, new seasons of Glow and Mindhunter, new international shows Green Frontier and Better Than Us, and I’m now two seasons behind on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
Beto O’Rourke apparently thinks it will pass legal muster to “require large internet platforms to adopt terms of service to ban hateful activities” and “remove legal immunity from lawsuits for large social media platforms that fail” to do so. There’s no indication as to who or what determines which platforms qualify as “large”, nor any mention of who or what determines which platforms have failed to adopt the prescribed terms of service and therefore which companies have their Section 230 immunity stripped away.
Not sure where to begin. The parents of the Dayton shooter published two obituaries: one for the shooter, which doesn’t mention the shooting and praises him as a “funny, articulate and intelligent man”, and one of the shooter’s brother, whom he shot and killed, but using his deadname instead of Jordan Cofer.
Natasha Stovall’s beautiful, difficult, and leisurely stroll through whiteness flirts a little too often with psychopathologizing racism for my comfort, but all of its other discomforts should be willingly endured, much in the way you’ve hopefully endured the discomforts of White Fragility and So You Want to Talk About Race.
Over the transom from Write.as development today comes news of Submit.as, a workflow for accepting writing submissions to your Write.as blog, and I am reminded of CJ Eller’s discussion of letters-to-the-editor as an alternative to blog comments, and I’m here for it. Or, rather, I will be there for it once the folks who run the .blog TLD accept my request to register a “reserved” domain name so I then can move this blog over to Write.as proper. (Yes, I’m pretty sure that move is happening.)
Over the past three years, I’ve been researching our conceptualizations of free speech — why we afford it to Nazis, how its been influenced by billionaires, and how it can exist in a system in which some people have immense power and influence, and most people have almost none. We tend to think of the internet as a separate entity from the real world, but of course the two are inextricably linked. The internet has come to mirror our economic and political atmosphere writ large: dominated by a few people who are largely unaccountable to the masses, filled with disinformation, surveillance, and a consumerism that breeds complacency and overconsumption.
Joe Biden’s allies admit he’s not prepared to be President of the United States. This is the only possible conclusion to draw from their suggestion that he scale back his public events and campaign activities in order to “limit the verbal flubs”. Here’s the thing: they are not verbal flubs, they are mental ones.
Just days before the event, Twitter’s Trending Topics sidebar—intended to surface the most interesting conversations on the platform—had become flooded with conspiracy theories about the death of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. A month earlier, the president of the United States had used the platform to share the idea that four members of Congress, all women of color, should “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” For too long, the platform has been a breeding ground for the kind of anti-immigration rhetoric that likely contributes to hate crimes and to the American epidemic of mass shootings. If Twitter is a party, then it’s a party where the punch is spiked with PCP and the carbon monoxide alarm won’t stop blaring, because all the guests are slowly succumbing to toxic fumes.
This cannot, cannot, always be on me alone. That I can do everything right, take every precaution to protect myself, short of just never leaving my room (and then I would doubtless be told that I was “letting my diagnosis limit me” or “using it as an excuse”), and still wind up hurt, sick, melting down, my ability to function for the rest of the day or the week ruined, not because of my [SLAM] autism, but because you don’t [SLAM] have any stakes in being more fucking careful about how you go stomping through the world. It cannot just be my fault for existing and, like, daring to think I might be able to do something wild like go out for coffee before work without destroying myself.
This morning, I was unprepared for the degree to which my body and brain were going to say, “No.” to today, but then I guess that’s usually how this sort of thing happens. (See “brain foam”.) Which is why it’s so difficult for trying to plan normal life things, like, say, ever returning to Vocational Rehabilitation to see if working even is a possibility anymore. Still on hold with my primary care physician is an investigation into my fatigue issues, and given how today went it’s a bit weird that Merriam-Webster posted about the word this afternoon.
I’m not sure about the weird rhetoric that ditching the “like” button “could help bring us back together”, but Darren Loucaides gets into the issues involved in removing the standard public metrics of social media platforms, chief among those issues that if you’re an advertising-driven site, metrics help drive your revenue. I’m less interested in the dopamine and oxytocin addiction than I am in the difference between indication and interaction in our social media behavior, and removing, well, the indicators is part of that, but I think it needs to go hand-in-hand with finding and implementing additional tools for interaction.
CJ Eller reveals to me the existence of “blogchains” and mostly I am wondering why they’re called chains instead of, say, threads, since we already understand what Twitter threads are, and this is basically that except for blogs, with the added business of a sort of embedded table-of-contents on each post because blog posts in a series don’t tend to be immediately successive like tweets in a Twitter thread, instead being posted only now and then, over time.
Normal people, working inside the normal American system, fight hard for something. They see an objective—say, tax cuts or a new law protecting the quality of drinking water—and they work toward that end. White evangelical Christians do not fight for things. They fight against things. I’m not talking about fighting against, for instance, tax increases. I’m talking about fighting against a human being’s right to be what that human being wants to be in this life. White evangelical Christians fight against that right, because they deny that some human beings are as human as they are.
“Efforts to expand the definition of ‘public charge’ through welfare and immigration reforms of the mid-1990s laid the groundwork for the current Trump policies,” writes Alonso-Yoder, “but so too did the original 19th century statutes limiting migrations of poor people. When examined together, these immigration policies on public charge bear striking similarities to the racist rhetoric which peaked in the 1990s surrounding Black families’ use of public benefits.”
There’s an interview with Matt Mullenweg over at The Verge about Automattic’s acquisition of Tumblr, and it’s chock full of nostalgia and hopefulness for the open web and how Tumblr can fit into that—everything from being able to follow non-Tumblr sites via RSS (a feature I didn’t know they once had), to potentially making Tumblr open source.
The premiere of The Terror: Infamy was better than the five episodes I made it through of The Terror last year, primarily because I couldn’t have cared less about anyone in The Terror but already am interested in the characters of Infamy. In the first season I’d taken to gimmicks like desaturating my television to watch in black-and-white because all I wanted was to learn more about that season’s “terror” but absent any characters worth wondering or worrying about, the “what’s happening” of it simply moved too slowly to sustain any interest.
We remember the Tea Party as principled rogues committed to the rule of law, rugged individualism, limited government and fiscal responsibility. But we remember these characteristics because that’s what Tea Party apologists said when they rationalized its goals to the Washington press corps and the public. Its real agenda was abundantly clear to anyone who was not white and to social scientists who took the trouble to understand properly what it wanted to achieve. Rule of law, rugged individualism, limited government and fiscal responsibility—these were means to an end, but those who characterized them as ends unto themselves were delusional, lying or both.
Earlier this month, as part of discussing friction online, I posted about friction offline and the suggestion by Richard Sennett that “you move through a space and you dwell in a place”. Now, through Kimberly Hirsh, I learn about Yi-Fu Tuan who “suggests that place is security and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other”, which seems roughly consistent with “dwelling” versus “moving”. Unfortunately, that book is not available for Kindle, although Richard Sennett’s is, and I’ve added it to my wishlist and requested Multnomah County Library license it on Overdrive.
Yet I can’t help but carry my own disquiet. It comes and goes, but it never fully disappears. It tags along to the movies, and the Stop & Shop where I buy groceries. It’s there when I think about my nephew, who starts kindergarten in September. It’s here now on a stormy afternoon as I sit and write at that library. It’s a specter that has crept into every conceivable public place I visit or think about, and it has irrevocably changed how I see them. The openness means there’s nowhere to hide. The unpredictability that was a joy now seems like a liability. I spend more and more time thinking about the regularity with which these spaces have become stages for ghastly, mass-scale tragedies.
In my long-running and long-winded bio, I argue that “the small, every day courtesies matter”, and now there’s research to back that up. That said, while I believe in the strength of “that brief acknowledgment, that brief glance” to improve the flow of any given day, the fact is that I do “prefer the solitude of, say, reading a book” to striking up a casual conversation.
More neptunian distance from The New York Times comes in this Vanity Fair piece in which an editor says that the “feeling from the top” is that the newspaper is “not gonna be a part of the resistance”. This makes sense in normal political times, but when the issue is the creeping fascism of the governing political party, every damned newspaper in the republic should be part of the resistance. That doesn’t mean you abandon the elements (or principles) of journalism. In fact it means that you need to apply those elements more fiercely than ever.
Arguably, the thing to shun when writing a blog post is writing a blog post like this blog post, but I especially dislike Lesko’s last point. Blogging does not require setting drafts aside for hours or even days. Blogging always was meant to be more casual art than professional craft, although obviously it has plenty of room for both. For sure, I’ve sometimes got posts in draft for a bit, but typically it’s either because they’re not much more than notes or because I feel like I’ve been posting too frequently and some things can wait. Mostly, though, in the early days anyway, blogging was about not needing to abide by more traditional gatekeeping processes.
What is the slow web? At it’s core it’s the idea that we shouldn’t fill our mind with junk and we should connect with those around us. Social media is fast food for the mind. Consuming it feels in the moment, but when you look back you’re not left with anything memorable. Moreover, because of the lack of nuance afforded by platforms, such as Twitter, it encourages behavior based on dopamine and adrenaline impulses.
Fashioning an ouroboros of unaccountability (as astutely spotted by Adam Jentleson), The New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet today privately told staffers that, in the words of The Daily Beast, “the paper shouldn’t allow itself to be edited by Twitter outrage”, after just last week having publicly told Lizzie O’Leary that the newspaper didn’t need a public editor precisely because there’s no “shortage of ways to criticize” or “ways to call us to account”… thanks to social media.
Dmitriy Andreychenko told local authorities that he “wanted to know if that Walmart honored the Second Amendment.” That’s not what he was testing. He was testing whether white people would continue to tolerate open displays of sadism; whether they would continue to rationalize what should never have been rationalized; and whether they still believe that violence-as-pleasure would not reach even them.
This seems like a big deal for the web. Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, just bought Tumblr from Verizon. On the one hand, consolidation of blogging and social sites is not terrific. On the other hand, Tumblr’s been kicked from itself to Yahoo! to Verizon over the years, and Automattic likely can bring some long-term stability to the platform. Yes, I know, we’re supposed to be all about the IndieWeb now, but, still.
One of my regular Substack newsletter reads has opened up paid subscriptions and it’s made me think about something I think is an innate flaw in Substack’s paid newsletters model. Were I to want to pick up paid memberships, say, in my five most-read Substack subscriptions it would probably run me at least a combined $25/month.
We might need new political terminology. Or maybe it already exists and just isn’t used. Once again, this time in a Nature editorial, the argument is made that such-and-such subject matter or so-and-so group of people “must rise above politics.” Except that politics is how we determine policy, and how we funnel the ongoing conflict over our values into collective and redistributive action.
Like I said. You aren’t going to find “small moments of shared humanity” with someone who simply doesn’t like sharing the internet with humanity and feels that they wouldn’t have to suffer so “had really smart people not made careers of lowering the bar of entry”. For those who don’t recall, said poster literally at one point lamented that people who don’t know any HTML are allowed to participate in online conversations.
To some, this conjures up dystopian visions of a privacy-less future. But it also echoes something that happened more than one hundred years ago, when many young people were flooding into U.S. cities. Scholar Jeanne Catherine Lawrence describes how philanthropist Ina Robertson created boardinghouses branded as “Eleanor Clubs” for young working women.
Twitter says it suspended 166,513 accounts for promoting terrorism between July and December 2018. When asked for clarification on what constitutes “promotion of terrorism” and what kind of groups would fall under this banner, Twitter pointed to its “Terrorism and violent extremism policy,” which makes no mention of white nationalism, specifically.
But most of all, if you allowed yourself to be swept away by The OA’s strange, gently bonkers poetry, you were rewarded with an increasingly rare sort of hopefulness. Comparisons are often made between The OA and Twin Peaks — another absolutely unhinged show I adore about time, space, and blonde women trapped in interdimensional rooms — but Twin Peaks wasn’t a hopeful show. Twin Peaks held a mirror to humanity’s darkest, most nefarious impulses; it ended with its main characters trapped eternally in the wrong dimension, howling infernally. Conversely, The OA was a show about believing in impossible things (and I don’t mean psychic octopi and brain flowers). The OA was one of the only contemporary shows I’ve ever seen that leaned on the notion — as creator-writer-star Brit Marling put it in her mournful post-cancellation Instagram post — “that the collective is stronger than the individual,” that “there is no hero,” that “humans [are] one species among many and not necessarily the wisest or the most evolved.” It was one of the only shows to grapple directly and beautifully with things like toxic masculinity, American gun violence, PTSD and trauma, the pitfalls of capitalism, impossible ethical quandaries — all this on top of coming up with that freakin’ octopus and staffing one of the most diverse casts and crews in TV history.
The inability for even me to find old posts here due to WriteFreely’s lack of pagination on hashtag pages, lack of native search, and the incompleteness of search results via Google or DuckDuckGo is becoming a real problem. The only work-around I can think of is to download and search a local archive and then manually call up the given URLs. That’s ridiculous and maddening.
I hate to tell you, CJ, but you very much are “writing into the void here” when you respond to that particular poster, given that they believe that most people are “lesser” and those people being present on the internet at all due to “lowering the bar of access” is the equivalent of “war”. You might be right that “small moments of shared humanity can be nurtured” but you won’t succeed at that talking with them.
It’s good that the press is talking about misogyny as it pertains to mass shootings in the U.S., but I can’t help but feel like we need to move beyond that term, especially since it doesn’t appear to apply to the motivations of the El Paso shooter, but the broader concept of toxic masculinity easily applies both to him and the Dayton shooter (and, for that matter, the Gilroy shooter). As rare as it is to see people openly discussing “a hatred of women”, it feels like a comparatively safe move on their part, versus tackling the more comprehensive issue of, well, traditionally masculine attitudes and behavior.
Unable to engage or focus, I found myself absently and endlessly scrolling up and down on this blog. I imagine it might have been a sort of virtual analogue to rocking back and forth. It did prompt me to resume my intermittent and continually-frustrated search for a local psychotherapist who grasps adult autism and is covered by my insurance.
But the media’s desire to erase the shooter and his ideology ended up erasing his victims and their community, too. While the news media successfully portrayed this shooting as part of a national epidemic of mass killings, we failed to accurately convey how this one was different. The visceral emotions of the Latinos I spoke with should have been—and should still be—front and center.
Whatever new stuff I am watching on television, I always also have some sort of rewatch going. Right now I am rewatching Humans, which easily can be seen as a sort of thematic sequel to Battlestar Galactica. You could consider the “evolution of robots” opening titles of the later series to pick up right where the final “evolution of robots” sequence of the earlier series leaves off.
Awhile back, I read an interview with archaeologist Jeremy Sabloff about archaeology learning “how to look beyond the temples and palaces” of the 1% and instead to look at the 99% below them, and I’d love to know if there’s a book on that subject, showing just how this shift came about and how it changed our understanding of various long-gone cultures.
Two years ago, British Columbia suffered one of the worst wildfires in the Canadian province’s history, which consumed 1.2 million hectares and displaced 65,000 people. The 2017 blaze was so intense that scientists are using it to model the climate conditions that might be created in the fallout of nuclear war, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
One of my early-warning signs when watching a television show is finding myself almost unconsciously rewriting dialogue. This happened not long into the first episode of Wu Assassins on Netflix. Another sign for me is if one character accuses another of having a small penis as a way to insult them. This also happened not long into the first episode of Wu Assassins. Nonetheless, I finished the first and started in on the second episode of Wu Assassins, and I should have trusted my early judgment. Halfway into the second episode of Wu Assassins, a black thug shows up and immediately threatens to rape the white female co-lead in the ass. What I’m saying is don’t bother with Wu Assassins. It’s garbage. Wu Assassins on Netflix is garbage.
I found this Kimberly Hirsh memo on the evolution of academic thinking about the various features of so-called “affinity spaces” interesting, especially the different ways such spaces can think about things like skill levels, depths of interest, participation routes, and consumption versus creation. Affinity spaces aren’t limited to the online arena but that’s surely most of my own experience of such spaces.
It seemed to McMillan as if he was working in virgin territory, designing places for kids with a seriousness of purpose he hadn’t seen before. Watching children use his equipment, often in ways he could never have anticipated, made him more and more certain: play wasn’t a frivolous distraction from learning, but something essential to childhood and indeed humanity. The line-up-and-go-on-an-iron-ride model of the theme park was defunct. The key was to build things that sparked interaction, between kids and the equipment, but especially between the kids themselves. According to his design philosophy, each park wasn’t just a place to jump on a shockingly large air mattress. It was “a place where a child can ask questions of what it means to be human”.
Ayman Mohyeldin just conducted on MSNBC an entire conversation with Tony Romm and Clint Watts about today’s White House meeting with tech companies to address online extremism without once mentioning the draft White House executive order to protect online extremism, although they did mention the recent White House social media summit of online extremists.
Somehow in all the general wow and flutter, I missed that back in April Nancy Pelosi also threatened Section 230, deriding it as “gift” to internet companies that merely established a “privilege”, and threatening that it “could be removed”. Section 230 was not gift to internet companies, it was written as a gift to internet users since it would authorize and empower websites to engage in community management without fear of legal reprisal.
That young, white Trumpist who “drove 10 hours to El Paso from Houston to make his statement of support for President Trump” by brandishing a gun outside an immigrant community center reportedly is heading to Portland for next weekend’s Proud Boys event, which is expected to be countered by “the Spectacle”.
It doesn’t get much cable news coverage, but toxic masculinity lurks behind both of last weekend’s mass shootings, and now (well, two days ago, actually, although the mainstream press doesn’t seem to have picked up on it) we learn that the Dayton shooter’s first victim was not, as reported by the press, his sister, but in fact his trans brother. That a young man who’d once assembled rape and kill lists first shot his trans brother only reinforces that the underlying problem here is America’s problematic and damaging sense of what a man is “supposed” to be, made lethal by the easy access to guns.
Daniel Jalkut says that in your forties “you feel more competent, and empowered than you’ve ever been, yet also more despondent”. My recollection, as I stare down the barrel of the fifty coming my way in October, is that I’ve had bursts of competency eventually smothered by the pressure, very little in the way of empowerment, and an increasing despondency as certainty grows that the second half of my life looks pretty dire.
This effort to criminalize dissent doesn’t appear to bother those in the Democratic Party who are happy to use the labor and sacrifice of anti-fascist activists in Charlottesville as launching points for new chapters in their political careers. Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden launched his 2020 bid with the words Charlottesville, Virginia, strong invectives against President Donald Trump, and a video of anti–Unite the Right protesters being assaulted by torch-swinging white supremacists. Those of us who were there that night, though, did not face down the angry mob to send a message to Trump, but because we know—we have always known—that white supremacy is violent, hateful, murderous, and outrageously common. We faced down the angry mob because we never believed that neo-Nazis would abide by the “honor code.” And too often, we have had to do the jobs of protecting our community that those in power, like McAuliffe, couldn’t or wouldn’t.
We’re going to tax your mega churches so bad Joel Olsteen will need to get a job at Chik Fil A to pay his light bill. Speaking of Chik Fil A, we’re buying all those and giving them to any LGBTQ person your sick cult leaders tortured with conversion therapy. Have fun with the new menu you bigoted fucks. Try the McPence. It’s a boiled unseasoned chicken breast that you have to eat in the closet with your mother.
When you engage in surprise raids, round up hundreds of people, leave their children crying in parking lots, then almost immediately release half of the people you rounded up, there is no point except sowing fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This is state-sponsored terrorism. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a terrorist organization.
Sunday night, I began a free week of HBO through Amazon expressly to binge Years and Years, which so much of my Twitter feed had been watching as it aired. I’m not sure why I decided to watch a dystopian drama as my escapism after a weekend of mass shootings, but there you go. It wasn’t until a couple of episodes in that I noticed it was a Russell T. Davies show, which, given the even more brutal dystopia that was the wretched Torchwood: Miracle Day I guess makes sense. Mostly my takeaway is that Lydia West, who in her first television role plays Bethany Bisme-Lyons, should be cast in everything.
How very convenient for Trump that on the same day he’s duty-bound to go make presidential noises in El Paso in the wake of its white nationalist mass shooting (setting aside that he made those noises badly and unconvincingly), ICE stages massive raids in Mississippi against the very people both Trump and the El Paso shooter wrongly believe to be “invaders”, leaving children crying in the streets, effectively winking at his white nationalist base that nothing will change. How very convenient.
I’ve had the privilege of growing up in a tradition that didn’t believe in the myths and the legends because we had to bear the brunt of them. Either we’re going to change, Nicolle, or we’re going to do this again, and again, and babies are going to have to grow up without mothers, and fathers, uncles, and aunts, friends, while we’re trying to convince white folk to finally leave behind a history that will maybe, maybe, or embrace a history that might set them free from being white. Finally. Finally.
In the wake of another mass shooting by a white nationalist whose language apes that of the President of the United States, the White House is preparing an executive order targeting 47 U.S. Code § 230’s protections for moderating online content. I’m expressly tying these things together because it’s already been established that social media companies have resisted clamping down too hard on white nationalist content “because the collateral accounts that are impacted can … be Republican politicians”.
After Barack Obama’s victory, Republicans suddenly talked less about conservative economic orthodoxy—i.e., being anti-Big Government—and more about who deserves what. Even as they denied the racist roots on their thinking, Tea Party Republicans declared that entitlements were, wrote Reuters’ Chrystia Freeland, for “the deserving, hard-working citizen” as opposed to the “unauthorized, foreign freeloader.”
That’s what makes this bigger than a question of sloppy reporting. The Times’ error is the type of error made by powerful people who understand politics as a game played by two competing but symmetrical teams, who hardly dare imagine anything could come along that would truly threaten that status quo. That approach is not up to the challenge of the rise of a fundamentally illiberal, violent faction in America headed by a fundamentally racist, authoritarian president of the United States.
It’s probably time for another health update. Next month is the consult to discuss the lymph node questions mentioned in the last update and decide which ones to biopsy and what exactly those procedures will look like. That also will be the time for lab work to follow-up the “elevated decreased kidney function” found in the last round of tests.
This evening’s unbidden nostalgia led me to remember another bit of history: Rebecca Blood’s ten tips for blogging, as well as her weblog ethics, which I referenced in the site policies on Portland Communique. In my current return to blogging, I mostly still follow these ideas. Her seminal The Weblog Handbook remains available for Kindle.
Randomly thought of Cyborganic today, although I only ever had at most a kind of tangential interaction, mostly through Spacebar, I think, but I did attend a single Thursday Night Dinner after I moved to San Francisco. I know that I had a crush on someone I now don’t remember, but who certainly was out of my league. Inexplicably, there’s no Wikipedia page about the community but I did stumble onto “Utopian Socialities in an Entrepreneurial World: Cyborganic 1994-2003” by Jenny Cool, in case you’re asking yourself, “What the hell is a Cyborganic?”
Much of the press and the political establishment sees Trump’s racism as something he injected into a fundamentally good system, rather than some existent force he merely tapped into—either because they prefer to see it this way, or because they are morally or financially invested in believing in America’s essential innocence. That’s the only way to make sense, to take just one example, of CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s comically blinkered announcement on Twitter after the entire Republican Party lined up to defend the president’s conduct: “Every day, I am struck by how radically the GOP has changed from 2015 to today.” You see, pundits like Cillizza had believed that the Tea Party goons in tricornered hats were mad about the debt-to-GDP ratio, even though those goons actually spent most of their time shrieking about sharia law.
“Mitch McConnell,” I wrote, “will find some way to spin it.” Sure enough, his campaign has boys-will-be-boys’d photos of teenagers choking and groping a cardboard cutout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This sort of blithe dismissal of toxic masculinity is the hidden breeding ground for incidents like this weekend’s mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. Not all young men who behave like these Team Mitch high schoolers will go on to compile rape and kill lists as did the Dayton shooter, but pretending their behavior is no big deal affects the placement of teenage America’s Overton window when it comes to the objectification and disparagement of women.
If we don’t make it clear that toxic masculinity and our ongoing, routine dismissal of it (which is how police in Ohio somehow with a straight face can say there’s nothing in the shooter’s history to have precluded him from purchasing a gun despite, you know, having once assembled both kill and rape lists in high school) is responsible for the Dayton shooting, the Republican attempt to both-sides it will work.
Yet on the other hand, leaving the earth feels like the last thing we should be doing. Our planet is in crisis. We’re in the middle of a mass extinction event. There is increasing social and political polarisation and division. It’s hard to feel the same awe and excitement seeing another SpaceX rocket land successfully, when the waters are — metaphorically and literally — rising.
George Conway is a resistance grifter. Neither he nor Kellyanne Conway in reality care about the places they’ve staked out on opposite ends of the Trump spectrum. It’s a third-rate Carville/Matalin grift, and everybody knows it, even—or especially—the media figures who routinely quote George Conway’s tweets and then shake their heads as they play up the marriage as some sort of entertaining romantic/political conundrum. The couple is engaged in a lol-nothing-matters hussle in the middle of a grave national existential crisis. It’s the height of political nihilism, and every one of you who participates in it, including by elevating it to a level of worth taking seriously, is complicit.
Speaking this morning about these mass shootings, President Trump said that mass shootings are carried out by “mentally ill monsters” and claimed that in order to prevent them, we must “reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure these people not only get treatment but, when necessary, involuntary confinement.” These remarks are a blatant attempt to target and scapegoat people with disabilities in order to distract from the active role our President himself has played in inciting anti-immigrant sentiment and white supremacist violence. ASAN calls on policymakers and the American public not to be taken in by this dangerous rhetoric, but to insist on real, meaningful change.
Currently reading: Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane, which is a bit weird to be reading right now because I only just recently read Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet by Will Hunt; and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose Signal to Noise I enjoyed. You can browse my highlighted passages from these books, although it takes a bit of scrolling.
Mitch McConnell, et al, will find some way to spin it, but be very clear on this: these Team Mitch boys are displaying a variant of the selfsame toxic masculinity that erupted this weekend in Dayton and, via radicalization into white nationalism, El Paso. We need to tackle outright white nationalism, and we need to tackle guns, but even “just” toxic masculinity on its own, armed or not, generates an environment of threat.
I watched the video recording of the rally in Panama City shortly after reading the El Paso killer’s so-called manifesto. It is a document littered with phrases and rhetorical devices injected into mainstream discourse by the president and his supporters—talk of a “Hispanic invasion,” accusations that Democrats support “open borders,” and the like. As Trump faces the possibility that he will lose the presidency next year, he may become more enraged, and more willing to deploy the rhetoric of violence as a way to keep his followers properly motivated. The Panama City speech was an important moment in Trump’s ongoing effort to make the American presidency a vehicle in the cause of marginalizing and frightening racial minorities; the killings are a possible (and predictable) consequence of such rhetoric.
Netflix is home to two of the boldest things American television has tried, and while I thank them for giving it a go (and while I enjoy many of these international partnership series they’ve been producing lately), if they are getting out of the “unique vision” business, that’s a shame. I’m not sure there’s really anyone else filling that niche.
They themselves warn about this argument, although only vaguely and in passing, but be very, very wary of pushing the “imagine if these had been radical Islamic terrorists” comparison made by The New York Times editorial board, because it carries the danger of imposing upon ourselves more of the draconian (or, at the very least, misguided) measures enacted in the wake of 9/11. The lesson to take is that policy action is necessary, but we need to be vigilant about what kind of action.
This anti-outsider vibe and the erasure of the rightful owners of the land our city occupies are reminiscent of the blatant, glistening white supremacy I grew up around in Australia. In Portland, it’s cool to be pro-immigrant but hate people moving here. It’s hip to protest a border wall but definitely not want more people visiting the Gorge than already are. We all know cultural appropriation isn’t cool, but we will twerk around our white friends. We brag about our tolerance or liberalism while simultaneously shaming a Thai restaurant for its “tacky” (read: traditional) décor and rewarding the same cuisine packaged in the white upper-class aesthetics of hardwoods and Mason jar light fixtures. Portland is built upon and continues its legacy of exclusion, classism, and racism, thinly cloaked by declarations of good intention and the mantra of “I’m a nice person.”
Nothing endangers American public space in 2019 as much as mass shootings, says Yale sociologist Vida Bajc, who studies public space and security. In each of the four shootings, fundamental modes of our shared existence — eating, socializing, shopping, partying — gave way to blood, death, panic, and necessitated the response of a militarized police force.
Along with that D.C.-area soccer player stopping to call for gun control, I forgot to mention that what also needs to continue is the sort of anger on display this weekend by Tim Ryan, Beto O’Rourke and Beto O’Rourke. As reminded by someone I follow on Twitter, we’ve kind of needed a Network moment for awhile now, and I think that it’s time to drop the pretense that this sort of thing is inappropriate. It might be indecorous, it might be uncivil, but sometimes the inappropriate maybe is the only thing that’s appropriate.
But just as important, all of us have to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy. We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people. Such language isn’t new – it’s been at the root of most human tragedy throughout history, here in America and around the world. It is at the root of slavery and Jim Crow, the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. It has no place in our politics and our public life. And it’s time for the overwhelming majority of Americans of goodwill, of every race and faith and political party, to say as much – clearly and unequivocally.
My primary fandoms have all been week-by-week TV fandoms: Sailor Moon when it aired as an afternoon show in the 90s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls (yes, Wonderfalls!), The Inside (I’m here for Tim Minear’s most obscure work), Veronica Mars, 30 Rock, New Girl. The intensity of my participation in fandom for each of these varies, but other than a brief flirtation with Star Wars fic in high school because Sonja was doing it, and some heavy time spent reading Harry Potter fic and playing in related RPs, weekly television is my medium of choice.
Don’t let them distract you. The perpetrators of this weekend’s two mass shootings might have held diametrically opposed party political views, but they shared two things: toxic masculinity and access to guns. White supremacy is not an inevitable destination for toxic masculinity but the latter is an ingredient of the former, and only one end of the American political spectrum is carrying on with the same rhetoric that grooms and radicalizes toxic (usually white) men into the violence of white nationalism.
White supremacy is a far bigger and more pervasive pathology than a single party, or even the entire electoral system. White liberal racism is a thing too, as is left racism, and both are destructive. But in the face of this wave of terror, there are some basic facts we need to state clearly: This violence has been abetted most specifically by the Republican Party. Its perpetrators are feeding on Trump’s unmistakably fascist, racist rhetoric, which in turn draws profligately from the same racist conspiracy theories and memes that populate the far-right boards where the killers plan.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has been an asshole for awhile, but because he’s tended to restrict his Twitter antics to tamping down fan enthusiasm for pop culture properties it’s mostly been just profoundly annoying. But could he really not stop himself from “well, actually”-ing public reaction to another mass shooting?
If we find violence motivated by hate unimaginable from sane people, it is only because we have forgotten the majority of human history. Short of retroactively diagnosing large swaths of past humanity with mental illness, it is difficult to justify the idea that hate requires mental pathology. Some do seek such a retroactive diagnosis, but such an approach seems to define mental illness down to simply mean “people who do abhorrent things”. The Nazis were not mentally ill. The KKK is not mentally ill. The campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq and in countless other places throughout history were not motivated by mental illness. To believe otherwise hurts those who actually do experience mental illness – and it leaves us unprepared to fight evil, because we refuse to believe it actually exists.
So this is who we are now. We go to bed still rattled from the day’s mass shooting, and we wake to the new day’s mass shooting. And to another day of the faith without works of the Republican Party doling out their thoughts and prayers while gun control legislation founders in the Senate. Politicize it. Politicize it all.
The day after the White House suspends a reporter because he offended one of Trump’s white nationalist guests at a social media summit a few weeks ago, a white nationalist gunman kills more than a dozen people in El Paso. These are threads in a single, ugly tapestry being woven with an increasing ferocity.
As a disabled person, this kind of unscientific thinking is a red-flag. There is a certain type of person you meet when you are visibly disabled or disclose an invisible illness. This person, usually abled, wants to help you “get well soon” — even if you have a chronic, incurable disease. They offer unsolicited health and wellness tips ranging from going vegan to trying “alkaline water.” And while these people may be well-meaning, the overall effect of their unwanted advice is to situate the blame for our chronic, incurable diseases on the people suffering from them. The implication is that if you just tried harder you could get well. This is extremely toxic for disabled people, and yet we encounter it all the time.
“Big news organizations often seem to editorially privilege the difficulties and even the feelings of Midwestern whites,” writes Greg Sargent. “I can’t cite a study that proves this. But you see it constantly.” He highlights the asymmetry of how the press views your basic white diner patron or factory worker as the go-to perspective to get on everything.
This profile by Elizabeth Flock of India’s so-called “Green Gang” in The California Sunday Magazine—”thousands of low-caste women have banded together to become vigilantes”–is legit remarkable, but I was not entirely prepared for the somewhat compromising turn it takes near the end. Hopefully when Angoori Dahariya’s story is optioned for the inevitable movie they don’t manage to cast Scarlet Johansson.
They believe cities are taking advantage of them, because the Republican Party has for decades been telling them we are real Americans while they who live in urban centers are atheist, criminal, lazy, parasitic, or even diseased. Meanwhile, “real Americans” are pure, hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and virtuous. “We” are the makers in other words. “They” are the takers. The more very smart people seek an empirical basis for fictive fascist thinking, the more they actually legitimize fascist politics.
Immoral or criminal autistic people need to stop blaming their autism for their immoral or criminal acts. Just as Nick Starr-Street didn’t harass black women because of his autism, Jason Berlin didn’t rape a woman because of his autism. Of lesser import but still important, however, is that autistic people need to stop talking about an allegedly strong sense of right and wrong that somehow emerges from being autistic.
CJ Eller draws a line from Jorn Barger to Vannevar Bush (or would that be from Vannevar Bush to Jorn Barger?) and, really, I find it interesting that twenty years on, new blogging is talking about old blogging, and at some point I am either going to be suffering from a kind of web whiplash (weblash?) or just start feeling like I’m on some sort of Billy Pilgrimage.
At this stage of human history, stars have lost their critical role of orienteering signposts and human humility reminder. They are almost invisible to urban dwellers. There is an aesthetic vacuum up there. Since the human race does not like to leave blank spaces, some started to think that we can pimp our starless sky with twinkling satellites, fake shooting stars and pieces of art. How will the sky look in 30 years from now? To which extent will we be aware of the artificiality of the night landscape? Will it matter, if we can get some magic twinkling in our life?
Politicians and pundits need to get over the idea that the middle will save us. White supremacist terrorism is going largely unchecked, states are trying to make abortion punishable by prison time, and we are running large-scale baby jails and concentration camps on the border. There’s no such thing as moderates anymore — only those who can tolerate these injustices, and those who can’t.
It’s been awhile since I had a good “who the fuck is writing this timeline” moment, but this jaw-dropper of a New York Times piece that no one asked for or ever would ask for likely qualifies as an all-time winner. Revealed by the Times is that Jeffrey Epstein apparently had something of a transhumanist eugenics bent that included a desire to seed the world by impregnating women at a New Mexico facility. I’m left pleading to the sky for an answer to why all these evil men with which we have found ourselves surrounded seem to be a combination of James Bond villain, Wile E. Coyote, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Everyone’s going to write about the eugenics (or maybe the penis-freezing!), so what I wanted to note was a uniquely-batshit revelation elsewhere in the article.
These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.When does silence become complicity? What will it take for us all to say, with one voice, that we have had enough? The question is less about the president’s sense of decency, but of ours.
It’s a madness, alas, we must take literally and seriously. If we continue to look for a reason why the president attacked Baltimore, we are distracting ourselves from what’s going on. Trump is not attacking one set of policies in order to justify another set of policies. There is no motive. There is no cause and effect. He’s attacking the very thinking that goes into policy-making. In other words, he’s attacking our minds until we stop thinking altogether and all that’s left is him and the power he wields.
There are two things I wish were the takeaways from last night’s debate but won’t be, because neither of them fit into the usual narratives: Buttigieg’s admonition against campaigning based upon what the Republicans will say, and Williamson’s (yes, look, I know, and I’ll get to it) trenchant analysis of race in America.
Sarah Kurchak has a good response to critics of Hannah Gadsby, especially the weird idea that Gadbsy somehow might be invoking autism as a kind of criticism shield. It’s an especially strange critique, to be sure, not just given that autistic people often are judged simply for being autistic, but given that Gadsby herself doesn’t even think autism is a disability, having once nonsensically intoned, “It’s not autism that makes it difficult to live with autism.”
‘I have this plan,’ Merlin [Sheldrake] says, ‘that for each formal scientific paper I ever publish I will also write its dark twin, its underground mirror-piece – the true story of how the data for that cool, tidy hypothesis-evidence-proof paper actually got acquired. I want to write about the happenstance and the shaved bumblebees and the pissing monkeys and the drunken conversations and the fuck-ups that actually bring science into being. This is the frothy, mad network that underlies and interconnects all scientific knowledge – but about which we so rarely say anything.’
Now, there is growing recognition that buildings not only need to be designed to be functional and aesthetically pleasing, but acoustically satisfying as well – leading some architects and engineers to rethink how spaces are shaped and the materials they are made from.Scientific research suggests they are wise to do so. Noisy work and home settings have been proven to annoy people, and noise annoyance itself has been linked to depression and anxiety. Furthermore, issues concentrating in the workplace due to office noise and intermittent noise has been found to significantly reduce human performance.
“Did you know that fewer than 1% of people on Twitter produce most of the Tweets that break our rules against abuse?” asks a new sitewide message making its way (and making a plea to “support a culture of respect on Twitter”) into users’ feeds today. “Please take a look at our rules to know what is and isn’t allowed.” Everything about this message is wrong, except perhaps that statistic, which I’ve no way of checking. It’s worth noting, however, that if Twitter’s self-reported numbers are to be believed, this still is three million people running around abusing others. It’s not clear to me just who is the audience for this message. Those three million people, or any new users like them, are not going to be dissuaded from abuse by it. In fact, it often seems like it’s the Twitter moderation team itself that needs to read the site’s rules, as violators routinely managed to go unpunished. But what I really want to call out here is the notion that “respect” should be the goal of community standards of conduct. Respect is a thing with asymmetrical impact favoring the privileged and the powerful. Respect is kin to “civility”. Respect is used by Twitter nazis to tone-police their targets into being silenced by moderators. Respect is weaponized to game the enforcement of rules in a way which encourages abusers and discourages victims. With all due respect, Twitter, this new message strategy regarding abuse in your community is a piece of shit.
I don’t have bladder cancer, according to the biopsies. Hilariously, and ironically given my thing about the use of messaging, I missed a message from my urologist last Thursday during my hazy surgery recovery daze telling me this. I could have been relaxing on the cancer thing for the past five days, but no.
One of the disadvantages so far to not finding a therapist covered by my insurance who understands autism, let alone adult autism, that has become achingly clear over the past couple of weeks: my anxiety remains completely unconfronted by medication. Just last Friday, I suffered an epic anxiety attack at the urologist’s office that easily lasted at least half an hour. (One that, not-so-incidentally, would have been visibly obvious to anyone that passed by, including all of the doctors, nurses, and other staff who never asked if I was okay.) I was, at least, given something prior to my surgery last Monday, as I lay prone on a hospital bed and naked except for that flimsy gown. Today, I’m having one I’d say is “moderate” as I await a telephone appointment with my urologist to get the lay of the medical land, as it were. There’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Low levels of anxiety I can often walk back through some rudimentary breathing exercises, but cross the threshold into a more intense attack, and I am left at sea.
Todd McCarthy, the 69-year-old film critic at The Hollywood Reporter who dismissed critics of the casting of Tilda Swinton in Dr. Strange as “politically correct … alarmists” and disparaged Diego Luna in Rogue One as not being “a strong and vigorous male lead” today decided to complete a sort of trifecta by confessing the “throbbing” he felt while watching… Dora and the Lost City of Gold.
For awhile now I’ve been interested in how trauma gets laid down in the brain, because I’ve wondered if the way sensory and other stimuli hit the autistic brain carries a risk of causing trauma, especially with research suggesting persistent connections in such brains. I’ve wondered if such connections effectively mean that, for example, ongoing environmental stimuli don’t give the autistic brain time to recover from moment to moment, creating a kind of mounting pressure. In comes a story on Spectrum today about sensory overload and hypervigilance which seems to support pretty much exactly this idea.
As a member of the Oregon Trail generation, I came of age alongside the Web. I had access to much of it a little earlier than my peers, because my dad’s work provided home access for him. As an adolescent, I had this sort of constant feeling of the immense potential of my life ahead of me and of the Web, and as a young adult I really leaned into that, blogging starting in 2001. It’s not a big leap from me to this rando kid on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “I Robot, You Jane” who says, “The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.” I feel this visceral connection to the Web that I have a hard time putting in words.
Compensation might be an adaptive trajectory that can be differentiated from other trajectories in psychiatry, such as resilience, in which a negative outcome is avoided, behaviourally, cognitively, and neurologically, despite exposure to risk. Instead, autistic compensators, despite apparent lack of observable autistic behaviour, continue being autistic at the neurocognitive level. Importantly, compensation can generate challenges in diagnosing and supporting these individuals. Because autism spectrum disorder is diagnosed by behaviour alone, compensators might not receive a diagnosis and support until later in life, if at all. This issue is thought to be particularly acute in females, who are less likely than males to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder despite similar underlying autistic characteristics. Even for people with a diagnosis, a neurotypical appearance due to compensation might result in support needs being underestimated in educational and workplace settings. Additionally, compensation is thought to contribute to poor mental health in autism. Compensatory attempts are taxing, need to be sustained over time, and are often unsuccessful, resulting in a cost to wellbeing.
“Well then, my final ‘reason’ for not supporting social justice is a really simple one,” admits Nils Grønkjær, “and that is I think that suffering is actually a somewhat healthy and fundamental part of being a living being.” This after earlier in the post admitting “the concept of social justice has no personal appeal to me” because “I want for almost nothing in life. I’m not lonely, I’m not poor and most of all I’m not bored with my life.”
Trump does not need a Soviet Politburo. He does not need a Nazi Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda. He does not need an army of Russian saboteurs. He doesn’t even need House Republicans repeating conspiracy theories. All this president needs to make war on the truth, break the law, profane the US Constitution and undermine the will of the people is a press corps as aggressively anti-moral as ours.
It’s not clear whether Pelosi even thinks people actually believe this line of reasoning. She just doesn’t seem to think it’s her job to convince them. Voters handed Democrats a meaningful avenue for holding the executive branch accountable in 2018, but Pelosi seems to have no interest in the hard work of doing that, except inasmuch as it means Democratic Party elites will issue public statements condemning the president’s actions, and effectively fundraise off of those public statements. As far as she’s concerned, her assurance that she’s in some distant fashion righting the wrongs of Trumpism by hoarding her own symbolic political power should be action enough for now.
The authoritarianism of indifference. That’s what [Free Speech Absolutists] are implementing: an infinite acceptance of toxic speech and malicious ideas, built on the accusation that any criticism or attempt at gatekeeping is a slippery slope toward mass censorship. To make it worse, FSA’s focus is toward a handful of issues, all conveniently targeted by far-left activists and groups. It reeks of reactionism. FSA’s and their sympathizers argue they should be able to discuss race IQ “science,” refuse using a person’s preferred pronouns, and mingle with racists and vitriolic conspiracy theorists with no consequences. Absolute freedom, with absolutely no concern for others.
I haven’t posted anything today because the day began at 5:30am not for the Mueller hearing as planned but for dealing with the urine on my bedroom floor because apparently I had not locked the drain spout on the catheter bag during its previous emptying. Fortunately for convenience’s sake I’ve been hanging the bag inside a small waste paper basket, so most of the urine actually was just pooled at the bottom of that. But since I didn’t notice the problem until I went to pull the bag out of the basket, a fair amount of urine had been splashed onto the floor as well.
Not for nothing, but I think Joe Biden should read this Jane Coaston piece asking the right to imagine for a moment that the left has been correct, all along, on race and on the right’s problem with race, because what she’s describing, in fact, is the “time before Trump” back to which Biden says he wants to take us, and the fact that he doesn’t comprehend this is hugely problematic.
While I don’t think the retweet is some sort of smoking gun for what’s wrong with social media, I do think there’s a strong argument for discussing how to build more friction–and more context–into actions we can take on social media platforms. I’m not sure what form that takes, but I do think that push-button reactions don’t communicate much except as analytics data.
It’s not that tricky. Conservative intellectuals have always been, in one way or another, in agreement with overt white supremacists. They just had the good sense of understanding the social liability of being openly racist in Washington, where such “impolitic gestures” might cost them a fellowship or coveted inches in the legitimate press. Moreover, conservatives have been at least OK, one way or another, with state intervention as long as the beneficiaries were the right ones. Conservative Democrats greenlit the New Deal’s expansion provided it excluded black people.
It’s the day after my bladder surgery, and as much as I talked about it beforehand, I don’t really want to talk about it much here. It’s been more suited to short in-the-moment bursts on Twitter than something comprehensive and thought out. Suffice it to say that, so far, the catheter has been more annoyance than burden. We will see how I feel about its removal on Friday, for which I have to be awake.
CJ Eller is talking about friction again, although without using the word. This time it’s about the different cognitive impacts of differing ways to “copy” information. “I wonder,” they ask, “whether the gulf between copying and comprehension is salvageable.” If such a gulf exists, I’d suggest some of it can be bridged by what CJ Eller is doing, and what I am doing: blogging. One thing I’ve noticed lately is that if I save links to blog about rather than links to “read later” (and they are right when they ask how often it seems like we are saving links to forget to read), I end up not only reading more of them but also creating a record of having done so.
It isn’t that Facebook or Twitter aren’t communities but that social media companies self-promotionally call them communities while actually treating them merely as userbases. Social media platforms are, and contain, communities—sometimes singular and solitary, sometimes cross-pollinating and overlapping, sometimes fleeting and ephemeral. How what’s treated by the company at issue as just a userbase itself makes use of the platform often is more about the users than the makers. I’d have less of a problem with the companies themselves referring to their users as a community, or communities, if they ever considered them that in any way other than rhetorically.
To appreciate the charms of small structures, it is useful to remind ourselves that we primarily interact with architecture from a ground level rather than the god’s-eye view employed in films and renderings. The architecture of day-to-day urban life is driven by utility and merges so integrally into our tasks that we barely notice it as architecture. There have been visionary architects who have recognized and celebrated the underrated nobility of everyday life, and there are some superlative little wonders scattered around our cities.
But more frustrating than pure semantics is that liberalism’s most ardent defenders tend to credit the liberal order for victories won beyond the means of properly liberal politics. More often than not, the march toward justice in liberal societies has been fueled by illegal strikes, civil disobedience, riots, and, at times, the threat of violence—not merely winning arguments in the “public square.” If we always played by liberalism’s rules, abiding by its preference for legal and parliamentary procedure over open revolt, the progressive victories now attributed to liberalism’s natural egalitarian tendencies would never have been achieved.
As the English writer and academic Mark Fisher tells us in Ghosts of My Life, in the 21st century we exist in “a general condition: in which life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” The “general trajectory” of the future has disappeared—and, with it, culture “has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present.” Popular culture exists in a constant stasis of anachronism and “formal nostalgia”, with the music of artists like Adele exemplifying a general “classic” tone which—in terms of its sonic signifiers—could be temporally placed anywhere from around 1950 on. “Or it could be,” Fisher goes on to hint, “that there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.” Without the general trajectory of the future, we have lost the ability to understand what it would mean to be present anywhere—we have only the past.
Getting mad at McConnell for hypocrisy is like getting mad at your cat for not understanding English. He does not hold values higher than power, so expecting him to respond to charges of hypocrisy is like expecting your cat to talk. The proper response therefore is to stop giving McConnell, Trump or the Republicans the benefit of the doubt. Expect them to sabotage democracy. Democracy threatens them.
It would be nice if the Beltway press corps for the love of god or whatever would stop aiding and abetting Ivanka Trump’s repeated efforts at rehabilitating her reputation in real-time. Until and unless the story is that she’s renounced her father and his supposed fortune, everything else is just image laundering, which she is free to engage in but reporters have no professional reason to help her out, and every professional reason to rebuff.
This is the sort of thing that actually makes me glad I don’t blog on Write.as, because I know I’d pick fights with people like this who blame “wokeness” for Donald Trump rather than blaming bigotry. Here’s the thing, though: this performative display of having roommates and a wife of a different race than their own itself is white fragility in action. You only go out of your way to bring these sorts of things up in order to use them as a shield.
A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.
As of this writing, hours after the fact, Trump’s basking in the violent cries of “Send her back!” directed at Representative Ilhan Omar has yet to yield any response from Speaker Pelosi, Leader Hoyer, or the Democratic National committee, although the latter’s “war room” was watching the rally, and Hoyer had time to tweet about emoji.
Tipping further entrenched a unique and often racialized class structure in service jobs, in which workers must please both customer and employer to earn anything at all. A journalist quoted in Kerry Segrave’s 2009 book, Tipping: An American Social History of Gratuities, wrote in 1902 that he was embarrassed to offer a tip to a white man. “Negroes take tips, of course; one expects that of them—it is a token of their inferiority,” he wrote. “Tips go with servility, and no man who is a voter in this country is in the least justified in being in service.”
Trying to scare white people is an effective political strategy, but it is also an effective ratings and traffic strategy. Trump’s ability to manipulate the media through provocation and controversy has been effective precisely because covering those provocations and controversies provides news outlets with the ears and eyeballs they crave. Trump considers the media “the enemy of the people” only when it successfully undermines his falsehoods; at all other times, it is a force multiplier, obeying his attempts to shift topics of conversation from substantive policy matters to racial scaremongering. The tenets of objectivity by which American journalists largely abide hold that reporters may not pass judgment on the morality of certain political tactics, only on their effectiveness. It’s a principle that unintentionally rewards immorality by turning questions of right and wrong into debates over whether a particular tactic will help win an election.
Sometime between seasons four and five of Portlandia, after a two-year stint abroad, I moved from the Kingdom of Morocco to the City of Roses. I settled first in rural Oregon. A year later I settled in Portland proper. And a couple enlightening years after that, I settled for the natural beauty and the promise of this place despite its glaring shortcomings.I’m talking about its lack of racial diversity and its history of racial prohibition. Its integration and then systematic marginalization of communities of color. And its circumstances today as one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, or the way I see it, one of the fastest growing cradles for whiteness.
Normally I would find a good pull quote and just post this as a link, but I expressly want to call attention to “Me and Monotropism” by Fergus Murray, because I think the “focus on some key features of autism as seen from the inside” (emphasis mine) is key to convincing more people to look at autism through this lens of monotropism. Especially important to my mind is the reframing of “executive dysfunction” as “autistic inertia”.
The press has been covering this as tit for tat. One side hits. The other hits back. On it goes, leaving citizens to wonder what’s what. Or worse: leaving us to wonder if all they want to do in Washington is fight and not get anything done. The news has been lots of heat but no light. Result: journalistic malpractice and a bewildered citizenry.It doesn’t have to be this way. Journalists can but don’t act morally. I do not mean moralizing. I mean assessing information methodically and coming to a reasonable conclusion about its meaning—then relaying that information, and meaning, so we all of us are better informed citizens. In other words, acting like grown-up journalists.
And I fear that we are collectively making a big mistake. To strip away honest words about a phenomenon like this seems to me an abdication of our post. To turn explicit racism in a demagogic presidential candidate into merely railing against immigration feels like the kind of malpractice that, in historical retrospect, often is seen as culpable for dark and gruesome things.
The convention adopted “high crimes and misdemeanors” with little discussion. Most of the framers knew the phrase well. Since 1386, the English parliament had used “high crimes and misdemeanors” as one of the grounds to impeach officials of the crown. Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.
BuzzFeed has some pretty peculiar journalistic standards. Earlier today this story included a flat, declaratory statement by its author: “The federal act’s protections are contingent on these companies acting neutrally.” The federal act in question being 47 U.S. Code § 230, establishing “protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material”.
For years I resisted getting a professional evaluation of whether or not I was actually autistic because the family member that had been suggesting it can exhibit sort of a projected hypochondria (e.g. any sniffle means I should go to the doctor because it might be pneumonia), but in the end they were right on the autism count.
What is maddening to me is that we already have a party in an overt panic over demographic change and it’s the Republican Party, and we don’t need the Democrats engaging in some sort of Lite version through centrism or civility or whatever it is House Democrats have been up to this week (although I guess it obviously hasn’t been “civility”).
As human beings, we live by emotions and thoughts. We exchange them when we are in the same place at the same time, talking to each other, looking into each other’s eyes, brushing against each other’s skin. We are nourished by this network of encounters and exchanges. But, in reality, we do not need to be in the same place and time to have such exchanges. Thoughts and emotions that create bonds of attachment between us have no difficulty in crossing seas and decades, sometimes even centuries, tied to thin sheets of paper or dancing between the microchips of a computer. We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
It should be noted, when Mike Pence says that people in America’s concentration camps have “access to hygiene”, that when trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act the Republican Party often touted its own support for “access to healthcare”, but it was pretty well established when looking at their ideas that providing “access to healthcare” shouldn’t have been read to mean providing healthcare.
So many interesting things you can do on Write.as that you simply can’t do on a hosted WriteFreely site, like this creative method of receiving “letters to the editor” by giving readers the address for posting-by-email to a private blog that you check for comments to address or engage. I wish I knew what the timeframe was for including existing Write.as features and functions on WriteFreely.host sites.
The second issue is the prolonged placement of children in institutional settings. Obviously, the two are linked in this particular situation. From the perspective of what we know about children’s health and well-being, what we know about trauma, abrupt separation is one area where we have a lot of research and a lot of evidence about its consequences. But prolonged institutionalization is a separate area in which we have an equally deep research base and knowledge about how damaging that kind of setting is for kids. We are dealing with two very well-studied, serious assaults on the health and well-being of children.
There’s no good reason to do this. The families who are going to get broken up aren’t any better or worse than those who will watch this happen, or the millions of others who will look away. The people who are going to get rounded up and thrown into concentration camps won’t be collected because they’ve hurt anyone else. And even if some truly bad apples get caught up in the dragnet, it isn’t as if justice will be served: Mass expulsion is widely considered a crime against international law itself.
I don’t know which office or department has been leaving voicemails last night and today, but even on a good autistic-brain-day, it takes me awhile to get to voicemails I don’t know what they are about ahead of time, and the entire past week (up to and including Thursday’s “oh, nope, sorry you don’t have a proper recovery helper set up” debacle) has been too much mental stress and strain as it is.
And the first ethical hacker was René Carmille, the comptroller general of the French Army, who headed up the French census before the Germans invaded. The Germans instructed Carmille to input census data into IBM machines and have it analyzed to produce a full list of Jews living in France. Carmille and his team had a different idea. They hacked the punch card machines so that data could not be entered for the column that specified religion. His sabotage worked until 1944, when the Nazis discovered the plot. Carmille was tortured and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, and he died shortly thereafter.
Tomorrow’s surgery has been thrown into question by a new-to-me set of requirements for the person who will be driving me home and babysitting me afterward. This morning’s scheduling email from Kaiser Permanente suddenly revealed that they expect my helper to be onsite during the surgery, something I did not arrange because it wasn’t previously mentioned, and in fact my current helper isn’t even available under later in the afternoon.
And what do these shows have in common? White guys. Specifically, white guy showrunners. Before we proceed, let’s clarify: The problem is not white guys, per se. It’s that even when “woke” white creators attempt to wade into the waters of feminism, it only goes deep enough to explore issues as they relate to white women, because often that’s all they know. Audiences deserve shows that explore the issue through decentralizing a single point-of-view, i.e. white women. And if you think that hiring a couple women for the writer’s room grants you the keys to the kingdom of the entire feminine experience, you are sorely mistaken.
Someone today seemed surprised that I wasn’t automatically conceding their contention that people should feel guilty for being on Twitter. (This came up on Mastodon during today’s Twitter outage.) If I felt guilty about inhabiting every online or offline space that is compromised I would have to go live on the Moon.
Offline, our lives are hemmed in by institutions that force us to engage System 2, even when we are disinclined to. Children are taught to wait their turn before talking; grown-ups are frequently required to wait before marrying, divorcing, buying a gun. No matter how sure they may feel, scientists face peer review, lawyers face adversarial proceedings, and so forth. Also, back in the day, before instanticity, technology itself slowed us down. Printing and distributing words required several distinct stages and often multiple people; even a trip to the mailbox or a wait for the mail carrier afforded time for second thoughts. Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill were among the many public figures who wrote what Lincoln called “hot letters,” splenetic missives that vented anger but were never mailed. (Usually. One of Truman’s rants escaped and threatened a Washington Post writer with a black eye.)
It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.
The Republican Party was not always so sadistic, but elements of sadism were always present even when the party was still committed, in word and deed, to the demands of liberal democracy. (You could say William Buckley’s long career was an effort to suppress the GOP’s sadism or at least make it look respectable.) The party’s democratic commitments started to unravel during the 1990s and finally blew apart after the country elected its first black president. Conservatism detached from democracy is fascism, and that’s precisely the Republican Party we now have.
Things are still quite a ways away from Write House accepting its first invite-only members. In truth, I might have gotten things underway a bit early, given the alpha state of WriteFreely and the number of things that should be in place before bringing other people on board. However, you’ve got options if in the meantime you’d like just to support my own return to more routine blogging.
“What we like contributes to the picture of who we are,” writes Kimberly Hirsh about constructing identity online, “but what we want people to know we like does even more so, I think.” I don’t have anything insightful to say about this at the moment except that I wanted to wonder whether this outward-facing curation has anything to do with the how and the why of some people thinking that online is not real life even though we outwardly curate ourselves offline, too. Also, it made me think about my observation that I don’t have a stable or constant sense of self, and I wish some outside omniscience could look back over my life and see how both my sense of self and my outwardly-curated identity varied over time, and to what degree they did so in sync or at odds with one another.
Speaking of management, I remain somewhat disappointed that my pet theory for the identity of Management on the cancelled Counterpart turned out not to be correct. I don’t think I ever posted it, but my idea was that Management would turn out to be the only people who were not duplicated when the universe was split in two. Presumably the people present at the schism’s epicenter, I imagined how interesting the dynamics both of power and of identity might be amongst a group of people responsible for doubling the universe, especially as it concerned the metaphysical yet pragmatic question of which was the “real” world and which was the copy. Would the members of Management take different sides, or would Management as a whole try for some sort of neutrality? Would they think of themselves as belonging to one world or to the other, to both worlds or to neither? Maybe this is a good premise for an entirely different show: the lives of people who accidentally remake the world and whether they will help or hinder those worlds from tearing themselves, or each other, apart.
This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media’s most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo—including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Lauer —television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power. Even after a midterm season in which women—many of them women of color, some of them very progressive—won elections in historic numbers; even in the midst of a presidential crisis during which poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities have been made more vulnerable than ever, and have been brought closer to the center—finally—of left political engagement and activism; even given all of this, so many of the voices interpreting the events around us still belong to the guys who’ve been clumsily telling us what to think about politics for ages.
Even on their own terms, the civility police had missed the point. At that point, when the evidence was clear that this bill would hurt people (and was overwhelmingly rejected by public consensus) and the Senate Republicans were looking to pass it anyway (whether to achieve tax cuts, deliver a political promise to the hard right, or placate Donald Trump) there was no space for civil debate. People in power were simply trying to do an indefensible thing. Elizabeth Warren was using the language that people use to describe indefensible actions, and she was using it clearly and accurately. But certain types of political minds were more offended by her description of these actions than by the actions themselves. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” Politicians mask descriptions of their atrocities in vague or meaningless language to obscure them. In civility-policed discourse, something similar is at play. The language that can plainly describe terrible things is declared out of bounds, so, in response to an atrocity, you’re faced with either normalizing it or stepping out of line to name it.
Having recently watched Jinn and more recently watched the second season of Dark, my ongoing tour of international Netflix shows continues this weekend with Leila, the first episode of which is sort of a mix of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange Is the New Black but with more every day moments of routine sadistic debasement.
Kaiser Pemanente waited until one week out from my bladder surgery and biopsies to tell me that whoever I arrange to bring me in the morning needs to stay there all day and be the one who takes me back home in the afternoon, thereby scuttling the current lead options for my transportation and babysitting needs that day. Now I have seven days to find a solution that doesn’t involve mental and emotional stresses that I simply cannot manage on top of the physical and psychological ones of, you know, the surgery and recovery themselves.
Until reading this Jonathan M. Katz piece yesterday, I guess that I hadn’t seen the actual reasons for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reportedly becoming visibly angry at border agents during her recent tours of America’s concentration camps. It wasn’t even in the distance. She was two feet in front of me, and there was this glass perimeter in front of them. And that’s when all hell broke loose. Because I pointed at her as she was holding the phone in front of everybody: the entire congressional delegation, the acting director, all of their supervisors. And I said, “Look at her. She’s taking a selfie right after everything that was just released this morning. Which you all just indicated you’re aware of.” And I was like, “Look at her. She’s taking a selfie right now.”
I wish that when I’d posted about mistaking Seattle’s “breathing rooms” as safe places to go when you’re trying to avoid a mental health crisis that I’d yet read the Sarah Holder piece on open-plan offices adding “pods” for privacy, although I’m loathe to link it because in the early going it quotes a little too much Dilbert, and any Dilbert is too much Dilbert.
Most people most of the time would note, at the very least, that choosing between one’s God and one’s child is unfair. Others might say God sabotaged Abraham. Other might question Abraham’s mental health. But to the “Christians” we’re talking about, this is not a dilemma. The answer is simple and clear. God is the ultimate authority. No questioning. No negotiating. If you’re wondering, yes, the Almighty here is a fascist and in every way the diametric opposite of the loving merciful God of the Gospels. The “Christians” we’re talking about do not look on the faces of migrant children and see undue harm and suffering. They see people getting what they had coming to them.
Multiple things can be true at the same time. In this instance, it’s true that more people wearing backpacks need to be conscious of how much more room their bodies take up because of them, and, yes, there are situations in which, if you can, you should remove them. However, it’s also true that Michael Callahan is an asshole. One good thing to come out of this nonsense, however, is Ernie Smith’s history of backpacks over on Tedium.
So, it turns out that in its current state, WriteFreely, the platform Write House runs on, doesn’t paginate hashtag pages, which means currently each of my various archives (including the date archives which currently are just made from hashtags) only go back ten posts. The only way to find anything older than that is to browse my front page through the “Older”/“Newer” pagination links at the bottom, methodically one by one. It’s either a bug or a temporary oversight. Sorry for any inconvenience, although I can’t imagine very many people are coming here to find older posts just yet.
Tonight I burned through the last three episodes in season two of Dark, so that tomorrow I can binge season three of Stranger Things while our fascist-in-chief is off publicly masturbating to tanks on the National Mall, although with any luck thunderstorms will make his martial madness a sadder affair than his inauguration. Dark is maybe the densest thicket of time travel storytelling television’s ever done (like, if you had any trouble following the later seasons of Lost, maybe don’t try Dark), and I don’t quite understand how they’re going to work in this season finale’s setup for the show’s third and last season, but I’m game.
Let’s be clear: this is a public admission that he knowingly views these conditions as a deterrent, and that amounts to a confession to committing crimes against humanity, and that is grounds for immediate impeachment. It’s long past time for Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to decide who they want to be when the history books are written.
At Ursula, however, the children Sevier examined—like the panting 2-year-old—were “totally fearful, but then entirely subdued,” she told me. She could read the fear in their faces, but they were perfectly submissive to her authority. “I can only explain it by trauma, because that is such an unusual behavior,” she said. Sevier had brought along Mickey Mouse toys to break the ice, and the kids seem to enjoy playing with them. Yet none resisted, she said, when she took them away at the end of the exam. “At some point,” Sevier mused, “you’re broken and you stop fighting.”
Other than the free loaf of bread here and there, the only thing of value I got out of playing some collect-and-win game at the local Safeway was a Shutterfly discount on a 20”x30” print. Due to arrive while I am in post-op recovery at home after surgery next Friday is a print of this, which I’ll still have to find the money to frame at some point.
There’s a bunch of stuff I wanted to write about, or at least link, but today almost entirely is about the 90-minute commute to a nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, the nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, the 90-minute commute back from the nurse consult about catheter care and other post-operative recovery information, and the state of my mental health during and after all of this.
That last post, it turns out, does not do justice to how angry I’ve suddenly become tonight. There was no time, earlier, as I was off on my weekly mental health trip to the zoo, and I do tend to treat that as a protected environment for self-care. But within minutes of putting up that last post, I inflicted an increasingly-hostile rant upon my Twitter followers.
It’s all well and good, and necessary, that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus went on a barnstorming tour of some of America’s concentration camps, but combine what the delegation found even with authorities on their “best” behavior with the massive ProPublica scoop about racist and dehumanizing border agent attitudes in a private Facebook group and I can’t help but feel like the only thing commensurate with and proportional to the degree of cruelty and the extent of inhumanity is for all 280 congressional Democrats to travel en masse to one of these camps. Small delegations are important, and good, and need to keep happening, but I feel like if this isn’t a thing for a party to “go big” on, then nothing is. Not because it’s partisan, but because true politics is driven by morality, and the immorality—or is it amorality?–of what’s happening is simply too immense for, well, politics as usual.
I keep forgetting that the platform behind Write House is not even beta software, it’s alpha software, and it only just today hit version 0.10. For my purposes here as I slowly (not a critique, just a description) watch WriteFreely come together for an eventual invite-only launch of my instance here, the only relevant change in the new version is I’m able to redirect visitors from the base URL to this site’s “About” page, since the regular landing page is irrelevant until Write House actually opens up.
From the post-modern conservative position, what they believe has no bearing on their rhetoric or argument, which is from the position that truth – objective, material truth – does not exist. Whoever wins the argument decides that the color of the sky or the existence of oppression, regardless of what is happening in reality. Reality, to the post-modern conservative, has no bearing on truth.
If you listen to pundits, Democrats remain a party of “coastal elites” who act like the rest of the country doesn’t exist. (And this is setting aside that what they mean is they feel Democrats don’t talk enough about “real Americans”, by which they mean middle-American white people.) CityLab, however, mapped the Democratic debates and the geography discussed over the two nights is anything but purely coastal.
Alex Zielinski of Portland Mercury last night posted a write-up of what she’d found out about the Portland Police Bureau’s dangerous “cementshake” tweet. It’s based on the same info Katie Shepherd got from the Bureau, although Zielinski more explicitly draws a straight line to the on-site report from a police lieutenant in fact being the only information they received.
Apparently some English towns are installing “chat benches” (really, signs on existing benches, it looks like) for people in the mood to talk to other people. I’d be fine with this happening elsewhere if it was also then implicitly understood that if I’m sitting anywhere else, leave me the fuck alone.
I’m not going to call them “principled conservatives,” as the Washington Post’s Max Boot and others have insisted, because so much of what these pundits do is contrary to any ordinary definition of “principled.” As for “conservative,” truthfully, I’m not sure what that word means anymore, except perhaps for a kind of authoritarianism-lite.
In animals this is often fatal, because their cells and systems are highly specialised and inflexible. Think of animal biology as an intricate machine in which each cell and organ has a place and purpose, and all parts must work and cooperate for the individual to survive. A human cannot manage without a brain, heart or lungs.
Over the last several months, I’ve been getting back to subscribing to things via RSS feeds in Feedly, and getting into subscribing to things via email in Stoop. Ideally, I’d want to be able to do both of these things in a single app. Add “read it later” bookmarking for random things I find on my own (which I’ve only just discovered I can do in Feedly), and maybe even podcast support (although I only listen to two and currently I just do that through Apple’s native app), and I feel like I’d spend more time seeing what other people have to say about things. There should be a combined inbox of every item from every type of subscription, separate inboxes for each type of subscription, and individual archive boxes for each subscription.
Katie Shepherd has been continuing to push today and gotten a bit more out of the Portland Police Bureau. We’ve gone from “quick-drying cement” in their tweet yesterday afternoon, to a “substance … similar to a quick drying cement” in their press release half an hour later, to “a cup which appeared to have material on it consistent with quick drying cement” in a statement to Shepherd twenty-four hours later.
And so as June comes to a close and the year is halfway done, I seem already to have completed my Goodreads challenge of reading 35 books for the year. This was the same goal I’d set for 2018 and 2017, when I read 37 and 36 books, respectively, by the end of December. While I’ve read an increased number of short stories or novellas this year, I don’t see how that could account for all of it. Not really sure what happened.
News outlets serving as little more than third-party publicists is a longstanding pet peeve of mine, so you’d be unsurprised at my annoyance with Portland Mercury’s story on the new Portland Indie Con for not even referencing in passing originally having invited, and then having to disinvite comics creator and editor Brandon Graham. You don’t have to belabor it, but do you sort of have to mention it.
“The discussion in this race today,” Joe Biden told the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, “shouldn’t be about the past. We should be talking about how to do better. How we can move forward.” This in a speech defending his track record, even, I guess, on busing. So while that quote says “in this race” it just as easily could have said “on race”, and what Biden doesn’t seem to understand is that you literally cannot have a discussion on race in America today without discussing the past—especially when your present isn’t too hot, either.
Rachel Maddow on Friday night had a weirdly contrived premise that every Democratic candidate had at least one moment that went well enough for them to be able to build on. I think there’s a difference between having a good moment in the moment and having a moment that “did themselves some good”, so the framing here was frustrating.
There is no evidence that immigration spreads disease. One recent study in The Lancet found that immigration makes arrival countries healthier. Another review of European studies found that the “risk of transmission” of diseases from refugees and asylum seekers to local populations “is very low”—in fact, that what little risk exists is borne almost entirely by the refugees themselves, on account of being forced to live in squalid conditions.
Twitter today was buzzing about automatic faucet sensors (and, apparently, soap dispensers) not seeing black people, reminding me of previous stories about the Kinect not seeing black people and about HP webcams not seeing black people. Each of these stories (some since reportedly debunked) at the time inevitably reminded me of “Racial Sensitivity”, the fourth episode of season one of the late, great Better Off Ted, about Veridian Dynamics’ new companywide motion detectors.
That feeling when you find yourself in a mid-surgery argument in the operating room over what procedures you did or did not agree to but then you hear booms from outside and realize the bombs finally have started dropping and look outside the window to see mushroom clouds blooming and you wake up in the dark of night, hyperventilating.
Warren basically did what she had to, although it’s inexplicable that the moderators gave her question after question during the first half only to all but ignore her for the second. It will be down to whether or not her closing statement reminded everyone of who the moderators let people see during the first half.
Mostly unnoticed until today: the management of The Edition apartments in Hyattsville, Maryland, posted a public statement about resident Nick Starr-Street’s harassment of black women, and he’s in trouble: “In no way does the staff at The Edition condone the actions of the resident in question, and we are taking swift corrective measures to address the issue.”
This brings us to the larger problem of city rankings in general, issues that reflects the problems of technocracy itself. By using data as a driver, such rankings present themselves as dispassionate and impartial, as if they are simply removing the lid on a machine to reveal objectively how the engine beneath is functioning. They nonetheless represent a worldview taken from a highly specific angle, one that is full of scarcely acknowledged assumptions about who the imaginary citizen they address is.
And yet, there’s a counterexample that should inspire hope for anyone whose content has been ganked for the lulz. Another cartoonist, KC Green, similarly saw one of his characters meme-ified for political purposes. The figure was initially named Question Hound but has since been dubbed the This Is Fine Dog. Across social media, we see him sitting in a burning room with a dumb smile on his face, musing to himself, “This is fine.” It’s a simple, potent image that captures the tenor of our chaotic times and the reactions of those who refuse to accept awful reality, and it’s been used far and wide. What makes Green’s story different from those of folks like Furie is that he has, astoundingly enough, been able to harness the meme’s success for profit and greater recognition, and is surprisingly renowned as its creator. He says the trick is vigilance, luck, and not being afraid to steal from your thieves.
If you’re reading this (and haven’t already responded because you saw this call on Twitter and Mastodon), please consider taking this one-question survey about how you get here. Blogs powered by WriteFreely have very minimal stats—and none for RSS use—and I’d like to get a sense of how people are notified of new posts.
It looks like The Three-Body Problem might be headed for the small screen in China, and I hope that it’s a better adaptation than was the movie of The Wandering Earth, which was fun—in a “the Chinese film industry scoff at Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay” kind of way–but essentially had nothing whatsoever to do with the short story. I’m definitely more on board for this trilogy being a series instead of a film, which it seems they tried already and shelved.
Somewhere at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum they have on display a rendition of “First they came…”, a calling-out of “the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy … following the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets”. Somehow, the museum also opposes any suggestion that any other past or present situation can be analogous to what happened in Germany. As pointed out on Twitter, some of their own programs seem not to follow this new company line. If only the Holocaust itself can be referred to by the rallying cry, there’s no point ever again in saying, “Never again.”
When he first saw Yankee Trump, my neighbor on the train literally said “I feel attacked,” and it’s the unspoken subtext in a lot of other Trump supporter sightings. It does not take a lot of imagination to know that if someone comes up scapegoating you and encouraging followers who do it even more forcefully, you’ll feel less safe when you see people supporting him and getting away with it. When it comes to public acceptability of Trump support, it basically is that simple. There’s no way to support the guy who does these things and not contribute to that aura of fear.
Yes, I did indeed, as promised, finish Last Day by Domenica Ruta so that I would not have dropped two fiction reads in a row. Verdict: don’t bother. On the upside, it means I’ve been able to start in on P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums. Also, because I’ve not mentioned it in awhile, you can follow me on Goodreads to see what I’ve been reading, or, you know, buy me my next book.
Five months after a data breach at the Oregon Department of Human Services, they finally notified me by mail that my information was accessed. In the process, while they managed to mail my current address, they addressed the notification to my birth name, which was legally changed an entire year before the data breach. What’s more, they got the middle initial wrong.
Robbi Bishop-Taylor has provided a kind of answer in this unique, lovely map of the contiguous U.S. cast in sunset shadows on the Solstice (aka June 20). Bishop-Taylor, a geospatial-science PhD candidate at Australia’s University of New South Wales, used NASA data and a hill-shading algorithm to simulate sunset at a “consistent azimuth of 300 degrees from north and an altitude of 1.5 degrees above the horizon,” he says via Reddit DM. The map “effectively shows what the shadows would be like at each point in the map if the sun was 1.5 degrees above the horizon at that specific place!”
While cities have always done a good job of helping numerical minorities achieve a density sufficiently big to sustain a business (for example, a gay bar) or even a movement (think organized labor in major industrial cities), politically conservative suburbs and rural places have always faced a paradox: the built environment is made to support the individual family structure and is deeply isolating by design, which makes it harder to organize socially or politically. But social media is a good-enough stand-in for urban density, providing a means to form the early connections necessary for starting longer-term relationships. Platforms like YouTube, and talk radio before it, let anti-social conservatives who don’t want to live next to other people connect online and later in person for marches, rallies, and meetings.
We Jews do not own this term. But in fact, I would argue it is imperative that we Jews use this term whenever these dreadful facilities are imposed on groups of people other than ourselves. History has shown us that the concentration of humanity into forced detention invariably leads entire societies to exceedingly dark places. This practice did not begin with Nazi policies against European Jewry—nor did it end there.
Yesterday my primary care health provider called to set up four different appointments related to the bladder surgery coming up in three weeks: a pre-operative telephone appointment with my urologist tomorrow, an office appointment with the nurse in a week and a half to go through catheter care and other post-operative information, an office appointment four days after surgery to remove the catheter, and a post-operative appointment with my urologist three days after that.
Reading this ode to Universal’s aborted “Dark Universe”, I feel like the premise of making a cinematic universe out of the studio’s classic movie monsters wasn’t the problem. The problem was the argument that it should be a franchise of action movies, when instead these should have been individual horror movie reinventions, linked by connecting threads ultimately leading us somewhere. The failure of imagination here was one of genre.
But anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary – it just helps people cope. In fact, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, mindfulness says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids.
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “creeping normality” that I mentioned earlier and the ways in which it could account for how some autistics can go decades without knowing they are autistic due to a process beginning in childhood of being slowly cooked by society’s background radiation of conformity into quietly engaging in a lifetime of masking without realizing.
It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that w.tf, the best-ever domain, has vanished into history. The top-level domain’s registry now says, “The domain name ‘w.tf’ is not eligible for registration because it … is composed of an insufficient number of characters.” Wayback is forever, but it’s not the same.
Trump’s concentration camps are leading edge of a pattern of belief and behavior unfolding in plain sight. The comparison to atrocities of the 20th Century—whether the first U.S. concentration camps in the Philippines, the Soviet gulags, or even the Nazi concentration camps that after nearly a decade of slowly worsening crimes made the Holocaust possible—is obvious for a reason. Which is terrifying.
I’m pretty sure this is some sort of mindfulness newsletter that I’d otherwise find annoying but, not for nothing, “creeping normality”, or “landscape amnesia”, is as good as any description of the political dynamic of the long pre-Trump status quo to which Joe Biden wants to return and as a result of which most everyone deluded themselves into believing “it can’t happen here” in the first place.
That research I mentioned mapping a Cretaceous-era shoreline to certain American election results, that I referenced in a piece using quotes from Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History to show that geologic privilege accounts for the success of Western civilization? It actually shows up later in Origins. I should have known, because of course it does.
Liberals tend to believe that everyone has the right to the public square no matter how reprehensible a person’s views are. In trying to tolerate the intolerant, American liberals tend to believe they are being good liberals and by extension good Americans. The marketplace of ideas, they believe, will sort out the whole truth in time. But the reverse is the case. What they are really doing, in a context of fascism politics, is helping fascists exploit liberal principles to undermine and replace democracy.
I find it interesting that a bit of research suggests a connection between autism and mitochondria, given that there’s also been a bit of research suggesting a connection between chronic fatigue syndrome and mitochondria. Many autistic people I’ve run into online also seem to have CFS, and given my ongoing fatigue, pain, and intermittent dysphasia, investigating that is next up on my medical to-do list after dealing with the bladder stones or, you know, possible cancer.
If you are experiencing a sense of déjà vu that we are debating the term “concentration camp”, that’s because exactly one year ago we were having this exact same discussion. It’s a strong indicator of just how badly we have failed to protect immigrants that despite our “never again” protestations every time this comes up, apparently we don’t even realize that we’re having this debate again.
The fortunes of functional families began to shift in the mid-1960s as fears of the family in crisis swept the nation. The rising New Right dovetailed with a generation of politicized post-war homeowners, both of which saw formal-family zoning as a vindication of their values. For social conservatives, formal-family zoning could help stave off the decline in nuclear family formation, and for homeowners, it could protect their property values against their perception that having abnormal neighbors might drive prices down.
So this Abraham Riesman piece on Vulture about the rise and fall of Marvel shows on Netflix does mention other networks but somehow fails completely to reference Cloak & Dagger over on Freeform, which quietly has been going about its business as the best Marvel show on television for two seasons in a row.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t baby it. Never have. I solved the sleeve problem by wearing the jacket out in rain storm after rain storm, without protecting the leather, and pushing the sleeves up, then letting it dry, until they fit perfectly, with a permanent ripple to them so they are now exactly the right length.
Despite an early chapter’s reference to a possibly-autistic character’s “oblivious grotesqueries”, I’ve decided not to drop Last Day and just do my best to solider through until the end. Sarah Moss, it turns out, is not the only character with some fairly ugly observations of that kind, and the entire International Space Station thread strains credulity, but since it’s moving relatively quickly I’m going to err on the side of not already leaving another book unfinished.
The upside of being down at the heels, at least in Wonderland’s case, is that rents have tumbled enough that small businesses now make up most of the mall’s shops. Perhaps because the mall also doubles as a convention space, one that hosts geeky gatherings like Monster Con and Morphinominal Expo, many of these shops cater to various fandoms, making Wonderland of the Americas an unexpected hub of San Antonio’s geek culture, a pedestrian-friendly space dense with desirable destinations unlike so much else of the city. There’s the store that sells Funkos, and only Funkos. There’s the shop that sells wrestling memorabilia, and the one where you can buy a dress patterned with art from EC Comics. And there’s Gotham Newsstand, a comic shop managed by a Trinity University alumnus.
I don’t know what the hell The Art of Manliness website is, exactly, but Dino’s Journal led me to their excerpt “from Arthur Murray’s Popularity Book, originally published in 1944”, which is an article by one Gelett Burgess on so-called “vocational friendship”, and weirdly I feel like you could convert it into an argument for how to think about neurodiversity?
Black Americans did not abandon liberal democracy because of slavery, Jim Crow, and the systematic destruction of whatever wealth they managed to accumulate; instead they took up arms in two world wars to defend it. Japanese Americans did not reject liberal democracy because of internment or the racist humiliation of Asian exclusion; they risked life and limb to preserve it. Latinos did not abandon liberal democracy because of “Operation Wetback,” or Proposition 187, or because of a man who won a presidential election on the strength of his hostility toward Latino immigrants. Gay, lesbian, and trans Americans did not abandon liberal democracy over decades of discrimination and abandonment in the face of an epidemic. This is, in part, because doing so would be tantamount to giving the state permission to destroy them, a thought so foreign to these defenders of the supposedly endangered religious right that the possibility has not even occurred to them. But it is also because of a peculiar irony of American history: The American creed has no more devoted adherents than those who have been historically denied its promises, and no more fair-weather friends than those who have taken them for granted.
Western archivy operates from implicit and explicit assumptions of futurity, which become precarious in light of the temporal and scalar distortions which scholars of memory studies have theorized as a critical existential challenge of the Anthropocene. The Society of American Archivist’s (SAA) Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology predicates a record’s worth on its potential for future use. SAA’s Core Values Statement and Code of Ethicsreiterates that “archivists thus preserve materials for the benefit of the future more than for the concerns of the past.” Similarly, the Association of Canadian Archivist’s (ACA) Code of Ethics and Professional Conductidentifies no higher goal than to “[make] records available and [protect] them for future use.” The interests of future users shape core practices of appraisal, preservation, description, and access.
Over the past few days I’ve spent some time tweaking the CSS here to get away from the default WriteFreely style, and I should give some credit for various bits of inspiration to Micro.blog, Substack, and Svbtle, each of whom, in different ways, informed how I thought about past minimalist approaches I’ve taken, extending all the way back to blogging’s golden age.
The ridiculous thing about the story I told the other day is that the incident described is a manifestation of something I’d previously established: that when faced with a stressful bit of socially performative communication, I defer to the other—even if it means agreeing to something that will be even more stressful, or even damaging.
Over on Twitter, author Anne Ursu noted that her son’s summer reading teacher “doesn’t let students choose what they read because ‘they’d just read graphic novels and fantasy’”, which prompted the expected sort of incredulous replies and stories about comics as not only valuable in themselves but as gateways to other reading.
When we talk about “not pathologizing autism,” we don’t mean “pretending autistic people don’t have impairments.” But we also don’t assume that neurological and behavioral differences are always problems. For example, there’s nothing inherently wrong with disliking social activities. Not wanting to socialize is different from wanting to participate and being unable to. Both are possibilities for autistic people. One requires acceptance, the other requires assistance. Sadly, I have yet to meet a therapist who doesn’t treat the two as equivalent and in equal need of correction.
Poor adaptive skills without adequate supports may explain the dismal higher-education and employment rates among autistic adults. This is particularly true for those without intellectual disabilities, who may be presumed capable of attending college or pursuing competitive employment without a need for significant supports. In fact, however, these individuals often have significant impairments in basic day-to-day functions.