Words are inadequate

The paperwork for my credential has FINALLY gone through, so I am actually done with BCIT. Unless I need to get a transcript or something, I guess. \o/

Meanwhile, have some links. Roughly zero percent of these are cheerful.

The culture war is a metaphorical war (for now), but the metaphor is valid makes two points, neither in as much detail as I would like.

One: "We liberals really need to acknowledge that (a) we are in a culture war and (b) we are the aggressors. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have been features of the dominant culture since... well, pretty much forever. We are engaged in a conscious effort to marginalize -- and, if possible, extirpate -- these tendencies, and we are using whatever means we have at our disposal to do so, including the sword of the state."

Two: "...[A] very deep cultural and psychological problem on the liberal-left, which is a pervasive tendency toward various types of Whig history, in which history itself is more or less assumed to move in an inevitable direction, with a sort of vaguely Marxisant or quasi-Christian eschatological faith that in the end the good guys have to win because that’s the ultimate plot line."

I do not, in fact believe that 'the moral arc of the universe ... bends towards justice,' because why would it? Any bending has to be done by us, by people who act to bend it, and in the face of thousands of years of tradition, fear, and resource-insecurity.

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. ... There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
--Hunter S Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

Related, I Want No One Else To Succeed: "I've been doing this experiment on classes for the past 10 years and not one class has agreed unanimously because there’s always somebody who doesn’t want someone to have what they have because they don’t think they deserve it."

Also related, rachelmanija reviews Dying Of Whiteness: "[W]hite people perceive their own interest as upholding white supremacy and punishing people of color and liberals. They value this so highly that they are willing to deprive themselves of money, material goods, and even their own lives in pursuit of this goal. And they are doing exactly that: literally killing themselves as a side effect of killing people of color, in a kind of cultural murder-suicide." Erik at LG&M reviewed it some years back as well. His concluding words feel prescient. "Until whites stop preferring to kill themselves rather than admit non-whites as full citizens of the nation, fascism will continue to be a serious threat to the rest of us. And to themselves too, but they will be A-OK with that."

Who Goes MAGA?, a fictitious analysis of various personalities. "It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness." (Also links to Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay "Who Goes Nazi?", also worth a read.)

And, in case the previous weren't depressing enough: Assuming the can opener of free fair elections and a subsequent Democratic victory in 2026 and 2028: "Will America’s non-fascist party have the will to purge the government of fascists?" In which the FBI is conducting witch-hunts against employees who were friendly with people on the director and deputy director's 'enemies lists'. Primarily concerned with There Will Be No De-Trumpification:

Imagine it is 2028 and Democrat X has won the presidency. Kash Patel will only be four years into his term as FBI director. Dan Bongino is now a career employee of the bureau. The entire agency will be stacked, top to bottom, with Trump loyalists.

Would a Democratic administration have the will to purge these Trumpist elements from federal law enforcement?

I’m pretty sure I know the answer. And you’re not going to like it.

There will be no housecleaning of any Federal agencies; Trump appointees will remain in place despite their commitment to opposing Democratic governance and priorities. There will be no significant rollback of ICE's increased budget and powers.

We have the model for this: Obama in 2008 declining to go after the banks; Biden's appointment of Merrick Garland to fail to investigate the 6 January coup attempt. Hell, the pardon and rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.

Well. Two hundred fifty years was a good run, I guess.

Practicum complete. It hit me harder than expected at the end of last week. Plenty of possible reasons. Biggest, I think, was "this was supposed to be a pathway to a Real Job and it was instead a dead end," and there's not anything I can do about that. So that set off ... not really a full-blown depressive episode, I don't think. A sort of low-key moodiness. Days later I'm still sad that it couldn't work out but not overwhelmingly so.

On Friday I returned to Whistler for the fifth(!) and final round on my tattoo. I'm quite happy with it. It's larger and brighter than I'd expected it to be, but I'm okay with that. And it does look good. Red maple on the outside of the calf, aspen on the inside, both in full fall foliage, with a kudzu vine twining around the leg. This last session finished up the maple and a couple of last kudzu leaves. It hurt like hell for a couple of days; now it's just itchy. And a bit startling, whenever I look down.

After some thought I'm anxious about going to Niagara, but I'm not, for the most part, scared. I'm angry, and it's easy for that to sink into, well, depressive fatalism, because there's not anything I can do about it. I try to talk to folks who can keep my perspective grounded in reality. That seems to help somewhat.

I feel like the horrific ICE news stories are radicalizing me in a similar fashion to Abu Ghraib twenty-one years ago. I'm mostly okay with that. Just need to figure out a useful way to point it this time.

There's a bit in The Good Place where Chidi tells Eleanor about the idea that toddler-mentality is (I'm paraphrasing, probably badly) "me not you" and a more mature line of thought is "us not them". I feel like the great lefty/progressive project is to move beyond even that, to break down the divide of 'them'.

Six years ago a fellow named Frank Wilhoit coined a phrase that's been called Wilhoit's Law: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. This pithy expression wasn't the point of his comment; that was a later bit, that I've been thinking on a lot lately. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Tomorrow I wrap up a homework assignment, do a bunch of dishes, pack, and then head out for nearly two weeks. I'm gonna miss Mr Tuppert. He's been mostly friendly and affectionate the past couple of days.

Perhaps I'll have some answers when I come back.

"Society has to work, it has to feed people, it has to keep them reasonably healthy, it has to keep functioning over time and in emergencies."
--Graydon Saunders, Safely You Deliver (Commonweal 3)

Part of why I like the Commonweal books is that they're a fantasy about a functional democratic society, one that has taken "everyone or no one" as a fundamental principle.

"The Bad Old Days worked. People had kids, it kept going. It was generally horrible, but it was a society, it existed to make whatever sorcerer was in charge of it happy. The people who founded the Commonweal were determined not to have that society, they needed something else that would work, and they knew they didn’t know how. All they knew is that no one was going to have any inherent authority, something stronger than 'no slaves', and sorcerers weren’t going to be in charge of anything."
--ibid.

One can of course substitute "billionaire" for "sorcerer" as desired.

"Half a thousand years, and yet ye will not fall."
...
"All things come in time to die. The Line says 'united we fall'."
--ibid.

About a quarter of the second book (A Succession of Bad Days) is concerned with building a canal, one that will take thousands of people from "probably starving" to "belts tightened but mostly making it through this winter and next". There's general agreement that this needs doing, and now rather than in five years, and ... it gets done. There's no argument about whether the twice-displaced in the Folded Hills 'deserve' it, or about whether to put the Creeks into a lean winter, food-wise.

"Everything is tradeoffs. The Commonweal decided, when it was coming into being, that it was going to do at least so well for everyone, or die trying. It's not dead yet."
--ibid.

It's a good time to remember that kind of society is something that can at least be conceived of.

I desire that the enemies of the Commonweal should cease to oppose our polity, our comity, and our unity; that none should seek hereafter to make all joy and goodness arise from merciless obedience; that none should possess the might or strength to make rule of their preference.

I would it be that these things shall come to be by no harsher means, by no less mighty means, than the apprehension of facts and the disdain of fearfulness that is the best and greatest means by which anything might come to be in the world.

And yet these things shall come to pass.
--Graydon Saunders, A Mist of Grit and Splinters (Commonweal 5)

ETA: forgot I'd seen this awhile ago. Fucking terrible moving company sues for nonpayment, is forced to pay instead. Reminder that 2 Burley Men Moving, based out of Victoria, are absolute shit: no communication, major delays, and broken stuff. Avoid at all costs.

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In A Succession Of Bad Days there's a bit where the sorcery students work with a fire elemental to design and build a house. The elemental does most of the design work. Including the basement, with a hat-tip to Mr Penrose:

The walls are, floor to ceiling, tiled black and white, black shapes like a flat cruciform kite and white shapes like an extremely stylized swallow or falcon or something, nothing to it but pointy wings. ... Kynefrid sounds shockey. "I don't think the tiling pattern ever repeats."

Naturally someone has actually done this, thirty years ago. It looks amazing and I want it. I also enjoy the circa-2000 webpage design. Sad that all the "here's some more examples" links are broken, though. All things come in time to die.

---

I went to renew my US passport online last night (it's not up until late '26 but may as well). There's a form you fill out that will pre-fill a PDF form for you, and then you just print out the PDF form and mail everything off. It's pretty great.

It also includes the option for an X gender marker, which was mildly startling. More startling was that you can just select that, or for that matter M or F: no need to provide additional documentation or anything. I poked around a bit more and found the announcement from Sec'y Blinken, from spring 2022. It's... it's exactly what I would want it to be. "We're doing this; we talked to a bunch of people about the best way to do it, and figured that making it as easy as possible was the right call." It made me sniffly, both for its existence as the obviously, simply, right thing, and for the certainty that it'll be torched within six months.

I'm getting one, partly because it feels right and partly because if I draw flak that would otherwise have gone at someone more vulnerable that's all to the good. I considered not: it's got a nonzero, if low, chance of making my life worse. But: fuck preemptive compliance. Also fuck gender data. (Also fuck gender, honestly.)

---

I went to see Steph, the day after Halloween. I saw a giant outdoor puppet show and talked a little about Abby. I made pancakes, which an extremely picky small child declared to be the best pancakes. I bought spices and washed a lot of dishes and was generally quietly domestic in loving company for a few days.

I came home Wednesday afternoon, so I did at least get to spend the initial Wednesday-morning shock with someone else.

Had a couple days to re-center now. I'm not angry and confused, like I was in 2004. I'm not hurt and incandescent, like I was in 2016. I'm just sad. Sic transit gloria mundi. Everything dies, and everything flies economy.

Though I did discover Mycopunk Principles (from Mastodon, I think via Charlie Stross), which I appreciate.

Onward, always onward.

Ported over from Twitter, written 30 December 2022, lightly edited.

"Why are you a democrat? Me: lived in poverty - even had a Salvation Army Christmas as a kid; was a single mom; and I am a dual citizen US/Canada - I know what it is like to live in a nation with healthcare, maternity leave, few guns, etc. You?"
--Wyona M Freysteinson, PhD, MN, RN, FAAN (she/her) @ wyonaf on twitter

I switched in summer 2004 because Republicans didn't give a shit about the torture at Abu Ghraib. The current answer is "because I try to believe in 'none of us without all of us.'"

I should write this up formally sometime, but: I was raised by Reagan Republicans, my dad was an Army officer, and both my parents were quietly but intensely churchy. My teenage rebellion came in the form of libertarianism and backing away from the Church.

Specifically, in the 90s I was a middle-class-straight-white-dude with a bunch of peers from higher socioeconomic strata, so I had a firm belief that Racism Was Over, sexism wasn't real, and the only oppression was me getting speeding tickets. I also read a lot of PJ O'Rourke. I absorbed the whole 'republicans aren't great but democrats Want To Take Away My Freedom' thing.

A few things happened in the early oughts to shake that. First, I started reading Boing Boing and picking up on Cory Doctorow [et al]'s distaste for the Bush admin's anti-intellectualism. Second, the Iraq War was obviously, transparently, bullshit. And third, PJ O'Rourke stopped being a libertarian and started being a bog-standard conservative. In a later book he talks about riding with cops on a drug bust, and I was just "... no, no, this ain't right."

And then in late spring 2004 we got the revelations that the US Army had been torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Understand that I'd been raised to believe that the Army were the good guys. That whatever their faults they played by the rules. I genuinely believed that this would be a huge deal, with resignations and prosecutions. Because We Don't Do That. Instead from the get-go, Republicans defended it.

(It was a post on Patrick Nielsen Hayden's old blog, with the human-pyramid photo, that actually broke me.)

So for maybe a month I flailed around. What the hell did I believe, if the things I believed in were so obviously wrong? And then I stumbled on a post by Matt Yglesias that included the phrase "Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society."

That opened my eyes. Gave me a framework for not just politics but the whole endeavor of civilization. We all pay taxes to make things better, for all of us. Beats the hell out of every-man-for-himself libertarianism.

It took years of learning and some doing to get to a point where I could see systemic inequality (etc etc etc), but by summer 2004 I was firmly committed to the Democratic cause. (And then Kerry lost, which taught me an important lesson about US politics: people suck.)

I'm not sure where I encountered the phrase 'none of us without all of us' but I think it was in Graydon Saunders's writing about his 'egalitarian fantasy' Commonweal series. I like it, though. It's aspirational and worth aspiring to.

None of us without all of us.

Mick Gold et al, Watergate

I yield to rydra_wong regarding a four-hour Watergate documentary that I watched over the weekend: WHAT THE ACTUAL EVEN: a BBC/Discovery co-production.

I love the fact that nearly everyone I've made watch this documentary has the same reaction at around [the half-hour] point, because WHAT THE ACTUAL EVEN (you'll know it when you reach it). And then it continues to be jaw-dropping in a variety of different ways (moving, bizarre, mind-boggling, entertaining ...) for the next three and a half hours.

It's an in-depth and intensely, shockingly, compelling work of visual journalism/history. It opens with an almost unbelievable "yeah, we set out to do all these highly illegal things," and then the whole situation spirals far out of control before tightening back in. There are lengthy, candid interviews with just about everyone who was still alive at the time of filming (1994): the only exception I can think of is Nixon himself.

What gets me about the whole of l'affaire Watergate is the sheer number of things that had to go wrong for there to be any accountability at all. If Liddy had been less of a nutcase, or if he'd been more competent. If the cops hadn't checked on the office complex that night, if the FBI hadn't been able to connect the burglars to Howard Hunt, if Hunt hadn't gotten greedy. If John Dean hadn't developed a sense of self-preservation (something notably lacking in Ehrlichman and Haldeman) that turned into a genuine concern for the rule of law. Above all, of course, if the tapes hadn't existed, or if Nixon had set fire to them before they were subpoenaed. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the only reason anyone higher than Hunt and Liddy suffered any consequences at all, even in an era of decreased partisanship, is because Nixon was literally caught on tape authorizing felonies.

I'd love to see a similar documentary in 2040 about the Trump administration, or even in 2030 about GW Bush's. I doubt we will, though. I expect the only reason so many of the principals spoke so freely is that all their actions had been a matter of public record for twenty years. Don't Get Caught remains the operating principle of the Republican party.

Ah well.

(Available on Youtube, though with poor video quality. Also available on BBC's iPlayer for the next eleven months. Highly recommended.)

Not a whole lot, but that's been the refrain of the last ten months. I've played a lot of Hades, Supergiant's fourth game. It's really good, in ways that really work for me. Gameplay, obviously, but also storyline and art and music of course and the voice-acting and the pacing of how the various story aspects get revealed, and just, it's really really good. I should go back and play Pyre, I never did get around to that one.

I loved Bastion, Supergiant's first game. Then I quite enjoyed Transistor, their second, despite having a ton of complaints and criticisms that boil down to "the pacing is awful in multiple ways". Transistor's art-deco-Tron aesthetic made me quite happy.

... huh, I played Transistor the winter I was laid off. I'm not laid off this winter but I'm working from home and finding it difficult to keep focused on work, due to *gestures at everything*, so it's similar. Supergiant makes games that I'm happy to get lost in, I guess.

---

There was an election and the Democrats took the Senate, which was a source of great relief and joy for like twelve hours before it got overshadowed by a literal if disorganized coup attempt. Things are back to "normal," by which I mean we'll see if the Senate Dems can unite among themselves enough to do anything or if they choose to let the minority party dictate what gets passed. I am ... hopeful but not optimistic.

The thing is, if the filibuster doesn't go, I give up. At that point the people who've been saying that Democrats are useless are right. They have a chance to make some real, lasting changes: a two-year window to show demonstrable improvements in people's lives and provide reasons to vote for them. If they choose not to do that, not to exercise the power they have, then it's by choice, and nothing will get any better because they don't want it to. Absent real concrete change I am hard pressed to see the Democrats holding the House in 2022 (it's gonna be an uphill slog regardless), even if the Senate math improves, which it might. And then it's two years of Republican intransigence and 2024 is a bloodbath, and watching that will not be good for me.

---

I read Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower and meant to write more about it, but it's really good. In a style that I didn't expect to like: the prose is ... not difficult but not transparent. I'm surprised and pleased that it still grabbed me.

After, I reread Brust's Hawk, which is a perfectly cromulent Vlad novel that's a bit too full of itself, and Vallista, which I don't like any better the second time, though I'm happier with the ending than I was with much of the rest of it. And then I tried to read A Memory Called Empire, which lots of people liked, and couldn't get into it, so it sits awaiting another try.

I'm watching Arrow, about halfway through S2. It is not great art or even great television but it's diverting, and I'm enjoying the characters, and the bits of backstory for Legends etc. Erin and I started watching Flash last weekend and I already find myself enjoying it more.

---

I've been noticeably shorter of breath than "usual" at least since I came back from Vancouver in July and got a covid test (negative). It got worse over December/early Jan, so I made a doctor appointment. In between I stopped using the humidifier with what turned out to be an unclean filter, and my breathing got better but not back to where it was pre-December. Doctor seemed unconcerned; he sent me for an xray "just in case" and will have another test done once the machine for the test is functional again in February. Meanwhile I'm coughing (less so since I stopped using the lung steroid he suggested I try), but not "none") and still short of breath.

Trying the whole exercise thing again. Hoping I can convince it to stick this time.

---

There's stuff about possibly moving that is still rattling around in my head.

Work is stupid but saying it sucks is an exaggeration. I'm not happy there, though. No bites on anything else yet.

Thoughts on autism and gender rattle around in my head and don't settle out into anything worth posting, much less coherent.

I dunno. I'm still here. I guess that's enough for now?

I'm not worried about the Presidential election, except in the "if three of you vote for pizza and two of you vote to kill and eat Frank the pizza guy, even if you get pizza you have a problem" sense. Under any rational electoral system the only question would be "by how much is Trump going to get his ass handed to him." In the world as it is, Pennsylvania will be a pivotal shitshow. Republicans will insist that because Trump is ahead on election night (because those same Republicans prohibited Pennsylvania from early-counting the early-voting ballots) he's won and the count should be stopped. Either he "wins" that, or he doesn't.

(Side note: here, as in the case of Amy Coney Barrett vs Merrick Garland, Republicans have no honour and no principles save power. Many of these same Republicans, notably Brett Kavanaugh, argued twenty years ago that not counting every vote would be a perversion of the democratic process. Recommended search terms include "Bush v Gore" and "Brooks Brothers riot".)

So the prospect of a Trump win fills me with despair. I don't think it's likely, which helps; I also, mm, don't have any hope around it. Despairbot, the part of me that keeps on going when everything looks like it's gone to shit, will get me through if necessary.

It's the Senate that scares me. (I am unconcerned about the Democrats losing the House, and maybe I shouldn't be?) A Biden presidency without a Senate majority or at least a tie is little better than a Trump presidency. Worse, for my mental state, because I'll get to spend the next four years watching a replay of 2010-16 several turns further down the spiral.

Even if the Democrats take the Senate, there's still the judiciary to deal with. But that's a January problem.

Paul Campos at LGM&M mirrors my thoughts post-Tuesday.

(3) Elizabeth Warren’s biggest problem was that she’s a woman.
...
(5) I’ve been extremely negative about Biden relative to the other choices in the original Democratic field, but he is of course infinitely preferable to Trump on every single metric, and he would probably do an OK job as a caretaker president, assuming his health, and especially his mind, hold up for four years. BTW people who assume he won’t run for a second term are making a huge and unwarranted assumption. ... At this point, doing everything possible to make sure we have to deal with that problem four years from now is job #1 for every Democrat, democratic socialist, actual rather than fake Never Trumper, and essentially anybody who isn’t a an authoritarian-worshiping ethno-nationalist.

I'm deeply disappointed in the Democratic primary electorate but, ultimately, not surprised, and therefore not wrecked. The country's more conservative (racist, misogynist) than I would prefer. I know that. S'a big part of why I'm here and not there.

For now I'm gonna go cry over the DNC 2016 'Fight Song' video one more time, and then resign myself to this summer/fall's Duel Of The Old White Guys.

A couple of weeks ago my mother emailed me with "We're moving into a smaller place, so if you want anything from the house, now's the time."

I hemmed and hawed and talked to some people on Facebook (including my aunt Susan) and, well, now I'm at my parents' house in Burke, because they're moving out at the end of the week.

I'm still not sure what to do about my relationship with them. We had a long talk Monday night. The conclusion that I came to is that I am having a really hard time reconciling qualities like "love" and "empathy" with "votes Republican," because to my mind Republican policies are always implicitly and sometimes explicitly opposed to those things. And the end stage of that argument is "Yes, but Fox News is lying to you" and that is not a fight that I have anything like the energy to have.

I had dinner with Alison last night, which was a good re-grounding. The EPA is not in good shape, these past three years, and that's fairly typical across the board for government agencies; I'm not imagining it.

Oh well.

---

This (the second half) is a good description of what it's (still, to some extent) like to visit here. I can mostly fight it off or not succumb to it, but when I'm marinating in memories...

Tuesday I sorted through about half of my stuff, mostly saying either "I don't remember this, it can go in the trash" or "I remember this, and it can go in the trash." In some cases I'm a little sad that I'll never again have the memory triggered by the physical object. More often there's a sense of relief that it's okay to get rid of some of this now. I've kept a couple of smaller things, because they were important in some way, but far more of the Important things are ... not important enough to keep.

Wednesday night I got through most of the rest. This was harder, because as I dig through boxes I'm getting further back in my childhood. The 2.5 boxes of stuffed animals ("friends") in particular took, will take, some work. Or at least some mentally girding myself before being ready to dig into them. This afternoon, I hope.

The difference between "i will probably never see this again (but it's there if i want to)" and "i will never see this again" turns out to be significant. Which is also why I'm here at all, so.

---

Most of the stuff to be moved got packed yesterday or the day before. Now they're wrapping the last of it and loading it onto a truck, and then it goes away.

My parents built and moved into this house in 2000. Before that they (we) lived in a townhouse less than a mile away. I drove home last night thinking "I won't ever need to go west on Braddock and turn left at Burke Lake Road again," something I've been doing literally since I learned to drive. And it mostly doesn't affect me, except for how it does, and I don't entirely know how or why.

you packed up every room and then you cried and went to bed
but today you closed the door and said "we have to get a move on.
it's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
we push ourselves ahead."