Arizona Public Service killed my mother

This has now grown beyond what a post can or should hold, so it has its own website:

APSKilledMyMom.com

Andor

Andor : Star Wars
   ::
The Wire : cop shows
   ::
Deadwood : Westerns

It uses Star Wars as a setting to talk seriously about how authoritarian governments actually work, and how to actually fight them, without getting hung up on any historical or contextual specifics. And like those other series, it as well-crafted and entertaining as it is serious. And of course now timely.

Nemik’s Manifesto

Of course it’s my favorite thing. I am very fond of this little adaptation with some very graceful allusions to Star Wars at large.

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And …

Remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.

A wise internet acquaintance says of it [spoilers]:

I’m sort of a cruel cynic because while that monologue is genuinely stirring, I can’t help but remember the incredibly cynical beat where the idealistic little “read theory!” guy writing his manifesto is literally crushed to death by money (the real power of a rebellion) after achieving very little. Like yes, the monologue is great, but Andor is also cold enough to recognize that what sparks the rebellion after decades of Imperial oppression, is a theft of cold hard cash deliberately conducted to provoke reprisal, not just stirring words alone.

Despite being someone sentimental about the stirring words, I agree. It’s part of what I love about Nemik’s story and Andor more broadly. The series insists that revolution against authoritarianism is no one thing. It warns of the danger of resting the movement on any one thing. Some moves just won’t pay off.

I assume that Star Wars lore will eventually succumb to making Nemik’s Manifesto the rallying cry of the Rebellion. But at least as of today, while we just have Season One, Andor is wise enough to hint that Cassian Andor — Nemik’s “ideal reader” — is the only person who read it and no, the Manifesto didn’t radicalize Cassian Andor.

At first.

By itself.

But even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

A hero

Rescuing a thread from the Bad Place which explains why I caught feelings from a glimpse of a tiny little street sign in the background at the 15-second mark in the first proper trailer for Fantastic Four: First Steps.

I will never, ever locate and re-read Marvel Two-In-One Annual ^#7 because I want my memory of it from when I was twelve to remain pristine, because when I think of a hero, I think of that comic and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing.

In the comic, this big blue zillion-year-old alien guy The Champion comes to Earth. He loves to box and travels the Cosmos challenging people to boxing matches. So when he arrives at Earth, of course he teleports a bunch of Marvel superheroes to his boxing gym.

The heroes are like, dude, we are not getting into the ring with you for your entertainment. The Champion is like, I am not asking, I am telling. Defeat me in a boxing match or my spaceship will blow up the Earth. So it’s superheroes vs. The Champion for all the marbles.

Cut to a huge stadium. The boxing match will be simulcast on all the TV channels.

One by one, The Champion squares off against various brawny superheroes. They get quickly dispatched or disqualified. The Hulk cannot keep his composure and obey Queensbury rules. Thor refuses to put down Mjolnir. Wonder Man probably just got KO’d with one punch because he’s such a doof. I do not recall all of the details.

The important thing is that the last hero left is The Thing.

The Champion soliloquizes: Woe is me, I have traveled from one end of the Universe to the other seeking a worthy challenge, but I am just too good at boxing.

The Thing asks do ya plan to win the fight by boring me to death?

Fans of The Thing know what time it is. But alas, it is immediately apparent that it is not The Champion who will get clobbered. The Thing is outmatched!

Ding. The first round ends and The Thing staggers back to his corner. The Champion soliloquizes some more about how sad he is that his might is peerless. The Thing tells the Champion I’m just gettin’ warmed up.

Ding. Round two. The Thing keeps taking a pounding. The Champion brags that the fight is a foregone conclusion. The Thing says my Aunt Petunia throws a better punch than you.

Ding. The round ends. The Thing is bleeding. The Thing. Bleeding. Twelve-year-old Me was very not okay with this. I had seen him take hits from wrecking balls, kaiju, howitzers, lasers, and what have you … and just dust himself off. This is scary.

As The Thing catches his breath in the corner, the Fantastic Four are there. Reed is like, don’t do this to yourself, Ben. The Thing is all, sorry Egghead but ya know I am just too dumb ta know how ta quit.

Ding. Round three. The Champion continues to mock The Thing while beating the tar out of him. He moans once again I have been denied the glory of a real fight. The Thing tells him I’m from Yancy Street so I know more about a real fight than you ever will.

The Champion lands a punch on The Thing which lays him out on the canvas. People in the stadium and around the world gasp. The ref starts counting.

Just as the count is about to run out, The Thing stands back up and puts up his fists, of course. But he looks bad.

The Champion mocks him some more. Why get up? You are bleeding and your ribs are broken and you can barely stand, Loser. I’m not even winded. It’s over.

The Thing says: The deal here is that when the fight ends the world ends, right?

The Champion says: Yeah, that’s the forfeit since you are such a loser.

The Thing says: Then I’m gonna keep gettin’ up, no matter how many times ya knock me down.

Ding. The fight is back on. But the Champion lowers his fists.

The Thing is all are we gonna fight or what?

The Champion tells him: No. The fight is over. Sure, I could knock you out, eventually. But you will not be defeated, will you? Not really. Not ever. I travelled billions of light-years seeking a worthy opponent and never even knew what one was.

Superheroes are silly. That story is silly. And of course that story is in no way original. It’s older than the written word. But I first got it in the form of The Thing.

I got teary retelling it.

So it was good seeing a little sign announcing “Yancy St”. I know a hero from that neighborhood.

Israel’s “right to exist”

Many commentators allude to the question of “Israel’s right to exist”. Noah Berlatsky calls shenanigans on that turn of phrase in his post The Right To A State And State’s Rights:

Only individuals can have rights. Nationalist projects, however, are addicted to claiming rights for themselves.

Just so. His post lays out the ugly implications in asserting that nations have “rights”, not least in apologetics for the Confederacy and Jim Crow in US history.

That said, most people addressing Israel’s “right to exist” are not really engaging with any such theory. People generally reject it in response to Israel hardliners saying it to rationalize wrongs Israel has committed. People generally defend it in response to the common and ultimately antisemitic suggestion that Israel is a uniquely (or at least extraordinarily) illegitimate nation-state.

That attack on Israel’s legitimacy is not a fantasy of Israel hardliners. The original PLO charter in 1964 — three years before Israel’s occupation of Gaza & the West Bank — asserts:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate [which includes all of Israel], is an indivisible territorial unit.

[⋯]

The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians.

[⋯]

The liberation of Palestine [⋯] will safeguard the country’s religious sanctuaries and guarantee freedom of worship and of visit to all, without discrimination of race, color, language, or religion.

Most of the 2½ million Jews in Israel in 1964 had no other home — they were refugees from the Shoah, Zionists who moved between WWI & WWII, and their descendants born in Israel. That charter sought to deny them citizenship in the Arab state of Palestine which the PLO wanted to displace Israel to create.

The PLO went on to recognize Israel’s legitimacy three decades later, demonstrating that one can both stand for Palestinian liberation and accept that the state of Israel has fundamental legitimacy. But not all advocates for Palestinian liberation have done the same; implicit (or even explicit) rejection of Israel’s legitimacy remains common, carrying with that the suggestion that one wants to see the displacement of Jewish Israelis. Asserting Israel’s “right to exist” is a bad way to respond, but it does address a real point in contention.

I avoid the expression “Israel’s right to exist”. I recommend that others do the same. We must talk about Israel-Palestine as crisply as possible. But I find it a lot more forgivable than many rhetorcial moves people make in this space which have bad unintended implications. And I embrace the extremely modest defense of Israel which it tries to offer:

• I reject claims that a state has a “right” to exist while seeing millions of Israelis who have never known another home as cause for recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I reject the Westphalian order of nation-states as the right way to structure geopolitics while accepting it as the reality of the world we have now, which compels recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.
• I consider Israel’s government illegitimate because of their longstanding apartheid policies and current genocidal attack on Gaza, while distinguishing that from my recognition of the state of Israel as legitimate.
• I consider a single democratic state of Palestine vastly preferrable to the liberal Zionist dream of a soft-ethnonationalist Israel — more just, committed to inviting immigration by diaspora Jews, recognizing a truly sovereign neighbor state of Palestine in Gaza & the West bank — and even consider that liberal Zionism unworkable, while still counting liberal Zionism as a respectable position out of recognition that the state of Israel is legitimate.

Starship Troopers

In my wasted youth, I read most of Robert A. Heinlein’s published writing. I cannot recommend doing that. But that inheritance from my younger self has me frustrated with the state of Discourse around his novel Starship Troopers. At the risk of talking about the orangutan, I have something to add which I am puzzled no one else seems to have said. I feel an itch over failings I see in both defenses & critiques of the novel.

Yes it is fashy

One cannot talk about fascist themes in the novel without addressing the other Starship Troopers, Verhoeven’s film, a satire offered as if it were propaganda from a fascist society. Many Heinlein fans grumble, with some cause. The film cutting so directly against the novel whets my own appetite to see its strengths somehow presented in film. I am nerd enough to want to see a depiction of a capable Mobile Infantry in powered armor, and I am sentimental enough that I feel moved whenever I re-read how Flores dies on the way up.

But people who reject the film because the novel is Not Fascist At All misunderstand both the novel and fascism. The book is fashy as heck.

In the world of Troopers, civic vigor results from martial valor, because it restricts the franchise to people who have volunteered to fight in endless frontier wars. This political order emerged after a brownshirt rebellion against “failed” liberal democratic governance, explicitly rejecting universal human rights, including the right to vote, producing a better society. That is the core fascist dream. Considering that plausible — not even good, just plausible — is fashy thinking.

David Forbes’ superb long essay The Old Iron Dream (summarized here) situates Heinlein in a context of the far right strain in golden age science fiction; Noah Berlatsky observes how entangled far right fantasies and SF have been with each other. My favorite single commentary on Troopers is a series of long video-essays contextualizing Troopers in Heinlein, Verhoeven, and the essayist’s family (!) which defends having a soft spot for the novel while registering unmistakably fashy elements in its foundations.

But all that said, I do not read the novel as simply fascist propaganda, and taking Heinlein as a fascist badly misunderstands him.

Politics in Heinlein’s fiction gets weird

Heinlein’s harshest critics look past how protean and strange both his fiction and his personal politics really were. SF writer Charlie Stross’ comment Dread Of Heinleinism contextualizes the ideas expressed in his fiction.

Heinlein, when he wasn’t cranking out 50K word short tie-in novels for the Boy Scouts of America, was actually trying to write about topics for which he (as a straight white male Californian who grew up from 1907-1930) had no developed vocabulary because such things simply weren’t talked about in Polite Society. Unlike most of his peers, he at least tried to look outside the box he grew up in. (A naturist and member of the Free Love movement in the 1920s, he hung out with Thelemites back when they were beyond the pale, and was considered too politically subversive to be called up for active duty in the US Navy during WW2.) But when he tried to look too far outside his zone of enculturation, Heinlein often got things horribly wrong. Writing before second-wave feminism (never mind third- or fourth-), he ended up producing Podkayne of Mars. Trying to examine the systemic racism of mid-20^th century US society without being plugged into the internal dialog of the civil rights movement resulted in the execrable Farnham’s Freehold. But at least he was trying to engage, unlike many of his contemporaries (the cohort of authors fostered by John W. Campbell, SF editor extraordinaire and all-around horrible bigot). And sometimes he nailed his targets: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as an attack on colonialism, for example (alas, it has mostly been claimed by the libertarian right), Starship Troopers with its slyly embedded messages that racial integration is the future and women are allowed to be starship captains (think how subversive this was in the mid-to-late 1950s when he was writing it).

In contrast, Heinlein’s boomer fans rarely seemed to notice that Heinlein was all about the inadmissible thought experiment, so their homages frequently came out as flat whitebread 1950s adventure yarns with blunt edges and not even the remotest whiff of edgy introspection, of consideration of the possibility that in the future things might be different (even if Heinlein’s version of diversity ultimately faltered and fell short).

We need to get that to get Heinlein’s portrayals of strange politics. One should never take him as simply advocating for the political order presented in any of his fictions.

Stross points to how many read Luna in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as a libertarian utopian fantasy despite how it depicts an anarchist culture muddling through in the context of a very neglectful authoritarian rulership and very peculiar material conditions. In Double Star, the Emperor Of The Solar System offers a spirited defense of constitutional monarchy! I take these stories, and others, and Troopers as provocations, letting illiberal socieites make their best case for themselves on their own terms. Each is a different exercise in pushing against how the core principles of liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy are sacred cows in American society — inadmissible thought experiments indeed.

Part of why I read Heinlein in my youth is how I share his taste for looking the Devil in the eye, though I have learned that one must tread carefully. Heinlein was not careful enough, but his failures are interesting and twisty.

What I read RAH trying to do

The social & political order in Troopers has unmistakably fascist characteristics, but also includes a few breaks from the pattern of fascism. Importantly, it has no dictator, no cult of personality.

The core of its unique political system is now famous because Verhoeven’s explicitly satirical film adapation points directly to it:

• Only people honorably discharged from military service may vote (so people in service cannot)
• The military must accept all volunteers
• People in service may generally retire at will, but then they do not get the franchise

I read this What-If emerging from a tension between his romanticization of the military (which animates many of his stories, including my favorite) versus the liberatarian-unto-anarchist aspect of Heinlein’s worldview (evident throughout his work, loudest in Moon, which he wrote a few years after publishing Troopers).

Heinlein assumes not just that war emerges inevitably from human nature but that this reflects nobility, in protecting one’s society with violence. He dreads democracy devolving to lazy, destructive “bread & circuses” populism. Fashy sentiments. But Troopers also reflects Heinlein’s libertarian-ish disgust at conscription, and his sober dread of authoritarian alternatives to democracy. The world of Troopers tries to square the circle of these conflicting sensibilities through what Heinlein imagines could act as a tidy, clever system of checks-and-balances:

1. Requiring service as a test & training for a sober and truly public-minded electorate addresses his anxieties about electoral democracy — to vote, one must demonstrate willingness to commit to the public good.
2. Requiring that service accept every volunteer is meant to be quasi-democratic in spirit — since any can serve, none are disenfranchised. (I find it telling how in later commentary on the novel, Heinlein mis-remembered it as including the enfranchisement of people unsuited to the military by allowing for other forms of service.)
3. People in service cannot vote, to keep them from bending the military away from serving society.
4. Since voters have all Been There, that deters them from abusing the people in service.

But if one thinks about this with any depth, it falls apart.

Consider, f’rinstance, how this system would still allow a racist society to prevent the enfranchisement of people of color, simply by assigning Black & brown people in service to far more dangerous and degrading duty and refusing to ever discharge them from service. People of color would never become veteran voters who could prevent such abuses. Such shenanigans are so obvious to anyone familiar with the sham faux democracy of Jim Crow that one might suspect Heinlein of trickery.

I don’t. I see a naïve sincerity.

Heinlein’s good heart enabled this bad idea

If one has read much Heinlein, one cannot miss his disdain for bigotry. He wrote a lot of smart, capable women. He often would make that mid-20^th-century move of revealing that a hero was a person of color midway through a work. But as Stross observes, he had the sincere commitmment combined with shallow analysis of injustices like racism & sexism characteristic of white men of the era. He could not see the misogyny threaded through his Strong Woman Characters, and wrote tone-deaf tranwrecks when making unmistakable attempts to stand against bigotry.

I submit that the racist version of the Troopers political order just did not occur to Heinlein. This kind of mistake is why we need to be no less wary the dangerous short-sighted-ness of white male privilege than we are wary of overt bigotry and cruelty.

Someone as fundamentally pessimistic about human nature as Heinlein presented himself as being would have seen this and countless other potential abuses of the system in Troopers. Heinlein’s fundamental decency paradoxically hobbled his imagination.

I suspect that decency also protected him from sliding down the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline. Among the anarchist fantasies, prescient warnings about American Christian theocratic totalitarianism, and other inadmissable thought experiments, Troopers was the high water mark of his fascist sensibilities in a writing career which lasted almost thirty more years. I imagine Heinlein voting for GWB in 2004 had he lived so long, but I am confident that he would have hated Trump.

Heinlein’s libertarian-ish impulse won out because he wasn’t mean enough to turn to fascism.

The skeptical, satirical Heinlein

Heinlein’s faux-cynicism also reflects another virtue which softens my disgust at Troopers. Despite the smug, didactic, that’s-just-how-it-is tone of his writing, he was too cheerfully skeptical of everything to entirely buy any of the suggestions implied in his fiction, even from his own mouthpiece characters.

Some of his work is outright satirical — he named Stranger In A Strange Land explicitly as a satire. Even in works not intended as satires, the satirical note bubbles up often. I think of an aside in Friday depicting an independent Republic Of California with an exaggerated version of the state’s realworld ballot initiative process. In that example, though Heinlein lampoons “too much democracy”, the fictional political order is harmlessly goofy rather than sinister; he couldn’t help blunting the teeth of his own critique.

Indeed, a few defenders of Heinlein’s novel claim that Verhoeven’s film makes overt a critique of fascism covertly embedded in the novel. I don’t buy that, but Heinlein’s sensibility creates openings to read it that way. Consider a counter-reading which finds that the novel presents a dystopia of slavery and mind control.

There is evidence, however, that enslavement is ubiquitous in Starship Troopers in the form of coercive mass hypnosis. Such a plot device occurs in no other RAH book, so it can’t be dismissed as an accidental trope. RAH included it on purpose.

[⋯]

The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. [⋯] to make him do what you want him to do. [⋯] But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. [⋯] that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. [⋯] other people — ‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say supply the control.

Implication: the Politburo, made up of and selected by a single party state of Komsomol veterans, control the rest of the population through mass hypnosis. That’s not to say the book is not a paean to duty and patriotism, but that it’s primarily a cautionary tale of enslavement by mind-control of diligent patriots by Soviet-style communism. And, to that extent at least, the book is intended as a satire.

That linked post describes that reading to debunk it — and I don’t find the Mind Control Dystopia reading convincing myself — but the argument in full does demonstrate that reading as very available.

That satirical impulse makes it hard to measure the sincerity of Troopers ….

How plausible did Heinlein consider the political order in Troopers?

Aside from the basics of the backstory and political system, Troopers invokes a lot of fashy ideas.

Consider one of the passages in which the protagonist of Troopers reflects on his high school class in History And Moral Philosophy, which features a teacher given a lot of space to speak with Heinlein’s unmistakable Author Mouthpiece voice.

Law-abiding people hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons … to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

[⋯]

Were [those criminal kids] spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.

[⋯]

the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’

Disgusting. Research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that authoritarian parenting is harmful and indeed produces worse-behaved adults. This exemplifies authoritarian myths offered uncritically throughout the book. The passage goes on to have the teacher, Dubois, reject universal human rights as the failing of the society — our society — which the future social order presented in Troopers is said to have replaced.

“⋯ Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’”

Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. [⋯] that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Repellant.

And yet.

In the middle of this passage, Dubois claims that moral philosophy has become an “exact science”:

⋯ the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry.

[⋯]

We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations.

Oh … really?

Heinlein never returns to this science-fictional conceit of an exact science of morals. He just leaves it as an assertion by the propagandist for their social order in our protagonist’s high school classroom. In moments like that — as when he gives us an Emperor rationalizing constitutional monarchy, or an anarchist philosopher, or countless other advocates for Inadmissible Thought Experiments — I sense Heinlein’s tounge reflexively drifting toward his cheek, perhaps without him even realizing it.

”Do you believe that the people of this world are right to be so smug about having this all worked out?”

Bad and complicated

So. I want to embrace that nuance without doing the thing of defending a villain by calling them “complicated”.

Heinlein’s political provocations are always weird, often dumb, sometimes ugly, and in the particular case of Starship Troopers, odious.

And complicated.

One demand

I have ambivalence about the memory of the breathlessness of the Occupy movement, but A Message From Occupied Wall Street (Day Five) still moves me:

Note: Our use of the one demand is a rhetorical device. This is NOT an official list of demands. Click Here to learn more about how you can participate in the democratic process of choosing the “one demand”.

---

This is the fifth communiqué from the 99 percent. We are occupying Wall Street.

On September 21^st, 2011, Troy Davis, an innocent man, was murdered by the state of Georgia. Troy Davis was one of the 99 percent.

Ending capital punishment is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, the richest 400 Americans owned more wealth than half of the country's population.

Ending wealth inequality is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, four of our members were arrested on baseless charges.

Ending police intimidation is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we determined that Yahoo lied about occupywallst.org being in spam filters.

Ending corporate censorship is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly eighty percent of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.

Ending the modern gilded age is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly 15% of Americans approved of the job Congress was doing.

Ending political corruption is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of Americans did not have work.

Ending joblessness is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly one sixth of America lived in poverty.

Ending poverty is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, roughly fifty million Americans were without health insurance.

Ending health-profiteering is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America had military bases in around one hundred and thirty out of one hundred and sixty-five countries.

Ending American imperialism is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, America was at war with the world.

Ending war is our one demand.

On September 21^st, 2011, we stood in solidarity with Madrid, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madison, Toronto, London, Athens, Sydney, Stuttgart, Tokyo, Milan, Amsterdam, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Portland and Chicago. Soon we will stand with Phoenix, Montreal, Cleveland and Atlanta. We're still here. We are growing. We intend to stay until we see movements toward real change in our country and the world.

You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, the people will speak. Join us.

We speak as one. All of our decisions, from our choice to march on Wall Street to our decision to continue occupying Liberty Square, were decided through a consensus based process by the group, for the group.

Comic book physics

A fragment I created thinking about worldbuilding for a superhero TTRPG setting. The rough idea was to identify every power as using a type of energy, so that characters using a particular type of energy would have advantages in dealing with other manifeststions of it.

Mundane

0. Pure
1. Kinetic
2. Heat–cold
3. Electromagnetic
4. Gravitational
5. Sonic
6. Light
7. Nuclear

Magic

0. Pure
1. Fey
2. Wild
3. Celestial
4. Arcane
5. Soul
6. Love
7. Black

Cosmic

0. Pure
1. Warp
2. Primordial
3. Quark
4. Dimensional
5. Ether
6. Negative
7. Void

Life

0. Pure
1. Animal
2. Plant
3. Microbial
4. Psychic
5. Evolutionary
6. Gaia
7. Death

Mushroom

Putting a little internet classic here for my convenience:

personsonable
me holding a gun to a mushroom:
tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom:
can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face:
I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

---

miaislying
Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

---

personsonable
decay exists as an extant form of life

---

miaislying
That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day
#philosophy #mushrooms #you cannot kill me in a way that matters #perspective

Using tokens to clarify the Fate point economy

I have been tinkering with a rules summary sheet for the Fate tabletop roleplaying game for a long time. A sharp-eyed forum commentator caught my earlier version describing the award of Fate points a little misleadingly, which made something belatedly fall into a place in my understanding of the Fate point economy.

I now want to try a different practice for tracking Fate points at the table, using three different counters. I like those little colorful glass “gaming stone” beads.

The system

• At the start of each scene —
  1. Give the GM 1 white bead per player
  2. Convert black & red beads into white beads
  3. Give everyone 1 red bead (including the GM)
• White beads denote Fate points one can use. (Players start a scenario with their characters’ Refresh, or the Fate points they carry over from the previous scenario, whichever is greater.)
• Black beads denote Fate points which one cannot spend this scene. When the GM (or a character’s own player) invokes an aspect against a character, the player gets a black bead from the Infinite Bank. When a player spends a Fate point to invoke an aspect against another character, they pay a white bead which converts into a black bead for the target; both players and the GM may receive black beads this way.
• Red beads denote potential Fate points. Every time a character takes a condition from an attack, they get a red bead from the Infinite Bank. If a character leaves the scene by conceding a conflict, they get to keep their red beads; if they leave the scene another way, they lose them. If all GM characters concede, the GM keeps their red beads; if not, the GM loses them.

Why

First, this clarifies the scene-to-scene award of Fate points. Players can see what they have to work with next scene and get immediate feedback when that changes, without confusing what players can spend during the current scene or requiring a retrospective between scenes to get players’ Fate point tallies right.

Second, and more importantly, I hope that it will change the psychology of ending scenes and conceding conflicts:

• It implies that conceding a conflict is the normal way to end a scene. Red beads inspire loss aversion; if one ends the scene another way, it feels like sacrificing Fate points which one already has waiting. This supports the defeat-defeat-comeback pattern of fiction which Fate tries to emulate.
• Black & red beads piling up tempts players to get on to the next scene to cash them in, nudging play toward a faster pace.
• Players hesitate to add conditions until they run out of stress boxes. This makes a bit more visible how taking a mild condition from an attack can pay off with a Fate point while only requires a pretty easy skill check to clear … which comes with fun Team Bonding roleplay.

Responsibility for Gaza

A capture (and slight refinement) of a bushy Bluesky discussion starting from Starfish saying:

I think [older Democratic electeds] don’t really get that to people younger than say, shit … 40-50 at this point? Israel as the plucky underdog just kinda doesn’t track on an instinctual level. In some ways, the “Israeli Defense Forces as unstoppable supermen” propaganda worked too well, ironically enough.

70 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when every single neighbor of Israel invades it at once and almost win

50 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when Israeli F-15s shoot down 11,000 Syrian MiGs

30 year-olds: Arab-Israeli wars are when the IDF turns somewhere into the lunar surface

I agree that this generation gap in experience explains a lot about the Discourse.

And Loud Penitent offers a counterpoint which opens up bigger questions. (All the boxed quotes which follow are his.)

I think that applies primarily to Gentiles.

Part of the problem here is that for a lot of Jews 10/7 was a pretty explicit reminder “oh yeah these people would like to butcher and rape you and it will not matter if you want peace.” (“These people” here is referring to Hamas, not Palestinians generally — many of whom behaved far better towards their grieving Jewish neighbors than other Gentiles in the moment who were Alive with the Words.)

And a lot of [those Jews] — us, really, I include myself — were really hoping to use 10/7 as an example of “look, our concerns are not wholly unjustified! People really do want us dead! Hamas are actual monsters!”

And then what felt like the entire rest of the public just shrugged and went “so anyway.”

And a minority, smaller but extremely vocal, basically went, “Actually that’s great, more of that, you’re next Zio. Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?”

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me who call for Palestinian liberation and vigorously fault Israel say that we must name Hamas’ culpability as well.

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me who recognized Israel’s attack on Gaza as genocidal a few weeks after 10/7 are mortified by the antisemtism implicit in so many people unsatisfied with pointing to the immense real wrongs, adding fantastical misrepresentations — calling it an inevitable consequence of Zionism, claiming it emerges from Israel’s longstanding plan to annex Gaza and expel-or-kill all Gazans, framing common horrors of war as demonstrations of Israel’s unique brutality.

people who don’t recognize “so yeah that’s what happens when a war is fought in a dense urban area & one side utterly refuses to surrender, did we just erase WW2 from memory?”

This underlines why a lot of Jews like me insist that — without diminishing Netanyahu’s & the Likudniks’ moral responsibility — advocacy for Palestinian liberation must also recognize how Hamas chose the rivers of blood shed in the last year and a half, callously disinterested in Palestinians’ lives.

Netanyahu is not motivated by wanting the release of hostages … but Israelis are, and demanding the hostages’ release is not just a rationalization of Israel’s attack. Hamas keeping hostages is both morally and legally unjustified.

The elephant in the room is that the reason the Gaza war has turned so horrific is because Hamas has kept refusing to surrender despite in every other respect than keeping its hostages, being unequivocally and dramatically defeated.

Like, in ways that basically any government that gave a fuck about its people would normally be going “alright time to throw in the towel.”

But Hamas does not, and everyone goes “how brave and plucky of them, glory to the resistance!” and not seeing that Hamas is openly doing the meme of: “Some of you may die but that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

[Israel’s] demands are extremely actionable, I’d argue, it’s just that Hamas doesn’t want to do them, because it would constitute their total surrender.

But Hamas’ response is essentially to proclaim that they are entitled to remain free and in power after embarking on a monstrous pogrom, that at most they should be entitled to a return to the status quo, and that they are willing to tolerate any number of Gazan dead to permit this.

They cannot win a war that (in at least its latest phase) they very deliberately started with feverish hopes of total victory, so instead their strategy has essentially become “lose as dramatically and horrifically as possible until the rest of the embarrassed world steps in to stop it.” And the thing is … this isn’t actually how international laws of armed conflict work! Hamas does not actually have a right to expend its people’s lives in perpetuity to preserve their own! There is no “good game, now back to your starting positions!” or “stop! stop! he’s already dead!” clause!

If Hamas is losing a war they started and refuses to give up their (illegally held) hostages or surrender, the international legal response is, bluntly: “Skill issue.”

One can say that at some point the number of Gazan dead has exhausted the moral license for Israel to reclaim its citizens from their illegal, barbaric captivity by force of arms.

But this is a moral appeal. It is not a legal one. And [then one] must honestly admit one is saying it is OK to keep hostages.

Basically the entire basis for negotiations, however necessary, is built on the poisoned foundation of considering the taking of hostages for ransom an acceptable Hamas strategic doctrine, & folks act like they have a right to it.

Like in a classical sense the answer would be “you want to keep holding the hostages, contest them by violence.”

Hamas cannot contest them by violence, because they’re weak, useless cowards who suck at anything other than butchering unarmed or unwary people, so they have civilians do the dying.

Ongoing negotiation is vital, but I cannot imagine it bearing fruit until neither the Likudniks nor Hamas are the agents at the table, since neither of them care to end the bloodshed.

What the Democratic Party should do

I’m just an interested amateur, but I said this in an exchange with some people with rather different politics who found it clarifying, so it seems worth capturing. Assuming that we have elections in 2026 and 2028, the Democrats should …

1. … make a persuasively sharp break from their current voice, to get inattentive voters to engage and re-evaluate them. Figures like Sanders, AOC, Walz, and Fetterman are models here, not for their policy agendas but for not sounding like Politicians.
2. … articulate a clear, coherent vision of the better America they want to build, not a preservation or restoration of the status quo ante Trump.
3. … fight hard for that vision, both practically and theatrically. Showing up hard is more important than tactical victory, as conservatives have demonstrated for decades.

What vision?

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate Americans’ appetite for big change. Trump’s success demonstrates that hunger.

I believe that mainstream Dems underestimate the appeal of much of the wild-eyed leftist stuff I would include in the vision, if they presented it properly.

I believe that if we get to build a better America, we should swing for the fences to make it a lot better.

But.

Having the break-envision-fight formula displace the vague, tepid practices of the Democratic Party is more important than almost any policy particulars.

More on making a progressive appeal

A follow up a month later, arguing against the case opposing a much more progressive Democratic Party agenda in ’26 & ’28.

I became a serious politics nerd during the mid 2000s, as part of the wave of “netroots progressive” amateur bloggers who opposed the “centrist” turn the Democratic Party took during that era. The Dem establishment remembered Reagan’s movement conservative coalition breaking the Democrats’ New Deal coalition and governing with neoliberal policy, they saw Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy claw back voters who had defected to the Republicans for Reagan: campaigning as a “moderate” and governing as a neolib. Progressives like me thought that trying to woo voters in the supposed center so depressed turnout by the left-leaning Democratic base that it cost Dems more than it gained.

Events in the years that followed unfolded confusingly, so both progressives and the “centrist” Dem establishment had reason to claim vindication. Obama campaigned with a lot of progressive dogwhistles and won. But his policy agenda aligned with the neolibs and he won again. Trump shattered the movement conservative coalition, making Republicans the MAGA party, and won — a reälignment at least as significant as the turn toward neoliberalism, if not bigger. (I have a lot more on that, which animates this read.) Then after a long career as the embodiment of a neolib Dem, Biden defeated Trump in 2020 offering a bland return to “normal”. Then he governed with the most progressive policy agenda since LBJ! But voters never registered the shift, Harris & Dem candidates did not run on it in 2024 — going so far as to accept endorsements by Republicans! — and they lost with lower turnout than in 2020.

Confusing.

“Moderates” in the Dem establishment trying to decide where to go from here say that 2024 proves progressives wrong: enacting (some of) our policy agenda did not win elections. Progressives object that voters didn’t know about any of that policy not least because Harris didn’t run on it. (And 2024 was weird in a bunch of ways. Incumbents around the world got crushed — left, right, and center.)

But progressives should beware doubling down by saying “our agenda didn’t work because we didn’t do it hard enough”. That’s Cope coming from anyone, and we recognize it as shenanigans:

“Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” I came up with this during my long experience of studying the right, and realizing that basically anything that is politically successful is kind of labeled conservatism. Any failure is wiped off the books in this bad faith utterance that well, of course it failed because it wasn’t conservative. Romney wasn’t conservative enough. McCain wasn’t conservative enough. “Bush wasn’t conservative,” you began to hear in 2004, when the wheels came off the bus with Iraq, and all the rest.

But.

Obama in 2008 was the only presidential candidate in generations to even try campaigning on progressive change, and he won. Facing Trump’s promise of crazy boldness, Harris campaigned on moderate restoration, and she lost. I find it perverse to conclude that the progressive pitch is a demonstrated failure.

This post is about how Dems need to offer something bold. So if not the hard moves progressives propose, what?

Cas = Carlo !

It is well-known that in the original conception of the TV series Supernatural, road-tripping monster-hunting brothers Sam & Dean Winchester are inspired by road-tripping beatniks Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, who themselves were based on Kerouac and his real-life friend Neal Cassidy.

To my delight, the Tik Tok algorithm has decided that I am a lesbian nerd, so I recently stumbled across a clip arguing that Dean’s bisexuality in On The Road bled into his Supernatural counterpart even before (some of) the show’s production team decided to lean into fans’ enthusiasm for reading Dean that way. The Tok further speculates that this was a big part of why there was so much “Wincest” fanfic about a romance between the brothers starting very early on: actors Jared & Jensen had great screen chemistry, Dean’s bisexuality is Just There, and Dean didn’t have a standing love interest because the show wanted him to be a ramblin’ man, so fans with a taste for slash fiction (non-canonical gay romance, created by and for women fans) just took the next step on the love Dean had already demonstrated, just as they had done when creating the first slashfic about Kirk & Spock.

I said “(some of) the show’s production team” above because for the entire fifteen-year run they were divided about how to respond to queer readings by fans. Some of the team fought against it, others enthusiastically embraced it. Episodes oscillate between deliberate homophobia and the Xena: Warrior Princess thing of maxxing out the Subtext it could fold in while maintaing plausible deniability.

That Tok creator also speculates that the character of Anna The Fallen Angel Who Loves Dean was an attempt to neutralize queer readings by providing the missing love interest for Dean. It didn’t work; either Anna wasn’t compelling enough on the merits (I had forgotten that she existed!) or the audience refused to accept him loving a girl that much. The show abandoned Anna, figuring whaddaya know, it did have another angel on hand whom the audience did like. Castiel got Anna’s planned storyline, minus the explicit romance … but the romance tropes were still there in the story, leading to infinite “Destiel” fanfic.

Persuasive.

That got me thinking about my favorite passage from On The Road, in which Carlo Marx, based on the very gay poet Allen Ginsberg, joins the story:

⋯ And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes — the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up with them.

[⋯]

They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. “Now, Carlo, let me speak — here’s what I’m saying …” I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.

I doubt that anyone on the Supernatural production team ever connected Castiel to Carlo, but now I cannot un-see it.

Trump, Nixon, and despair

I wrote this in a fit of insomnia.

As a kid, I inherited hatred for Richard Nixon from my parents. In the years since, I have gone a few rounds of obsession with him. Books, films, articles from the time. After each cycle, I came out hating him more.

We have had worse than Nixon. Harding’s corruption and stupidity. Bush The Younger’s warmongering and torture prisons. Jackson’s genocide. Johnson sabotaging Reconstruction. Twelve slavers — twelve! Jefferson Davis, the anti-president. And then, well … y’know.

Despite that, Nixon inhabits a place of special disgust in my heart. So dishonored that he resigned. So toxic to the Republic that many seriously thought it best to pardon him of his crimes before even naming what they were, just to get us to stop talking about him. (Though no, that was not what was best.)

Yet now I find myself thinking:

“Sure, Nixon was corrupt, bigoted, dishonest, and had a gawdawful policy agenda … but he was intelligent, informed, skillful at the work, and committed to what he sincerely thought was best for the country.”

“Sure, Nixon undermined American institutions … but he did know what they were well enough to pretend to care about them, rather than witlessly shattering them as a toddler prince.”

“Sure, Nixon lied relentlessly … but he respected truth enough to make an effort to lie convincingly, which required knowing what the truth was, knowing the basic facts of the physical universe.”

“Sure, Nixon was corrupt … but he did not brag about it.”

“Sure, he resigned in disgrace … but that showed that he could conceive disgrace.”

Because now Americans have elected — twice! — a President who makes me yearn for Nixon’s competence … a President who makes Nixon’s vice look good because it paid the minimal tribute to virtue of hypocrisy.

Because every day I see more people saying things utterly detached from reality, saying things nightmarish in their cruelty. Not just internet randos, or paid propagandists, but people I know personally. Even a few I once counted as friends.

I am not naïve. I know history. I know American history.

But still, I am having a moment of despair at the thought that the world we have made is possible at all.

---

Understand that my pang of nostalgia for Nixon is a failing of mine, not a an apologia for him. Historian Rick Nixonland Perlstein reminds us:

Watergate was great for Nixon. Gets off scot-free for the quasi-fascist 2^nd term plans he wasn’t able to carry out. Protected via firing his entire cabinet and making them pledge loyalty to regain their posts, his Financial Year ’74 hyper-austerity budget, the Malek Manual, and vengeance plans on the tapes. Oh, and impoundment.

A Tryst With Destiny

A wise friend reminded me of this speech, and it is profound enough that I figured it was wise to keep a copy in full here. My friend also says it makes a great pairing with Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, and I vigorously agree.

Jawaharlal Nehru delivered it to the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on August 14 1947. The words below are his, not mine.

---

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again.

The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Freedom and power bring responsibility. The responsibility rests upon this assembly, a sovereign body representing the sovereign people of India. Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labour and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow. Some of those pains continue even now. Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us now.

That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.

The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for anyone of them to imagine that it can live apart.

Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this one world that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

To the people of India, whose representatives we are, we make an appeal to join us with faith and confidence in this great adventure. This is no time for petty and destructive criticism, no time for ill will or blaming others. We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.

The appointed day has come — the day appointed by destiny — and India stands forth again, after long slumber and struggle, awake, vital, free and independent. The past clings on to us still in some measure and we have to do much before we redeem the pledges we have so often taken. Yet the turning point is past, and history begins anew for us, the history which we shall live and act and others will write about.

It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the east, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises. May the star never set and that hope never be betrayed!

We rejoice in that freedom, even though clouds surround us, and many of our people are sorrow-stricken and difficult problems encompass us. But freedom brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them in the spirit of a free and disciplined people.

On this day our first thoughts go to the architect of this freedom, the father of our nation, who, embodying the old spirit of India, held aloft the torch of freedom and lighted up the darkness that surrounded us.

We have often been unworthy followers of his and have strayed from his message, but not only we but succeeding generations will remember this message and bear the imprint in their hearts of this great son of India, magnificent in his faith and strength and courage and humility. We shall never allow that torch of freedom to be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest.

Our next thoughts must be of the unknown volunteers and soldiers of freedom who, without praise or reward, have served India even unto death.

We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us whatever may happen, and we shall be sharers in their good and ill fortune alike.

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for any one of us till we redeem our pledge in full, till we make all the people of India what destiny intended them to be.

We are citizens of a great country, on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action.

To the nations and peoples of the world we send greetings and pledge ourselves to cooperate with them in furthering peace, freedom and democracy.

And to India, our much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new, we pay our reverent homage and we bind ourselves afresh to her service. Jai Hind [Victory to India].

Free Mahmoud Khalil

DHS agents broke into the home of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and detained him without charges. Khalil holds a Green Card for permanent residency; the Trump Administration is evidently trying to revoke it and deport him.

I have contributed ^$18 to support him and his legal defense. I encourage all people of consicence to make contributions if you can. I encourage making contributions in multiples of ^$18, exercising Jewish custom as a sign of solidarity, even if one is a gentile.

Team Trump are after Khalil because he is a Palestinian involved in organizing anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. They are violating due process in several ways, including that they stonewalled habeas corpus until that got too much attention. I have seen no credible argument that he violated any law.

I am not an Israel hardliner. When I call moves in support of Palestinian liberation antisemitic I extend a lot of grace to people who have just not thought through the implications of what they say. I remind y’all of that to contextualize that Khalil has said things about Israel-Palestine which I find repulsively antisemitic.

That is not a deterrent to my donation to his defense; it is one of the reasons why I consider it important. The Trump administration’s attempt to deport Khalil is a wedge to create openings for arbitrary deportation. To truly stand for liberal democracy — the universality of rights, for due process, for limits to state power — we must fight for them on the behalf of the people we like the least.

More commentaries

Vox has a characteristically thorough explainer; one can expect them to add to it with new developments.

On Truth Social, the President said:

Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, you presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!

Journalist Jeff Sharlet reads that post closely:

Trump celebrating an illegal detention by name tells us a great deal.

1. This wasn’t overreach; it’s the plan.
2. Fact that Khalil is legal resident w/ no evident Hamas sympathies isn’t a glitch; it’s the point.
3. Gaza protesters are means to an end; real target is higher ed.

I know there are going to be good people who have a hard time with that 3^rd point. But after a few decades on the rightwing beat, I can tell you Gaza protesters are, to fascists, only the latest excuse. Trump not only doesn’t care about fighting antisemitism, real or imagined; he’s stoking it.

Journalist Josh Marshall underlines:

Those who know me know I was highly critical of what I saw as some of the rhetorical excesses of the campus protests. Khalil and I wld probably get into a spat immediately. It’s all the more important for people who believe as I do to say clearly, the protections of the law are for everyone.

This is not only outside of our traditions and values. It’s flatly illegal. This is the first step to others, not just green card holders but citizens getting rounded up in the middle of the night. Green cards can be revoked. But only for specific reasons. And only after a judicial process.

If the government has a real arguemnt, tell it to a judge. Trump wants everyone to feel afraid, foes and friends. Their liberty is at his whim. That’s a King not a president. We’re Americans. We’re not slaves or supplicants. Elected officials serve us. We don’t answer to them. We talk back to them.

Blogger Emptywheel describes in detail that it’s not the shameless executive power grab in plain sight, it’s the attempt to retcon it afterwards:

⋯ it appears that the Trump Administration made a shameless power grab without doing their investigative work first. So what we see going forward may be nothing more than an attempt to retcon it, to change their story after the fact to adjust for new facts

[⋯]

There’s that old adage, which seems inoperative since Nixon, that it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. With Trump and under expansive authorities of Article II, it often looks like it’s not the initial power grab that might create legal problems. It’s the attempt to retcon that power grab after it becomes clear the facts were not what Trump or others believed when the Administration took action.

Over and over, Trump 2.0 has taken aggressive steps based off bullshit, much of it coming from Elon or other far right propagandists. And over and over, Trump’s top people keep creating problems for themselves as they try to adjust the (legal) narrative to match their evolving understanding of the facts.

So as we go forward with discussions about Khalil, don’t necessarily assume that legal justifications that the government could have used were yet the legal justifications they may argue going forward.

John Ganz makes similar points:

The details here are very important: agents of the state without charging a crime or presenting a clear legal basis have detained a legal resident and are threatening him with deportation

[⋯]

The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state.

NPR reports a chilling interview on 13 March:

Journalist Michel Martin:
Mahmoud Khalil says he acted as a spokesperson for pro-Palestinian demonstrators and as a mediator with Columbia University, where he was a graduate student. As you know, Mr. Edgar, any conduct that can be legally sanctioned must be described. So, what is the specific conduct the government alleges that Mr. Khalil engaged in that merits removal from the United States.

DHS Secretary Troy Edgar:
I think what you saw there is you’ve got somebody that has come into the country on a visa. And as he’s going through the visa process, he is coming in to basically be a student that is not going to be supporting terrorism. So, the issue is he was let into the country on this visa. He has been promoting this antisemitism activity at the university. And at this point, the State Department has revoked his visa for supporting a terrorist type organization. And we’re the enforcing agencies, so we’ve come in to basically arrest him.

Martin:
A White House official told the Free Press that there’s no allegation that he broke any laws. So, again, I have to ask, what specifically constitutes terrorist activity that he was supporting? What exactly do you say he did?

Edgar:
Well, like I said, when you apply for a visa, you go through the process to be able to say that you’re here on a student visa, that doesn’t afford you all the rights of coming in and basically going through this process, agitating and supporting Hamas. So, at this point, yeah, the Secretary of State and the State Department maintains the right to revoke the visa, and that's what they’ve done.

Martin:
How did he support Hamas? Exactly what did he do?

Edgar:
Well, I think you can see it on TV, right? This is somebody that we’ve invited and allowed the student to come into the country, and he’s put himself in the middle of the process of basically pro-Palestinian activity. And at this point, like I said, the Secretary of State can review his visa process at any point and revoke it.

[⋯ more talking in circles ⋯]

Edgar:
I think if he would have declared he's a terrorist, we would have never let him in.

Martin:
And what did he engage in that constitutes terrorist activity?

Edgar:
I mean, Michel, have you watched it on TV? It's pretty clear.

Michel:
No, it isn’t. Well, explain it to those of us who have not or perhaps others have not. What exactly did you do?

Edgar:
Well, I think it’s clear or we wouldn't be talking about it. I mean, the reality is that if you watch and see what he’s done on the university …

Martin:
Do you not know? Are you telling us that you're not aware?

Edgar:
I find it interesting that you’re not aware.

Martin:
I think you could explain it to us. I think others would like to know exactly what the offenses are, what the propaganda was that you allege, what the activity was that you allege. Well, perhaps we can talk again and you can give us more details about this.

The interview ends there, without an answer.

Edgar demonstrates authoritarian sensibilities. They reject rule of law, institutional limits, or any other check on the direct exercise of power; indeed, they find the liberal insistence on clear & explicit rules and adjudication of those rules morally disgusting. They say You Just Know and actively evade naming how, because they value “loyalty” which does not ask.

And “I find it interesting”? That’s a threat.

Ellie Mystal warns that we are asking the wrong questions:

The only relevant question is not “How can the government do this?” It is “How can we who oppose this fascist regime?”

[⋯]

People expect or hope for the law to restrain Trump and his regime’s use of violence. People keep waiting for Trump to clearly and unambiguously “break” the law, as if doing so will trigger some kind of failsafe protocol causing the statue of Abraham Lincoln to self-animate out of its chair like a democracy-defending golem. But (as I have written many, many times) the law simply doesn’t work like that. The law is not an objective set of rules that snap into action when they are violated. Instead, the law is an argument. It can be bent, stretched, or straight-up ignored by the side that wins power.

Every authoritarian ruler throughout history, from Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix to Vladimir Putin, has had an argument for why their actions are “legal.” I can scream till my vocal cords snap that the government’s actions are illegal, but successful dictators make their actions “legal” through iron-fisted control of both the courts and whatever ineffectual legislatures they allow to exist. Trump is no different. He’s got an argument for why he can abduct a man from his apartment in New York and send him to a for-profit concentration camp in Louisiana. He’s got an argument for why he can revoke the green card of an activist for exercising his free speech rights. He’s got an argument for why he can deport people who oppose genocide as long as they’re non-white.

Adam Serwer says Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run:

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

The Trump administration began its drive for absolute power by ignoring congressional appropriations of foreign aid, which are laws. It calculated that Americans would be callous enough not to care about the catastrophic loss of human life abroad and that the absence of backlash would enable the administration to set a precedent for defying duly passed laws without consequence. Trump began his assault on antidiscrimination law with a vicious campaign against trans people — but has already broadened that campaign into a sweeping attempt at a great resegregation of American life. The detention of Mahmoud Khalil begins a dangerous new phase, in which the Trump administration will attempt to assert an authority to deprive people of due process based on their political views.

[⋯]

It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.

Anti-commentary

Over on Bluesky, Judith Shulevitz wrote a thread which showed up shared on my feed as a bad example, and I want to foster some precision about what is wrong with it.

I strongly defend Mahmoud Khalil’s right to have rights, due process, and all the other protections to which his green card entitles him. The way he is being treated is egregious and wrong. But I think we should be clear about what he has done. His actions do not constitute protected speech because even free speech is constrained by rules — time, place, manner, and other legitimate restrictions. He hasn’t been punished by any disciplinary body, but he’s no martyr.

Take the case we’ve all followed closely: the occupation of the Barnard library.

First, he was part of a group that barged onto the campus without permission — the campus is not open. Then he was part of a group that barged into the library, knocking over or manhandling (not clear which) a security guard to the point at which he had to go to the hospital.

Is protest allowed indoors? No. Here’s FIRE: Because of concerns about disruption, noise, and even fire safety, colleges may generally impose more restrictive rules on what students can do inside buildings.

Then Khalil was part of a group shouting through a bullhorn into a library. It is expressly forbidden to do that, because’s it’s a dramatic disruption of the educational process. Call it the hecklers’ veto of studying. Then he was part of a group that handed out leaflets stamped by Hamas, among other things, and put up a poster of Sinwar.

That’s not something that should be prosecuted by the government — it should have First Amendment protection — but private universities don’t have to abide by the First Amendment; they do have to abide by Title VI. The material they distributed celebrated the massacre of Israelis. That is a violation of rules against threatening or harassing a group on the basis of national origin, and maybe on the basis of religion.

And let’s think for a minute about what they were protesting: the expulsion of students who burst into a class taught by an Israeli and shut it down and refused to leave. Meanwhile, they handed out flyers (well, since the students refused to take them, they flung then on the ground) that featured, among other things, a giant jackboot stomping on the Star of David. None of this is protected speech. It’s also effectively heckling — preventing the teacher from speaking.

So Khalil is no hero. It’s just that there is no basis in law, as far as I can tell, for the way the government is mistreating him.

I saw a lot of people responding to the merits of her critique of Khalil. I think:

• Khalil’s Palestinian liberation advocacy serves a vital cause but is pretty darned bad in the particulars
• Shulevitz’ commentary addresses some real questions about his advocacy in ways I sharply disagree with
• Shulevitz’ take on his advocacy efforts is still legitimate
• It is bad to chew on the particulars of his advocacy like this

Yes, Shulevitz bookends her thread with the actually important thing, the lawlessness authoritarianism of the government’s actions.

But.

While I don’t like to rest too much on faulting the tone of commentaries, it does in fact matter how the kicker saying “it’s just that” trivializes the important thing. It does in fact matter how this comment sweeps past the main thing to spend most of its time examining Khalil’s failings.

We have to make the important thing the important thing.

The Dem establishment and trans liberation

This post lines up the forks in a Bluesky discussion —

Reflecting on California governor Gavin Newsom taking a turn against trans liberation over bullshit about trans atheletes, Jamelle Bouie observes:

The thing about chasing what you think is public opinion is that if and when things turn you will have made a bunch of statements and taken a bunch of stances that you’ll have to disavow. probably a better strategy just to say what you actually believe and stand by it. anyway, this guy sucks.

John Rodgers underlines:

Interracial marriage did not cross 50% approval in the US until 1996, when I was 30 years old. Good political messaging drives opinion, it doesn’t follow it.

Newsom understands this better than almost every other major pol. His early, vigorous support for same-sex marriage — breaking with the Democratic Party by having San Francisco issue marriage licenses when he was mayor — bucked the conventional wisdom and moved public opinion practically overnight. It makes him especially culpable for his betrayal.

Sharp-eyed journalist David Forbes replied with sage wisdom:

I think an underrated part of this is the degree to which anti-trans bigotry is an elite phenomenon across political parties. That comes out in everything from the New York Times’ anti-trans crusade to, well, Newsom’s actions here.

The gentry leans conservative (also why Newsom and Kirk can chat like this). Cis gays in marriages? Outside the far-right they can go with that. But trans rights are driven by a working class movement that threatens some core status quos around gender and identity, so they're frantic to crush it.

I asked about reading trans liberation as a “working class” movement, since I tend to take elites as fearing trans liberation as an elite movement resisted by non-elites. Forbes continued:

In U.S. especially, elites always think they’re more salt of the earth than they are. Also: see painting rural gentry as working class.

Trans liberation gets painted otherwise, but overwhelmingly comes from poor / working class. On the ground a lot of “how dare they talk back to me” reaction from liberal pols.

Those elites viewed marriage as the concession (perhaps with some toothless non-discrimination laws too) so after that the “gay rights” box was checked. On the ground I see a fair amount of queerphobia from liberal pols around any continuing activism and about queers outside the elite.

One local pol (wealthy her entire life) exemplifies this. In private, contemptuous of trans organizing as “baristas with weird hair and pronouns” and felt that support for marriage a decade ago and a proclamation for pride each year was “more than enough.” Newsom’s turn ain’t all that surprising.

I suspect that part of the thing with marriage is how the Dem establishment were blindsided by how quickly popular opinion turned once Newsom broke the ice. Since they thought it would never fly, they have to rationalize that it burned up all the political capital. Of course all of that is animated by their own queerphobia which they do not want to admit to themselves.

After the war, the dishes

There’s a little memoir I read on the internet ages ago. I have tried in vain to find it again. I find myself thinking about it more and more.

The narrator describes how in the 1970s he and his colleagues would go to lunch at a little restaurant near their office, run by a sweet, graying immigrant couple. They had family pictures all over the walls, memories of the Old Country. They loved talking with the customers.

One day, the memoirist goes out to lunch there with the usual crew, plus a guy in his 60s who was visiting their offices. The new guy is surprisingly interested in the family photos. When the owners drop by their table to talk, the new guy asks them some questions about the photos.

Four or five questions in, the sweet old couple are angry. How dare you ask that?

The usual lunch gang are still baffled. What has gone wrong?

The new guy asks, “Will you tell them, or do I have to?”

Two minutes later they are leaving the restaurant, the little old lady screaming at them. “You don’t understand! You were not there! You don’t know what the Jews did to us!”

Ukraine, NATO, and Russia

I have seen a resurgence of a false account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so I have assembled a debunking here. I expect I may add resources over time, if it keeps coming up.

The false thesis goes something like this:

It is wrong for the West (the US & Western Europe) to fault Russia for invading Ukraine. It was a predictable response to Western foolishness & aggessiveness toward Russia.

Given Napoleon in the 19^th century and Hitler in the 20^th, Russians have good reasons to worry about security threats from the West. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have said clearly that they would read expansion of NATO toward Russia as an existential threat, so the West promised back in the 1990s not to rouse that concern.

The West betrayed that promise with aggressive expansion of NATO, toward the end of Western troops right on Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Much as the Soviets created a buffer of client states in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Russia has seized part of eastern Ukraine as a buffer against the West now. Putin is eager to embrace peace with Ukraine, if they simply allow that ethnically-Russian territory to have an independent, Russia-friendly government, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi refuses because he is an instrument of the West’s dangerous betrayal of Russia.

I dug down the rabbit hole of this argument a couple of years ago. It is deceitful Russian propaganda.

False history

The biggest hole in this thesis is how Ukraine has not joined NATO. That should end the argument right there.

But but but, they say, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was triggered by the security threat presented by a pattern of aggressive NATO expansion pointing to Ukraine eventually joining.

This does not hold water.

Russia invaded Ukraine in the 2020s because the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania which share a border with Russia joined NATO … in ’04? Between then and Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Russians sent weapons and troops into Ukraine starting in 2014 while the only addition to NATO was North Macedonia ’20, which does not share a border with Russia. The timeline makes no sense.

But but but, they say, that still did break the promise the West made to the Russians back in the 1990s.

No. The West made no such promise.

But but but, they say, there has been talk of Ukraine joining NATO!

True. The Ukranian parliament voted to pursue NATO membership at the end of 2014, reversing their prior disinterest.

Aha oho oho, they say, Ukraine changed their tune because in 2014 the West created the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in order to get a friendly government which would support NATO expansion.

That reading compounds several absurdities.

It ignores the Ukrainian motivation that earlier in 2014, Russia sent weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea on Ukraine’s southern border.

Yes, Maidan did have Western support, but it was an organic popular movement which did not need the help. Ukrainians have obvious reasons to favor building ties to the (rich & democratic) West over ties to Russia, which is impoverished, ruled by a dictator who denies Ukrainian national legitimacy, and genocided millions of Ukrainians in the 20^th century.

Again, how is the West “pushing” for NATO expansion if a decade after Ukraine made these overtures, it still is not a member? For the last decade, NATO has responded to Ukraine, “yeah, okay, we can offer some support and someday maybe we will let you join”, while some NATO member states remain hesitant over the prospect, since it would commit them to potential war with Russia.

And Zelens’kyi? He refuses “peace” because the only “peace” on offer from Russia is seizure of Ukranian territory with zero security guarantees against further Russian aggression. That is not diplomacy, that is a demand of surrender.

Moral absurdity

The claim that the West provoked Russia is not just absurd, it is morally repulsive. NATO is not an aggressive alliance, it is a mutual-defense agreement: an attack on one is an attack on all. Sying that Russia had to invade Ukraine to prevent it from joining an alliance which would defend it from invasion is like saying:

“That domestic violence shelter is responsible for provoking Ukraine’s ex-husband to break into her house and beat her again, like he did years ago. They should not have endangered Ukraine by accepting a call to their hotline after he showed up pounding on her door.”

References

• Russian Disinformation on NATO Expansion and the War in Ukraine (2023) — from a US Army analyst
• Exposing the myth of Western betrayal of Russia over NATO’s eastern enlargement (2022) — a succinct analysis from an expert
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never about NATO expansion (2025) — a short critique of the thesis, with numerous links to supporting resources
• Putin debunks his own propaganda by disarming Russia’s NATO borders (2023) — what it says on the tin
• Russia’s belief in Nato ‘betrayal’ – and why it matters today (2022) — contextualizing the thesis in the historical half-truths it relies upon
• Ex-Nato head says Putin wanted to join alliance early on in his rule (2021) — more on Putin’s frame of mind: “‘Well, we don’t invite people to join Nato, they apply to join Nato.’ And [Putin] said: ‘Well, we’re not standing in line with a lot of countries that don’t matter.’”
• Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine (2022) — an interview with the most promiment American proponent of the Russian thesis, in which he cannot answer straightforward questions about his argument
• The American Pundits Who Can’t Resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine (2022) — digging into Mearsheimer and other commentators
• Antisemitism in the Oval Office — historian Timothy Snyder contextualizng at instructive length how the White House meeting emerges from antisemitic Russian propaganda about Zelens’kyi

On the US manipulating Ukraine

In a discussion, I had someone offer a variant of the theory above — Ukraine’s Maidan revolution in 2014 was “astroturfed” by the US to produce a “proxy war” to weaken the Russians. They offered Chinese propaganda claiming that all color revolutions are supported by the US, and said that it was naïve to ignore US covert action.

Sure, covert action is a thing

I am an American lefty. I can name countless examples of covert skulduggery by the US intervening in other countries’ politics. The known history is extensive.

It is indeed hard to gauge how effective those efforts have been because the whole idea is that if they work well, one does not see the US’ fingerprints on the results. The history we do have suggests that the US is clumsy more often than not, but even just a moderately attentive amateur like me has seen enough to know that American technique has developed and refined a great deal in the last couple of decades under the logic of “Fourth Generation Warfare” integrating information control (including but not limited to propaganda) and political influence in military thinking. It is plausible that US covert action today is not so clumsy one might imagine given the history we know.

Given all that, despite not seeing any evidence demonstrating US intervention in support of Maidan, I consider it safe to assume that there must have been some covert involvement by the US. But that is far short of the much stronger conclusion they drew.

There is no reason to think Maidan was “astroturfed”

It was an organic Ukrainian popular movement. There were institutional motives: Yanukovych’s corruption and authoritarianism provoked opposition and an appetite to return to the 2004 constitution. There were policy motives: Ukraine has more to gain looking west for alliances rather than east.

Covert US support for Maidan may well have helped the revolution succed, but there is no reason to believe it was the primary force. There were people in the street. Protestors seized government buildings. The police folded under the pressure. Ongoing popular support over the last decade for the political order which resulted demonstrates the organic strength of the political movement.

Believing that Ukrainians could not have had their own revolution reminds me of American leaders during the Cold War who made the catastrophically stupid error of assuming that anticolonial movements were nothing other than a catspaw created by Soviet & PRC intervention. Of course Soviet & PRC support did play an important role in those movements — one cannot understand Cold War anticolonial movements without incorporating that — but colonized people have obvious reasons to fight colonialism, and the refusal to recognize that produced catastrophic failures of American policy. The entire Vietnam War, for instance.

To the degree that one can understand the “color revolutions” since the Arab Spring as a coherent constellation, and count the Maidan revolution among them, sure one can see them benefitting from American methods, tech, intel, and even material resources … but that does not mean that they have been designed and directed by the US. Local movements have their own motivations. Local movements can figure things out. The US is not the only actor on stage.

There is no reason to think that Maidan in 2014 compelled Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022

Putin has a pattern of military interventions in eastern Europe, and a particular obsession with Ukraine as a lost part of the empire with no legitimacy as its own sovereign state. He did not need the Maidan revolution to choose to try to annex (at least part of) Ukraine. He did not need the US to manipulate him into it.

There is no reason to think that the US wants the Russia-Ukraine war as a way to weaken Russia. Everyone has been surprised by the course of the war since 2022; the US could not have planned it. We have seen the US and broader west support Ukraine at arm’s length, trying to thread the needle of preventing Russian expansionism without risking further escalation. I cannot believe that planners in the US were able to titrate the exact right amount of expressed commitment to protecting Ukraine that would provoke rather than deter Putin.

There is no reason to accept a stack of absurdities

Imagining that the US pulled a Thanatos gambit which lured the Russians into a quagmire by controlling the course of politics in Ukraine requires believing six impossible things before breakfast. US intervention in Ukraine was vigorous and effective and had complete control of the results and the US sought Just The Right Amount Of Proxy War and they hit that target by puppeteering Ukraine? Preposterous.

If the US had such immense powers of covert political manipulation, why wouldn’t we just engineer a color revolution in Russia to overthrow Putin?

A satire

I summarized the thesis with an imaginary dialogue in the halls in Langley.

Here’s our plan to handle the threat of Putin. First we manipulate the politics of Ukraine to create a government friendlier to the US.

Love it.

We keep that up for a decade or so.

Uh, isn’t that kind of slow? Putin is already an old man.

Yeah, but the plan really pays off, Sir. Because it compels the Russians to invade Ukraine!

Wait, weren’t we trying to reduce the threat from Russia, here?

It’s just Ukrainians, Sir. They’re used to it.

Tragic, but a sacrifice we are willing to make. So then what happens?

Well then we support the Ukrainians. Not so much that they win, of course; we want a protracted conflict which drains Russian resources.

Brilliant. I assume that we will engage at exactly the right level which will also avoid the Russians escalating further and using nukes.

Exactly, the Russians will have no choice but to stay in the quagmire, thereby weakening them economically and preventing them from destabilizing the geopolitical order by exercising military power.

Exercising military power anywhere else. Brilliant. What are the risks?

None to speak of, Sir. The CIA has ironed out all the kinks in their system. We can be confident in controlling both the Ukrainians & Russians.

You have persuaded me that US national security interests require Russian tanks rolling west. Let’s do it.

My interlocutor concluded that I successfully captured how dumb the realworld “ambien and adderal strategic planing process” is, so if you believe that the US national security apparatus is simultaneously that dumb yet also able to control Ukrainian & Russian politics, there you go.