Regional cuisine in these United States

I have San Franciscan pride in the unique magic of the Mission burrito. But I have the good grace not to claim it is the Only Good Burrito. Tex-Mex does not appeal to my California palate but it is legit; if you think it is the best Mexican food in Los Estados Unidos, I respectfully disagree.

Texas style wet brisket is my favorite American barbecue, but Americans have the good grace to know that we are engaging in joking chauvinism when we claim that Our BBQ Is The Best. This is how we keep the Union together.

To that point, I respect New Yorkers’ smug enthusiasm for their disgusting pizza because they have that little bit of grace to claim that it is the best pizza, not the only good pizza. We are humoring you when all we do is roll our eyes over it. Take the win on having a terrific local style of “Chinese” and the best bagels and the only real pastrami.

Some time ago a colleague of mine rolled over to my desk at work and said, “Hey JK, you know about This Kind Of Thing so I hope you can help me.”

“Already I am flattered. What are you wondering?”

“I just got back from NYC and while I was there I had this pastrami sandwich …”

“Oh yeah. That’s the stuff, Brother.”

“I couldn’t believe it. This pastrami sandwich was a religious experience.”

“No lie. Nothing better in this world.”

“So where do I get that here in San Francisco?”

“Oh my Brother, I am so very sorry. Your average pastrami sandwich in San Francisco is not even going to qualify as a real pastrami sandwich. I can point you to several places where you can get a real one, and a few where you can get a good one. But that sandwich? The one you had in New York? That sandwich is not available in exchange for love or money anywhere closer than Los Angeles, and even there you have to be smart enough to go to Canter’s Deli to get it. There is nothing to be done.”

I also love the regional stuff that does not properly exist at all elsewhere. The weird, delicious toasted ravioli of St. Louis. The gross-yet-magnificent Italian beef sandwich of Chicago, which is Just Not The Same if you get it somewhere else. (Also gotta love the deep dish pizza, though I insist that the best version in the world is weirdly only found in Berkeley.)

But, uh, Cincinnati? If you are going to brag about that … stuff … fine. Call it “chili” if you want, whatever. But you have to warn people that it is a completely different dish, fergawdsake.

The state of UX design, and a job I did not take

An old colleague reminded me of a story about a job I did not take. It’s partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2010, partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2025, and partly a story about professionalism & org development.

I interviewed to become the First UXD at midsize company making niche consumer electronics which had superb industrial design capacity but did not have a UX design practice at all, and realized they needed it. It was a good org in a lot of ways. I liked the people I met. They did not understand UXD, but they mostly knew that they didn’t know.

They gave me an offer. It was Grown-Up Money, but the number was weak, rolling back the odometer on my career by a decade.

I told the hiring manager that I would not take the offer. He was unsurprised, had warned HR that the salary was inadequate, and was confident that he could get them to improve it significantly.

I said:

Look, more money in itself won’t change my mind. That number reflects a different conception of what this job is than I thought we understood. That number is low for someone to do UX design, and you need someone to pioneer a UXD practice.

He replied:

You’re right. We don’t have a commitment to go heavy on UX design. We are adding a UX designer to the team as an experiment. If that works out, we want to build a practice.

I said:

That sounds reasonable. And it is doomed to fail.

If you don’t address how UX design connects to your design & development process, you won’t get much leverage even from a great designer. With the pay you offered me, people in the org will smell on the person in that role that they are not worth listening to about the process & organizational elements of turning good UX design into actual products with good UX.

It is even worse if the person in this job manages to drive some product improvements in spite of that problem. The org will learn the wrong lesson. They will expect modest gains without org change. They will never invest organizational juice into supporting UXD properly.

This position is set up for failure. I don’t want that job, even if you pay me more to do it.

The hiring manager said:

That is very clarifying. I only half-understood that problem. I know I cannot address it from where I am sitting in the org.

I said:

You really need someone who has made it happen before, but there are all of a dozen people in the world with that on their résumé, and you’ll need a crowbar to pry them loose from where they work now, so the best move available to you is to roll the dice on investing a lot of trust in someone like me, who does not have that experience but has the skills and a fundamental understanding of the process & org challenges. But it is obvious why it is so hard to make a commitment to that. You need executive air support.

Because I like what y’all do and want to see y’all build a real UXD practice even if I don’t get to be the one to do it, I’ll offer you a bit of free consulting time. Put me in front of someone who can drive org change, and I will lay it out the case for them, like I just did for you.

The hiring manager was enthusiastic about that being the Right Thing. They said that they would communicate my offer, but predicted that leadership would not bite. I was unsurprised that I never heard from them again. I needed a new job, but I felt relieved that I had dodged a bullet.

In the 2010s, we saw a lot of orgs became enthusiastic about the importance of user experience. They hired a bunch of designers, then just sprinkled them into their organizations without changing any of the structures or processes.

My prophecy for that organization I interviewed with happened across the industry. User experience design “didn’t work”, as in the famous parable we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

First of all, the requirements for the game are stupid: it does not scale. They say you need at least nine players on a side. That’s stupidly inefficient. The minimum number of players is clearly four: three men on and one batting. That’s how we played: four people on a side.

With only four players, we didn’t need all those bases ⋯

[⋯]

The thing that finally condemns the entire “baseball” idea, however is this: even with all these improvements, the game is no fun at all.

We tried baseball, and it didn’t work.

Frankly, the UX design profession bears significant responsibility as well. We have not delivered clarity about what we need or even what we do, because we lack it as a professional community. Too many of us were insufficiently skilled. Too many of us accepted doomed positions because we felt we had to.

Now we have a lot of capable UX designers leaving the profession or having trouble staying in it … and a lot of crappy products & services. A tragedy.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”?

I want to never lend strength to Israel apologists who disingenuously find antisemitism in anything anyone ever says and does in the name of Palestinian liberation. All people of conscience must vigorously oppose the escalating genocide in Gaza, must not settle for merely ending that horror, must support an end to countless forms of oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, inside Green Line Israel, and in the diaspora. We must ground commitment to Palestinian liberation in the rightness of the cause, not make it contingent on the movement using the right slogans. We have a genocide to stop.

But I confess to weariness with people saying bad things and then brushing off criticisms by saying “who cares while there is a genocide?” I hope we would agree that saying “kill the Jews” would be unacceptable, so it is possible for slogans to matter.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is a far cry from “kill the Jews”. Most who use it mean neither more nor less than a call for Palestinian liberation. I do not fault them.

But the slogan itches at me. Rhymes make good chants, but the alchemy of combining “from the River to the Sea” with “Palestine will be free” gives this particular slogan unsavory implications which are not obvious to gentiles. We must closely examine it as rhetoric and see how that lands with Jews not because those are overwhelmingly important in themselves, but to contextualize the movement for Palestinian liberation choosing it as the slogan they promote.

From the River to the Sea

Defenders of the slogan dismiss Jews’ uneasiness with the expression “from the River to the Sea” as disingenuous, for good reasons. We have decades of both Palestinians and Israelis using “from the River to the Sea” as a call for solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis. But that usage emerges in dialogue with other history.

The phrase “from the River to the Sea” can be found in print well before the founding of Israel, used in aspirations to claim the whole territory for an ethnically homogeneous nation. Both Arabs and Zionists did this.

It also brings to mind the expression “push them into the Sea”, used — again both by Arabs and by Zionists, again dating back to even before Israel was founded — to name intent to expel people from the territory. Most Jews recognize it first from Israel hardliners who rationalize the Nakba — the genocidal expulsion of Arab Palestinians at the founding of Israel — with a claim that Palestinians fled their homes at the direction of Arab leaders who told them to flee in order to clear the way for Arab armies to “push the Jews into the Sea”. Reasonable people could once believe that story, since the founding of Israel was chaotic with conflicting accounts on all sides, but decades ago scholarship conclusively established that it is a pernicious lie, inverting how it was Israeli brutality rather than Arab hostility which sent 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes.

So saying “from the River to the Sea” is not a call to commit horrors, but it is not simply disingenuous to register that the more history one knows, the more hearing it summons such calls to mind. That does not disqualify use of the phrase in itself, but those ambiguities combine with ambiguities in the other half of the slogan ….

Palestine

“Palestine” can mean several different things —

1. The loosely-defined region extending far to the east of the Jordan River, including both what we now call Israel and Jordan (archaic, since this usage was typical of the late Ottoman Empire)
2. The current quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority comprised of Gaza and the West Bank
3. A hypothetical truly sovereign successor to the Palestinian Authority with the same borders, no longer subject to Israeli military interference or settlements
4. The territory of British Mandate Palestine which between WWI-WWII included the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, now broken into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
5. A hypothetical egalitarian unified state with equal rights for all, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority
6. A hypothetical secular Arab ethnic state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered
7. A hypothetical theocratic Muslim state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered

This ambiguity confuses many conversations about Palestinian liberation.

Naming Palestine in the same breath as “from the River to the Sea” excludes ^#1-3 … which rejects the legitimacy of a two-state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There are good reasons to oppose a two-state resolution. I favor ^#5, a unified democracy, as ideal. But two states are a legitimate alternative one could regard as preferable on the merits … or just as more achievable.

Not only Zionists say this. The PLO publicly accepted a two-state resolution in principle back in the late 1980s. Hamas have at least nominally accepted it for about a decade; there are good reasons to doubt their sincerity, but they did say it.

It is weird to use a slogan which takes the two-state option off the table.

The slogan has room for “Palestine” to mean ^#5, ^#6, or ^#7. Most people using the slogan unmistakably intend to it to mean ^#5, the democratic, egalitarian version.

But many real advocates for Palestinian liberation demand the genocidal, undemocratic options ^#6 or ^#7. The original PLO charter called for ^#6, a secular Arab state denying citizenship to Israelis. The original Hamas charter called for ^#7, a theocracy. Plenty of people still take those positions today.

It is weird to use a slogan which excludes a two-state resolution while not excluding the displacement or genocide of Israelis.

Palestine will be free

With genocidal visions of Palestine on the table, what does “free” mean? The slogan does not say Palestinians will be free, it says that Palestine will be free. To Arab ethnic nationalists, a “free” Palestine means a state only for Arabs. To Muslim theocrats, a “free” Palestine means a state dedicated to Islam.

Plus Jews cannot help hearing a rhyme with the Nazi dream of a “Judenfrei Reich”, a Nazi slogan for the utopia they wanted to create through genocide. Will Palestine “be free” of Jews?

A cocktail of allusions

Again, we know that most people do not mean the expulsion of Jews when they use the slogan. But it evokes the prospect in several ways in the space of just ten words. Knowing what most people mean does not prevent feeling a sting from that.

I would say that Jews have an obligation to just handle how that spooks us, but yet more context complicates things further.

Antisemitism

Assuming universal or inherent antisemitism among Palestinians & Arabs is a racist fantasy. Contrary to what Israel hardliners claim, the movement for Palestinian liberation is not fundamentally antisemitic. Those hardliners’ use of big platforms to misrepresent any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” makes it harder for everyone to think. It tempts advocates for Palestinian liberation to dismiss all concerns about antisemitism as nothing other than Israel apologetics.

We must resist a paranoid temptation to find antisemitism in everything. We must resist naïvely dismissing antisemitism as irrelevant. Antisemitism is tricky, subtle and complex and hard even for well-informed people to think about. Most gentiles are not just poorly informed — they rarely know just how complicated the territory gets.

Many people — Palestinians, Arabs, and otherwise — have antisemitism woven deeply into their thinking about Israel-Palestine. As exemplified in the subtle problems with the slogan inspiring this post, most of that antisemitism reflects ignorance or confusion rather than bigotry.

Fascists and other overt bigots often pose as “anti-Zionists” or supporters of Palestinian liberation. Sometimes they just use that pose as camouflage, to make their antisemitic propaganda sound reasonable. Sometimes they try to bend the movement for Palestinian liberation into an instrument of their efforts through entryism.

There are even Jewish cults muddying the waters with disingenuous opposition to Israel motivated by disgust that Israel is not the theocracy they dream of having.

With all that chaff and more in the air, “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is only one among a host of examples of antisemitic rhetoric Jews encounter while trying to stand for Palestinian liberation.

Social justice praxis

I cut Palestinians a lot of slack for intemperate language & ideas. One must respect Palestinians’ experience of their own oppression.

But accepting confusions and bigotries without comment plants landmines in the road to a more just future.

It is profoundly unfair that the movement for Palestinian liberation bears this extra burden of avoiding & addressing antisemitism. Worse still navigating so many bad actors working in all directions. But rising antisemitism creates an obligation which frankly the movement has not met. Too many refuse to admit any antisemitism at all.

I was prompted to finally assemble this post by people telling me, “Golly gee, there is no good reason to feel spooked by the slogan. Your grumbling is no different from white people rejecting the slogan ‘Black lives matter’. You obviously will never accept any slogan because you just oppose Palestinian liberation.”

Of course there are plenty of people who object in bad faith, but I hope I have made clear how I speak from solid support for Palestinian liberation and have substantive reasons to object to this particular slogan. It is maddening that so many people serious about social justice praxis seem to forget it when gentilesplaining to Jews about antisemitism.

How much does this matter?

In the current moment, few concerns in any domain rank with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Jews’ feelings about clumsy slogans do not remotely make the cut. Support for Palestinian liberation rests on justice, not on the conduct of the movement. We must avoid tone policing which says, “Golly, I would support the cause if you were nicer about it.”

But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and this slogan connects to the broad relationship between Jews and the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Jews do not bear a special obligation to speak out about Israel-Palestine but we do have an opportunity in our voices bringing a different weight than gentiles’. But the more vigorously we support the cause, the more we encounter its large & small manifestations of antisemitism. We feel raw. It throws grit in the gears. The slogan is one more damm thing, doing antisemitism even when innocent of bigotry or malice.

The point, at last

It’s not about Jews’ feelings, or the reasons for Jews’ feelings. But one cannot understand what is important without having that background. Here’s the real thing:

The leaders of the movement study the history of the conflict. Many of them do know all of this context. They have heard these objections before, from other supporters of the cause. They know how this particular slogan lands differently with Jews than with gentiles.

Why do they encourage people to use this slogan despite that?

Indeed, they have plenty of other slogans. But we hear this one a lot. So they prefer it. Why? I find it hard to resist the conclusion that they choose this slogan because of the reaction Jews have to it.

At best, that choice is antisemitically callous toward Jews, a signal that those leaders do not want our support.

At worst, it maliciously uses dogwhistles which gentiles do not register to provoke Jews into seeming unreasonable, compounded by them gaslighting us by saying “don’t center your feelings, you have no good reason for them”.

With so much nonsense which the movement cannot control, I cannot imagine a charitable explanation for them embracing this heartache.

I will continue to grit my teeth and accept the slogan among countless other microagressions from the movement. I encourage Jews who feel as I do to do the same. The cause is more important than our feelings.

But solidarity does not require that I pretend not to see a problem.

Wouldn’t it be better if the movement did Jewish allies the kindness of abandoning this slogan for any of the countless better alternatives?

FREE PALESTINE

PALESTINIAN LIBERATION NOW

Another terrible analogy for Israel-Palestine

Over on Bluesky, someone challenged me over my insistence that “Zionism” means neither more nor less than wanting Israel to continue to exist in some form with a pointed analogy:

I think the states South of Mason-Dixon should be able to have the right to resist Federal imposition of human equality in some form. The only forms I materially support exactly conform to the Confederacy, but how dare you imply that I support the Confederacy!

I’m impatient with anti-Zionists offering bad metaphors for the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I have to admit that the challenge in that had real edge. I thought it was recoverable into a useful form.

But I was wrong; it is rotten at the core, and trying to reframe it into a better form only had me wading out into a revisionist history which is easily misread as apologetics for the Confederacy, which I certainly do not want to do. I should have remembered my own warning against analogizing the history of Israel to the history of the United States.

Retaining it here to keep myself accountable for putting my foot in my mouth.

An alternate history

To try to really work the analogy, one must break the parallel between Israel and the Confederacy by first recognizing how the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Green Line Israel are brutal, and the Nakba was a genocidal horror, but antebellum Southern slavery was even worse than that. We should be wary of mapping the oppression of Arab Palestinians inside Green Line Israel directly to Jim Crow (or to other inequities like South African apartheid), but it is similar enough to accept for the sake of the allegory. We must also register how the Confederacy was defined by its project to preserve that nightmare in a way that Zionism is not.

That blunts the analogy, but it still very sharp. Jim Crow was profoundly unjust. With that, we can conceive a loose dystopian alternate history parallel to the history of Israel-Palestine:

1862 — The Confederacy successfully secedes with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Black people fleeing & driven from their homes escape to the Louisiana & Tennessee territories of Mexico and the USA.

Late 19^th century — Mexico & the US fight a series of wars trying to destroy the Confederacy. It is clear that if they win, they will genocide the Confederates.

1885 — The Confederacy seizes Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia in one of those wars. They start establishing settlements and repress the Black people there even more brutally than in the CSA itself.

1890 — The wars end because the Confederacy hint that they have dynamite technology.

1900 — The USA & CSA sign a major peace treaty which ends their border conflicts. The USA gets North Carolina & Virginia back. The Confederacy retains Louisiana & Tennessee, under military occupation.

1915 — After lengthy, bitter negotiation, the Confederacy makes weak concessions to Black people in Louisiana & Tennessee, which become a pseudo-sovereign state of the South. Confederate settlements remain, and the South remains subject to military policing. But there are free elections, which leaders of the formerly-terrorist Southern Liberation Organization win.

1930 — Conditions have diverged between Tennessee and Lousiana.

In Tennessee the Confederacy has expanded their settlements, making it a fragmented mess under de facto Confederate control. They are still governed democratically, under a corrupt party which evolved from the SLO.

In Louisiana the Confederacy have retreated, sort of: they abandon their settlements but blockade the state, creating grinding poverty. They have elected the authoritarian, theocratic Nation Of Islam to power … who never allow another free election again.

“Liberal Confederates”?

Let’s stop in 1945, before the Nation Of Islam conducts a brutal attack on Confederate civilians which produces an immense, genocidal response by the Confederacy, so we can look across this long, terrible history without that final horror consuming the story.

This less bad alternate Confederacy is still very bad.

It has liberal Confederates who say, “For generations we have fought for full sovereignty for the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee, full equality for Black people inside the Confederacy, and reparations for Black people in recognition of the Confederate history. The CSA is guilty of countless wrongs which we oppose, but we still love our home and want it to be far better.”

Would I count myself a liberal Confederate? Heck no. I don’t want the legacy of the Confederate project. I would want a just, unified, liberal democratic South encompassing all of the Confederacy plus the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee.

Would I count myself an anti-Confederate? Not quite. I would grant that liberal Confederates held a legitimate position which I respectfully disagree with. It is good to dream of a better version of one’s country.

Would I respect people less sympathetic to liberal Confederates than I was? Of course. Especially I would cut a lot of slack for Black Southerners saying that liberal Confederates are only rationalizing the white supremacy of the CSA. They would have good reasons, and their analysis would have a lot of truth to it, with plenty of “liberal Confederates” unwilling to really face the depth of the injustices they have an obligation to correct. And I would insist that sincere liberal Confederates dedicated to justice really existed, even if I was pessimistic about how many there were and the viability of their dream.

I’d also pointedly wonder how anti-Confederates imagined a harmonious United South working if they found themselves unable to imagine sincere liberal Confederates.

Some people would argue that animosity between white Confederates and Black Southerners is so intense that a two-state resolution would be better than a United South. I would not agree that it was better, but I would grant that they had a good case that it was more achievable.

One last thing

To properly parallel the history of Israel-Palestine, we would also need to imagine a Confederacy founded not by white people but by Native Americans fleeing genocide in the USA & Mexico, populated mostly with more Native Americans who arrived in the decades after succession — to parallel the Shoah, the Jews already in Palestine before Zionism, and the migration of Mizrahi Jews unwelcome elsewhere in the Middle East.

Wait, this is all terrible

So. Ugh. So I end up recruiting the genocide of Native Americans into this analogy, inventing a Confederacy without slavery, inventing an ahistorical Nation Of Islam as an anti-Confederate equivalent to Hamas, and more which is bananas if not ten kinds of racist. That is awful. Let’s … not.

So to the original point: the Confederacy is not a good analogy for Israel.

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.