Systems thinking

I am reminded that it would be convenient to keep an index of some of my favorite resources about systems thinking.

• Systems Thinking For Designers is a much more thorough resource than this one
• How Complex Systems Fail is a succinct discussion of what it says on the tin
• 20 Things I’ve Learned As A Systems (Over) Thinker describes the personal challenges of this kind of work
• The Goat Rodeo Index is a discussion of the “hard-to-define quality of utter fuckedness” of badly broken complex systems
• How to organize a children’s party is a very charming introduction to the Cynefin framework for thinking about systems
• The Iron Law Of Institutions is

  the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself; thus, they would rather the institution “fail” while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to “succeeds” if that requires them to lose power within the institution

  (see also Archibald Putt’s Law Of Failure “innovative organizations abhor little failures but reward big ones”, which produces the evil career advice to avoid easy things)

The livelihoods of far right cranks

TLDR

Gods help us all, I have almost 8000 words here. After saying something dumb and irresponsible, I had an obligation to write it.

The only people I would tell to read it are folks who want to take the step of sharing or acting on the preposterous claim that I am a “fascism apologist”. I am not. Here is the proof. Every word I say here is consistent with the mess of my comments on Twitter.

For everyone else, here is the gist:

• I said something on Twitter which it was irresponsible to try to say in 280 characters.
• The implied defense of Curtis Yarvin as a person or a commentator was a clumsy, irresponsible misstatement on my part. I have thought from the jump that he is despicable and dangerous and merits no defense.
• Fascism and the far right are poisonous and dangerous, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter them …
• … and bigotry in the workplace is poisonous and harmful, and we must make a range of vigorous efforts to counter that …
• … but recruiting conference organizers and corporate HR in that project by having them judge people’s public political writings, then attack the livelihood of those who expressed far right ideas, should not be in the toolkit …
• … if only because free speech principles make us hesitate to have democratically-accountable governments inspecting people’s public writings and delivering consequences for them, so we should hesitate even more over less-accountable agents doing so.
• There are a lot of reasons to think I am wrong on this point, and while I respectfully disagree, I emphasize “respectfully”, as I grant a lot of merit to those disagreements.

And.

After thinking this hard, and talking to a range of people about this subject, I have an ethical vertigo that leaves me stumped. Considering both the magnitude of the threat of the far right and the magnitude of the effort which that calls for, plus the magnitude of the damage bigotry at the workplace does, deciding whether far right propagandists do or do not give technical talks at conferences shrivels into an absurdly trivial question. In the course of laying out my opinion on the question, I became giddy with confusion about whether it mattered.

Consider this a capture of what I believed and advocated for, in the moment I made the original comment and engaged in the conversations which followed, rather than a picture of where I stand at the time of this posting.

I don’t know where I stand now.

And with that, the long version:

What I said, and meant

The other day, in the course of succumbing to getting into a long, messy argument on Twitter, I foolishly made a comment trying to make a point about a very particular antifascist tactic, a point just too subtle to try to get at in snippets of 280 characters, and I screwed it up.

I was prepared to hold my nose and defend Yarvin on the basis that he was not appearing at λ as Moldbug so his repugnant politics were irrelevant — and then he kindly nullified my hesitancy by defending UR in his public comment on λ

If you cringe reading that, I respect it. “Foolish” is, in fact, too kind a word for what I did there. Though I stand by the principle behind it — this essay is about what that principle is, and why I consider it important — first I have to register that the tweet was irresponsible.

It also got more attention than I had reason to expect, and soon I was facing a wall of smart criticisms of what I said, dumb criticisms of things I did not say and do not think, and a lot of stuff in a space in between. The resulting discussion sadly went as these things do. I bear significant responsibility for that. As I say, the original tweet was clumsy and wrong in a vital way. I said graceless things to some people. That internet shitstorm dynamics got the better of me explains but does not excuse my sharper and clumsier comments; I should have done better. Some folks in that conversation say I owe them an apology. Well, I was careless, and I am sorry.

In service of doing better, I hope that this is a more appropriate medium in which to say properly what I had to say. I’m afraid that I see no way to do this right without getting long-winded. I want to be held responsible for what I actually think, rather than for what one may glean from messy conversations held 280 characters at a time.

Reasonable people may think I am wrong. I want people holding me responsible for being wrong about what I actually think.

Also in service of doing better, this essay ends with a catalogue of several key counters to my stance which I have heard or considered. I include this both to lay out why I am not convinced and because many of these points haunt me with the possibility that they are right. If you read that far, you deserve to chew on those objections, because I still do.

So, with apologies for using so many words ….

Yarvin? λ? Moldbug? UR? WTF?

If one is unfamiliar with the story I alluded to in that tweet, I offer this thumbnail sketch from memory. I properly should check all the particulars and provide links — and I might try later — but as I write this I am snowed in with limited internet access.

Several years back, a guy named Curtis Yarvin was scheduled to do a talk at a technical conference called LambdaConf.

On one level, this was perfectly natural. I gather that Yarvin was and is an undisputedly significant figure in the technical domain of the conference, with relevant knowledge to share.

On the other hand, Yarvin is an extraordinarily terrible person. Not just extraordinary in the degree of his terribleness, but in the kind of his terribleness.

Under the name “Mencius Moldbug” he wrote the blog Unqualified Reservations, in which he made very very long and complicated arguments about culture & politics which made him one of the leading figures in a small, energetic, strange, nerdy, evil movement of political ideas known as the “Dark Enlightenment” or “Neo-Reaction” or “NRx”.

Moldbug said that if one reads enough dead white reactionaries, one realizes that democracy stinks and liberalism is at war with human nature, so we would be better off if we appointed someone smart like Steve Jobs to be dictator of America. Or maybe we should clone Charles II and crown the clone king. After all, Singapore is authoritarian but a nice place to live and very economically productive. This long, tortured argument was full of repulsive asides like, “Golly, reviving slavery is probably not the best move, but while it is not a big deal to me, I have to admit that dead white reactionaries made a lot of persuasive arguments that slavery is actually a good idea, and if you think about it, Black people really are best suited to slavery, aren’t they? Not that I’m a white nationalist, though. Those guys are not as smart as I am.”

If you don’t know Moldbug, I know that sounds like a parody. It is not. That is a succinct taste of stuff the blog really said. I read a fair bit of it years ago, fascinated by its bizarre style and repulsive ideas.

Moldbug is not exactly a Nazi or a fascist; he reflects an idiosyncratic far right sensibility significantly different but equally horrible. Yarvin was not attached to a political movement which did anything real, they just said a bunch of crazy, evil stuff on the internet, but that is still quite bad enough. And though really just a blowhard, he is a dangerous, damaging blowhard. He has radicalized a bunch of nerds. Yarvin evidently had some kind of contact with the Trump campaign though the racist, fascist advisor Steve Bannon. Fascist or not, I cannot overstate how evil his ideas and influence are.

Rather than get fussy about which evil far-right nuts are According To Hoyle “fascists”, antifascists use the word “fash” as a term of art for the whole range of evil far right nuts. Moldbug is definitely fash, and I will refer to him as such here.

(If you are cursed with a desire to know more about Moldbug and this bananas movement, I recommend Elizabeth Sandifer’s witty and suitably vicious book Neoreaction: A Basilisk; I am proud to have backed the Kickstarter which funded its publication.)

Yarvin maintained a soft split between his professional work as Yarvin and his political writing as Moldbug. One could easily look up Yarvin and not discover Moldbug, but he made no secret of being the person behind both names. It was easy to find out who “Moldbug” really was, and to discover Moldbug while looking in to Yarvin.

So when people saw Yarvin on the conference schedule, many of them offered the conference their Strongly Worded Concerns about a fash presenter.

Then Yarvin published an essay on the internet — under his name, not as Moldbug, not on the Unqualified Reservations blog — saying, “Hey there, LambdaConf community! My politics are not as bad as you’ve heard! Sure I think Black people make good slaves, but that is really no big deal if you think about it!”

Really. I am deliberately not linking any of his stuff, but you can look it up for yourself if you have the stomach. That is what he said. [Update: since originally publishing this post, I have added a few links in the name of helping newcomers make sense of the particulars.]

All this left me with an itch, which led me to talk about it now, years later.

Am I some kind of fascism apologist?

So what the heck? Why would I hold my nose to be in any alliance with this asshole?

It is because of a serious, principled objection to a very particular political tactic. I mention Yarvin at all because he presents an acid test of my dedication to the principle. The main purpose of this essay is to describe the line I draw, as clearly as I can. But I need to lay a little track about where I am coming from.

First, I have to confess that an important part of what I screwed up is that I was foolish — no, worse, irresponsible — to frame my position as though it were a defense of Yarvin. I retract the heck out of that. I don’t have a defense of Yarvin, I have a specific principle which makes me reject a particular attack on him.

My phrasing was dumbass and wrong, so people reading me wrong has been in significant part my own fault.

Thus I have a big correction to that tweet. I offer no defense of Yarvin. No defense of his evil, racist, reactionary, anti-democratic philosophy. No defense of the far right in general or of fascism in particular. I want to attack him however will work best. Everything I say here is motivated by me thinking about how best to combat the Yarvins of the world.

Indeed, I have been excitable about my opposition to fascism and the far right for a good long time. I first threw a little money at David Neiwert, my favorite journalist covering the far right beat, over a decade ago. This is part of why I had already taken a hard look at Unqualified Reservations when all this LambdaConf stuff happened.

With the turn American society has taken in the last few years, my opposition to fascism has grown more pointed.

I support militant antifascist work, both in principle and (very modestly) materially. Go git ’em. I have some tactical quibbles with the people who do that stuff (and this essay is about a big one) but they are doing the work in a way that I am not, so I misgive my own misgivings. Doxx the fash to their friends and family. Disrupt their organizing. Step up against them when they show up in the streets; don’t start a fight, but be ready to face one down. Shame and embarrass and belittle fash at every turn; videos of them getting punched in the face are known to work. Et cetera.

Ideally I want well-resourced, serious law enforcement efforts to disrupt fash organizing and crimes ... but this is a fantasy, requiring law enforcement institutions which are not structurally kinda fash as they are now, and a law enforcement corps which is not riddled with officers who are super duper fash, as they are now. So after we abolish the police — which we ought to do, in large part because they are so fashy — let us replace them with institutions which combat the far right rather than support it.

Fash are always grave threats, and especially so now. We must smash the hell out of them. I have sworn an oath to a terrifying elder god to fight fascism in my nation. Over on the same Twitter where I put my foot in my mouth, I also do exactly that, as I do on this blog, and in other places. I am not a militant antifascist, but I support those who are, and I do my small part.

So, again: what would make someone like me potentially supportive of a monster like Yarvin in any way, under any circumstance?

The answer lies in a principle which I hold dear because it lies at the intersection of what action against fash is effective, what action is wise, and the principle of free speech.

Free speech

When I summon the question of free speech, one has good reason to expect that I am about to offer the arguments of “free speech absolutists” who reliably get suckered by fash. There are free speech boneheads naïve about the Paradox Of Tolerance who fall for bad faith actors like fascists claiming that they deserve to lie, plot, and threaten people without consequence. And fash are among the free speech charlatans feigning a commitment to free speech in bad faith to their own advantage.

I am neither.

Limits to free speech

A few years back, I blogged a short essay about what the principle of free speech means, in part because I had been through the conversation many times and figured I needed to just set out my thinking and have it handy. I also wanted to have it as a companion to another essay about how it was right for protestors to No Platform Milo Yiannopoulos.

I will recapitulate the important arguments from both.

Both bonehead and charlatan free speech absolutists would say Yiannopoulos had a right to be heard. But he did not, on two counts. First, while he has a right to say what he will on platforms willing to have him, that does not give him a right to speak in every forum, on every platform, or even on any platform. The people who own the microphones, and the communities around those microphones, have not just a right but a duty to examine whether his voice should be heard in the space that microphone reaches. Second, it would be enough that the community rejected his message for any reason, but they had especially good reasons with Yiannopoulos. He was not just offering odious ideas, though his ideas are odious. Worse, he had demonstrated that he would use the microphone to harass members of the community and thereby target them for further harassment. That is not just unworthy of protection and support, it is criminal.

Yiannopoulos is a free speech charlatan, abusing the principle of free speech in defense of harassment, deliberately doing this, as fash do, in order to discredit the principle of free speech itself. We must actively work to deprive such people of platforms.

No Platform’ing such figures is a defense of free speech principle, not some exception to them. We have no conflict with the First Amendment. It does not protect harassment, lies, threats, criminal conspiracies, and the like. The principle of free speech protects people who offer ideas — even bad ones — but not threats and other crimes.

Since my response to Yarvin hinges on the need to defend free speech principles, even when it puts us momentarily on the side of bad people, this also makes a good moment for me to talk about a mistaken moment when principle put another free speech defender momentarily on the side of some fash: the ACLU’s support for Nazis’ Skokie march.

I love the ACLU, their rigor, and their commitment to taking difficult and unpopular stands, and forgive them this error, but they got this one wrong. The march was not an offering of ideas to the American public. A swastika is a way of saying, “I am advocating for killing people. I am planning on killing people.” There is no swastika which does not say that. It is a threat. Carrying a swastika or its equivalents, marching for Naziism, and such are crimes.

But though I believe in a lot more limitations on free speech than “absolutists” do, in an important way I have a commitment to a more muscular version of free speech than many of them do.

Beyond the First Amendment

I hold that the principle of free speech extends well beyond First Amendment protections against government censorship.

The state is not the only force of coercion. If one cannot express ideas without facing violence from private citizens, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s housing, one does not have free speech. If one cannot express ideas without risk of losing one’s livelihood, one does not have free speech.

So I oppose — or at least withhold my support for — a lot of Get ’Em Fired pressure campaigns when the reason for the campaign is that the person they want to see fired said something very bad, even when I share the desire to see that person face consequences. My reasoning is both principled and practical.

On principle, as a civil libertarian, I do not think any of us have the wisdom to choose unerringly which ideas should be punished. I would not punish people for expressing ideas at all ... and I surely do not want that power in the hands of corporate HR, bosses, and social media mobs.

On principle, as a leftist, I do not think anyone should be driven from being allowed to work so long as we live in a society in which dignity and survival depend on working for a wage. If we embrace a tactic whose logical endgame is to leave people who say sufficiently bad things houseless beggars, how is that meaningfully different from just saying we should round up people who express sufficiently bad ideas and throw them in prison?

I am vexed that so many leftists have this libertarian-ish blindspot which only fears government power over speech. One of the injustices of the world we have is how landlords and corporations and bosses are permitted to exercise this power without even the inadequate democratic accountability of our government. They are not censors we should court, they are censors we must oppose even more than the government.

In practice, I also think that such campaigns make a grave strategic error.

I am vexed that so many social justice advocates do not just legitimize but actively court the exercise of this unaccountable power over people, shaming employers of bigots and other villains. I respect their frustration at having so few means to deter antagonists against social justice, but history teaches us who suffers most when employers fire employees because of their political views ... or other things they have said ... or fear public pressures over their employees. This knife cuts reactionary white male professionals the least.

Advocates for these campaigns say that it will teach employers not to hire fash, but I do not imagine that the bosses will learn that lesson. They will learn “don’t hire people with controversial political opinions”. They will inspect workers’ social media. They will ask “do you have any political opinions we should know about?” in job interviews. That is bad on the merits and will most hurt the most vulnerable.

In practice, if we support Get ’Em Fired campaigns, then we legitimize those campaigns as tools for anyone to use, and we encourage employers to make their own guesses about how to preëmpt them. Yes, it will hurt the fash, but I expect that it will most hurt the most vulnerable.

With all that, I do not want depriving fash of their livelihoods in our Fash Smashing toolbox. There are plenty of other ways to respond to them.

Principles for the workplace

Having said that we should reject moves to fire people for their politics, even if they are fash, it would be nice if it were simple. But there are complexities.

My rule is more specifically don’t fire people for ideas they share outside the workplace, if the ideas are irrelevant to their job.

In this I do not want to legitimize the most visible critics of “Cancel Culture”, who are profoundly wrong. I am pushing back against a part of what we talk about when we talk about Cancel Culture, but not their part.

I call shenanigans on culture industry professionals decrying other culture industry people losing jobs — or most often, just having to change jobs and move to another platform — for the ideas they publish. If one’s day job is offering ideas, then of course one may lose their job over the ideas they share to the world.

More generally, one’s employer has a legitimate interest in what one says outside the job about the kind of stuff one does on the job. On Twitter I talk about design, because I work as a designer; if I say something stupid or smart about design on Twitter, then of course it will affect my livelihood.

Similarly, for a manager or executive with significant power and authority, especially over other people, a wide range of ideas that person expresses reflect on the fitness of the leadership judgment which they exercise. If an airline executive advocates for the Flat Earth theory, then that suggests they might not be right for, ah, global responsibility. If a manager expresses racist bigotry, then that indicates that they are unfit to manage people, who may be people of color ... or who may not be, because the bigoted manager drove them away.

And of course an employer has an unmistakable interest in the ideas which a worker voices at the workplace. A bigoted machinist working a lathe alone who keeps their mouth shut about their bigotry well enough that their colleagues do not know what they think is one thing; if that bigoted machinist wears a swastika T-shirt and spews offensive epithets in the lunchroom, their colleagues are harmed and the employer has not just a right to kick them out, but a responsibility.

That does not draw a perfectly bright line but it gives some principles, which underlie my teeth-gritting defense of LambdaConf offering a speaking platform to a fascist. Yarvin is the opposite of the reason for the principle I describe here; he is the hard counter example which tests how deeply I believe in it.

The case of LambdaConf

All this undergirds why I might have defended Yarvin being allowed to present at LamdaConf ... and why I felt perverse relief when he ran his mouth.

As I understand it, there was no reason to imagine that he would bring his politics into the forum. Since his politics is published under another name, legitimizing Yarvin as a technical expert did no legitimizing of Moldbug as an expert in culture & politics.

When confronted by the community with the link between Yarvin The Expert and Moldbug The Fash, I imagine a possible response in terms of the principles I have committed to here.

LambdaConf could have said something like:

We are hosting a technical conference, and have invited Mr Yarvin to speak on the subjects of his technical expertise. We are aware that he comments on culture & politics under another name, and we do not condone or support any of what he says on those topics. We have told him that his professional obligations as a conference presenter forbid him speaking to topics outside the technical subjects we invited him to discuss. We ask that conference participants not prompt him on other subjects, as we want him not to have any occasion to air his opinions on them.

Yarvin could have said something like:

While I do write on other topics under another name, it would be irresponsible of me to use the platform I have for talking about technology in this forum to promote that other work. I discourage anyone intrigued by my presentation about the Urbit technology from taking that as a reason to seek out my commentaries on culture & politics; the one does not inform the other in any way.

Had they done that, much as I would want to see Yarvin suffer embarrassment, dishonor, and loss for being fash, I would have gritted my teeth and stood by LambdaConf, because they had excluded his political ideas from the professional space.

This would have been desirable as a bulwark against placing both impossible duty and unmerited power in conference organizers’ hands. We should not want conferences vetting everything a presenter has ever said in public.

But Yarvin, instead, responded to his critics by publishing to the conference community some of his very worst political / cultural opinions, to offer his justification of why people should not find them troubling. He brought his politics into the forum. Once introduced into the space of the conference, the organizers had responsibility for it, and this made it right and necessary to exclude him. Alas, they did not.

Years ago, when I learned of this, I breathed an unwholesome sigh of relief. I did not have to occupy the position of conflicting principles leaving me supporting the platforming of fash, even in the privacy of my own heart. I could cheer Yarvin’s exclusion with a clear conscience. Yet I must also register the cost which makes my own response unwholesome; it meant people throughout the community had been exposed to his evil justifications of slavery and racism.

In sum

I oppose the far right and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting them. I oppose bigotry in the workplace and support a range of vigorous tactics in combatting that. But I reject the specific tactic of attacking their livelihoods of people who express far right ideas in public, both on principle and because I believe that it in the long run it does more harm than good, including that it puts vulnerable people at risk.

I read Yarvin as having been subject to one such attack, so while I favor a number of measures to disrupt the spread of his fashy ideas, those principles took precedence. Potentially standing with him on this particular point is a high price for what I take to be a necessary, very particular, virtue.

It was foolish and irresponsible of me to open this subtle question on Twitter. This longer treatment was necessary.

Criticisms

Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I have faced a number of criticisms of this stance over the past few days. I am frankly frustrated by how many criticisms I received took me as advocating things different from — sometimes even diametrically opposed to — the things I said both there and here.

But there are many legitimate criticisms of what I advocate here. I disagree, but respect many of those deeply. And some of them give me strong enough doubts that I will sit with them and revisit my thoughts over time.

Harms from fash

In one sense, Yarvin’s mere presence at the conference is as unthreatening as a person could be, just another nerd talking about software. But it is obviously painful for someone who knows what his views are to see him at the front of the room in a position of honor. I am too white to understand what it is for someone Black to know that Yarvin looks at them as a potential slave, but what I can imagine is nauseating and enraging enough. Perhaps some might find a bit of comfort in the thought of Yarvin chafing at having to hold his poisonous tongue in front of people alert to find any hint of his politics, but that is not enough. Again, as a white guy I know better than to try to gauge how deep that cuts.

Indeed, one of my Twitter challengers told me that it is simply not my place to evaluate harms, period, I should simply accept when people assert that a person’s presence is harmful to them. It should be obvious why I deeply respect the impulse which gives rise to that sentiment. But that proposed principle chills me. Almost everything I say here comes of trying to out-think bad actors who might twist the principles we apply. Radical credulity about harms practically invites abuse.

The principle I am calling for does have a deep cost for the people who already suffer the most. I would not do so if I did not think the alternatives are worse, for the reasons I describe.

If we do count being in the presence of a quiet bigot intolerable, I am at a loss for a proper remedy. I wish Yarvin’s measure of bigotry were so very exceptional that we could find the entire poisoned handful and tell them that the only work available to them is done in solitude. But they are numerous. Shall we find and fire them all? How will that work out?

Is the presence of my hypothetical tight-lipped machinist in the workplace intolerable? If we left them alone but were as quick to punish visible bigotry in the workplace as I hold we should, I count that as coming out well ahead of the status quo. And this does not grant a pass to the Klansman who has the good sense to leave his robes at home; I simply hold that we should deter, catch, and correct that Klansman outside the workplace rather than within it. I see plenty of headroom to do better at that without resorting to coming at their livelihood.

And all of this underlines that my principle — that we should refuse to make workplaces better by responding to the bigotry we find in things workers expressing outside of work — only has moral credibility paired with an assertion that we must do a lot more to make workplaces more just, safe, and supportive for people who face bigotry. In one sense, my stance is prioritization of where we put our energies: not in ferreting out secret bigotry but addressing the unjust circumstances we know we have inside organizations. There is so much to do. That it is so common for people to suffer harms large and small from bigotry at the workplace that we should have the impulse to catch bigots there by looking at what they do outside only underlines the urgency of doing all of the other things we need to do to improve those spaces.

Free speech

There are a few arguments against the fundamental importance of free speech.

The most fundamental says that free speech is integral to a Western liberal democratic tradition which gave us colonialism, slavery, genocide, exploitation, environmental crisis, racism, war, and other evils. I am deeply committed to free speech liberal democracy. But, uh, yeah, this critique is undeniably right on an important level and keeps me up at night. Free speech comes to us from guys like John “Slavery” Locke and Thomas “Slave Rapist” Jefferson. I believe in the potential for a deeper, more profound liberal democracy — societies which are categorically more dedicated to equality, equity, rights, democratic accountability, and all the promised fruits of the libdem tradition through new institutions with better formulations of rule of law and public engagement and rights protections. But my hope may well be wrong. It is all too possible that the worm lives in the seed of the apple, and any radically new liberal democracy would only reproduce the failings of the old. Thus free speech would simply not merit valuing. Again, I disagree, but respect the heck out of the position, and would love for someone to offer me a better alternative to liberal democracy.

There is also the horror and bafflient with which people like the Germans look at the way we conceive free speech in the US. They know firsthand its vulnerabilities to movements like fascism. We are certainly in a moment in which the threat of toxic bullshittification of our entire public discourse already has a genocidal body count and is only getting started. Maybe free speech is itself specifically poisonous. Again, I don’t think so, but the people who do have very good reasons.

And there are the people who say free speech is good, sure, but just not as important as I take it to be. Other things are just more important. Some of these folks frankly make me uneasy; I suspect that they do not value free speech at all, and I wonder what their social and political philosophy really is. But many of them are weighing values against each other, as we must. As I say above about harms from fash, there is every reason to respect weighting them above free speech.

The vulnerable lack this protection

I hold that we need to protect fash from attacks on their livelihoods for things they say outside the workplace because, in part, we need a hardline principle to protect more vulnerable people who already face injustices from suffering similar attacks.

One may object that I am being naïve in thinking that I am protecting those folks. We can point to examples of how they already suffer loss of livelihood for things they say and do outside of work. Am I not, in practice, proposing a protection which only the privileged fash will actually enjoy?

My calculation is different. I believe that existing injustices show where the energy will go if we step up attacks on the livelihoods of people who express disagreeable ideas in public. Yes, the vulnerable suffer now. If we make this move, I submit that this will not simply stay the same, it will get worse. We would win victories against the Yarvins of the world at a price of even greater pressures on the folks we were trying to protect.

Are corporations and conference organizers wise, ready to learn to ferret out the fash in their organizations? Or are they stupid, likely to learn from attacks on the livelihoods of fash that one must guard against employing people with “controversial political opinions”? Will employers learn to lock out bad actors, or become overreactive in ways which bad actors will learn to exploit? History teaches me to bet on stupidity.

But this is also a place where I am least confident of my prediction. My own privileges make me less qualified to judge than those who experience the risk. If those folks have a strong consensus that they are prepared to roll the dice, that matters more than what I think.

Political expression is not a protected class

One may say that we have already litigated who we protect from the caprices of employers. We protect immutable characteristics like race and sexual orientation and gender (increasingly, but not yet universally, including protections for transgender people). Chosen characteristics like political beliefs and public expression, we do not protect.

But in many cases we also protect religion, as we should. Religion is “chosen” but deeply held. We protect it because we recognize the dangers of discrimination. And even where we do not legally protect it, we have norms which understand that firing someone for being Muslim or Jewish or Catholic or Atheist or Buddhist or whatever is wrong.

I am arguing for a norm even though we do not have the law. And yes, I very much advocate legislation. Workers’ political creeds and expressions outside of work absolutely should be protected by labor law. If they were, that would, again, most help the most vulnerable.

(I should add that one Twitter critic of mine said that what I really should favor is universal basic income: if one’s livelihood is just not dependent on employers, then employers lose the coercive power which make them a threat to free speech. This is, indeed, one of the countless reasons why I am a UBI crank, who holds that we should implient a generous UBI and other policies sufficient for a dignified life without work.)

Fash require ruthlessness

I know from militant antifascists that doxxing fash to their employers and getting them fired works. It often breaks those individuals away from their politics, and often does the same for the other fash they know; imagining that one is persecuted is fun but being persecuted turns out to suck. Even if they stay with it, the disruption makes them less effective.

As I say, there are plenty of other tools for fighting fash, but I want to recognize that I am advocating that we discard one of the best.

This is partly because I believe that how we win matters as much as that we win. But it does matter that we win. And we have a fash problem right now. There is a school of thought which says that vigorous militant antifascism is a bit like running a fever: it’s bad for the host, but worse for the disease. So I respect folks who think that this particular move I resist is necessary for the duration of the crisis. But I also worry about how temporary crisis measures have a tendency to stick around.

The fascism gets in everything

One can make a case that Yarvin’s technological projects are themselves inherently fashy, with reactionary politics baked into the structure. That may sound silly, but to me it does ring true; I know that Bitcoin has libertarian goldbug ideas implicit in its structure.

Further, there is a good case to be made that this is not specific to Yarvin but characteristic of all fash: their worldview is so consuming that it gets into everything they do. My imagined tight-lipped fash machinist may not find a way to make a fash cog, but they still will do some harmful fash stuff all the time.

If you don’t know much about the far right, or fascism in particular, this sounds paranoid. I have read enough studies of fascism, authoritarianism, and related political and cultural tendencies to be a little paranoid.

Not quite an attack on livelihood

One could say that I am right to want to avoid attacking fash for the ideas they expressed in their day job, but that preventing Yarvin’s presentation at a conference does not quite meet the threshold of qualifying as a sufficiently coercive attack on his livelihood. Missing a speaking opportunity is a different order of thing than outright unemployment.

This is another fair point. The point of the hard principle is to be strict, but I have already talked about many fuzzy edges. One could draw a bright line which says one’s actual day job merits protection but more para-professional stuff like conferences does not.

(Note that this is in friction with a parallel criticism one may offer of my position, that Yarvin’s presence at the conference damages the livelihoods of diverse people who are deterred from participating in career-advancing conferences by the presence of him and other monsters. Surely if his attendance impacts their livelihoods, barring him impacts his. And again, if I thought this were the entire choice, it would be easy for me to decide against Yarvin and figures like him.)

In this I fall to the principle of erring on the side of caution and expansive rights protections in general. I know very well how professional opportunities include much beyond the workplace itself.

Presenting is power

Per my point about managers and executives facing a more stringent standard, admitting more of their outside-of-work behavior as relevant to their jobs, one might argue that presenting at a conference likewise calls in more of a presenter’s whole self than merely attending.

But I find this criticism much less impressive than many of the others. Yes, presenting is power, but far less pervasive power than a manager or executive’s. What misbehavior a bad actor can do as a presenter is in plain view, literally presented to the community, such that what matters can be judged without needing reference to outside the professional domain.

We will only use this power for Good

One may argue that one is not advocating for allowing attacks against the livelihoods of everyone for the things they say outside of work, only people who say really bad things. That’s not to be flippant about Yarvin. His politics are, again, evil, a word I generally hesitate to use.

This is in important ways both the best and the worst argument against my point.

I am sure that a lot of people read me as just doing some stubborn white guy nose-pinching here, letting abstract principle get in the way of just doing the obvious right thing. Fergawdsake, just let other questions be other questions and answer this question. Fergawdsake, we know who it hurts and who it helps to have him present versus to kick him out, so just be on the right side of that.

I certainly respect people who see me as overthinking things, getting in my own way, prioritizing distant theoretical worries over a very present very real very serious threat to real people.

And also, this is “the ends justifies the means” territory, setting aside principle or thinking ahead to unintended consequences or possible error is in judgment. History teaches what happens when people convinced of their goodness and rightness decide that they don’t need rules or systems of oversight. Yes, we can agree that Yarvin is really bad, but what will we do when we disagree?

I think we need to care about principles, which is why I have written so very many words about mine, to clarify for you and for me what mine are, and hopefully to help clarify for you what yours are.

In sum: respect

It should be apparent that I take the disagreements many have with my stance seriously. There are good reasons to reject my position that the principle of free speech must protect even a figure like Yarvin from attacks on their livelihoods for ideas they express outside work.

Indeed, I assume that most people do not share my worry about this particular move, and are unworried to see someone like him take a blow this way.

I hope it is clear that I recognize that I could be plain wrong on this. I hope that people will register that I am not merely dismissing their concerns. I invite people who disagree to continue to try to convince me. And I pray that if they are indeed right, that they will convince me.

Ethical vertigo

After sweating out this long essay, and engaging in both friendly and hostile discussions about these questions on Twitter, I have spent enough time steeped in the fundamentals of these questions that I have become unmoored.

We face far right ideas and movements which are a cancer on democracy and a deadly threat to countless people now, and are on the march to do the worst things imaginable. We face injustices and cruelties in the workplace which reinforce grinding, horrible, pervasive social inequities … and even make those workplaces less effective along the way.

There is so much we must do. The addition or subtraction of a few tech conference speakers does not rate. I feel dirty having written the necessary words above.

In the face of such things, my hesitation to back an ouster of Yarvin before he brought his politics into the forum is, in one sense, a check on my own impulse to ruthlessness. Because whatever misfortunes he suffers for being fash, when I hear of it I will start by carving myself a thick, guilty, delicious slice of schadenfreude pie. Costing him a speaking gig is not even a tiny pebble at the foot of the mountain of things I am prepared to do to keep his ideas from taking hold, which is good because I remember the time it took lakes of blood to stop the Nazis from filling the oceans of blood they wanted.

I asked people about their endgame for stopping the far right at the workplace, and some reassured me that there was no way we would have a world where everyone who expresses far right ideas is so universally reviled that they end up homeless and destitute out of inability to find work, which I suppose means that the hope is to have a world which screws up the livelihoods of fash just enough that it deters them just enough, which … does not sound right.

If spending an hour listening to Yarvin talk about data structures is intolerable harm to people who know themselves to be threatened, physically threatened, by his ideas then should a guy like that have any job, any place? If we were prepared to send GIs across Europe with tanks to blow fascists to bits, which was both justified and necessary, then keeping far right advocates out of the workplace is small potatoes, right?

Are unaccountable conference organizers a better instrument for this than the government because they can do so much less? That too is several kinds of wrong. If, as I argued at grinding length in this essay, it is worrisome to have conference organizers and corporate HR and advocacy campaigns to pressure such organizations acting as censors, then does that principle create an obligation for me to attend a tech talk by a Yarvin, lest I pressure the conference? That too is thoroughly perverse.

So the disrupting the livelihoods of far right cranks is justified, which makes depending on a constellation of jumpy corporate authorities too chaotic and unaccountable. But that implies doing something systematically, exercising authority, with, uh, due process of law? If we are prepared to impoverish these folks because they are dangerous, should we not put them somewhere where they cannot hurt anyone? Uh, did I just now propose that we scour the websites for folks like Yarvin, put them on trial, and put them into prison? Camps for political prisoners? But not, y’know, too much of that? Is that what I am saying?

Seriously, what do we do with these folks? We have many thousands of outright fascists. We have millions of QAnon cranks in the US who seriously want to murder most journalists and Democratic Party leaders.

Keeping their visible proponents from speaking at tech conferences? I cannot care any more about that. What will we actually do?

I am giddy with horror. I have stalemated myself. I cannot think about this any more, right now.

Desk stuff

At the time I write this, I keep a nice home office which I currently cannot use because I am camping out away from home as part of my bubble's pandemic protocol. I just finished setting up a smaller but still fairly elaborate desk at the place where I will be for the next month or two (or, heaven forbid, longer) and snapped a picture of it to share with Facebook friends. Folks were so interested that I have been writing up what all my Desk Stuff is, so I thought it would be fun to transcribe that here. At the time I post this it is still a work in progress.

1

I suffer the constant temptation to clutter already-cluttered desk with items which are strictly decorative. In this reduced arragnement, I have sweated it down to two items.

I have never met a Hindu programmer who did not keep a representation of Ganesh at their desk. I am not qualified to give puja, but I find that he is patient with western pagans with modest offerings, so I give him a little “jai Ganesh!” or a bit of candy from time to time, and credit him with the smooth running of my computer. If things get really dire fixing something, I light the candle.

The Dymaxion icosahedron globe is a relatively new acquisition. I am a bit of a Buckminster Fuller enthusiast and the map is my favorite of his designs. I’m starting to think I should have gone for the blue/orange version, thoough, because when unfolded the dark blue oceans of the satellite image version I have are hard to distinguish from the magnets which hold the globe together.

2

The important thing at the end of the desk is an old iPhone, now repurposed just to run the BeFocused app, which is a smart pomodoro timer. I do not really practice the Pomodoro Technique rigorously — though I am working on it — but it does help keep me self-aware about my time and working rhythms. Keeping that in reach and visible and able to make its own independent sounds really helps.

A little organizer holds my favorite fancy bullet journal marking supplies: colored washi tape, sticky tabs, color coding dots, a correction ribbon, and a Postit glue stick. I have been stepping up my BuJo game this year. I do not keep an elaborate journal as many folks do — the simplicity is part of what makes it work for me — part of what makes the BuJo work for me is how it engages my attention through getting to fuss with paper products.

Then I have a little wooden playing card holder. My stationary obsessions extend to a love for index cards, so it is nice to be able to set up a tiny kanban board with them at my desk.

3

On the left side of the desk, I have my iPad on a stand, a little storage box with some alternate cables and other supplies, and a new acquisition: the big Contour ShuttlePro.

The Shuttle is programmable keypad with a jogwheel, primarily designed for audio and video editing. The driver software is smart enough to recognize which application is selected and to deliver shortcuts appropriate to it to the device, so I can work with one hand on the trackpad and one on the Shuttle. I'm just getting set up with it because for many years I relied on a different (and better) solution the Razer Nostromo, a gamers' programmable left-hand keypad with the same application awareness. Alas, they ended Mac support for the Nostromo and its successors a while back, and the new Mac OS Big Sur killed the controller software, so I had to change platforms.

4

The inexpensive flat-pack desk I got has open side shelves, so I have a few desktop organizers tucked onto the shelves on the left. I have spare notebooks, extra pens, index cards, sticky notes, a pair of scissors, index cards, stamps, and the like here.

5

My MacBook Pro recently bricked itself and my decade-old iMac was wheezy, so when Apple announced the new Apple silicon Mac Mini, I upgraded to it ... and thus needed to get a new monitor. Dell has a retina-resolution monitor which is Good Enough and a big step up from the monitor I used to have, and it has one of those Dell stands which makes it easy to switch to portrait format. If I am flush later this year, as I hope, I will spring for an awesome main display and rotate this one to use as a tall adjunct display dedicated to reading, writing, and note-taking. It also acts as a USB hub, which helps with the Mini's port limitations.

This also meant I needed to get a USB webcam, especially in this work-from-home quarantine year, and to my pleasant surprise I could find a camera better than what I can reliably transmit over the internet was inexpensive.

6

Together with the webcam, upgrading my machine and doing more remote meetings, I also recently needed to break down and get a proper USB mic rather than rely on my headphone mic, so I got a mic that was not too expensive, well-reviewed ... and old-timey-looking. Interlocutors tell me that I do not quite sound Broadcast Awesome, but much better than before.

On the monitor stand I also keep my (now collectors' item) Silicon Valley Tarot deck (which is witty and surprisingly useful for work), eyeglasses, and a fidget cube.

8

That wacky Keyboardio keyboard arouses the most curiousity, so I have a whole separate post about it.

10

So the big thing here is a vertical file organizer with a mini-whiteboard which I got dirt cheap from of of my favorite catalogues, American Science & Surplus. It is a glamourless plastic thing, unlike the beautiful glass desk WB from Quartet which I lust after but do not really have a proper use for. The organizer has a slightly depressed tray on top for a couple of WB markers, which is a nice touch, keeping those big WB markers away from my other pens. But the cool part — the thing which makes it an essential part of my arsenal — is how in back there are four thick slots for folders, ascending a bit in back stadium-style. These are my Hot Files for stuff I am working on.

I use a set of durable plastic folders with translucent bodies so I can tell what is inside. I have marked each folder with a letter for indexing elsewhere if I need it, though I am not getting so much mileage out of that as I expected. But it is really useful to me that the tabs of the folders are colored, so I color code yellow/orange/red for ascending urgency of things I need to do, plus green for On My Desk But Currently Cool, and blue for Pending Action From Elsewhere. I keep the folder supply upside-down in the back slot, with matching colored sticky dots on each one so it is easy to pull a new folder of the appropriate color for a new project. The limited space in the slots keeps me from holding too much stuff on my desk.

To the left of the organizer thing I have chargers for my watch and phone, wired phone headphones for when I need them, a book of videoconference signs which I made, and three key desk tools: a good retractable pen, a good eraser, and a cheap little desk knife which comes in very handy.

Keyboardio

I have some unsolicited product endorsements for the magnificent keyboards made by by Keyboardio.

I have long been an enthusiast for exotic ergonomic computer keyboards. For years, at work I used a SafeType vertical keyboard, one of the weirdest keyboards money can buy ... and a nice security feature which keeps anyone else from using my computer. It eventually got a little flaky after more than a decade of hard use and several moves ... and the one I had was so old that I needed an adapter to connect it to USB. So I switched to the Matias Ergo Pro, a more conventional split keyboard, which is terrific, and the keyboard I recommend most to people. But six months ago the USB connector got flaky, which would have been easy to fix, but it gave me an excuse to commit to a keyboard I had tucked away because I had backed the Kickstarter for it a few years back: the Keyboardio Model 001. Look at this wacky, magnificent thing:

It is one of the nicest things I own, and a marvelously designed tool.

The designers really went back to square one in thinking about what a keyboard should be. They talk about looking at the research into keyboard ergonomics and discovering that even most “ergonomic” keyboards ignore what we now know about what makes a keyboard good. They committed to making an uncompromising keyboard that did things as right as they could.

A few things are obvious. The split design lets one set one's hands a distance apart which spares the wrists and shoulders. I do not want carpal tunnel syndrome. The backlighting on the keys is programmable; I like a warm red glow but there are built-in alternatives (including a spiffy rainbow animation), and one can program others if one has the patience. If you are anywhere near me working with it, the loud clickiness of the mechanical keys is unmistakable; as someone old enough to remember early computer keyboards which were built like tanks, I find both the feel and the sound very satisfying.

The other obvious difference is the little curved set of thumb keys on each hand. It took me a while to understand the thinking behind them, but they are ingenious. Each thumb has a shift and ctrl key, then there are thumb keys for the modifiers alt and cmd, plus the vital space and backspace keys. Once one gets used to them, it is much easier to locate and hold down the modifier keys when typing characters on the keyboard; the keyboard has no capslock becuase if one really wants to type in all caps, it is comfortable to just hold down the shift key with one thumb and type. They even considered the key combinations shift-alt-ctrl and shift-cmd-ctrl, placing the keys such that it is easy to hold down ctrl with one thumb and both of the other modifiers with the other.

The biggest subtle difference from a common keyboard is that it has an ortholinear arrangement. You can see that the keys are in vertical columns, which differs from the staggered arrangement of standard keyboards. This takes a significant retraining of muscle memory if one is, like me, a touch-typist. It was a couple of weeks before I was typing competently, and a couple more before I was typing at anything like my normal speed. But having made the adjustment, the ortholinear arrangement is much better. And I can happily report that learning this has not impaired my ability to use a normal keyboard.

Keyboardio also make a marvelously compact ergo keyboard, the Atreus. I have one of these, too, and it is equally a piece of amazing craftsmanship. I only like the keyboard layout 90% as much as the Model 001; I would have loved a third key in the centermost column on either side, and maybe even a center key, but that is a small quibble. I used their pretty-good key reprogramming software to change the Atreus key arrangement to better match the pattern of the Model 001.

The Model 001 is sold out, but at the time I write this they have an update, the Model 100, coming. You can get on a mailing list to find out as soon as it comes out ....

Black history

I need to spend more time with Charles A. Preston’s voluminous Black History Library.

An invitation to WandaVision

WandaVision is turning out to be very interesting on several levels. It is marshaling astonishing cinematic storytelling craft in service of something that is effectively “just” a very entertaining trifle. If you have any interest in the craft of television, the cultural politics of pop entertainments, old sitcoms, or contemporary surrealism, it is worth checking out. (On that last, astute genre entertainment commentator “Moviebob” Chipman calls WandaVision “Baby’s First David Lynch”.)

There is a lot of Marvel movie and comics lore threaded into the show, 90% of which is not necessary to enjoy it, but it helps to know a few key things. So this is a backgrounder with a few movie spoilers for folks who are curious about WV who have not seen many or any of the Marvel movies. Brace for some comic bookly goofiness.

Wanda

Main character Wanda is Wanda Maximoff, aka Scarlet Witch, a very powerful superheroine who has served with the movies’ super-team the Avengers together with Iron Man, Captain America, and others. She has vaguely-defined psychic and “reality manipulation” superpowers. Significantly, she has exhibited a form of telepathy in which she can deeply read people’s minds and send them into a reverie of real-feeling hallucinations which draw on people’s deepest fears.

Wanda, and her twin brother Pietro, grew up in the fictional eastern European country of Sokovia. In their childhood, Sokovia suffered in a nasty civil war. She and Pietro nearly died in a harrowing bombing which killed their parents; they came to hold Tony “Iron Man” Stark to blame as the face of the US military industrial complex which fed the war with weapons. This made them ripe for recruitment by Hydra, a secret evil organization intent on world conquest with roots in Nazi Germany. Hydra had stolen a super-technology scepter used by the supervillain Loki; the scepter was powered by a powerful cosmic artifact called the Mind Stone. The Hydra mad scientists used the power of the scepter to give Wanda & Pietro superpowers, intending to use them to combat the Avengers, the good-guy superhero team at the center of the story told by the movies.

The Avengers defeated Hydra and reclaimed Loki’s scepter. Tony Stark (with the aid of fellow mad scientist Bruce “The Hulk” Banner) used the scepter for his own super-technology project: a powerful, intelligent android called Ultron. Alas, Ultron hated Tony, as Frankenstein monsters are wont to do, and escaped. Ultron recruited the Maximoffs to help him fight Stark and the Avengers, stole the scepter, extracted the Mind Stone from it, and used it to power an ideal, super-powered “syntheziod” android body for itself. Wanda & Pietro discovered that Ultron was evil and crazy, plotting to exterminate the human race, so they turned against him and joined forces with the Avengers.

In the ensuing battle with the Avengers, Ultron killed Wanda’s brother Pietro and destroyed most of their home country of Sokovia.

Nerdy sidebar:

When Marvel Studios started making these movies, they did not hold the movie rights to many of their most popular characters. Sony had Spider-Man, 20^th Century Fox had the Fantastic Four and the X-Men and thus all the mutants. The Marvel Cinematic Universe Pietro is the only comics character portrayed in the Fox’s X-Men movies whom Marvel have been able to also use in thier own movies. The legal wrangling between the studios meant the two versions of him have similar superpowers but are played by different actors, in incompatible stories. I cannot resist encouraging you to check out two truly delicious short scenes with 20^th Century Fox’s X-Men movie version.

Marvel Studios have worked out a sharing arrangement with Sony for Spider-Man, and Disney now owns both Marvel and Fox, so fans hope that future Marvel movies will take advantage of finally having legal access to all of the comics characters. Wanda has not appeared in the Fox X-Men movies but in the comics she is a mutant and has been a member of the X-Men, so she might play a role in a story which brings the mutants into the ongoing Marvel Studios storyline.

During the course of things, the Avengers stole the synthezoid body Ultron had made for himself before Ultron could decant his consciousness into it. Stark & Banner took a second bite at the apple of making a Super Android For Good, and this time it worked; the resulting extremely powerful and almost saintly superhero joined them in the fight against Ultron, and took the name ....

Vision

The other main character of WandaVision, Vision is also a superhero, an android essentially with powers much like Superman, plus the ability to “phase” through walls like a ghost. He is reflective, soulful, even saintly. Over the course of several movies, he and Wanda fell in love.

Because Vision is powered by the amber Mind Stone which rests on his forehead, the mad and immensely powerful cosmic supervillain Thanos sought to kill him to get the stone, as part of his plan to collect the six Infinity Stones and use their primordial energies to create his weapon the Infinity Gauntlet, which he wanted to use to murder half the living beings in the entire universe. Thanos’ plan succeeded. He killed Vision and gruesomely tore the stone from Vision’s forehead; Wanda barely survived standing between Vision and Thanos in her failed attempt to save her lover.

Vision’s Mind Stone was in fact the last element of the gauntlet which Thanos needed to enact his plan. With a snap of his fingers in the Gauntlet, he dissolved half of the living beings in the world into black dust; this horrifying event came to be known as The Snap. The Avengers spent years working to undo this calamity, and after a titanic effort, finally succeeded; they reconstructed the Gauntlet, used it to restore everyone who had been lost to the Snap — leaving them with a few years of lost time — and killed Thanos.

Alas, since Vision did not die in the Snap but rather in battle against Thanos, Vision remained dead in the wake of this happy ending. Other characters were reunited with their fallen friends, lovers, and comrades, but Wanda remained in mourning.

---

Oh, and if this show inspires you to want to get into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I have a guide to help you watch them all, or skip through just the best of them, for the first time.

He could have been our greatest President

A couple of years ago I did some politics-adjacent field research. I talked to a lot of different kinds of people. I saw something about a certain strain of racism which I did not understand at first.

I am skilled at conducting interviews with a measured neutrality which brings out surprising honesty very quickly — check out Liam Neeson’s subtle performance in Kinsey for a taste of how it works — but there are limits to what I can do. I can tone it down, but I will always read as a weird nerd. My research partner was Asian. We were not going to convince any white people in 90 minutes that we were “cool” enough that they would slip into using The N Word.

Those people still give it away with their characteristic coyness. “I don’t hate anybody.” “I’m just saying.” When they talked about Obama, I could see their plain disgust.

I mention those folks because I want to point to a different flavor of white racism.

There were white people who had conservative political and social sensibilities but claimed to have voted for Obama, or if not, to have greeted his election in 2008 with some enthusiasm anyway. I say claimed because we know that people claim to have voted when they did not, people claim to have voted for winners when they did not, people misrepresent themselves to nerds who interview them, people lie to themselves.

How they really voted, and how they really felt in 2008, matters less here than the story they told about it, to me and to themselves. They did not have the disgust of the Obama haters. They had, instead, a deep, bitter disappointment. They talked about him and racism and politics in different ways, but I heard this haunting refrain repeatedly.

“He could have been our greatest President.”

They said this as they talked about the excitement and patriotic pride they claim he inspired early on. They spoke directly about feeling a thrill at seeing a Black man as President. They said they were happy to have seen the day. They said it was good for the country. They called it a victory for American values. Again, I don’t take this at face value, as the complete truth, or even a truth at all. These people repeated any number of ideas I recognized as conservative propaganda, spoke racist sentiments different from the kind I heard from culturally and politically liberal people. They clearly did not feel the disappointments which a lefty like me would name, looking at Obama.

Nonetheless, I feel dead certain that this was not some deflection they were feeding me. Truthful or no, it had the sincerity of a story they were telling to themselves.

“He could have been our greatest President.”

But he was not. I asked how and why. What should he have done which he did not?

They gave maddeningly vague answers. He “did not bring the country together”. He “did not accomplish anything”. He was “divisive”. He was “uncompromising”. He made “wrong choices”. He was a “failure”. They were not angry with him as some of their friends were, they were sad.

I might have been able to get past that blurriness of this, but I had to resist the temptation to dig because I was mostly there to talk about something else.

“He could have been our greatest President.”

It itched at me. What? What did they mean? What had they hoped for? What had they expected? What had they wanted?

But of course it makes sense. It settled in my head and bounced off of other conversations and I wondered how I had not seen it at first.

They wanted him to declare racism over. Finished. Defeated. To tell them that they did not have to think about it now, they did not have to deal with it now, his election had proved that racism no longer played a part in our politics or our society. To be the Great President who finally put our legacy of racism to bed.

They imagined the absolution he should have given them. So they thought that he failed them.

Black Lives Matter demonstrations

For convenient reference later:

Princeton's US Crisis Monitor provides a detailed survey of Demonstrations & Political Violence as of summer 2020 which includes this summary:

An Overwhelmingly Peaceful Movement
The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Yet, despite data indicating that demonstrations associated with the BLM movement are overwhelmingly peaceful, one recent poll suggested that 42% of respondents believe “most protesters [associated with the BLM movement] are trying to incite violence or destroy property”
[...]
Research from the University of Washington indicates that this disparity stems from political orientation and biased media framing, such as disproportionate coverage of violent demonstrations. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have documented organized disinformation campaigns aimed at spreading a “deliberate mischaracterization of groups or movements [involved in the protests], such as portraying activists who support Black Lives Matter as violent extremists or claiming that antifa is a terrorist organization coordinated or manipulated by nebulous external forces”

Antifa (n.)

Talking about “Antifa” makes one Not Even Wrong. Antifa-with-a-capital-A does not exist. Saying “member of Antifa” reads like “member of Conservatism”. Clueless.

Yes, a large, loose antifascist movement exists. As do many antifascist organizations. As do militant antifascists. As do everyday antifascists. They may refer to themselves as “antifa”. I do. But no “Antifa” organization exists.

Militant antifascists oppose the far right through direct action. They may doxx far right actors, or counter far right groups’ street actions. This reflects not opposition to far right ideas, but defense from threats from far right action. No threat, no militancy.

Militant antifascists sometimes use a tactic called “black bloc”. On the street one refers to “the black bloc” as one says “the medics”. Saying “The Black Bloc” reveals the same cluelessness as saying “The Medics”.

Militant action reflects only a small part of the antifascist movement. It does far more research, commentary, and advocacy than direct action. Antifascist action includes publishing this blog post.

The antifascist movement studies fascism and the broader far right, distinguishing those from ordinary conservatism. We oppose all violent far right movements & actors, and say “fash” as term of art including all of them, not only avowed fascists.

Yes, many anarchists participate in the antifascist movement. As do socialists. As do social justice advocates. As do vegans. Overlapping but not equivalent. Antifascism means opposition to the far right. No more, no less.

No Antifa political agenda exists because no Antifa organization exists. No antifascist political agenda exists beyond opposition to the far right. Not anarchism. Nor socialism. Nor communism. Nor social justice. Nor the Democratic Party.

Resources

The Great Antifa Hoax

There you have it. U.S. law enforcement has now been directed to go after whomever it wishes to pursue on the basis of a made-up crime tied to an “organization” — if that be the word — that is effectively little more than a nuisance to local cops and actually does some good when it comes to exposing neo-Nazis. And they are doing so with a near-complete lack of transparency regarding their choice of targets and the methods they choose to pursue them. “Antifa,” in this context, Thomas Brzozowski noted, functions as little more than merely “a stand-in for a set of ideas that … the administration is broadly characterizing as effectively progressive, radical, [and] left-wing.” The government is right to investigate crimes. But now, it will be investigating and potentially prosecuting beliefs—and only one kind of beliefs at that.

Anti-Fascists Say They Are Protecting Communities From Right-Wing Violence, Not Fomenting “Terror”

“Antifa,” a label which many right-wing commentators tend to apply to anything vaguely left-wing, has become a boogeyman in recent years as large anti-fascist demonstrations have confronted white nationalists and Trump allies. Because of the virulent anger “antifa” inspires on conservative social media, Trump is able to score points with his base by erroneously blaming anti-fascists and escalating the language he uses to describe them.

Yet “‘antifa’ isn’t an actual organization. It’s a set of shared ethics and tactics used by activists to describe the work we do to protect our communities,” says an anti-fascist activist who goes by the moniker “AntiFash Gordon,” and is known for exposing neo-Nazis online.

U.S. Pushes Allies to Chase a New Terrorism Target: The Far Left

“They are trying to invent antifa as an international threat to tie it to groups and individuals in the United States,” said Tom Joscelyn, a counterterrorism expert who helped write the congressional report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “It suggests that the administration is further down the path of twisting the counterterrorism machinery of the U.S. government to going after domestic political opponents than people realize.”

Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: The Next Phase Of The Grift

While Ngo’s claims about antifa’s ubiquity are absurd enough, they’re only the starting point for even more bizarre comparisons. He suggests that there have been several “antifa” mass shootings, including on the list of perpetrators people who have no discernable relationship to antifascism. Yet that, of course, is not the point. Antifa for Ngo comprises everyone from actual leftists to liberals he dislikes. Anyone with an ideology that fits into this conception must be unstable and prone to violence. Antifa is a priori violent; all leftism is antifa and all leftism causes violence.

The invention of Antifa

Given the long history of anti-anarchist sentiment, the Trump administration’s conjuring of Antifa last fall was an act of necromancy: the return of an ancient American antagonist to front-page news. Allegations of anarchist conspiracy still have the power to quicken the pulse of opportunistic prosecutors, who have made, among other things, the presence of anarchist zines in the homes of the Prairieland defendants central to their case in Texas. The defendants’ friends and families gathered each day outside the courthouse with a boxload of these “terrorist” materials on display: One such zine, prominently displayed, was entitled “Things to Consider When Loving Your Neighbor.” Their other “terroristic” activities outside the courthouse included poetry readings, picnics, and anti-repression workshops.

The malls of the future, today

I read Joel Garreau’s Wired article Edgier Cities when it was new, twenty-five years ago, and it has stuck with me. I have long thought that he is a bit too optimistic about the prospects for the forms of suburban development he calls “edge cities”, but some of his guesses about the future are looking surprisingly prophetic.

Just so, in the near future, somebody realizes what a great space an old Kmart is — 80,000 square feet with 16-foot ceilings and killer HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). Then he or she realizes you can get them for nothing from the Resolution Trust Corporation — and the first edge-city bohemian district is born.

First the artists break the space into lavish 5,000-square-foot sculptors studios. Then they punch skylights into the roof to let natural light into the interior. Then they do the sensible thing and start living there illegally.

They place sculptures and anything else they can think of on the roof, although the windmills quickly become cliché. When all the really great space in the Kmart is full, other people start filling the former drugstores and dry cleaners of the abandoned shopping center with funky bars, savory restaurants, computer-arts master printers, and the shady dens of CD-ROM pressers. The exteriors of the buildings are painted in intriguing ways.

Smells more than a little like Meow Wolf.

Thinking of this because of news about a computer game company buying a ghost mall rather than renting or buying or building an office building for their new corporate headquarters ….

Executives

Via Christian Alden Jacobs on Twitter, I learn of the crisp and helpful reflection What Do Executives Do, Anyway?

To paraphrase the book, the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.

That's all.

Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don't, to send them back to try again.

As I focus on my profession of user experience design and its place in an ecosystem of roles for people doing product & service development, I tend to talk about how executives often think that coming up with new products and services — or at least making decisions about them — is their job, when in fact from the standpoint of the development team their job is to identify what constitutes “success” for a new product or service in the eyes of the organization, a question which is less obvious than it appears; there are a range of possible objectives, and if executives do not make the target clear, the development organization will suffer destructive internal friction over what it should be.

But this constitutes just a narrow consequence of the more profound principle that executives bake culture and values into the organization. Where this works properly, everyone in the organization can ladder their day-to-day work to broader and broader context, up to fundamental values, culture, and purpose: “today I am doing A (in the B way) because it accomplishes C for my current project D, which serves the greater project E with F, supporting the organization’s G initiative which serves our mission X, and I am doing this in the B way because it reflects our Y culture and Z values.”

Only executives can make this real in the organization. Everything else constitutes a distraction from this main job.

Stories, logic, systems

Alan Kay of Apple Computer, when prompted to talk about science education in computers in 1995, wrote a statement: Powerful Ideas Need Love Too! in which he talked about three kinds of thinking:

it is the way most of the college students that NSF and I talked to had “learned science” — as isolated cases, stories that would be retrieved to deal with a similar situation, not as a system of inter related arguments about what we think we know and how well we think we know it. Story thinking won out. Claude Levi-Strauss and Seymour Papert have called this incremental isolated “natural” learning “bricolage” -— which means making something by “tinkering around.” This is one of the reasons that engineering predates science by thousands of years; some constructions can be accomplished gradually by trial and error without needing any grand explanations for why things work.

Yet if we look back over the last 400 years to ponder what ideas have caused the greatest changes in human society and have ushered in our modern era of democracy, science, technology and health care, it should be a bit of a shock to realize that none of these is in story form!

[...]
In order to be completely enfranchised in the 21st century, it will be very important for children to get fluent in the three central forms of thinking that are now in use: “stories,” “logical arguments,” and “systems dynamics.” The question is “how?”

To address how to teach these things — and how to teach an understanding of computers — he offers an analogy.

Suppose it were music that the nation is concerned about. Our parents are worried that their children won't succeed in life unless they are musicians. Our musical test scores are the lowest in the world. After much hue and cry, Congress comes up with a technological solution: "by the year 2000 we will put a piano in every classroom! But there are no funds to hire musicians, so we will retrain the existing teachers for two weeks every summer. That should solve the problem!" But we know that nothing much will happen here, because as any musician will tell you, the music is not in the piano--if it were we would have to let it vote! What music there is, is inside each and every one of us.

Now some things will happen with a piano in every classroom. The children will love to play around with it, and a "chopstick culture" is likely to develop. This is "piano by bricolage". Some will be encouraged by parents to take lessons, and a few rare children will decide to take matters into their own hands and find ways to learn the real thing without any official support. Other kinds of technologies, such as recordings, support the notion of "music appreciation." It seems to turn most away from listening, but a few exceptions may be drawn closer. The problem is that "music appreciation" is like the "appreciation" of "science" or "math" or "computers," it isn't the same as actually learning music, science, math, or computing!

He offers an alternative approach, which is a vigorous challenge to the way we develop computer systems even now, decades later. Check it out.

Trans athletes

The question of trans people participating in athletic competition is the one area where opponents of trans liberation make arguments which are not simply bullshit. It is reasonable for a person who sincerely favors trans liberation to pause over the possibility that trans athletes have an unfair advantage.

Except that the experiment has been done. And the short version of what we have found is that trans women just do not have the advantage which one may reasonably imagine they might. Opponents of trans liberation reliably lie as a deliberate strategy.

(The long version is that we face a long overdue general question about athletics and fairness in a time when body modification technologies have progressed so much and will only progress further. Any good solution to that challenge needs to give every kind of athlete — trans and disabled and willing to ruin their health and unwilling to risk their health and so forth. Real inclusion.)

No one has proposed forcing sports leagues to adopt any policy. But public school sports face a public policy question, and the answer is simple. “Fairness” proposals offered by opponents of trans liberation always turn out to be backdoor attempts to keep trans kids out of sports, and we should just let the kids play.

I have assembled this index of resources in doing my homework to understand the question.

Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked

1. FACT: Including trans athletes will benefit everyone
   MYTH: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women
2. FACT: Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports
   MYTH: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes
3. FACT: Trans girls are girls
   MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics
4. FACT: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students
   MYTH: Trans students need separate teams.

Shades of Gray: Sex, Gender, and Fairness in Sport

This long article covers a lot of ground; even folks with no interest in sports may have an interest in the medical and biological details:

A scientific consensus does not yet exist regarding the differences between genders, let alone how to define those genders. Because of this uncertainty, rules and policies that encourage inclusion of transgender athletes represent the best balance among the imperfect choices available. Specifically, allowing male-to-female transgender athletes to compete in the division of their choice within sport should not be considered prima facie disadvantageous to other women competitors, though this will need to be considered on a sport-by-sport basis.

Stop Using Phony Science

A succint overview of the biology of sex and gender from Scientific American demonstrating that no, there are not simply two distinct biological sexes.

While this is a small overview, the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real. It is time that we acknowledge this. Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualized “facts” is unscientific and dehumanizing. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system.

Trans exclusion in sports: a discriminatory and erroneous tradition

An instructive look at both history and science.

Outrage and suspicion based on the idea that men are pretending to be women in order to dominate women’s sports is over 100 years old. When women’s participation in athletics increased in the early 1900s, this created significant anxiety that the position of (white) men in society was being threatened and the (white) ideal of women as delicate, feminine, and passive was in jeopardy.

GOP seizes on women’s sports as unlikely wedge issue

A strong argument from 2021 that opponents of trans liberation cynically chose to focus on “fairness” in athletic competition not out of genuine concern but because it seems like a plausible issue to uninformed people who are not bigots. Identifying, hyping, and exploiting wedge issues is a pattern by the right — the template is abortion used as an instrument by segregationists.

Wave Of Bills To Block Trans Athletes Has No Basis In Science, Researcher Says

But the question is whether there is in real life, during actual competitions, an advantage of performance linked to this male hormone and whether trans athletes are systematically winning all competitions. The answer to this latter question, are trans athletes winning everything, is simple — that’s not the case.

British Journal of Sports Medicine
Body composition and physical fitness in transgender versus cisgender individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis

While transgender women exhibited higher lean mass than cisgender women, their physical fitness was comparable. Current evidence is mostly low certainty and has heterogenous quality but does not support theories of inherent athletic advantages for transgender women over cisgender.

We Finally Understand That Gender Isn’t Binary. Sex Isn’t, Either.

For generations, the false perception that there are two distinct biological sexes has [...] caused humiliation for athletes around the globe who are closely scrutinized. In the mid-1940s, female Olympic athletes went through a degrading process of having their genitals inspected to receive “femininity certificates.” This was replaced by chromosome testing in the late 1960s, and subsequently hormone testing. But instead of rooting out imposters, these tests illustrated the complexity of human sex.

In real life, transgender girls in sports are a non-controversy

Competitive equity is a beautiful and elusive objective for those of us who coach or oversee high school athletics. It is why we have junior varsity teams and freshmen and sophomore teams and why we try to match up teams that won’t slaughter one another. It often does not work out that way and we have all seen and heard about lopsided scores in high school football and basketball and pretty much every other sport.

[⋯]

The possibility that a trans female athlete might enjoy any degree of physical advantage, then, will in no meaningful way alter the competitive equation.

In fact, it rarely has. In the more than eight years since the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) began allowing high school athletes to compete as the gender with which they identify — regardless of what they were assigned at birth — there has not been a single case in which a trans female athlete has been dominant enough to stir protest.

Including Trans Women Athletes in Competitive Sport: Analyzing the Science, Law, and Principles and Policies of Fairness in Competition

This fascinating paper tries to find a logically rigorous standard for “fair” competition, closely examines both longstanding sport regulations and some some very interesting medical evidence … and concludes that assumptions that trans atheletes using hormone therapies having an unfair advantage simply do not hold water.

Biological restrictions, such as endogenous testosterone limits, are not consistent with IOC [International Olympic Committee] and CAS [Court of Arbitration for Sport] principles [⋯] in place of a limit on endogenous testosterone for women (whether cisgender, transgender, or intersex), we argue that ‘legally recognized gender’ is most fully in line with IOC and CAS principles.
[⋯]
Thus, the divide policed by the HRs [Hyperandrogenism Regulations] is a divide between one set of female athletes with a particular physical characteristic and those that lack it, namely, a particular level of androgens and androgen sensitivity. Enforcing the HRs would thus create a group of females who were unable to compete at all. However, both the Charter and the HRs themselves either imply or outright state a right to compete.
[⋯]
In short, all available scientific evidence suggests that there is no overall relationship between endogenous testosterone and sport performance. It will take the rest of this section to substantiate this. There is also no available scientific evidence that post-transition trans women have an unfair competitive advantage. Instead, what little research we have indicates that post-transition trans women have no competitive advantage over cis women.
[⋯]
One-eighth of cisgender men are naturally already below the upper ‘normal’ range for cisgender women. There’s no relationship between endogenous testosterone and performance in men. There is a highly dubious relationship, at best, in women. Testosterone is a hopeless unreliable predictor of performance in post- puberty athletes. It cannot serve the function the IOC, IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federation], and other sports organizations want it to.

Fact Check: Lists Claiming Hundreds Of Trans Women Are Dominating Sports Are Dangerous and Incorrect

Opponents of trans liberation lie.

Together, HeCheated and SheWon may falsely make it seem as if there are thousands upon thousands of trans women and girls dominating their presumed-cis competitors across the globe. But many of their claims are uncorroborated or just plain wrong.

Trans boy wrestler forced to compete with girls, qualified for state tournament

People who assert that trans athletes should compete in the same class with the gender they were assigned at birth need to contend with the example of Mack Beggs, the high school wrestler who was forced by Texas law to compete against girls, though he was a trans boy taking testosterone as treatment to enable his transition.

Baudhuin now blames the state’s governing body for public school athletics and a vote a year ago by school superintendents and athletic directors that required athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificates.

Baudhuin said his outlook changed because he said he read reports that Beggs had asked the governing body, the University Interscholastic League, to compete as a boy and was turned down.

Sauce for the trans goose is sauce for the trans gander. Of course many opponents of trans women athletes competing with cis women turned around to assert that it was also unfair for this trans boy to compete with cis girls. The rules they had insisted on did not satisfy them.

It should be evident that a separate competitive class just for trans athletes is a ghetto. So what do we want?

That connects to this clarifying observation from Aaron Bady.

The GOP's war on trans athletes is about transphobia, yes, but I think it also very nicely demonstrates what so many people think youth sports are for: COMPETITION. Not a communal activity that brings people together; sports is a WAR for victory that trans kids are STEALING.

For so many people, the idea that we have physical recreation for youth some reason other than a Nike-branded “SECOND PLACE IS FIRST LOSER” deathmatch is completely foreign to them

If a kid’s experience of youth sports was RUINED because they didn’t win--which is the subtext of every “Trans athletes are DESTROYING sports” story--then maybe youth sports aren't serving all the kids who don't win (which is most of them) very well at all?

But hey, what do I know, I’m just someone who played a little baseball and ran track in school and sucked at all of it and never won anything

In other contexts, people will say that “learning to lose” is the most important character-building aspect of youth sports, along with working as a team.

Combines nicely with their contempt for “participation trophies”

This is a good point! The open hostility to recognizing the value of mere competition without victory, or the idea that “it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” as they say

Christine Mboma & Beatrice Masilingi

Dread of trans athletes has disqualified two African cis women from the Olympics, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi. One does not need to know a whole lot of history to see the deep racist resonances in authorities declaring that African women are not really women.

This development only furthers the belief held by many that Mboma as well as her compatriot Beatrice Masilingi (49.53 pb), who also is listed as withdrawn from the 400, did not meet the World Athletics eligibility regulations for female classification that apply to running events from 400 meters up to the mile. Those same rules are preventing Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui from competing in the women’s 800 this year as they have all refused to lower their testosterone with birth control pills.

Parker Molloy | Reasonable Concerns

On the politics around the 2026 SCOTUS decision

So let’s say you meant it. Your worry really was just about a fair race, or just about kids and hormones, and nothing past that. Fine. Here’s some of what’s happened while you were thinking it over.

New York Times
G.O.P. State Lawmakers Push a Growing Wave of Anti-Transgender Bills

Demonstrates how athletes were cynically chosen as a wedge issue.

Mr. Schilling, of the American Principles Project, confirmed that his organization’s long-term goal was to eliminate transition care. The initial focus on children, he said, was a matter of “going where the consensus is.”

Twitter thread by Dr Sheree Bekker

I have been hearing more frequently the narrative that women’s sport apparently exists as a ‘protected category’ so that women can win (because on this account without it no woman will ever win again) This is:

1. not the reason why women’s sport exists as a category
2. it is not true that women will never win again.

This narrative is profoundly paternalistic and keeps women small. Let’s unpack this a little:

A. Women’s sport exists as a category because the dominance of men athletes was threatened by women competing.

We see this over and over again in the history of sport...

Exhibit A1: Figure Skating

• 1902: Madge Syers enters the World Champs and comes 2^nd (no rule preventing her, though no woman has ever entered before)
• 1903: Women banned from World Champs
• 1905: Segregated women’s category

Exhibit A2: Skeet Shooting

• 1992 Barcelona: Zhang Shang wins the Gold Medal. The event had always been an open event (no gendered categories)
• 1996 Atlanta: women banned from shooting
• 2000 Sydney: Segregated women’s category, fewer targets for women

Exhibit A3: Football

• 1920: Women’s football thriving in the UK with 53000 strong crowds (men had been off fighting in WW1)
• 1921: FA bans women’s football (men had returned from WW1)
• 1971: Fifty (50!) years later ban is lifted, women’s football is still recovering

More examples exist but the pattern is clear:

Where women were included (or simply included themselves) it was only when they started threatening men’s dominance/entitlement that we were segregated into a separate category. It is why we still see Sport & Women’s Sport 👀

Women’s inclusion was on the terms of those in power. They didn’t want women ‘taking opportunities’ away from men so they segregated women. It was never about a benevolent (still sexist) aim of supposedly ‘giving women a chance to win’. It was about control.

And the narrative …

B. About women being inherently physically inferior to men?

Concocted as a reason to segregate us without threatening masculinity. There are once again actually greater fears here that women may start to challenge men’s dominance more broadly. Indeed we are already starting to see this...

Exhibit B1: ultra-endurance racing

The longer the race, the stronger we get

At the outer edges of endurance sports, something interesting is happening: women are beating men

Exhibit B2: surfing

(this article is excellent!)

This Woman Surfed the Biggest Wave of the Year

Here’s why you probably haven’t heard about it.

Exhibit B3: The ban on men pacemaking for women

Women Who Run Marathons Alongside Men No Longer Allowed to Set World Records

Exhibit B4: shooting again

(fascinating article here for how it tries to explain why women are winning)

10m air rifle: The Olympic sport where women outgun men

The air rifle event is one of only two Olympic sports where female athletes post consistently better numbers than males.

There are some really lovely real-life examples and research studies that show that the more men participate against women, the more they come to accept that women can be good athletes, e.g.

1. Challenging the gender binary? Male basketball practice players’ views of female athletes and women’s sports

   Kane’s ‘sport as a continuum’ theory posits many women can outperform many men in a variety of athletic endeavors. However, because sports are typically sex-segregated, this athletic continuum is rarely seen but provides a potentially powerful mechanism of transformation relative to views of female athletes and women’s sport. In women’s intercollegiate basketball, it is common for teams to practice against a male scout team. We used Kane’s continuum theory to examine the effects of integrated playing experiences on male practice players’ attitudes towards female athletes and women’s sports. Data from interviews revealed divergent first-order themes (‘Acknowledgement of the Sport Continuum’ and ‘Maintenance of Traditional Gender Stereotypes’) and several related second-order themes. The divergent themes reflect the complexity of gender relations in sport as the men simultaneously experienced and articulated a gender continuum while reinforcing a gender binary, which kept their own power and privilege in sport intact.

2. Towards the “Undoing” of Gender in Mixed-Sex Martial Arts and Combat Sports

   Based on the accounts of my interviewees, those who stand to benefit most from increasingly sex-integrated practice in MACS are women who wish to achieve ever-higher levels of martial capability. This may involve serious, lifelong commitment to developing combat skills purely for their own sake; wanting to feel more secure or powerful through their self-defense preparedness; or aspiring towards a successful competitive career. But such women following these paths typically find themselves lacking sufficiently talented female training partners and competitive opportunities, given the general over-representation of men at such levels in most clubs and disciplines. Therefore, integrated training (and even competition) often becomes necessary, and so practitioners and instructors invested in this type of training would likely do well to seek ways to encourage integrated practices, perhaps in the ways in which I have suggested [56].

   However, the positive outcomes of integrated training, I believe, go beyond simply the development of particular practitioners’ performance levels. As argued above, activities which promote the “undoing” of gender—that is, those which encourage men and women to identify and behave in ways which challenge sexist understandings of difference—are considered by feminist scholars to be highly useful in undermining gender injustice more broadly. Although such a process is rarely accomplished without difficulty, and in practice may be fraught with contradictory impulses that operate to reassert gender at the same moment as challenge it , I nevertheless contend that MACS represent one such site at which this potential may be at least partially realized. Following their experiences of integrated training, many men and women in my study claimed to reject typical gender ideals, and the sexual hierarchy arising from them:

   Being a real man? That means nothing to me, absolutely nothing… (A real woman?), it’s the same again, nothing. I couldn’t separate them out because they’re the same as much as they are different. You don’t need to be either to be good at kickboxing, to be a martial artist. (Amir, 43, kickboxing)

   I see myself doing something for women, instead of just obeying a stereotype… I think it’s feminism, you know, pursuing something for ourselves and showing that normal everyday women are capable of doing something which a lot of people say we’re not. I think it’s a good thing what we’re doing. (Rachel, 22, BJJ/MMA)

Inclusion is not only the right thing to do, but it also makes us all better. This is why I will always fight for the inclusion of trans women in women's sport.

Just as cis women are kept small, so too are trans women kept small. “The idea that women and girls have an advantage because they are trans ignores the actual conditions of their lives.” Our liberation (and excellence!) is bound up together.

Sport isn’t inherently gendered. We manufacture strict binary gendered differences, and then we naturalise them. Understanding and interrogating this helps us to understand the panic and fearmongering around women’s sport right now, and where we might go next.

I’ll end with this paragraph on women’s sport as a radically inclusive space

Women’s sports is not a defensive structure from which men are excluded so that women might flourish. It is, in fact, the opposite of this: it is, potentially, a radically inclusive space which has the capacity to destroy the public’s ideas about gender and gender difference precisely because gender is always in play in women’s sports in ways that it is not in men’s sports (with a few exceptions — e.g. figure skating). Because men have been so committed to the “end of women’s sports” for so long, women’s sports thrives in the zone of destruction. It has its own character thanks to the gender trouble at its origin. If women’s sports has one job that really is different from men’s sports, it is the destruction of sex/gender difference. Men’s sports (with a few exceptions which prove the rule) reinforce ideologies of gender difference. Women’s sports destroy them.

It is possible to have a different conversation here. Gender expansiveness gives us all permission to break free from - and take up space beyond - societal norms, and I'm very much here for that. Onward.

A Twitter thread from Brynn Tannehill

Not substantively different from the resources above, but crisp and convenient for sharing on Twitter:

The transgender athlete won’t seem to die. This is so frustrating, because from a logical standpoint, the answer is so freaking obvious: the current system is not broken. It does not need fixing.

Quick test: name a transgender Olympian off the top of your head. You can’t, because since the IOC started allowing transgender people to compete in 2004 there hasn’t been one.

The NCAA has allowed transgender people to compete without surgery since 2011, and there has not been a single dominant transgender athlete anywhere in college sports.

These constitute large scale, longitudinal tests of the system with millions of athletes as a sample, and the IOC and NCAA rules for transgender athletes are clearly sufficient to preserve the integrity of sports at this time. 15+ years and millions of test subjects is bigger, and longer, than any clinical trial of a drug that I can think of. The development and deployment of the F-22A, the world’s most advanced stealth fighter, lasted roughly as long.

The clinical evidence and subject matter opinion aligns with the observed results: removal of testosterone for a year is sufficient to remove competitive advantage. In terms of testing this hypothesis, there is literally no disagreement between various results.

The arguments from the other side are either anecdotes (What about so-and-so who won some mid-level event?), or are a form of fearmongering (Transgender women will start dominating women’s sports in the future!) that ignores the large scale, real world testing of the policies.

The implied “solutions” of “Well, they can compete against men or get their own league” replaces a speculative harm with an actual one, because no harm to sport is happening now, but either of the proposed “solutions” represents a de facto ban on transgender athletes. Testosterone, which the NCAA and IOC regulate, is a key factor in performance. Because trans women lack it, they cannot hope to compete against men. And there simply aren’t enough transgender people for them to “get their own league”, nor would there be enough public interest to fund such events even if you could find 32 world class transgender fencers. Or 16 crew teams, etc...

On top of that, segregating transgender people from society, and driving them from public life, is what the right wing wants. When asked about transgender people in 2016, Ted Cruz replied “Can’t they just do that in their homes?” Separate but equal never works out that way.

If, at some point we start to see a disproportionate number of transgender women winning high level athletic events, then it would be appropriate to reevaluate the rules for participation. But for now, there is no data-based evidence that the system is broken.

Athletic leagues do this all the time: if something is giving people a competitive advantage, they ban it (but not the players, unless they cheat on the new rules). Steroids, weird golf clubs, aluminum bats, corked bats, intake manifolds with laser holes in them....

I’m frustrated as hell that we’re still fighting this battle. The empirical evidence all points one way. We have years of data and huge sample set. The alternative is hurting a minority group for no measurable gain (you can’t have less than 0 trans Olympic athletes)

So, when I point these things undeniable facts out, and people still want to argue, I have no issue with calling them bigots and transphobes. They are immune to facts, logic, data, and expertise. But they are willing to hurt trans people based on their own “gut” feelings.

Oh, and Renee Richards was 40+ years ago, never ranked higher than 20th, never won a major event, and Martina Navritilova beat her all three times they met. Fallon Fox never made it to the big leagues, lost once, and is retired. The woman who complained about Rachel Evans winning, had beat Evans in 8 of the 11 events they had met in previously. And with that, I just summed up every major female trans athlete in the past 40 years. This isn’t a big enough sample to decide ANYTHING.

We have thoroughly field tested the hypothesis that transgender athletes will dominate if they are allowed to compete, and statistically we can reject this hypothesis with high degree of certainty. (I’ll do the math and display it for you if you really want).

Let Them Play

We believe that children deserve the right to experience the wide-reaching benefits of organized sports in a fun, safe, and nurturing environment, without having to compromise who they are. We believe that is what is right and fair, from both a scientific and a moral perspective—and in this package we explore exactly why and how. We hope this collection of stories will help people who are new to this issue see that trans kids are simply kids, and will equip you to advocate for them in your own community.

Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote more transphobic lies

None of this is new for Dawkins. He’s been pushing right-wing anti-trans talking points for years now.

Ballet

A very instructive example which raises questions about how we respond to trans kids.

When I said I wanted to be a dancer at six years old, adults took that to mean I’d want certain permanent alterations to my body. Unlike with young trans kids, no one was looking to make sure I fully understood what I was getting into. And unlike with young trans kids, these changes were not reversible when I changed my mind. There wasn’t even a way to delay things to buy time (like puberty blockers), it was all or nothing. If I wanted to be a professional dancer, my normal ass joints were a ticking timebomb.

Leave Trans People Alone: A Rant

Jonathan V. Last writing for the anti-Trump-conservative The Bulwark says a lot of little things which as an advocate for trans liberation I would quibble with … but he still gets the point.

Let me say this very clearly: Trans people playing sports isn’t an “issue.” It’s a small universe of edge cases that can mostly be sorted out by the direct stakeholders.

The “issue” that’s broad, and systemic, and happening right in front of us is that we have a society that’s decided it wants to bully a class of vulnerable people who are already having a hard enough time. We have an unhealthy percentage of citizens cheering “LFG!” as the current administration revels in the freedom to target anyone on the margins. The trans “issue” is, at root, simple. Be a good person. Try to help others make their way in the world. Don’t be a bully.

Annotated Bibliography of Point-by-Point Rebuttals of Anti-Transgender Disinformation

An extensive general resource.