Jefferson

I am fascinated with Thomas Jefferson. I love him. He is my favorite of the Founders.

The first reason is the Declaration of Independence, which kicks off with two hundred words explaining liberal democracy with bracing clarity, then embodies those liberal-as-in-liberal-democracy values by submitting facts to a candid world so that he may justify an improvement to the political order. The Declaration is by my lights one of the greatest achievements in all of history. Jefferson was not truly its sole author — it is, after all, the shared statement of a committee — but his voice is integral to its greatness.

The second reason is the rest of his writing: clear, thoughtful, and inquisitive about every corner of the world. One might almost say the same of Franklin, but Franklin was earthy, practical, and grounded, while Jefferson was airy, intellectual, idealistic. The Library Of Congress began as Jefferson's personal library. In our mythology if not in fact, Jefferson is our First Nerd. And as I am an American nerd, Jefferson is my grandfather.

The third reason is that he was a monster. A profoundly and specifically American monster.

Jefferson was monstrous in owning slaves and profiting from their labor. We know he raped at least one of his slaves. (Any relationship we can imagine between Jefferson and Hemings does not make it rape any the less; she was a slave, bound to obedience by pain of death and worse.)

Jefferson was monstrous in advocating for and enacting genocide against American Indians.

And Jefferson was monstrous in hypocrisy, championing equality and liberty, calling American Indians his equals ... and yet still keeping slaves and pursuing genocide even as he wrote with conviction that these were evils.

So what is this love I have for Jefferson, the monstrous hypocritical genocidal slave rapist?

I hope my disgust at Jefferson is clear. I cultivate this disgust, deliberately summon it every time I speak his name. But I love him in his monstrosity, and I love him for being a reminder of the monstrosity to which I am heir, both in the way that all Americans inherit the consequences of those crimes and in the way that as another nerdy American White guy I inherit an ownership of those crimes.

To love truly is to embrace the whole of the beloved without delusion, to see clearly and love anyway, to know the worst and support the best. I would do that for my country, and for that there is no better symbol than Jefferson, who embodied so much of our very best and our very worst. We cannot understand the American condition or the human condition without recognizing that all of these things were the same person.

Jefferson — so much a skeptic that he took a scissors to his Bible to cut away every mention of miracles — said he trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just. As he should. As do I. Trembling in terror and in anguish and in awe and in awesome responsibility as I invoke his name.

Update: Smithsonian's The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson has an excellent deep dive into Jefferson's attitude toward slavery and the details of how slave labor maintained Monticello.

Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson.

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise.

Art & politics

At the time, I tweeted a kind word about Meryl Streep's speech referencing the (then forthcoming) Trump administration, though I had mixed feelings about it.

For instance, her opening assertion that the glamorous and successful Hollywood people in the room constituted “the most vilified segments in American society” lacks perspective, to say the least. So I thought that — bracing as that was — I didn't need any more earnest actors talking about our national moment of dread.

I was wrong.

Because David Harbor's speech given tonight is a marvel: it talks about the news without talking about the news, by reaching down to fundamental things about the craft of acting, the nature of art, and (dear to my heart) the virtues of genre stories.

On behalf of this fearless and talented cast ...

[...]

I would just like to say that in light of all that's going on in the world today it's difficult to celebrate the already celebrated Stranger Things.

But: this award from you — who take your craft seriously and earnestly believe, like me, that great acting can change the world — is a call to arms from our fellow craftsmen and women to go deeper ... and through our art to battle against fear, self-centeredness, and exclusivity of our predominantly narcissistic culture. And through our craft to cultivate a more empathetic and understanding society by revealing intimate truths that serve as a forceful reminder to folks that when they feel broken and afraid and tired: they are not alone.

We are united in that we are all human beings, and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that is being alive.

Now: as we act in the continuing narrative of Stranger Things we 1983 midwesterners will repel bullies. We will shelter freaks and outcasts, those who have no home. We will get past the lies. We will hunt monsters. And when we are at a loss amidst the hypocrisy and the casual violence of certain individuals & institutions we will, as per chief Jim Hopper, punch some people in the face when they seek to destroy the weak and the disenfranchised and the marginalized.

And we will do it all with soul, with heart, and with joy.

We thank you for this responsibility.

A few things I feel I must underline:

• He opens by giving his castmates the highest compliment I think an actor can give another actor: fearless
• This is the case for seemingly trifling art in times like these. And it is correct.
• That last word: responsibility. Bingo.

Necktie

So a while back I spat out this story on Facebook and now I'm posting it here.

There's this skinny young guy I run into on an irregular basis in downtown SF in the late afternoon. He sells snacks out of a little box to commuters on their way out of their office jobs. I never buy a snack from him.

But a few years back, after the first few weeks of saying “no thanks” to him as warmly as I could, I complimented his necktie because of Dapper Solidarity. And it became our habit that when he had a moment we would do a little howyadoin' and when he didn't have a moment I would give him a wave or a little salute. He started giving me dap because he knows White guys love that shit and I am so not above loving that shit and so I try to join in with the minimum of White gracelessness that I can muster.

I still know almost nothing about him other than that he has an open face.

So the day before I originally post this to Facebook I see him and it's a howyadoin' day and he says he's doing well and has a birthday coming up and I wish him Happy Birthday In Advance and he likes today's tie and it's one of my favorites, a tie I paradoxically don't wear very often because I like it so much, and I take off the tie and give it to him and he gives me dap and I roll into BART.

I don't know what this story is about. It's like a Harvey Pekar story that may not even be about anything.

It is definitely not about me being a swell guy. When I posted it to Facebook, I threatened that if someone even hinted at that in the comments I might well unFriend them because sweet suffering Sartre I hate even getting close enough to that thought to have to say that it's wrong.

It's not a story about what I did. It's maybe a story about something that happened to me. I suspect that it isn't even that much about me. But it's a story I felt I had to tell.

TTRPG toolbox

Because I am that kind of geek, I have constructed a sort of EDC solution for tabletop roleplaying games.

For a long time, my only supply solution was a plastic case with dice and counters:

But that was never really quite adequate, and I wanted to be better prepared to leave home and run a game. I looked at toolboxes, but they didn’t have quite the right compartments. I considered a tackle box, because those have lots of little compartments, but the options there are frankly overwhelming. Then I found a sturdy makeup case at a discount, and have assembled this:

In the upper right that’s a GameMaster’s Apprentice deck. (Actually three of them, including a couple of the neighboring trays, with different genre themes.) It's a surprisingly handy tool. Each card is packed with all sorts of randomized stuff that a GM might need in the course of a game: character names, memorable details, surprise encounters, et cetera. Plus of course die rolls. The graphic design is frankly a little hokey, but it is legible enough to work well in play. If I had to run games on a desert island with no other play aids, I'd bring the main deck.

The upper left corner is a stash of wound PennyGems, including a set of the jumbo 5/10 counters, specifically designed for counting hit points et cetera. I haven’t used them all that much, but when I have they’ve been really handy, and they are nifty. The gray bag half-visible in the bottom right of the lowest rung of the case is a jewelry bag with lots of interior chambers, full of more different PennyGems. The creator of PennyGems has a fascinating site about their design: the graphics subtly representing different numbers are cunningly chosen. Alas, the PennyGems themselves are no longer avaiable. You can find comparable jewelry bags or as dice bags.

You can see glass beads and dice. I have a few sets of polyhedra dice (including one in metal, my favorite), enough matching d10s to play a character in a Storyteller or other game that uses dice pools of those, and a few sets of Fate dice which the sharp-eyed will recognize are actually old school Fudge dice, cast before Evil Hat released Fate. I need to rearrange things at some point to have more d6es because there are plenty of games that require throwing big handfuls of them.

In the tray on the lower left you will see some exotic dice of my own design. They are d6s painted with nail polish: matte black on three sides, silver on the other three, good for playing Lady Blackbird style games that rely on a coin-flip dice mechanic.

I have a ton of blank 3x5 cards in the bottom tier because I use them a lot in all kinds of games, especially Fate, which is my go-to generic system. There are some dry-erase cards in there, which are pretty great. They don't erase perfectly cleanly, so eventually they give up the ghost, but they make me feel less guilty than throwing out a bunch of cards at the end of the game. The binder clips in the upper tray are there to get cards to stand up, a trick I learned from Zed Lopez. Not pictured are some dry erase name tents I keep in the bottom tray.

The section with the organizer tabs has a few different decks of Fate play aids: Fate rules summary cards, an It's Not My Fault deck (which show up colorfully because I’ve color-coded the edges to make the different types of cards easier to keep track of), a pack of common aspects, blank Fate Accelerated character cards, and Backstory cards. Frankly, I’ve not yet experimented with the Backstory cards, which provide a formalized version of collaborative backstory chargen that I learned from folks at my old table, but I have them in the kit because I’m itching to use them.

On the right side in the middle is a stack of a few other generic play aid card decks I like. There are turn tracker cards, which Iave used a few times to good effect, plus a set universal score cards that sometimes turn out to be useful.

Plus dry erase and regular pens, of course.

Update

The latest edition of the Box Of Fun has a number of small changes. I have added a lot of the great color-coded Sentinel Comics dice, a lot more clear round plastic bingo chips, some of my paper scoring tokens, wooden meeples, and more weird cards on the bottom.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Right, and free speech

If you have the good fortune to not know who Milo Yiannopoulos is, you have my envy ... and my apologies for ending your innocence. He is a gadfly critical of both the broad left and the mainstream right, notorious as a skillful troll, arguably the most visible figure in the pop segment of the “Alt Right”.

One is tempted to dismiss him as just an even more mean-spirited and erratically witty version of P. J. O'Rourke for the era of reality television, to try to avoid feeding his narcissism and transparent hunger for fame. But I think he is interesting and important. We must talk about him, to clarify some important things.

When I first heard that Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter a few months ago, I was ready to hold my nose and defend him on free speech grounds. My interest in understanding conservative politics had me watching his jokey, offensive provocations with one eye for a while, his range of racist, sexist, authoritarian, liberal-hating pronouncements positively begging to inspire outrage. (Homophobia has an peculiar role in his oeuvre, since Yiannopoulos is emphatically out as gay, which he deploys as a shield against social justice criticism of him and his allies.) Had the offensiveness of this stuff been Twitter's case against him I would call it wrong for them to remove his access to their system because Twitter has become a unique part of our public discourse, with sufficient influence that they have a free speech obligation to avoid picking which ideas they do and do not allow people to express, even if they have a legal right to deny service to whomever they choose.

But a little digging reveals Yiannopoulos doing more than just saying ugly things. As an early booster for the GamerGate movement which systematically harassed women in a cascade of insults, threats, and doxxing, he implicitly endorsed the use of those tactics ... and as his fame grew, engaged in them himself, identifying with a wink and nod targets for his numerous followers to harass. Twitter explicitly identified this — and not the ideas he expressed — as the cause of the ban.

People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter. But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.

Yiannopoulos has relished the ban which he was transparently courting, playing the martyr to the cause of free speech. He has turned to undertaking a speaking tour, doing talks at college campuses wherever local organizations invite him. Just a couple of days ago, I got a ping from an activist friend; he and some other activists were thinking about how to respond to a planned appearance at a local school, and he had been reflecting on my recent post expressing concern over the misuse of No Platform tactics to stop controversial speakers. I said that while I supported the Twitter ban because he was using that platform for abuse, trying to prevent Yiannopoulos from talking about his ideas at a college was probably skirting too close to being opposition to free speech, and they should consider other tactics instead.

I was wrong. Today I see a report of Yiannopoulos engaging in further harassment on the speaking tour.

Content warning: Yiannopoulos being a transphobic asshole

In critiquing leftist criticism of the phrase “man up,” Yiannopoulos said around the 49:52 mark, “I’ll tell you one UW-Milwaukee student that does not need to man up.” He then showed the student’s photo. “Have any of you come into contact with this person?” he asked. “This quote unquote nonbinary trans woman forced his way into the women’s locker rooms this year.” He went on:

I see you don’t even read your own student media. He got into the women’s room the way liberals always operate, using the government and the courts to weasel their way where they don’t belong. In this case he made a Title IX complaint. Title IX is a set of rules to protect women on campus effectively. It’s couched in the language of equality, but it’s really about women, which under normal circumstances would be fine, except for how it’s implemented. Now it is used to put men in to women’s bathrooms. I have known some passing trannies in my life. Trannies — you’re not allowed to say that. I’ve known some passing trannies, which is to say transgender people who pass as the gender they would like to be considered.

He then referred to the photo, which was still onscreen, and said, “Well, no. The way that you know he’s failing is I’d almost still bang him.” The audience laughed.

(More on the fallout from that talk from UWM student Cary Gabriel Costello and a reprint of the harassed student's letter to the university.)

Yiannopoulos wants outrage at the odious transphobia he expresses here, in part to misdirect you into missing the second layer of what he is doing. Consider the context he brings with him: the reputation which put him on that stage was born from his support for and organizing of systematic, targeted group harassment. When he does this, Yiannopoulos points his finger at a target. We should not defend that as free speech; we need to recognize it as an attack on free speech.

(Update: Similarly, at the UC Berkeley talk that was prevented by riots, Yiannopoulos planned to suggest that people report undocumented immigrants in the campus community.)

Driving women off of Twitter through harassment is an attack on their capacity to speak plus a move to discredit the idea of free speech. And then Yiannopoulos walked away decrying Twitter's ban as a demonstration that they — and liberals who he claims hold institutions like Twitter in thrall — do not respect free speech.

All this invites protest from counter-activists whom he places in a bind. Do they attempt to starve him of attention ... allowing his campaign of harassment? Do they give him the opportunity to paint himself as the victim of intolerant liberal opponents of free speech? Do they take the bait and accept his misrepresentation of “free speech”, coming to genuinely reject it because they understand “free speech” only as assholes' shield? Do they get drawn into debate, implicitly lending credibility to him as representing a legitimate position which must be considered? Do they simply mock him, letting him claim that they have no substantive objections?

Yiannopoulos chooses forums like Twitter and college campuses in part because their scale and openness offer opponents who stumble in threading the needle of how to respond to him, further helping him to cast himself as heroically standing athwart a tide of liberal foolishness.

This is a method and it has a purpose.

If we look at the history of far right movements, we can recognize the basic pattern. These movements are not simply opposed to liberalism-as-in-the-Democratic-Party; they are opposed to liberalism-as-in-liberal-democracy. They oppose universal human rights and equality. They aim to discredit liberalism by turning its systems against itself, making them impracticable, perverting the meaning of words like “free speech”.

One of Yiannopoulos' signature moves here presents particular interest. He exemplifies the Alt Right's jokey, coy, hyperbolic aspect. Call him out on his worst comments and he shrugs it off as his accuser being humorless and taking him too seriously. This is a variant on oblique winking we might recognize from previous hard- and far-right media stars like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, married with jokey vulgarity-for-its-own-sake internet culture that runs deep in the roots of GamerGate. Watching Yiannopoulos for long enough, one feels struck by the transparency of his nihilistic insincerity, and this is characteristic of many other Alt Right figures like him.

Many say that we should understand the Alt Right as nothing other than neo-Nazis, and that points to the cold truth of what they really stand for, but the Alt Right's stacked layers of irony mark a style difference with significant consequences. Nazis regard speaking in bad faith as righteous political pragmatism, as we see in Yiannopoulos and other figures of the Alt Right, but Nazis have a demeanor of earnest sincerity. This makes the natural enemy of Nazi not violent counterprotestors — because violence is a language Nazis understand and embrace — but clowns who make them look buffoonish rather than scary. The Alt Right does not share this vulnerability; their own clowning makes them an effective foil to both leftist pomposity and leftist absurdity.

I don't know what Achilles heel Yiannopoulos and his crew have instead. And that gives me the cold spooky.

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Update:

Berkeley antifa have a statement indicating that they were operating under the principle above:

Ultimately, the bloc’s actions against Milo Yiannopoulos were not in response to the things he says, but the things he does. Yiannopoulos has a history of targeted harassment of transgender, Muslim and undocumented students at his campus speeches. On the night of Feb. 1, he planned to use his platform to teach the crowd how to report undocumented students to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was also rumored he planned to out undocumented students.

This is not protected speech. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater and you can’t out undocumented students on a sanctuary campus.

Despite all of this, the UC Berkeley administration chose to put their students in danger. We decided this was unacceptable. You may disagree with our actions, but if it protected even one student from being targeted, then we are not ashamed.

Free speech (n.)

Since so many people seem to be confused on this point:

free speech is the right to express ideas without coercion

We must protect freedom of speech both because it is an aspect of individuals’ right to liberty and dignity and because it is good for society to have a rich exchange of ideas.

It is important that we understand free speech broadly and protect it vigorously. But common misunderstandings inspire me to outline what free speech is not:

• Free speech is not just law, it is a principle, a social norm.
• Free speech is not just protection from government censorship, it is protection from coercion of all kinds. If there are things you cannot say because it might cost you professional opportunities in work unrelated to what you said, or it might lead to harassment or even violence, or it might prevent you from finding housing or medical care or other essential services, then that is no less coercive than a law. (It is important to distinguish this from professiional consequences for saying things related to one’s work.) The rest of that famous XKCD cartoon is correct, but that first panel is dangerously wrong: where it says “free speech” it describes the First Amendment, not the principle of free speech.
• Free speech is not only a protection for nice speech, it is and must be a protection for icky speech too. Free speech is a right to say things that discomfort others.
• Free speech is not a right to speak in every space. It is a right to speak in the public sphere. One may also be invited into private spaces, and what one says there is subject to the same free speech principles, but that does not mean one has a right to barge into any space you want and demand to speak. Private spaces may set their own rules for participation.
• Free speech is not a right to freedom from criticism. The whole point is that one’s critics are free to speak, too.
• Free speech is not a right to say anything, it is a right to express ideas. It is not a license for lies, deceit, and fraud. It is not a license to conspire to commit crimes. It is not a license for slander, harassment, and threats. There is no legitimate personal right to those actions, they do not contribute to the public sphere of ideas, and there is a significant public interest in curtailing them. Disingenuously defending these on “free speech” grounds is an attack on free speech.

This is not hard to understand. But things being what they are, I expect that I will have to expand and clarify this list over time.

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From a very long word about free speech protections in the workplace, and the implications for people with very bad politics.

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.

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.

Talking with and about monsters

Since well before the current crisis I have been worried that too many people don’t know the difference between No Platform and Not My Megaphone, and are not careful enough in thinking about when they are appropriate.

And now we are in a moment when we need to re-think these fundamentals.

Not My Megaphone is a refusal to engage with a person or organization or idea. They don’t get the use of your megaphone: you will not put their quotes in your article, or let them speak on your stage, or debate them in some third party’s venue. You do this in order to prevent them from getting attention, and to identify the range of legitimate discussion which you recognize. So a newspaper may refuse to cover a publicity stunt, an astronomer may refuse to debate a would-be “scientist” offering proof that the Earth is flat, and so forth. This isn’t a form of censorship, since the folks you refuse to favor with your megaphone have other ways to speak. Indeed, there is no way not to make choices about what you allow on your own platform, since the platform is finite. And any platform must exercise some form of editorial judgment: a newspaper that will print any story becomes a joke. There are hard tactical questions — when is addressing a point implicitly helping it? when is ignoring a point leaving it dangerously unchallenged? — but they are tactical questions about what is effective in the moment for your mission.

No Platform is a stronger and more profound move: not just refusing to engage on your platform but fighting to prevent a person, organization, or idea from appearing on any other platform. It is a form of censorship. I say that not to dismiss it as always wrong; No Platforming is an essential part of the immune system of liberal democracies, preventing attacks on the foundations. It is paradoxically a defense of free speech if it is used exclusively to block those who would destroy free speech. In order for that to be true it must be used very, very sparingly, reserved for cutting out sources speaking deceitfully, in bad faith (like fascists) … and cutting out positions which have been already thoroughly and publicly discredited as illegitimate because they attack free speech and other deep liberal democratic principles. There aren’t many of those people, but when you find them you hound them to the point that they can only share their poison on the shitty parts of the internet because if you don’t, they a cancer on a free society which will break free speech and everything else.

We have seen several miscalculations in recent years which have weakened our ability to use these tools effectively.

It must be said that we have had a few leftists who have been too eager to reject ordinary conservative ideas … and even some liberal ideas … as not merely wrong, not merely unworthy of their debate and response, but illegitimate, worthy of No Platforming and comparable tactics. A noisy few among them reject the principle of free speech root-and-branch: “your freeze peach is not more important than the harm your speaking does”. This gives trolls of various stripes an opening to claim that they are defenders of free speech when they are only opportunists who want to abuse the principle of free speech to claim the right to speak on any platform without criticism.

More importantly, we have failed at discrediting the authoritarian-fascist axis. These folks are the classic examples of the speech that should be No Platform’d because it is a cancer on the discourse. Authoritarians want to end free speech. Part of what makes fascists fascists is their embrace of speaking in bad faith as a method. Were our public discourse’s immune system healthy, people would be able to recognize them when they show up so that when we No Platform them, and everyone would understand why. But we have enough Americans unable to recognize them that they just won a huge electoral victory.

And so the cancer has metastasized. The Overton window has come to include authoritarian and fascist ideas. Like it or not, they have a megaphone and cannot be No Platform’d. It is time for chemotherapy on the discourse: doing some stuff that is normally poisonous but necessary now in hopes that it kills the cancer before it kills us. So we need to re-think when and where and how we make Not My Megaphone and No Platform moves. There are things we need to address directly in this environment.

This post was proximately inspired by my frustration at seeing people on my social media feed saying that it was wrong for Trevor Noah to interview Tomi Lahren on The Daily Show because it only legitimizes Lahren and helps her spread her poison. And were Lahren a figure scrambling to be heard, I would agree. Two years ago I would have said without hesitation that someone like her was a good example of a voice that a major media platform like The Daily Show should respond to with Not My Megaphone, and would have been willing to entertain arguments that she should be No Platform’d. But it is not two years ago. Her movement has platforms so effective that they just won a huge political victory. So while I think the jury is still out on whether Noah’s interview was a good move and a tactic worth imitating, it was an interesting experiment in revealing the monster for what it is and so legitimate for Noah to try. We need more experiments like that in fighting this thing that has come upon us.

I do not think that means that in our current world Not My Megaphone and No Platform are dead as tactics. But I do think we need to revisit how and when and why we use them. The time has come for chemotherapy.

Infighting

In the face of the forthcoming Trump administration, there is a lot of work to be done. Protecting people and necessary institutions who are vulnerable. Preparing to win Congressional and statehouse elections in 2018. Preparing to handle the worst if it comes. Watchdogging what is happening in our government.

But there is, unhappily, very little we can do about what the Federal government actually does until 2018 elections come around. Republicans hold both houses of Congress and have a grip on the Federal judiciary; Democratic Party leaders, activist organizations, and ordinary citizens will therefore have very little power to shape the course of the Executive Branch's actions.

This is terrifying because I see Trump leading a para-fascist movement which is sure to severely damage the Republic. There is a real chance that it will take us to an authoritarian dystopia. Watching helplessly for the next two years is a nightmare.

But. These next two years will not be a simple death spiral into an authoritarian takeover. The internal dynamics of what the Federal government will actually do are complex and impossible to predict. I see four key actors on stage who do not have a shared agenda.

1. The Deep State
2. Republicans in Congress
3. Team Trump
4. Trump himself

The Deep State

The Deep State is the network of Federal government functionaries (and connected powerful citizens) who run the country and give us the seemingly unshakable continuity between Presidential administrations which one might naïvely expect to differ more. It's the military brass and foreign policy advisors who maintain American global hegemony though military and trade power, the economists and bankers and regulators and titans of industry who shape economic policy, and so forth. It's easy to go Alex Jones Paranoid talking about the Deep State, but you don't have to. I am not talking about a tight-knit small cabal of sinister secret princes with a shared agenda. The Deep State is more a large collection of smart, motivated, sincere, and not-entirely-wrong people with shared inclinations but plenty of internal friction. They are very smart and powerful and very accustomed to bending new Presidential administrations to their will ... but this is not a normal administration. There's going to be a huge battle between the Trump administration and the Deep State, it's going to mostly happen invisibly under the waterline, and it's very hard to imagine how it's going to go.

Republicans in Congress

Powerful Republicans in Congress think it's Christmas, and they are largely right. Initially, Trump is going to be happy to rubber-stamp almost anything they send him ... so long as they commit themselves to loyalty to him. A lot of them are going to fall for the okeydoke; they're either too dumb to see what they're doing or too scared of losing Trump's base as voters to do otherwise. But Team Trump's agenda is not their agenda. It won't be long before we see friction between Trump's erratic and eccentric policy versus the ideological movement conservatism of most Republican politicians, who will face some hard decisions. Do they betray the big donors to whom they have become beholden? Or Trump's base of voters? Do they push back against a White House gathering power at the expense of Congress? Or do they align with an administration that rewards loyalists and punishes individuals who show any signs of disloyalty?

Team Trump

The Trump administration is not just the man himself, it's the collection of Cabinet members, White House staffers, and other advisors (including Trump's family), many of whom are yet to be named. The crew we have seen so far are turning out to be an army of evil clowns. There are a lot of different flavors of crackpottery in there, and a lot of ambition. Vice President Pence wants to build the Christian Republic of Gilead. Chief Strategist Bannon wants to realize his vision of Twue Capitalism. National Security Advisor Michael Flynn wants a Forever War of the US military against Islam. Ivanka Trump wants to build the Trump corporate empire and her own brand. And so on. We can expect wild irresponsibility and crazy talk and crazier action on the regular from these guys. Will they turn into a circular firing squad of incompetence, or a powerful crackpot alliance? (Being a geek of a certain age, I cannot help but think of how the Legion Of Doom were never a threat to the Superfriends because they just couldn't get their acts together.) Will their squabbling for power in the administration undercut their effectiveness or produce weird fiefdoms in different domains? How will that interact with the Deep State? And what will hold them together? Usually in authoritarianism, there is either a tight-knit ruling junta or a dictator at the heart of it all, but instead here we have ....

Trump himself

Every evidence is that the Maximum Leader wants to reign rather than rule. This is one way in which Trump doesn't fit the usual authoritarian mold. Like Hitler or Franco or Stalin or Peron or Saddam Hussein, he cunningly gathers power and builds a personality cult ... but unlike those guys and others like them, he doesn't appear to be terribly interested in actually running the country. Given his narcissism, he's likely to intervene vigorously, erratically, and capriciously in policy, which is going to make a hash of how these other players try to interact with him.

It's going to be a strange, surprising, rocky ride.

On Chait on Stein

Jonathan Chait's article Jill Stein's Plan To Stop Trump By Electing Him is making the rounds all over my feed, so I guess I have to take a minute to talk about why it is terrible.

There are a host of things that I think disqualify Jill Stein as a standard-bearer for the American left. I hope that in the years to come, Stein will not be one of the visible leaders of left criticism of the Democratic Party, not least because the quote at the heart of this piece demonstrates how she does not know how to speak well to people who are not already in her lefty bubble.

But this piece is reading her in bad faith.^*

What does Stein mean when she says “the answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism”? Her answer is sloppy, but it is not “gibberish”, and it is easy to understand if you've been paying any attention at all to leftist readings of the Trump phenomenon. That understanding hinges on getting what leftists have taken in recent years to calling “neoliberalism”.

Unhappily, too many folks have asked that word to do too much work, so it's been stretched almost out of usefulness as a precise term of art. It originally meant a school of economics and governance pioneered by the Thatcher administration in the UK, whose American manifestation was Reagan's policy program.

As leftists like Stein use it today, “neoliberalism” means the whole economic policy consensus that has reigned across both parties through the Clinton-Bush-Obama era:

• Federal Reserve policy willing to lift unemployment in order to prevent inflation
• Globalist economics that favors not just trade in goods and services but mobility of capital across international boundaries
• Weak regulation
• Private provisioning of social insurance as much as possible (401ks over Social Security, private health insurance over single payer, student loans over publicly-funded education, et cetera)

The strength and weakness of this analysis is that it elides the policy divisions between the Democrats and the Republicans and looks at what they have had in common for the last three decades plus.

As lefties tell the tale, neoliberalism has given us the current economic environment and trajectory affecting citizens' lives. Rising economic inequality. Stagnating or falling wages for most Americans, especially the working class who have suffered from the erosion of the manufacturing sector. Economic precarity. Weak public services. Et cetera.

In this reading, it is these consequences of “neoliberalism” that have discredited mainstream politics and policy, shaking Americans' sense that our institutions serve their interests. Disgust at neoliberalism and its fruits (married to perennial racism and authoritarianism) are the reason why Trump's quasi-fascist rhetoric has appealed to enough voters to net him the Republican nomination and make a plausible run at the Presidency.

So to Stein, neoliberal Clinton defeating Trump in November addresses the immediate threat of Trump's quasi-fascism, but will make the conditions that produced that quasi-fascist sentiment even worse. In order to defeat the impulse that Trump represents, we need to defeat the political ideology that produces the economic conditions that produce the hunger that Trump addresses. Thus to defeat Trump's quasi-fascism in the long run, we must defeat neoliberalism.

So no, Stein does not mean that defeating Clinton at the polls in November is the best way to stop fascism in the US; she means that defeating the neoliberal consensus that Clinton represents is the best way to stop fascism in the US. If Chait had been actually listening to the left, he would have known that and would not have written this bullshit article.

---

* I'd say the article was being willfully obtuse, but I've read a lot of Jonathan Chait, and I believe that his bafflement is as sincere as it is stupid. He can be very sharp on the political mechanics of the mainstream Democratic Party, and he's a good critic of the movement conservatism that has been the main animating force of the GOP since Reagan, but that is the limit of his range. Talking about radicals — whether it's Ta-Nehisi Coates or Trump supporters or Jill Stein — he just cannot bring himself to take them seriously enough to understand where they are coming from. And when it comes to the American left in particular, Chait is the poster child for the lefty critique that influential mainstream liberals hate the hard left, and would rather disdain leftists than win against conservatives if forced to make the choice.

Tak

I just succumbed to a Kickstarter for simple little abstract strategy game called Tak, meant to be the incarnation of a game referenced in a set of fantasy novels. Its minimalism is charming, making Tak a good (belated) entrant for Daniel Solis' Thousand Year Game Challenge. It's playable on a square grid of spaces: 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, 6x6, or 8x8. (Because the game has an imaginary history and cultural context, there is lore that the 7x7 variant is “rarely played”, while the 8x8 variant is sometimes known as the “Master's Game”.)

The folks behind the game have a nifty idea for a “hybrid” gameboard that makes it easy to play (almost) any of the variants. It looks like this:

For the odd-numbered variants players place their pieces in the truncated-square spaces, while in the even-numbered variants pieces go on the diamonds. Nifty.

But this made me itch that the 8x8 variant is not accommodated. Surely a Tak enthusiast who plays the Master's Game would need to be able to also play the smaller-scale versions. So it occurred to me that the absence of the 7x7 variant creates a little design opportunity:

Humans are scary

I wind up looking this up a few times a year, and I've never found a sufficiently legible version to satisfy me, so I'm cooking up one of my own.

It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.

I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.

How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?

Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.

---

HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN

YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.

A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT

humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.

REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.

WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE

WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY

THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.

HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS

WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.

HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE

OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD

---

More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness — but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.

(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)

Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:

• Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you — and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
• Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
• We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty — humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits — but they’re highly functional.
• Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.

In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.

---

I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right?

---

Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.

We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.

And by god, we will eat anything.

---

• We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
• We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
• We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
• We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
• We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
• Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
• We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
• We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
• On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.

Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us

---

can we talk about how pursuit predation is fucking terrifying

it’s one thing to face down a cheetah, which will slam into you at 60 mph and break your neck

it’s another thing to run very quickly to get away from a thing, only to have it just kind of

show up

to have it be intelligent enough to figure out where you are by the fur and feather you’ve left behind, your footprints and piss and shit, and then you think you’ve lost it and you bed down for the night but THERE IT IS

WAITING

WHEN YOU WAKE UP

and you split! again! but it keeps following you. always in the corner of your eye. until you just

die

we are scary motherfuckers ok

More:

On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great:

Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.

But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?

• Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips / beak / membrane /other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
• Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
• Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
• If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
• This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
• Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.

Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.

---

We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.

The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.

And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous.

We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy.

Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.

All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel.

They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.

Or so we thought.

The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.

The first human spacecraft were … exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.

It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet.

We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.

Humanity, at long last, was awake.

It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.

The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at … stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.

We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.

It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.

What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.

The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.

The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.

We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared. Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.

There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.

A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.

It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.

When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.

I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.

I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.

It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.

The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.

Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”

I nodded.

The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.

“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”

Be careful which corpus you use

Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

Voter ID laws

The Nation:

North Carolina’s new voter ID law goes into effect for the first time during the March 15 primary, and 218,000 registered voters do not have an acceptable form of government-issued ID now required to vote.

Ethelene Douglas, an 85-year-old African-American woman who grew up in the segregated South and first registered to vote in 1964, was one of them. Her struggle to obtain the necessary ID vividly illustrates the problems with the law.

Tucking this away for future reference when talking to people who are naïve about the implications of voter ID laws.

Running for gangster-in-chief

Donald Trump, answering a question at last night's debate:

Mr. Trump, just yesterday, almost 100 foreign policy experts signed on to an open letter refusing to support you, saying your embracing expansive use of torture is inexcusable. General Michael Hayden, former CIA director, NSA director, and other experts have said that when you asked the U.S. military to carry out some of your campaign promises, specifically targeting terrorists' families, and also the use of interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding, the military will refuse because they've been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders. So what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?

They won't refuse. They're not going to refuse me. Believe me.

But they're illegal.

Let me just tell you:

You look at the Middle East, they're chopping off heads. They're chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way. They're drowning people in steel cages. And he ... now we're talking about waterboarding. This really started with Ted, a question was asked of Ted last — two debates ago — about waterboarding. And Ted was, you know, having a hard time with that question, to be totally honest with you. They then came to me, “What do you think of waterboarding?” I said, “It's fine. And if we want to go stronger, I'd go stronger, too” because, frankly ...

APPLAUSE

... that's the way I feel. Can you imagine, can you imagine these people — these animals over in the Middle East that chop off heads — sitting around talking and seeing that we're having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding. That's my opinion.

But targeting terrorists' families?

APPLAUSE

And — and — and — I'm a leader. I'm a leader. I've always been a leader. I've never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they're going to do it. That's what leadership is all about.

Even targeting terrorists' families?

Well, look, you know, when a family flies into the World Trade Center, a man flies into the World Trade Center, and his family gets sent back to where they were going — and I think most of you know where they went (and, by the way, it wasn't Iraq) — but they went back to a certain territory. They knew what was happening. The wife knew exactly what was happening. They left two days early, with respect to the World Trade Center, and they went back to where they went. And they watched their husband on television flying into the World Trade Center, flying into the Pentagon, and probably trying to fly into the White House (except we had some very, very brave souls on that third plane). All right?

APPLAUSE

Let's review:

• Trump expects his orders as President to be followed without question, without regard for law
• This reflects his understanding of “leadership” because of his essential qualities as a “leader”
• He plans to order waterboarding and worse forms of torture
• He plans to intimidate people by murdering their families
• This bloodthirstiness distinguishes him as a better candidate for President than Ted Cruz
• A Republican debate audience applauds this

He imagines the Presidency he seeks as like being a mafia capo, fighting the “animals” in the Middle East by ordering his obedient minions to commit brutality.

May the gods have mercy on these United States, though I gather that the American god is not merciful but just.

Partial birth abortion

This is the post that made me pro-choice. Glad to see it still circulating.

Keeping the link handy. I'm sure to need it sometime.

Treaties

So it was just pointed out to me that Canada makes an effort to honor treaties made with Indians through annuity payments. Isn't that interesting?

Manhattan-ish projects

So today I saw yet another of these stories where “Politician X calls for a new Manhattan Project to Do Some Impossible Thing”.

I don't want to pick on this particular politician right now (though I am mightily disappointed), I want to talk about learning the wrong lesson from the Manhattan Project.

Many people seem to think that the Manhattan Project shows that you can just order up any breakthrough you want and if you give enough scientists enough money, they will just cook it up for us. “Here's a trillion dollars, go invent an antigravity machine.”

That's not how it works.

FDR did not wake up one morning and say, “Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a bomb that could blow up a whole city? Let's get our scientists working on that.”

No, it was a thing physicists thought of, not politicians or generals. Grad students had been standing at chalkboards through the late 1930s working out the cross-sections of uranium nuclei, and the difference in mass between uranium nuclei and their fission products, and saying, “Huh, it ought to be possible to make a mind-bogglingly powerful bomb”, half-joking and half-horrified. “Boy, it's a good thing that to really build something like that you'd have to deal with a bunch of weird engineering problems that would be hugely expensive to solve,” they would say, nervously.

Then after a few years of that the US was at war with Nazi Germany. American universities, as a result, were hosting an awful lot of German Jewish physicists who had emigrated because they saw the writing on the wall. Physicists got to talking. Who was the one person in the world who was best-qualified to crack the problem of making a fission bomb not at a blackboard bull session but in real life? Werner Heisenberg, obviously. And where was he? Still in Germany. What was he working on these days? Nobody knew for sure.

Other pieces were falling into place, too. Better and better understanding of chain reactions. Better and better techniques for handling uranium.

Ominous.

So some physicists got together and wrote a letter to the President of the United States explaining the potential for fission bombs. They got the most famous and respected scientist in the world, a German Jew named Albert Einstein, to sign it. And that led, ultimately, to the Manhattan Project and the Bomb.

The Bomb is so stunning and counterintuitive and such a dramatic demonstration of the power of technology to bend the Cosmos to our will — and the Manhattan Project such a dramatic example of a big, expensive, resource-intensive project bearing fruit that changes the world — that it creates the impression that anything is possible. But that is the wrong lesson.

Remember: the scientists came to the politicians with the proposal. Not the other way around. Because the Cosmos does not coöperate with what we want, and scientists are not short-order cooks.

Western civilization

Neal Stephenson, in his epic article on computers in China for Wired magazine (back when it was still cool), In the Kingdom of Mao Bell, makes a comment on Western culture that has stuck with me.

Our concept of cyberspace, cyber-culture, and cyber-everything is, more than we care to realize, a European idea, rooted in Deuteronomy, Socrates, Galileo, Jefferson, Edison, Jobs, Wozniak, glasnost, perestroika, and the United Federation of Planets. This statement may be read as criticism by people who like to trash Western culture, but I'm not one of those. For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

Brooks

I gotta assemble an index of David Brooks takedowns. I've blogged a bunch of them, but it's handier to have them together like I did with Thomas Friedman.

For when that day comes, I have a killer from Corey Robin, who knows more about conservatism than Brooks (or almost anyone else): You've Changed, You're Not The Angel I Once Knew.

Apple Watch

I waited a couple of years to pick up the iPhone and, as an interaction designer, I regretted my hesitation. I had been an early adopter on smart phones — I even bought that Handspring phone attachment for a Palm PDA — and so had wanted to wait because I saw that the iPhone was still a little undercooked when it was first released. But I missed getting a head start on absorbing the feel of the interface-level behaviors.

So when the iPad was released, I pre-ordered it the day it was announced.

With the Apple Watch, I waited until I could see it in the flesh. But I made an Apple store appointment to do that the first day it was available, and so now I've been wearing one for months.

I have been an enthusiast for the idea at least, as I have been thinking about smart watches for a long time. I have sprung for a few that wound up in a drawer. In a post anticipating the iPad, I said ...

I have said for many years that there are only five fundamental form factors for personal computing, yet we have only colonized three of them, and one of them only recently: the Desk, the Clamshell, the Tablet, the Pocket Thing, and the Wrist Thing.

... and in recent years had come to think of the smart watch as a solution to some of the awkward behaviors of the smart phone. (Chiefly that it does this barbaric 19^th Century behavior of making noise to get my attention.)

Having spent several months with it, I will grant that the Apple Watch has its charms. Having a watch face which shows me my next calendar event keeps it on my wrist, and I find that I use timers and alarms more often now that I have the watch to make them convenient. The software isn't quite compelling enough that it is entirely worth what I paid for it, though I expect that to improve over time.

But I grow more and more surprised at what I think is a fundamental wrong turn in the way that it is conceived. The Apple Watch has “watch apps” independent of my iPhone's apps, but I think it would be better if it were conceived entirely as a peripheral to the iPhone rather than as any kind of separate entity.

Consider these ingredients:

• The Watch has sensors that tell it when it is on my wrist
• The iPhone has sensors that tell it when it is in my bag or pocket (between the cameras and the proximity sensor)
• Apple has devoted great effort in recent years to creating a unified notification system

This should add up to the iPhone being smart about how it notifies me of things, just Doing The Right Thing in each among several possible conditions:

1. iPhone off, Watch on
   I have indicated that I want to be notified through my Watch by putting it on, so in this condition my iPhone never makes a sound. Anything that has an interrupt notification — a banner or an alert — on my iPhone will give me a tap and an onscreen indication on the Watch. I don't need to separately configure my notifications for the Watch, and iPhone app makers don't need to build a separate Watch apps: the Notifications settings on the iPhone tell iOS to do the right thing.
2. iPhone off, Watch off
   In this condition, I may need audio alerts from my iPhone, since I'm not paying attention to it and the Watch cannot do the job with a tap. Depending on my setting for the hard switch on the phone and the Do Not Disturb moon, the iPhone delivers audio and vibration alerts for notifications. To make sure I don't miss the alert, the Watch matches the iPhone's audio alert behaviors, in case it is closer at hand than the iPhone.
3. iPhone on, not in an audio or video app
   If the iPhone is on and not running an audio or video app, it's safe to assume that I'm looking at it. So interrupt notifications will tell me what I need to know without requiring the intervention of the Watch ... though if I'm wearing the Watch, as a grace note it gives me a small tap to coïncide with the visible notification.
4. iPhone on, in an audio or video app, Watch on
   I don't want an annoying interruption in my audio or video, so Notifications manifest only on my Watch, as if the iPhone were off.
5. iPhone on, in an audio or video app, Watch off
   In this condition, the iPhone obeys the hard switch and the Do Not Disturb moon, which indicate my intent about whether I want interruptions.

Thus the Watch configurator app on the iPhone does not need its own section for Notifications; this unified system inherits everything it needs from the iPhone's Notifications behavior.

By this same logic, the Watch should be smart about what iPhone app I last looked at. Whether the iPhone is on or off, if I was in an iPhone app that has a Watch interface built for it, then crown-clicking on the Watch should take me not to the Watch apps Home screen first but to the corresponding Watch interface. So if I had been looking at Maps, I get access to a Maps interface on the Watch, since that's my last registered intent.

The word on the street is that Apple will be announcing a major Watch software update tomorrow; I'm hoping it looks something like this.

Committed people and Korman's Third Law

So there's a little aphorism I hate, attributed to Margaret Mead.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

On the face of it, it's a stirring message of hope. If you're like me, you picture Martin Luther King sitting around a kitchen table with Bayard Rustin and Ralph Abernathy and James Orange and Frederick Douglas Reese.

But looking at it closely, the aphorism rankles. It's vanguardist, almost anti-democratic: never mind most people and mass movements, it's the committed few who matter. It's Green Lanternism: will matters above all. And the romanticization of “changing the world”, which one sees a lot of in the tech industry, is not entirely wholesome. Change is inevitable and not all changes are good; I want to look to what will make a better world.

Plus, there's no evidence that Mead ever said it.

Plus — and this to my mind is most damning — thinking about who might draw inspiration from the thought of a small vanguard changing the world through he force of their will, and remembering Rhett's Law, I feel moved to offer Korman's Third Law:

If it makes a funny “Nazi-spiration” meme image, it's questionable motivational advice.

Update:

You cannot make this stuff up. Irony-impaired former Kent State student Kaitlin Bennett tweeted this:

SexyCyborg

A while ago I was charmed by the underlit skirt project of maker SexyCyborg that made the rounds thanks to a blurb on bOING bOING.

One of my favorite wearables is the Hikaru Skirt: http://hikaruskirt.tumblr.com

My problem with the existing design is— Limited external control (just responds to movement) and the ugly frilly skirt/tutu style is not suitable for anyone over 8 years old (or at least not Japanese).

Solution: Denim mini/micro skirt with control pack hidden in belt buckle. Skirt length is a matter of personal taste but with the LEDs off it passed for normal.

The project came to my attention because of a flurry of feminist internet commentators noting the predictable sexist dismissal of her as a maker because her outfit was revealing and her figure is so striking.

Having more recently gotten interested in infosec, she built herself some James Bondian shoes with hidden chambers in the high wedge heels.

A handbag would be suspicious and leaving cell phones at the gate would be standard practice in any reasonably secure facility. My typical clothing does not leave room to hide anything- but that’s all the more reason they would not be suspicious of me ....

So. She's doing clever projects, and she has a sense of wit about her Sexy Lady style:

Any women with questions about teaching themselves online should feel free to contact me on Reddit and I’d be delighted to offer any help I can. Remember ladies— if you are thinking about becoming a Maker, learning to code or doing hardware; if a girl who looks like me can do it, how hard can it really be?
:-p

Edit:

Normally I have to sort though about 50% identical replies to my posts on Reddit. For those flexing their fingers and getting ready to give me a hard time:

• Yes, they are fake.
• Yes, I feature them prominently and deliberately in everything I do.
• No, most of my projects do not have all that much technical merit- they are 90% silicone and 10% silicon ;-)
• No, if you point out the absolutely obvious no one will think you are insightful, edgy or cool. They will think you are 12.

It seems like it might be worth keeping track of her to see what other projects she gets up to, so to have them handy, links to her on Reddit and Imgur.

---

Well this is a hell of a thing. I guess no one else would think to do this.

The new Apple file system

A friend was just complaining about the elimination of Save As from Apple's OS X.

In partial defense of Apple, this is a tragically half-baked execution of a good idea.

Save-as with prompt-before-overwrite are the two primitives necessary to allow users to roll their own system for doing organization and version management of their files. But frankly most people are not sophisticated about how they do that.

What you should have is a system of automatic saving, versioning, milestoning, organizing, searching, and mirroring to backup.

OS X is obviously working toward this, but the current state of things is an annoying mixed bag of levels of maturity. The incompleteness and incoherence make it a less satisfactory answer than the old Directories-And-Save-As regime ... if you understood how to use the old regime well.

• Automatic saving: OS X just does this, now. Which is good on the merits, but spooky if you have developed habits around saving explicitly. And since some applications have not yet integrated automatic saving in the new system, you cannot yet abandon those habits.
• Versioning: Uh, there's time-based automatic versioning in Time Machine. If you use that. Which of course you don't, for a host of reasons, not least because the versions it creates are not made available in the context of your authoring applications. To get at past versions of a file, you have to leap out of your working context and into hyperspace, which is reïnforced by Time Machine actually looking like hyperspace.
• Milestoning: There's no structural support for this. Except for the clumsy Duplicate function, which isn't smart enough to identify for you which is the copy you left alone and which you started modifying ....
• Organizing: Someone at Apple knows that nonexclusive labels are a better solution for organizing large collections than the hierarchical directory tree ... but OS X assumes you only need half a dozen labels, and provides weak support for using them, which makes them no replacement for the tree in the Finder at all.
• Searching: Text content search in OS X is astonishingly fast and complete in Spotlight in OS X, but it doesn't provide any structure, it just recognizes everything with the search string in it. There's no wisdom about metadata in the search at all.
• Mirror to backup: iCloud supposedly does this. But the process is Not Very Transparent, and iCloud has other weirdnesses, so it's impossible to fully trust it.

If anything, this current state of things makes managing files even more dependent upon getting clever with your file naming conventions.

Christian Reconstructionism

A really good interview with Julie Ingersoll, who has written a book on Christian Reconstructionism, an influential religious and cultural movement which has a complex relationship with the Christian right.

Reconstructionists do engage in explicitly political work but they claim that what they see as the religious right’s over-emphasis on the role of civil government is itself humanistic and therefore doomed to fail.

What Reconstructionists envision is a multi-generational transformation that starts in families: families need to be reconstructed in terms of biblical patriarchy. Women need to be in submission to men; children need to be educated in the home to fulfil their specific roles in terms of the exercise of dominion. Churches should be comprised of godly patriarchal families in submission to church authority.

I spent a lot of time thinking through how it is that Reconstructionists claim the religious right has failed while I maintain that the Reconstructionists have had more influence than has been recognized. It seems to me that our standards vary. Reconstructionists are looking for thoroughgoing consistent application of biblical law to Christian life and they do not see that happening.

There's also an interview on Salon:

One thing that emerges in your book is how different their concept of freedom is from what’s commonly assumed in America today, and how the opposite of freedom is defined so differently as well — majority rule, and democracy as tyranny. This has emerged particularly in the rhetoric of “religious freedom” against gay marriage. So where does this concept of freedom come from and? And what does it entail?

That’s a good one. Some of it, at least philosophically or theologically, goes right back to that division between submission to the authority of God — and claiming authority for our own rationality. It goes right back there. So, for these Christians, the way they understand it, the only true freedom is freedom in submission to God. The thing that we might think of as freedom is actually conceived of as bondage to sin. And in some ways, if you say “Where does that come from,” it says that in the New Testament, right? That’s what Paul says. Paul is working with all of those inversions: to live is to suffer, and to die is gain. And the leaders are the servants. He inverts all kinds of categories in that way.

You also see some of this in the discussions about slavery. And there’s a good bit about that in the book. To me, this is one of the more interesting developments over the last decade. Because, on the one hand, you do have this real minimization of the horrors of slavery, and the wrongness of slavery. You have people talking about, “It wasn’t so bad,” and “These are actually Christian families” and “People were well treated,” and “They were better treated than they were in Africa,” you get all that kind of stuff. So actual, literal slavery gets a little whitewashed, if you pardon the word, while being required by the federal government to fill out a tax form is considered involuntary servitude and slavery, and that’s appalling! I don’t feel like going out tax forms any more than anyone else, but I don’t really think of it as actual slavery. But they talk about it that way.