This post is not my own; the body of it was originally from Scott Madin of Fineness And Accuracy, posted at Shakesville. I meant for years to write something similar, but then he said it better than I ever would.

Its principle is useful in understanding how social injustices work, and can be helpful in fraught discussions of social justice. I often say things like, “No, I don’t think you are a racist. It is obvious that you are not a hard bigot. But in this instance I see you doing a particular racist thing which you should correct.” I will not pretend that this move immediately persuades people, but it does a lot to preëmpt certain unproductive conversational death sprials.

Since both sites have linkrotted the original post away, for convenience I’m reproducing the whole thing from archives here:

Nouning Considered Harmful^*

* — nerd joke

Here’s the thing: Using adjectives as nouns obscures meaning, harms discourse, impairs communication, and ultimately reduces our ability to think in a careful and nuanced way about controversial issues, let alone effect social progress. Anyone who wants to see our society become less divided rather than more, and in particular anyone who wants to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of prejudice and modes of oppression, should try hard to avoid the practice, and refrain from calling a person a sexist, or a racist, or a homophobe, instead applying those descriptors to his or her actions.

Here’s why.

“I don’t like the word ‘addict’ because it has terrible connotations,” Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. “Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as ‘Morphiumsüchtig.’ The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as ‘morphine seeky’ or even more loosely as ‘morphine-seeking.’ I prefer ‘seeky’ because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shaftoe says.

“Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It’s leaky all the time — even if it’s not raining at the moment. But it’s only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to ‘addict,’ because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe.” [emphasis added]

This passage from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon gets at some of my concern. Nouns have a tendency to be binary: a thing either is, say, a stone or a chair or a pen, or it isn’t; but adjectives admit of degree. We don’t think of “soft” and “not soft” as the only two possible states of softness, or “blue” and “not blue” as the only two possible states of blueness. A thing can be completely blue or completely hard — or at least we can conceive of those extremes, though they don’t really occur in life — but virtually everything falls somewhere between the poles.

And we, humans, are more complicated things than stones or chairs or pens, so nearly all the ways we describe each other are more meaningful than “soft” and “blue.” Surely, then, in the most emotionally and politically charged areas we ought to exercise special care to use language that recognizes, rather than denies, that no one is wholly one thing or another.

This is an idea that’s been developing in my head for a long time — probably ever since I read the quoted passage above.

Imagine with me a public figure who makes an off-the-cuff statement, say at a restaurant or something. This statement uses loaded language with a history of being associated with racism or racial slurs. Imagine how the public figure reacts if people then say, “Look, so-and-so is a racist!” Pretty easy thought experiment, right? Because we’ve seen that movie before, with Michael Richards and with Mel Gibson and so on and so on.

In many people’s minds, “A Racist” is nothing short of a white-sheeted KKK member with a swastika armband chanting the N-word and brandishing a noose while standing in front of a burning cross, and so to call someone “a racist” is to say they’re exactly like that Platonic Racist. And that’s clearly false, they’re not like that at all, why, some of their best friends are black! So it’s you, you crazy liberal, who’s all oversensitive, who’s really the intolerant one — you want to control every little thing anyone might think or say lest someone somewhere take offense! This just goes to show that racism isn’t a real problem anymore! Why, that kind of politically-correct thought-policing behavior is downright fascist! And now we’re off in Cloud Cuckoo Jonah Goldberg Land.

There are any number of great examples of this sort of thing happening. Like this one, or this one (which Coates discusses further here).

There’s a flip side of this, too: On the one hand, use “racist” (I trust it’s obvious that this applies to other terms as well) as a noun and your audience thinks you’re talking about the Platonic Racist. But on the other hand, being accustomed to using “racist” as a noun, and thinking of it as a noun, lets you tell yourself “I am not like the Platonic Racist, therefore I am not a racist!” This is a dangerous thing to say to oneself (no matter how buried that meaning might be in layers of obfuscation and rationalization): As PortlyDyke said so well in one of the posts that inspired me to start writing this one, if you don’t claim it, it’s not yours to change.

If I tell myself “I’m not a racist” because I don’t resemble or act or speak like the Platonic Racist, I conclude that this means things I do or think or say must not be motivated by racial prejudice. I can provide rationalizations and explanations of why they’re not racist, if I’m pressed. But the real reason they’re not racist is that I did or thought or said them, and I’m Not A Racist. To be A Racist is to be a bad person, obviously, and I’m not a bad person, so I must not be A Racist, so whatever I did can’t have been racist.

And so I elide, and blind myself to, my own role in a racist society, and quite probably not only prevent myself from doing the good I want to do but preclude my being taken seriously as an anti-racist ally by people of color. Thinking this way, thinking of and using “racist,” “sexist,” etc. as nouns that one either is or isn’t, is thus harmful in two ways: It hinders our attempts to address problems of prejudice and hierarchy external to ourselves, and it provides us a false sense of moral righteousness that prevents us from working to improve, or even recognizing, our own failings.

We exist in a racist, sexist, homophobic, heterocentric, xenophobic, fatphobic, ageist, classist, ableist, white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal / kyriarchal society. It has always been that way, and its structure is infused with prejudice and hierarchy. That means we are all, all of us, regardless of our respective positions in the overlapping hierarchies that make up that society, racist, sexist, homophobic, heterocentric, xenophobic, fatphobic, ageist, classist, ableist, to some degree. As Liss has said, “[A]ll of us, sans rigorous philosophical exertion, are hapless conduits for every limiting and oppressive archetype upon which the [kyriarchy] depends, conveying the bars of our own cages.”

Each of us probably has each of these characteristics in varying degrees, some more and some less than other people. We can’t help it: We’ve been soaking in them since before we were born, and they’re so pervasive that they’re hard to see. Does that make us bad people? Well, it doesn’t make us good people, but “Bad Person” / ”Good Person” is another false dichotomy like “A Racist” / ”Not A Racist”. We can always, and should always try to, be better. If I can quote myself:

We’re soaking in it, and we always have been. I want to emphasize, however, that in no way am I claiming any of this absolves us of responsibility. It’s uncomfortable, because it means recognizing that much of what we’ve been taught since before we were conscious is a lie, but it’s not actually hard to see the truth, and to see gender for the lie it is, even if we can’t fully free our own minds from that lie (I often think of gender as being like heroin — it poisons us slowly, but we can’t even fully process the notion of freeing ourselves from it, and what that would mean).

It makes me sick to know that hate is in me, but I have to own it: as someone — I believe someone around these parts — said, “if you don’t own it, it’s not yours to change.” I’m sexist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, heterosexist, fatphobic, ageist, ableist. I’m less so than many people, though also more so than many; these things aren’t binary, they’re matters of degree. And by doing my best to be aware of them, I can lessen them further and reduce their impact on others [I also previously wrote about this implicit bias study, which I think is immensely important]. And if we all do that, then gradually they’ll wither out of the world, even if we ourselves don’t live to see it.

But for now, they’re still there.

There is in fact no contradiction in being both racist and anti-racist, sexist and feminist, homophobic and an LGBTQI ally, or indeed in being both racist and a person of color, sexist and a woman, homophobic and an L, G, B, T, Q and/or I person. These things coexist and compete within us whether or not we pay conscious attention; but if we pay conscious attention we can put a thumb on the scale.

I’m not the first person to address this issue, of course (though I think I might be the first to do so by quoting Neal Stephenson). The always-brilliant Jay Smooth took it on; so did Kevin and Amp; and Liss often points out that it’s inappropriate and dehumanizing to use “male” and “female” as nouns in place of “man” and “woman” — “a female what?” as she would say. (Of course, we don’t actually have a noun that means “male person” or “female person” without specifying their gender role, as “man” and “woman” do, instead of just biological sex, but that’s a post for another day — and I suspect were we not conditioned to “need” to know each person’s gender, there would in fact rarely be any need for such a noun.)

Recent discussion both here and elsewhere (this post is one among many) has reminded me, too, that this doesn’t apply solely to negative descriptions like racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. If it were more normal to use “feminist” (for example) as an adjective, a mostly fruitless debate over whether Barack Obama is “a feminist,” which tends toward devolving into people claiming their set of views is what defines “a feminist” and anyone who doesn’t quite match up is “not a feminist,” could instead have been a discussion of how feminist he is (answer: more than Republicans, and probably more than many Democrats, but not nearly enough). These things are matters of degree.

So, please: make an effort to use words in a way that admits of degree. Attempting to shoehorn everyone into “X” and “not-X” is a counterproductive oversimplification. It hurts our own ability to understand the world, and it hurts our practical ability to reach people. As Jay says, making it about what they are — and I’d add, making that a binary, yes or no question — is a surefire way to get nowhere.

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This post appeared originally at Fineness & Accuracy, but I’ve revised it for posting at Shakesville, to clear up some of my phrasing and expand on some other ideas I didn’t feel I’d sufficiently addressed in the original.

Feeling seen

A word from Nils Gilman:

Piketty is precisely my age, and has apparently been on precisely the same political trajectory. That trajectory is defined by two formative aspects of our youth: on the one hand, we’re both children of post-68 leftist intellectuals, who passed to us in equal measure a respect for the values of socialist humanism and a distrust for the institutions of political power; on the other hand, the central political experiences of our childhoods were the belligerent revanchism of Reagan/Thatcher, the corrupt cynicism of Mitterand/Gonzalez, and the feckless foolishness of Gorbachev—capstoned by the collapse of Eastern European Communism in the very year we reached our majority.

Along with the impression left by post-Tienanmen China's capacity to generate (highly inegalitarian) wealth, this collapse produced two crucial psycho-political instincts in people of our specific age and political upbringing. First, it generated a deep disbelief in the utopian nostrums of so-called actually existing socialisms, which we were just old enough to have believed was a “permanent alternative” to liberal capitalism, but just young enough never to have personally committed to, despite our upbringings. (This is a very microgenerational experience: for those even four or five years younger or older than us, at least one of these does not apply.) Second, it led us to appreciate the economic importance of price mechanisms, innovation and competitiveness, without generating any love for capitalism as a system or any respect for the self-regard of the rich, who people with our background regard less as exemplars of meritocracy than as avaricious parasites. For us, TINA is the Big Lie of our times: just because socialism failed as a political project was no reason to believe the story (that the Right in our countries told about the lesson of this failure) that capitalism was humane, and not still an ecologically rapacious form of social vampirism.

What I find beautiful about Piketty’ s book is that it crystallizes and speaks to and for this worldview — that is, to the sensibility of a “red diaper” GenXer. It is a book written by someone who watched the socialist-utopian eidolon of his elders implode, without ever buying into the liberal-utopian promises made (or the sense of political limits imposed) by the successor regime(s).

Whoa. That is very nearly me, as well.

It is at once comforting and discomforting to see myself reflected in this way. To find that one is not alone is always a pleasant surprise ... but it also demonstrates how a lot of the way I see the world is historically and culturally contingent. Which is to say: likely wrong.

The American Dream

In the US we talk about “The American Dream” with a hazy shared sense of what we mean but this often hides disagreements. For a long time I described it like this:

Hard work and moral virtue manifest material prosperity; in fact, all three of these are the same thing

To my surprise, it turns out that we can name the person who originally coined the expression, a guy named James Truslow Adams, in his 1931 book Epic Of America.

That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

And of course, George Carlin unforgettably said:

The owners of this country know the truth: it’s called “the American Dream” because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Abusive institutions

I was recently reminded of some classics about patterns in groups and institutons which are abusive and dysfunctional.

Sick systems: How to keep someone with you forever

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they've ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they've ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and professional development, an excellent work/life balance, and good pay. But both of those options demand a lot from you. Besides, your lover (or employee) will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn't want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally?

You create a sick system.

A sick system has four basic rules:

1. Keep them too busy to think
2. Keep them tired
3. Keep them emotionally involved
4. Reward intermittently

How do you do all this? It's incredibly easy:

• Keep the crises rolling
• Things will be better when...
• Keep real rewards distant
• Establish one small semi-occasional success
• Chop up their time
• Enmesh your success with theirs
• Keep everything on the edge

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

[...] to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.
[...]
Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group “works.” That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project. While working in this kind of group is a very heady experience, it is also rare and very hard to replicate. There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;

1. It is task oriented
2. It is relatively small and homogeneous
3. There is a high degree of communication
4. There is a low degree of skill specialization

What is DARVO?

DARVO refers to a reaction perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.

Institutional DARVO occurs when the DARVO is committed by an institution (or with institutional complicity) as when police charge rape victims with lying.

Fine consumer products

If you want to buy things, I like these resources for finding good things to buy:

• Wirecutter has exceedingly in-depth reviews explaining what the best version is of numerous key products — especially electronics — including why that thing is the best and what difference it makes if you go for the best cheap or best spendy alternative
• The Strategist is a bit lifestyle-magazine-ish, but I forgive it because it has pretty darned good taste in a range of products.
• The Sweet Setup is a guide to applications for Apple devices, including not just the best solutions but a lot of advice about using them well
• The MacRumours Buyers' Guide will help you guess where an Apple product is in its release cycle, to reduce the odds that you buy something and then discover a few weeks later that a major upgrade was released right afterward
• Cool Tools is a huge collection of quirky, interesting reviews of a vast range of useful things
• The Ones is a site maintained by some hip but (mostly) practical industrial designers listing their favorite, rock-solid products
• Some things that are really quite good: “it’s just amazing how good the quality end of manufactured goods is, particularly compared to the landfill-fodder which is the norm”
• Buy Me Once is a web store for very well-made stuff
• What life-changing item can you buy for less that ^$100? is a wooly but fun and helpful Reddit discussion

Ender's Game is bad

People often ask how such a warmongering asshole as Orson Scott Card could write a beautiful, humane, anti-war novel like Ender's Game. I have come to believe that he did not. Which is not to say that Card did not write the book; rather, it is not the beautiful, humane, anti-war novel which people think they have read.

The book people experience when they read Ender's Game is very different from what the book contains, because the book which Card intended is so morally disgusting that it simply does not occur to most readers that it could possibly mean what it does. People cannot help but radically misread it.

John Kessel's Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality makes the horrible truth clear.

We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean.  Nothing is his fault. Stilson already lies defeated on the ground, yet Ender can kick him in the face until he dies, and still remain the good guy. Ender can drive bone fragments into Bonzo’s brain and then kick his dying body in the crotch, yet the entire focus is on Ender’s suffering.

The Rock, for President

An uncanny thought experiment:

Proposal for a book
to be adapted into a movie
starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson

Here is the meager gift tucked into the disaster that is Donald Trump: now, anyone can be elected president, so anyone will be elected president. We might never have another lawyer in that office again. Donald Trump broke the seal, but Dwayne Johnson will fulfill the prophecy.

If he runs, he will win, and he will run, so the question isn't, will Dwayne Johnson be president; rather, it's: what kind of president will Dwayne Johnson be?

"Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth," said Archimedes, maybe. With this book, we'll set our feet and push.

Street activism index

The quick and dirty tear gas primer
What's in the Bag? — A Guide To Packing A Protest First Aid Kit

Again, just getting started assembling an index

Social justice index index

An index of resources

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Antiracism resources
This document is intended to serve as a resource to white people and parents to deepen our anti-racism work. If you haven’t engaged in anti-racism work in the past, start now. Feel free to circulate this document on social media and with your friends, family, and colleagues.

Antiracism resource guide
Focused on action, from funds to contribute to through grand projects

Split a donation between 70+ community bail funds, mutual aid funds, and racial justice organizers

Transform Harm
TransformHarm.org is a resource hub about ending violence. It offers an introduction to transformative justice. Created by Mariame Kaba and designed by Lu Design Studio, the site includes selected articles, audio-visual resources, curricula, and more. You can use what is here, and submit recommendations to be added to the focus areas listed here. We hope you will use these materials to foster your own education and also share them with your communities to build something new. Only together can we transform our relationships to each other and society. We hope that this site helps in this effort.

Reclaim The Block
Reclaim the Block began in 2018 and organizes Minneapolis community and city council members to move money from the police department into other areas of the city’s budget that truly promote community health and safety. We believe health, safety and resiliency exist without police of any kind. We organize around policies that strengthen community-led safety initiatives and reduce reliance on police departments. We do not believe that increased regulation of or public engagement with the police will lead to safer communities, as community testimony and documented police conduct suggest otherwise.

A Running List Of Hoaxes And Misleading Posts About The Nationwide Police Brutality Protests

Mutual Aid, Trauma, and Resiliency

Person Of Interest

One of my favorite television series is Person Of Interest. This is my pitch for watching it.

What it is

On the face of it, the show is just a pretty good broadcast teevee Detective Procedural With A Twist. But it turns out to be playing a deeper game.

Our heroes are a Reclusive Nerdy Billionaire Hacker and a Haunted Former Military Badass. Together, this odd couple fight crime!

The hacker gets messages from a government computer system which taps into phones, security cameras, and so forth to predict terrorist attacks; it also predicts ordinary violent crimes in New York City, and our heroes use their combined talents to prevent those. The clever conceit of the show is that the predictions they get are incomplete: they don’t know what the crime will be or when it will happen. All the machine tells them is the identity of a person who will be involved … without informing our heroes whether that person will be the victim of the crime or the perpetrator. So each episode depicts our heroes detective-ing in a race against time to figure out what is going to happen and how they can stop it before it is too late and someone gets murderized, all while dodging police who think of these heroes who operate from the shadows as puzzling, dangerous criminals.

This is a fun idea and it allows for some classic detective TV pleasures: twists as we turn out to have misjudged who the bad guys are or what they are up to, nicely choreographed fights as our Haunted Former Military Badass stops bad guys from bad-guy-ing, banter between our regular characters, colorful guest characters, et cetera.

This alone supports interesting themes. Our heroes use a powerful surveillance machine, and in the course of investigating they spy on people; this makes us uneasy in the audience, raising questions about the technologies which now pervade our lives. Our heroes piggyback off of government institutions, hide from them, and unearth examples of how those institutions are inadequate or corrupt.

Which leads us to the show’s deeper game.

As it makes the turn from the first season to the second, Person Of Interest violates a law of genre TV. Instead of just accepting the conceit of the show, it looks straight at it, saying oh by the way, did you notice that this show features a nearly omniscient superintelligent AI? And so the show unfolds from a gimmick proceedural into an increasingly smart and strange work of science fiction, until by the end of its fifth and final season it is one of the smartest, most subversive things ever put on broadcast television while also delivering great popcorn entertainment.

As the series proceeds, it becomes clear that — unlike too many convoluted TV shows these days — it had a plan all along. It will get under your skin and into your head. Watch enough and you will never stop wondering if maybe the Machine is listening. You may even start hoping that it is.

Watching the show

A few tips to help you get into it and get the most out of it.

• The back half of Season One drags a little, making it tempting to skip ahead or drop out. Hold fast. That stretch lays some important track, and the doldrums will not get bad, nor will they last long. As the show wraps up the first season and makes the turn into the second season, it starts getting weirder and gutsier and better and really takes off.
• Always watch the title sequence. The show wants Finch’s explanation of the show’s story to sink in … and the show will occasionally use the content of the titles to good advantage.
• Actor Jim Caviezel’s gruff performance as Reese, our dapper vigilante badass, is so dryly comedic that you might miss at first that it is funny at all, so it is good to have permission up front to recognize the gag.
• Actor Michael Emerson’s anxious performance as Finch, our nerd billionaire, is also an underplayed marvel. The only other performance I know which takes as good advantage of the long game of series television is Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Late in the final season he gets a monologue which shows that he and the writers had been keeping his powder dry this entire time until it was time to finally dial it all of the way up.
• The show is in dialogue with The Wire; the crime drama aspects of PoI are often like a fantastical, melodramatic version of The Wire, and if you love The Wire you will enjoy seeing little winks toward it, including Wire actors turning up. I count myself lucky to have watched The Wire first, but it is hardly necessary. (Check out my enthusiastic pitch for The Wire for more about it; I am among the chorus who think it is far and away the best TV series ever made, as well as an important window into the American condition.)
• The show is also heavily influenced by a little-known 1970 science fiction movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, which is about a different super-intelligent AI. Forbin is a movie decades ahead of its time and worth tracking down for its own sake, and if you see it you will find its fingerprints all over PoI.
• If you find that, like all right thinking people, you take a liking to the glamorous fixer Zoe Morgan, you might want to check out the film Inside Man, which is a terrific movie and features Jodie Foster in a role which obviously inspired Zoe.
• Keep an ear on the soundtrack. Composer Ramin Djawadi, who would go on to do the memorably cool score for Game Of Thrones, built PoI’s mostly low-key, moody music out of an interlocking set of lietmotifs. If you fall in love with the show and watch it a second time, you can catch foreshadowing in the music.
• A couple of important characters are introduced without much fanfare, and it is good to have the small spoiler to know to keep an eye on them:
  • Kevin Chapman as salty, dirty cop Lionel Fusco
    
  • Amy Acker, who is a miracle worker of an actor wherever she appears
    

Binge like the wind, Gentle Reader, and drop me a line to let me know how you liked it.

Skip guides

If you do not want to commit to a 75 hour binge, I know a couple of good guides to getting the juicy best of the series. (I recommend against doing that — the show has a plan — but I also understand impatience.)

Indispensible geekkultur maven Annalee Newitz writing at the dearly missed io9 offers an abbreviated survey of the relatively mundane first season, recommending episodes 1 2 11 13 15 20 22 23.

IGN offers a skip guide to the first four seasons which sweats the 90 episodes down to a leaner 41. The final Season Five is a jam-packed half-season, with just 13 episodes to wrap up what was planned as at least two more 23-episode seasons of the show, so there is no skipping any of those.

HRC vs. DJT

HRC and the political moment

I keep thinking that I don’t need to say this any more … and it keeps coming up. So for my own convenience if for no other reason, here is my take on whether Hillary Clinton was a “good candidate” in 2016.

I am not talking here about Clinton’s merits as a potential actual President. Nor am I talking about the tactical particulars of her 2016 campaign. Just whether she was a fundamentally strong candidate.

I submit that she would have been a great candidate for the race everyone thought 2016 was going to be, but the worst possible candidate for the race we actually got.

The lesson of the George W. Bush era was that a Democrat running for President has to face a movement conservative slime machine which can find bullshit to sling at anybody. After they slimed Bill Clinton for a real estate investment where he lost money, they perfected the art and slimed Al “Most Square Democrat” Gore for being a “liar” and slimed John “Sliver and Bronze Star” Kerry for being a coward.

Barack Obama slipped that punch by getting unprecedented Black turnout. But there is no going back to that well; even if Fredrick Douglass and Martin Luther King came back from the dead and ran on a ticket together, I don’t think you could get the same numbers Obama brought out for his historic first.

So the Democrats needed a candidate who could counter the slime machine.

On that basis, Hillary Clinton was the best possible candidate. She had been facing the full force of that machine, under the most intense possible scrutiny, for decades. She knew all of their moves; she had already made every mistake you can and taken every punch they had and lived to tell the tale. Recall that they ground away at the Benghazi pseudoscandal for years, with Congressional subpoena power in their pocket, and couldn't make it stick.

Any other candidate was a risk, might turn out to have some unforeseen vulnerability which the conservative media machine would exploit. Not Hillary Clinton. She was the most thoroughly vetted candidate for oppo research of all time; no conservative was going to come up with new dirt on her, they had already tried everything.

If the Republican candidate for President in 2016 had been a movement conservative — Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or one of those guys — she would have crushed him like a bug.

But that was not the race we got.

Instead of a movement conservative, the Republicans had Donald Trump, buoyed on the enthusiasm of conservative voters disgusted with (or at least tired of) the movement conservatives whom Clinton had spent half a lifetime learning to fight.

To fight Trump, the Democratic candidate had to peel away a few conservatives and conservative-inclined “independents” who were unenthusiastic about Trump. They didn’t even need those voters to switch sides, just to stay home.

Any other candidate could have done it. They could have played left, reaching for “conservatives” who actually like liberal policies but have a taste for conservative rhetoric. They could have played right, promising that they were moderate enough that four years of their Presidency wouldn't be too bad.

But Hillary Clinton could not. For two decades “President Hillary” had been conservative media’s metonym for götterdämmerung, the worst nightmare imaginable. Anyone who gave the least bit of credence to conservative politics could not sit out an election with the Devil Herself on the slate.

That didn't make Clinton’s loss a sure thing; recall that the race was a squeaker. But it did make Hillary Clinton a uniquely bad candidate for running against a unique Republican candidate named Donald J. Trump.

HRC and sexism

Adding another important point I was thinking about during the run-up to the 2020 primaries —

During the 2020 primary campaign the Washington Post ran an article about Elizabeth Warren’s pay as a lawyer in the 2000s, which has been (I think rightly) criticized as creating a false insinuation that there is something scandalous there. On my social media feeds I saw people making comments which cast this as primarily a demonstration of misogyny directed against Warren: “see what happens when a woman gets paid for her expertise” et cetera.

I see a lot of misogyny directed against Warren just as I did against HRC and racist bigotry directed against Obama, because I have eyes and I am not stupid. And there is a whole sexist thing about women being expected to undertake all kinds of unpaid labor.

And. Also. Casting this and other bullshit news media behavior as primarily or simply a question of sexism is dangerously dumb. Just on that example with Warren, it is not hard to see other forces at work, like unreasonable expectations of college faculty. This is about a bigger problem with how American political media works. As I alluded to above, Bill Clinton faced endless bullshit press. As did Al Gore. As did John Kerry. As did Howard Dean. The vast rightwing conspiracy has been working the refs for so long that bullshit press for anyone left of the center of the Republican Party is baked in.

We need to examine how sexism and racism compound and interact with this press dynamic, in order to figure out how to counter these challenges, rather than collapsing all of that into a simple narrative of “see: sexism!” Because when we talk about the sexism of the political press without talking about the rest of its dynamics, we perversely produce sexist blowback.

For a certain kind of Democratic Party booster, focusing entirely on the role of sexism in the 2016 primary and general election campaigns has let them avoid facing failings by — or challenges faced by — the Democratic Party. If you believe that it was nothing other than sexism which denied HRC her place as the rightful President … and see only racism accounting for all of the bananapants bullshit that Obama faced … and you recognize that Trump is a dire threat to the Republic … then one concludes that the only Democratic Party candidate for President who can face Trump is a white guy.

I saw this simplistic thinking about racism and sexism behind for a lot of the hesitation over Warren and support for Buttegeig and O’Rourke and especially Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries, and I think it explains why the Party establishment eventually lined up behind Biden, the old white guy. Biden’s victory in 2020 locked them in to that reasoning.

It is false, and it perversely turns recognition of misogyny into doing more sexism. We need a sophisticated reading which supports us supporting women candidates, rather than refusing to vote in primaries for the candidate we prefer because we second-guess the bigotry of other people.

Brittany Cooper explores this further on Twitter:

I’m still mad. In the first debate with Bloomberg, which had record breaking ratings, Americans watched Warren singlehandedly tank dude’s campaign. It proved she could also handle Trump on a debate stage. Her reward for cleaning up the Bloomberg mess: voters coalescing for Biden.

How gender matters: folks are fine with women doing the custodial work of democracy. Sinking candidates that shouldn’t be there, writing actual plans for the progressive revolution, and in Black women’s case — us showing up to vote as long as we don’t demand too much.

I am still processing Black voter pragmatism in this moment, and trying to do so in ways that respect my deep sense of Black folks as people who care about both progress and democracy. I know essentially that our pragmatism shows that we don’t trust white folks to be progressive.

I get this. But I will say this: Warren is only the candidate that reached out to Black women constituencies early and often, took their pushes and correction, and thought substantively about what Black women’s issues specifically look like. This Black feminist appreciates that.

And though I can’t parse it all this morning, bc I have a plane to get to: it is Black feminists who have worked to crystallize the argument that Black women’s issues matter specificaly, not as an add on to other ppl’s issues. And Warren is only candidate who truly heard that.

Sanders thinks we are covered on his class revolution and Biden thinks that giving us the cherry of a Black woman SCOTUS pick (which Barack should have done) is enough. We would fare better with a class revolution and we deserve to sit on SCOTUS, but we matter in other ways.

So yes, I think gender mattered here. I think far left folks think that class matters more and pragmatic liberal voters think getting Trump out matters most. And I get it but we should ask why a revolution for women is never urgent enough to be a priority. That is all.

Tabletop roleplaying games and violence

GURPS

One of the grossest cliches in all of gaming is the dungeon. In its most offensive form, a dungeon is nothing more than a randomly generated set of corridors and rooms filled with traps, treasure, and monsters.

[⋯]

If such a thing as a dungeon exists, the most likely occupant is a group of intelligent creatures. A band of Orcs, possibly with a few dozen Hobgoblin servants, will turn a dungeon crawl into an interesting experience. And, as a bonus, the Orcs have usually gathered all the treasure into one place! Of course, this makes the dungeon-delvers into a gang of racially-motivated thugs, breaking into strangers’ homes to kill them and take their property.

Unknown Armies

Unknown Armies is the single tabletop roleplaying game dearest to my heart, not least because the writing is self-aware about how the nasty thrills of the noir horror stories it facilitates are actually … nasty. Well before the “murderhobo” critique of classic TTRPG adventure characters came along, the first edition introduced combat with this caveat:

Somewhere out there is someone who had loving parents, watched clouds on a summer’s day, fell in love, is kind to small animals, and knows how to say “please” and “thank you,” and yet somehow the two of you are going to end up in a dirty little room with one knife between you and you are going to have to kill that human being.

It’s a terrible thing. Not just because he’s come to the same realization and wants to survive just as much as you do, meaning he’s going to try and puncture your internal organs to set off a cascading trauma effect that ends with you voiding your bowels, dying alone and removed from everything you’ve ever loved. No, it’s a terrible thing because somewhere along the way you could have made a different choice. You could have avoided that knife, that room, and maybe even found some kind of common ground between the two of you. Or at least, you might have divvied up some turf and left each other alone. That would have been a lot smarter, wouldn’t it? Even dogs are smart enough to do that. Now you’re staring into the eyes of a fellow human and in a couple minutes one of you is going to be vomiting blood to the rhythm of a fading heartbeat. The survivor is going to remember this night for the rest of his or her life.

Six ways to stop a fight

So before you make a grab for that knife, you should maybe think about a few things. This moment is frozen in time. You can still make a better choice.

Surrender. Is your pride really worth a human life? Drop your weapon, put up your hands, and tell them you’re ready to cut a deal. You walk, and in exchange you give them something they need. Sidestep the current agenda. Offer them something unrelated to your dispute, and negotiate to find a solution.

Diasarm. Knife on the table? Throw it out the window. Opponent with a gun? Dodge until he’s out of bullets. Deëscalate the confrontation to fists, if possible. You can settle your differences with some brawling and still walk away, plus neither of you has to face a murder charge or a criminal investigation.

Rechannel. So you have a conflict. Settle it a smarter way. Arm wrestle, play cards, have a scavenger hunt, a drinking contest, anything that lets you establish a winner and a loser. Smart gamblers bet nothing they aren’t willing to lose. Why put your life on the line?

Pass the Buck. Is there somebody more powerful than either one of you who is going to be angry that you two are coming to blows? Pretend you’re all in the mafia and you can’t just kill each other without kicking your dispute upstairs first. Let that symbolic superior make a decision. You both gain clout for not spilling blood.

Call the Cops. If you’ve got a grievance against somebody, let the police do the dirty work. File charges. Get a restraining order. Sue him in civil court for wrongful harm. You can beat him down without throwing a punch.

Run Away. The hell with it. Who needs this kind of heat? Blow town, get a job someplace else, build a new power base. Is the world really two small for the both of you? It’s a big planet out there.

Oh Well

Still determined? Backed into a corner with no way out? Have to fight for the greater good? Up against someone too stupid to know this is a bad idea? Or maybe just itching for some action? So be it. The rest of this chapter contains rules for simulating the murder of human beings. Have fun.

The rules which follow are rich in scary randomness, by design. Skills are handled with percentile dice; a successful hand-to-hand attack costs the sum of the two dice in hit points (so a roll of 42 does 4+2=6 damage) while gunfire does the value of the roll (so a roll of 42 does 42 damage).

It is also worth noting that UA’s system for handling psychological shocks means that a character can be permanently harmed by performing or even witnessing violence.

Boot Hill And The Fear Of Dice

Though it was recognized as a roleplaying game by the time its second edition was released in 1979, Boot Hill was very much conceived as an old-school, Gygax-designed TSR wargame. There are no skills, attributes, guides, or systems in the early editions unrelated to stacking up bodies. Mechanically, all it simulates is violence.

Boot Hill is the best political intrigue system I’ve ever used.

[⋯]

That the game has simple randomly-generated combat stats helped me design a thorough, reactive campaign setting. If the game had classes, levels, races, or tactical options, I would be obliged to either create combatants by hand or study each in detail, limiting my precise grasp on each faction and their strengths. If the game were even simpler, like Apocalypse World, the players would know too well what to expect from their opponents. Instead I found myself perfectly between the two extremes.

The vicious, tense, and bloody combat made players very afraid of the consequences of mis-stepping. There was a fear, a tension, a thrill every time they even picked up the dice; if they were attacking they knew they were taking a great risk, and if they were being attacked, they knew they may have made their last mistake. Between these isolated combats there were no rules or clattering of dice to distract them from playing their characters and angles; the immersion was total.

There was another benefit to not having any social mechanics at all in the game, counter-intuitive thought it might seem for a game about managing adversarial relationships without combat. While combat in Boot Hill is decided immediately and obviously, and is thus very well suited to open dice rolls, the game’s social conflicts created tension by being uncertain.

Knights Of The Dinner Table

Cyberpunk 2020

Friday Night Firefight™ is a weapons combat system for using modern, futuristic and archaic firearms in roleplaying adventures.

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Friday Night Firefight™ is not good, clean fun. Most of the data herein has been complied from ballistics reports, police data, FBI statistics and other not-clean fun sources. These sources tend to point to a couple of basic truths about firefight combat.

Most (80%, in fact) gunfights occur within 21 feet of the respective targets. Some 40% of these happen within 8 feet or less! Most (60%) occur in dimly lit and difficult conditions — dark, tiny alleys, with both participants panting and out of breath, pausing momentarily to snap off a badly aimed shot at a fleeing shadow, then ducking back for cover. Hits are actually quite rare. When they do occur (assuming a large caliber weapon's involved), the victim is usually hors de combat on the first shot from a combination of wound shock and fear. A solid hit with a .44 magnum will usually splatter a real person all over New Jersey.

Why do we bring this up? We've tried to distill lots of real combat firearms data into a simple, user-friendly form; a form that means you don't have to deal with reams of table and charts to accurately commit mayhem on your fellow players. The result is that while Friday Night Firefight™ is deceptively easy to use, it is also deceptively dangerous. In this game, a large caliber handgun is something to be truly respected. If you’re the sort who likes to charge into a gunfight with both barrels blazing, be prepared to lose your first character. And the next. And the next, until you get the point. This stuff is dangerous. Good luck.

The Genius Of Friday Night Firefight

Time and time again, I’ve watched police bodycam footage, watched competition footage, read AARs, watched combat footage... and every time, bar none, I’ve been able to create a turn sequence and series of modifiers in Cyberpunk 2020’s combat system that would result in the exact events that played out in reality.

[⋯]

I’ll say it over and over again: Don't deviate too much from the core mechanics of Cyberpunk’s combat system. When it comes to realism, Pondsmith et al. pretty much got it right the first time with FNFF.

The reason FNFF combat is so realistic is because I very deliberately set out to simulate real ranged weapon combat as closely as I could. Damage, for example, was based on muzzle velocity, bullet weight and referenced against real ballistics damage reports from the Army and FBI (as well as two buddies who were actual Ranger medics in Iraq). Range difficulties came from police and FBI records from real gunfights and range data. I also own and shoot a variety of handguns and rifles so I have a pretty good “feel” for how they feel and operate. Because there’s no replacing experience.

And although people complain about the armor, that was also constructed based on real armors of the type--in most cases, handguns aren’t going to penetrate Kevlar body armors while rifles will plow through it with ease unless you add plates. And the stuff is heavy (I know, I own body armor), which is why stacking and encumbrance are a real thing in FNFF.

Most people don’t believe or accept the tons of work that we put into making FNFF realistic. LEOs and military guys do though, and they tell us all the time. So I appreciate the work you put into this demo and would like to thanks you for taking the time.

POWER KILL

John Tynes — the designers of Unknown Armies responsible for the warning about violence at the top of this post, created a little 1996 TTRPG-meta-game-about-TTRPGs.

No roleplaying game currently in print encourages players to act out roles that are fully in accordance with the laws and customs of society, either those of the real world or of the fictional world that the RPG is set in. Murder, theft, extortion, burglary, and other serious crimes are the bread and butter of RPG storytelling; regardless of a game’s higher purpose, it still amounts to story after story that consist of nothing significant other than gross criminal behavior covered in a glossy coat of genre acceptability.

Whether your character is a vampire, medieval hero, occult investigator, cybergear netsurfer, or starship pilot, few game sessions will pass without the players taking actions that would be considered a crime in our world---and probably a crime in the world of the game. Roleplaying game storytelling has used the crutch of crime fantasies since the beginning, and there is no end in sight. Layers of drama and symbolism aside, is there not something wrong with a storytelling hobby that glorifies criminal behavior as the primary protagonistic component? What is the true source of our enjoyment of this hobby? Is it the portrayal of an alternate personality? Is it the exploration of a given set of genre conventions? Or is it the illicit thrill of engaging in criminal behavior, sanctified with a safe trapping? What is the source of our [fun and enjoyment] anyway, and why?

POWER KILL is meant to suggest a few answers. Or at least, to ask a few questions.

Race Informs Violence in TTRPGs

Orion D. Black challenges all of these commentaries.

You lowkey wanna know why there are more Black people in D&D than there are in indie titles? I firmly believe that it’s not just exposure. I believe that, regardless of the obvious racial issues present, players have the ability to act without consequence. And that is a place of power that white progressives only view negatively, because white culture dictates that if someone has the ability to take over the world, then they will. Black people see an opportunity for justice and freedom.

Removing opportunities for exceptionalism makes a lot of sense if you’re only thinking about how white culture says “I must be the most exceptional.” Black culture says, “I want to be exceptional,” as do most marginalized cultures. That exceptionalism grows through community and our care for one another, because we know that when one person makes it, everyone who has participated in stabilizing our collaborative health gets to make it too.

Just because white guilt surrounds it, and because your culture strips its validity away from everyone else, doesn’t mean that the right choice is ignoring it. Because doing nothing means you’re leaning on the existing pretenses… whispers (which are raaaaaacist).

The Olivia Hill Rule

Not simply about violence, but not not-about violence:

In #iHunt, I featured a rule. it goes a little something like this:

No fascists

If you’re a fascist, you’re not welcome to play this game. It’s against the rules. If you you’re reading this and thinking, “You just call everyone you disagree w ith a fascist,” then you’re probably a fascist, or incaable of drawing inferences from context and acknowledging a dangerous political climate that causes the oppresed to be hyperbolid. Don’t play this game. Heal yourelf. Grow. Learn. Watch some Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood or something.

[...]
As you can see in the Reddit thread and pretty much any comments section when it comes up, the real value of the Olivia Hill Rule is that it forces cryptofash to out themselves. It’s bait they absolutely cannot resist.

Public option

This should be handy to have in my pocket: a blog post on the evidence that the Obama administration scuttled any hope of a public option in the Affordable Care Act behind closed doors.

This exemplifies how lefties like me read Obama. He dogwhistled progressive values, but did not actually fight for progressive policy because he does not believe in it — which his boosters attribute to the hard limits imposed by Republican opposition, but which lefties read as him deliberately leaving opportunities on the table.

iPhone Home screen proposals

From a Twitter thread —in which I made a few iPhone Home screen #UI proposals for my friends at Apple.

Get rid of the damm Notch

I realize that part of what is killing me about the Notch is that Apple has made a strong design brand commitment to rounded rectangles, which are part of Apple deep lore ... except they allow the Notch to introduce two sharp corners. There is a good defense of the shape of the Notch — it did emerge from real skullsweat Apple has devoted to curves. But no Notch would still be better.

And yes, the Dynamic Island which replaces the Notch is clever, but I would still prefer a stable black top strip with that status stuff floating in it, like I have tricked my iPhone Home screen into showing with a wallpaper image:

Gray dots for less-urgent notifications

The red dot signaling notification on an iPhone app was good but naive on Apple’s part -- they did not forsee so many apps screaming for attention when they first introduced it. Trying to fix this with the Notification Center was even more frustratingly naïve and inadequate, but I will grant that it is a very hard problem.

In the very least, I would like iOS to introduce a gray dot option for an app to indicate “hey you have something here, but it isn’t Red Dot Urgent”.

The first order of trouble with notifications on the iPhone and other devices is that the system does not provide a subtle enough vocabulary of notification options for responsible application makers, but of course the harder problem is apps which are hungry for attention. Facebook obfuscates the distinction between important notifications and trivial ones, forcing one to spend time on it sifting though the queue in order to avoid missing things one actually cares about. It is unmistakably a deliberate design choice.

It is not obvious that Apple can force Facebook to more responsibly differentiate the priority of different notifications. If FB withdraws from iOS, how does that showdown shake out? Twisting the arms of partners was one of Steve Jobs’ superpowers, but we do not have him any more. (I still want someone to tell the tale of how he managed to jiu-jitsu the music publishers, saving them from their own shortsightedness.)

We are in a weird moment where commentators are starting to recognize the failings of the tech industry but the critiques are also dangerously naive about the ways in which the problems are legitimately hard. Most suggestions for what Twitter should do to prevent harassment before Musk came along to make a hash of things were well-intentioned but dangerously stupid. The problem is actually hard.

And bad incentives encourage bad actors. The problem of addictive notification overload from software tools is ultimately grounded in the deep structure of the “attention economy”. To fix that you kind of have to overthrow market capitalism. I can say from direct professional experience that managing the scarcity of user attention is a battle within the product development organization. There are “growth hackers” and marketing people whose job it is to argue for exploiting user attention. User experience designers should be advocates for protecting users’ attention from “addictive” UXD patterns, but our skills, objectives, and positioning in product development are often directed otherwise.

But at the OS level, a Gray Dot option at least helps make it possible for apps to do the right thing.

And make Red Dot tallies accurate!

While we are on the subject, the OS should better support making these indicators rigorously accurate & responsive, almost on a par with responding to pointer & keyboard inputs. It is immensely frustrating to open an app with a red dot with a counter reading “3” to find 6 things — or 0!

User-defined directory icons

The grid of tiny app icons indicating a “folder” is nearly useless.

Allow users to pick an emoji and a color for the directory. Suggest directory colors which marry with the palette of the emoji they choose!

Limit UI color saturation

I have tried the hack of switching one’s phone UI to grayscale to make it less addictive, which is a good idea but the lost ability to differentiate elements is annoying. Instead, an OS should enforce limits on use of saturated colors.

Have a Recently Used slot

Copy the Dock behavior from the iPad & Mac to show one Recently Used app. This is great for re-organizing one’s Home screens.

Long work trips

A friend of mine is plotting a long work trip where they will be hopping from city to city for about a month. They know that I have done work travel like that and asked my advice.

On that kind of long work sojourn, the temptation is to travel Well Prepared because you are going to be On The Road For A While. But I recommend traveling as light as one can. This kind of trip in particular means packing and unpacking a lot, maneuvering through airports, loading in and out of cars. You don’t want to bring more than you can carry for a distance … because at some point you will have to.

I keep my travel kit packed all the time, and bring the same stuff whether on an overnight or hitting the road for a month, whether staying somewhere for a long stretch or roving around. That makes me ready to stay on the road indefinitely, because on a few occasions I have had to extend my trip by a day or three … or a week … and I want to always stand ready for that.

One of these days I will have to write about my whole travel kit in detail. For now, an overview relevant to this type of travel, with links to products I recommend.

I have a sub-maximum carry-on for the overhead plus a comfort bag for under the seat in front of me on the plane. I actually own two different carry-on options — a rolling pullman case for work travel and a backpack-able soft case for most personal travel — but I pack the same stuff either way. I have a bunch of recommendations for makers of these.

The comfort bag contains everything I need to have available for my animal needs on a plane or elsewhere, plus my laptop, tablet, and Kindle. I always keep it close enough to grab, and it fits on my lap if necessary. It has my neck pillow, blindfold, dorky mouth-and-nose mask, noise cancelling headphones — water bottle and electrolytes — convenient-format caffeine, melatonin, drugs, spices, and wipes — a plain white shemagh — and all my cables, batteries, and power converters. With a mini extension cord which turns one plug into two outlets, I can ask someone to let me cut in if they have taken the only available power outlet somewhere. Plus I leave a little room to tuck in some snacks: manage that blood sugar!

The carry-on has my clothes and other stuff that I only unpack on arrival. At this point my entire travel wardrobe is made of technical fabrics or merino wool that hold up to a beating and wash & dry easily. That makes it easier to travel with a small wardrobe with confidence.

(Update: a friend was surprised that I did not mention my enthusiasm for packing cubes. Packing cubes are a godsend. They make it easy to pack tight without your bag exploding when you open it. I usually take the cubes out of the bag and just lay them in the hotel dresser, still packed. I am particularly fond of cubes with a mesh side, compression zippers for squeezing the contents tight, and two-chamber cubes that pack clean and dirty clothes into the same tidy space; it seems that one can find cubes which do any two out of three, but not all three. Eagle Creek make an array of well-constructed options.)

In theory one can do ultralight travel and get it down to One To Wash And One To Wear but that means never ever skipping a day from being too tired or whatever. Better to have a buffer, but not too much because that means traveling with more kit and facing the dangerous temptation to not Always Be Laundering. Handwashing laundry in a hotel room it is hard to do more than two changes at once, so one can easily end up with a dirty laundry deficit that is hard to pay off. I pack four days of clothes and wear one, which gets me through a normal work week. But my kit always contains a clothesline, washbag, and soap. One can just do laundry in a hotel sink but having a Scrubba bag helps a lot. The instructions show a person agitating the bag with their hands but it is a million times easier to set it in the shower and stomp it for a few minutes with your feet.

One travel garment I strongly recommend is a middleweight zipper cardigan that zips all the way open or all the way up into a turtleneck-like arrangement. You can wear that under your jacket and be warm enough in pretty cold weather and it is easy to regulate temperature with the zipper. If real cold weather is a possibility, a light hooded puffer jacket layers nicely and covers a lot of situations while packing small. And whatever the weather I always pack a light rain jacket / windbreaker.

Aside from kit, you have to get your head right. When doing this kind of travel it is very easy to succumb to FOMO. “I have this one chance tonight to see a little of Chicago!” But on the long sojourn, the enemy is Creeping Exhaustion. Your first priority must always be taking every opportunity for rest you can get. It is 100% legit to hide in a hotel room or a host’s guest room. You will see and do more in the long run if you jealously guard your energies.

Getting to sleep in a strange bed, fighting jet lag, can be tough. I knock myself out with a cocktail of Benadryl and sublingual melatonin; melatonin forces the body clock but I find that if I don't fall asleep when it first makes me drowsy I end up with insomnia, so the Benadryl forces me to zonk out enough that the melatonin can take hold.

This is a good place to tuck Kevin Kelly’s travel tips.

And never forget the ABC of travel: always be charging.

Are people equal?

I think the most fundamental political question is: are people equal, or not?

Having looked at what divides liberals from conservatives, that is my shortest summary of my own read on the distinction.

Conservatives think some people deserve more than others and a good society sorts out who deserves what and gives it to them; liberals think all people are equal.

Recently in a bout of insomnia I succumbed to the temptation of a long Twitter exchange with a quasi-libertarian “conservative” sealion. I have a protocol for handling sealions which you can see in action here. It supported my read of the conservative sensibility, and supported including the “anti-statist” libertarian impulse as conservative.

Consider first this thread starting with a wacky version of the political spectrum which purports to show that communism and fascism are both aspects of the left.

Many historians have no understanding of economics so they lack the understanding of the American economic spectrum

The European spectrum is inaccurate. Equating economic nationalist to a racist ideology is extremely mistaken

Social ideologies and economic platforms are different

Yes, I am aware that you think that your assertions trump historians’ and political scientists understanding, and you have the esoteric little-known TRUE political spectrum.

Then tell me what the spectrum measures….

How does an ideology like fascism that likes heavy social programs like universal Healthcare and state control over the free market with heavy intervention Is opposite of Socialism.

Where does anarchy sit?

How do small government libertarians and right wing people fall on that spectrum?

Are they near anarchy or on the opposite side?

Please explain……

I have a whole collection of writings on what distinguishes left from right: Understanding American Politics: The Two Tribes

My own offering: Liberal vs Conservative

The ultimate distinction between left and right is: are all people equal? Really? Or are some people more deserving? The right says that we must sort out what different people deserve. The left says that all people are equal in rights, liberty, and dignity.

Holy fk … No wonder you’re views are so strange.

I can’t explain to you how far off you are.

If you’re open I can try to help you understand how they view the world and even tag some so you can see that I’m not just making it up…

Lmk?

I understand that conservatives do not put their case that way directly.

But how would you summarize conservatism such that conservatives of 2019, 1999, 1969, 1939, and 1909 are all covered?

Conservative and liberal can change meaning.

I prefer using individualist vs collectivist.

You have a very flawed understanding of the other side. I hope you become humble enough to challenge these views as I know for a fact you’re completely wrong.

If you prefer to use the terms “individualist” vs “collectivist” then I encourage you to do so. Would you care to define those terms clearly?

An individualist believes that the three most important minority is the individual. They believe that each individual’s liberty must be protected as each man owns himself. (or herself)

Collectivist[s] believe the individual lives to serve the collective. They will sacrifice the rights of the individual in order to benefit the collective.

A great example of this would be taking from the rich to give to the poor regardless of the wealthy person worked for their wealth. If you want to steal their factories then you’re a collectivist.

Okay, so an individualist believes that we have no obligations to each other, and that property rights are natural, fundamental, and inviolate.

A collectivist is anyone who will violate those values.

Is that correct?

Yes.

We don’t have obligations to each other except to respect each other’s rights.

Thru this system we will flourish as we are all trying to make the best of our lives. Which is why capitalism fosters so much innovation. When humans become wealthy they care for other humans.

Then this thread:

Unlike you, I do not think that property rights are the same kind of fundamental rights as things like freedom of speech. The Declaration Of Independence says “among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Property is not on the list.

I DO think that legal protections of property rights can be a VERY useful instrument in securing prosperity, comfort, and dignity. But property rights are an instrument of achieving something more fundamental; they are not fundamental in themselves.

This is very revealing!

If you don’t own your property, you don’t own your body or your own labor. You’re a communist. You don’t respect the individual and you’re 100% OK with slavery.

You’re a collectivist and that’s scary….

If you cannot distinguish taxation from slavery, then I submit that you are the one who is confused.

You just told me that property rights aren’t as important as free speech.

What’s the point of having the right to say what you want if you can’t defend yourself?

I’m sure you’re angry gun if you don’t even think people own themselves. Self ownership means you own your labor and you own your own property. You can’t separate these. If I’m a free person then if I create something then I own it.

If I use your capital and your factory and your raw materials then I don’t own the good. I own my labor which is what I invested and you pay me for it.

Yes, I am familiar with the argument that property rights are direct logical consequence of self-sovereignty. I do not find them convincing.

Our wealth and productivity are not only a consequence of our labor. They also result from a multitude of common resources: infrastructure and knowledge (much of them inherited from before we were born), the network of people indirectly contributing to what we create.

If I am paid a wage for making a car, what of the web of people who contributed to making that car? The people who mined the ore, the people who designed the engine, the people who maintain the roads which brought the necessary supplies to the factory?

Yes, most of those people were paid in some way. But the pay they received was not some fundamental truth of their value as people. It was contingent on circumstances, systems of power.

If they were worth more than the pay they were earning they should quit.

Could they build a motor if they weren’t trained while on the job… Being paid!!? What risk is involved in that?

They should revolt by not getting a job and learning while taking pay from an owner.

Some people are paid little enough that though they work full-time they can only afford to live in their cars. Is that all they are worth?

Who’s fault is this? Their job has so much competition because they have very little skills. If they were the only person that could do the job the wages would be higher. You also have to consider how much revenue their job creates…

I am not asking you an economic question. I am asking you a MORAL question. Is living in a car all those people are worth?

The reason people live in cars is due to their flawed economic system.

For example people in San Francisco live in their cars. This is because of high rent prices, the high rent prices are due to bad policies like rent control and government intervention in building. If these terrible left wing policies didn't exist there would be an excess of houses which would lower the price of rent substantially to the point where no one would need to live in their car. The supply would need to compete for the demand vs the current situation.

I happen to agree with you significantly about housing in the SF Bay Area.

But I asked you a more a fundamental moral question, because you insisted that property rights are a fundamental moral question. Is living in a car all some people are worth?

Yes. If you live in a free market system and rent is affordable and you simply choose to not work then your value to society is minimal. Therefore it would be your decisions and abilities that lead to your situation.

No one likes to hear it but it’s the truth.

So you believe a homeless person that does not work adds as much value as the person that [spent] their entire life studying to be the best in their field and now works 60+ hours a week? If you can agree that there’s a difference then you understand that not everyone is equal.

Emphasis mine.

You have made my point

The ultimate distinction between left and right is: are all people equal? Really? Or are some people more deserving?

The right says that we must sort out what different people deserve. The left says that all people are equal in rights, liberty, and dignity.

People not being equal is not the same as people not being deserving.

If you’re saying that a person that doesn’t work vs a person that does is about one person not deserving something … Nothing is deserved, it’s earned. So you’re starting from flawed logic.

So everyone has the same rights, dignity, and liberty. What you do with your life is up to you after that.

If you’re saying that a person that doesn’t work simply “deserves” money because they breathe the same air as Elon Musk but didn’t do half the work or create value for society then that ideology has failed countless times and has lead to people being murdered.

Why would I work in that society? It’s children’s logic.

This is exactly my point about how we define left vs right.

I, on the left, start from the assumption that everyone deserves a life of comfort and dignity. Everyone. Whether they “create value” or not. Just for breathing.

And you, on the right, have made clear that you do not.

Yes. If you don’t work I should not be your slave.