theory – and the lack thereof

insurrection

This was a tragic day for stability and peace. It was a massive victory for a movement that’s been agitating civil war for years. This is what the boogaloos and QAnons have been salivating over. The symbolism of taking Capitol Hill can’t be understated, and it’s going to fuel the growth of this insurrection tenfold in the coming months.

A lot of my rage today has been directed at the police. Watching them treat these terrorists so gently, seeing white supremacists walk home freely, unharmed, hand-in-hand with the police – it’s beyond infuriating after so many days and nights watching cops brutalize innocent people. But I also feel confusion, because today was the first day I wanted the cops to do their fucking jobs and put a stop to a violent mob threatening the security of our whole country.

My anger turns to fear as I think about the future. No one has the answers. No one knows the way out. The police are just a symptom. So is Trump. Yes, absolutely, impeach and arrest him before he nukes us into the stone age, but he could keel over tomorrow and the course of our country won’t change. That’s not despair or cynicism, it’s a goddamn fact. Too many people believe in false realities – wholeheartedly and without a shred of doubt – and they’re willing to die for these beliefs.

Our way of knowing is broken. We have no methods for reaching consensus. We have no ability to bridge gaps, to reach hearts and minds. Stuck in the time loop of each day’s scroll, it becomes harder to remember more than a few day’s events. A year of quarantine has pushed us ever further into our individual holes, accelerating the radicalization that seems to develop whenever we’re physically isolated but joined together on our digital islands of personal fixation. America is not special in this phenomenon.

Until we find a way to make sense of this insanely complicated world we’ve built around ourselves, it’s going to get worse.

biden my tongue

now that the voting’s over, i can finally stop biting my tongue and rag on what a garbage candidate Biden has been.

as we transition into this fresh hell where we play footsie with a coup, i simply could not imagine a campaign i feel less compelled to rally behind. they are empty vessels, an utterly bleak and soulless vision for the future of society.

this campaign was literally saved by trump’s relentless incompetence with covid. that’s what it took to squeeze Joe hair-sniffin’, shoot-em-in-the-leg, you-aint-black, you-know-the-thing Biden through on the narrowest of margins: a global goddamn pandemic.

the democratic party is pushing the limits of my pragmatism. this shit isn’t working.

looking forward

a bit of a raw one for you today.

whenever I check right-wing twitter or news, it feels like an alternate reality. police brutality doesn’t exist; but if it does exist, it’s always justified. covid isn’t real; but if it is real, 150,000 deaths is nbd. systemic racism is a myth, but also every non-white culture is morally and intellectually inferior.

meanwhile, in my personal feeds every day: brand new footage of police beating the shit out of innocent people; fundraisers for people trying to avoid homelessness; teachers begging not to re-open schools because they don’t want to die; karen going apeshit at the grocery store when asked to wear a mask.

we, as a country, can’t even agree that putting on a mask is the right move. it’s the simplest possible action, a mild interference into our daily lives backed by mountains of evidence – and this, too, is just another battleground. what hope does this leave for the deep, systemic change that’s needed? how can we possibly reckon with our country’s foundational wrongdoing?

in early June, after the protests had been going a few weeks, a coworker asked me “when this would all be over” and i laughed. i told them it was probably going to get worse. at the time, i was just thinking about the material conditions ahead: institutional gridlock, unemployment, evictions, degradation of core infrastructure. that was before the feds attacked Portland, and it wasn’t even on my radar that paramilitary troops would be agitating for riots in multiple cities.

it feels so so hyperbolic to write this out, but it’s hard to see how we avoid a civil war. because that’s what happens if we can’t agree on the most basic tenets of humanity, right? that’s what happens when they send wannabe soldiers to quell demands for justice, right? what’s the alternative? what part of the last 20 years in american history suggests that we’re going to successfully navigate towards a peaceful resolution in this disagreement over our way of life?

people keep saying they can’t wait for 2020 to be over, and all i’m thinking is: what the flying fuck are you looking forward to in 2021?

impeachment

I wish I could be excited about impeachment.

It’s not that it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s purely symbolic – and that’s what it is, I’m afraid – shaming the world’s most visible bigot is a worthwhile exercise. It signals to the world that much of our country rejects what he represents. And there’s at least some temporary satisfaction in watching him squirm.

But in terms of changing our political fortunes, it’s cosmically irrelevant.

This process isn’t going to make him less popular. It will play into the endless fantasy that he’s a victim of the deep state. When the senate inevitably fails to convict him, he’ll hoist it up as a trophy of exoneration at his rallies. His supporters will celebrate and feel further emboldened in their fever dream of white supremacy.

Everything about the impeachment process assumes we still live in a functioning democracy. But we don’t. The architecture of our government and electoral process is fundamentally flawed. Our constitution is woefully broken. Our checks and balances turn out to be laughably flimsy, built on an assumption of good faith participation. That hasn’t been true for decades.

These last four years, my whole mindset about politics has transformed. I no longer believe in incremental change or moderation as a path to a better country. Those are the tools of a civil society seeking to balance the valid needs and wants of many different groups. We’re way past that.

We need massive, sweeping reform. We need a constitution that reflects the concerns of the modern era, written by better people than rich, white slave-owners. A bill of rights that reflects a holistic morality and a genuine guarantee for a decent life.

I’ve tried to avoid letting my thoughts stray into this kind of naive idealism. But if the foundation is garbage, we have to fix that first. Trump isn’t an anomaly. He’s the symptom of a disease that America has always had, the inevitable product of our inhumane systems of law.

Impeachment feels good for a day, but the cancer remains untreated.

unfollowed

today i unfollowed the last (vocally) conservative friend i have left on fb.

it took me this long because he was symbolic of a certain possibility i once believed in. that one day, there would be a moment i could intervene, to make a difference, to reach across the aisle. but over the last four years, i’ve watched him gradually embrace every single pillar of bigotry and self-destruction in modern conservative ideology.

i thought about unfollowing him so many times before. when he started spamming the transphobic pseudoscience. when he discovered that most wretched factory of ignorant hot takes, the Babylon Bee. when he found his way into evangelicalism and suddenly fetuses were a top priority. after every mass shooting, he would instantly transform into a human rights activist for Chicago and Philadelphia, deploying the latest gun violence whataboutisms hot off the Breitbart / Washington Examiner / Fox News presses.

over and over i told myself, i can’t look away. i don’t want to be naive. i need to know what’s happening over there.

but i can’t do it anymore. i’ve thrown in the towel. i’m done.

if there’s one thing that turning 30 has clarified for me, it’s that i gotta pick my battles. i only have so much time, so much energy. death’s knocking at the door. every moment i waste staring in shock and horror at his lunacy is time taken away from myself and my community. it does not better me, and social media is not a platform for changing hearts and minds.

this also mirrors a larger shift for me in the last year. i’ve stopped my daily reading of the Washington Post and NYT – not because i distrust their reporting, but because the daily news cycle seems to be an overwhelming source of toxicity for everyone on the planet. i try to keep most of my news and political reading to long-form essays (n+1 is the best nonfiction periodical in the country right now) and investigative journalism (shoutout to ProPublica, Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Marshall Project). obviously i can’t avoid lots of daily news since i’m on social media every day, but i no longer seek it out. it’s been a good change.

today, what tipped me over the edge was this Toni Morrison quote. i’ll be totally honest here: i’d literally never heard of this woman before. yes, i am an unread heathen. but it’s a great quote.

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

there will always be one more thing.

i’ve reached a point where i no longer wish to ever argue with people. i will continue to make arguments. i’ll be critical, offer insight, and make observations. i’ll keep writing. i’m going to live the best possible life i can, one that demonstrates the harmony and euphoria that’s only made possible when you’re a decent fucking human being to everyone around you.

but i’m not going to hash it out with some fool that cannot see the racism coursing through his every action. that energy will be saved for the people in my life that need it.

performative

let us now whisper softly about PERFORMATIVE WOKENESS and MORAL FASHION

as we strive to hold society accountable, to raise the bar for behavior among our peers, to spread awareness of injustices past and present, we should recognize the ways in which our communication is working against these goals and opening itself up to malignant subversion.

social media strongly favors a certain kind of tone and attitude. we see it everywhere with the news, where controversy and bombastic headlines are what garner the modern currency of likes, shares, and comments. but this same trend exists beyond The Media or The Politicians, all the way down to the individual.

for anyone whose aspirations are tied to exposure – especially artists – there are strong incentives to be loud and angry every day of the week. social media is a grind, a rat race to stay relevant in people’s minds, to be remembered and noticed as often as possible. rage is one of the easiest emotions to squeeze into the 140 character limit.

activism is now integral to our brands, how we sell ourselves to the world. it becomes an act that can be performed at will, replicated by anyone who shares the right links with a sufficient number of upset emoji and a dash of the latest trend in favorable buzzwords.

take a more innocuous example: the environmental apocalypse formerly known as plastic straws, an injustice born for the current climate. a trite micro-optimization wherein, overnight, everyone demanded that restaurants and bars abandon this morally bankrupt practice as though it contributed anything meaningful to global trends in plastic waste. it shifted the responsibility for environmental justice away from corporations and governments onto the individual. as if we could make a dent in climate change by minorly inconveniencing ourselves at dinner.

this is how i’ve come to see a lot of the policing around the margins of individual social graces and language. while we bicker about which words to use, a battalion of megawealthy capitalist neofascists are hard at work cementing the prison industrial complex, immigration detention, and the socio-economic segregation of health care & education into the fabric of our society. and they don’t give a flying fuck about your wokeness.

yes, absolutely, we should strive every single goddamn day to deconstruct our words and behaviors to understand how we’re perpetuating the misogyny and racism passed down from our ancestors, to resist the ambient bigotry that permeates our culture and history. the work to self-analyze and critique our thoughts and actions is necessary and useful for growth.

but when we focus exclusively on presentation, on the look and feel and sound of moral behavior rather than the substance and meaning and motive, we miss the bigger picture, and we open ourselves to manipulation.

bad romance

I’m falling out of love with the internet.

I don’t know what exactly that means.

I know that I used to feel this deep, ever-flowing fondness for this place; I consistently felt awe for its impossible weirdness, its endless nooks and crannies that were such a delight to explore. I would gladly lose myself in the digital woods over and over again, exploring abandoned fortresses of outlandish subcultures, hunting for obscure bullshit across hill and dale.

I know that I now mostly feel a mixture of neutral gratitude for its conveniences and a constant, aching throb of weariness. Not just for the news and politics and social media, nor for the eternal arguments between misguided anuses. But for the repetition. The intense homogenization of our dialectic.

me: Memes have become so ubiquitous that they are supplanting genuine conversation
also me: It is fucking WEDNESDAY my dudes

me, an intellectual: Memes are a truly 21st century means of communication, the next step in the evolution of humor
you, an idiot: These are barely more than knock knock jokes and future generations will mock us ruthlessly

Every goddamn day I get on Twitter, I see geniuses – actual geniuses, people that are stunningly good at fucking whatever – farting out hot takes frosted with whatever flavor meme is currently trending. Over time, some of these formats prove to have some longevity, and now we have a whole roster of lazy starter kits that are sure to make the kids at home go apeshit for your PIPING FRESH HOT CONTENT.

i’m not bitter YOU’RE bitter shut up~~

Imagine going back ten years in time and telling all the journalists that they’ll be unironically trying to use stock photo memes to speak truth to genuinely fascist power on Twitter.

I have no point here. I just feel like every time I hunker down with my laptop or phone and SURF THE NET I find my brain glazing over with this sticky, slimy sensation of same-ness wherever I go.

Maybe I’m just getting cynical. Maybe I’m romanticizing the way the internet used to be. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places. Maybe complaining is my way of feeling above it all.

Good night.

concentration camps

I’ve pretty much quit with the politics on facebook over the last six months to a year, which seems to be where most of my friends are also at. I’m gonna take a short break from this because I don’t want to look back at this time and think “damn I probably should have said something about immigration”.

We’ve grown so used to the hyperbole that the comparisons to pre-WW2 Germany feel utterly meaningless.

But today, right now, we are:

– rounding up people based on skin color, spoken language, and family associations
– stealing all of their belongings, confiscating their money, their property, their jobs
– literally snatching children from the arms of their mothers in broad daylight, in the streets; taking mothers and fathers away as their whole family watches, sobbing, powerless; permanently separating families, creating an entire generation of orphans
– dumping them in overcrowded camps with no legal recourse, no means of communication with the outside world, poor living conditions, and relentlessly inhumane treatment at every step in the process
– shipping them off to countries where they’ve never been, where they don’t speak the language or know the culture or have any foundations or relationships of any kind
– the camps are so overcrowded that they’re about to start building tent camps in the fucking desert in the middle of summer

America has a lot of sins, past and present. But right now, I believe this is at the top of the list. I don’t know what to do. We seem to be incapable of holding our government accountable for even the most blatant infractions.

melt them all

I do not support your right to own a gun. I do not buy the argument that guns are a part of culture or society worth keeping. I have no sympathy for the idea that guns are important to anyone’s culture or lifestyle.

Of course I have no beef with hunting. But this isn’t, has never been, and will never be about hunting. For decades, responsible gun owners have chosen not to act in support of sensible legislation out of fear that their hobby might be inconvenienced. So my willingness to concede the validity of niche use cases has evaporated.

If someone’s cultural pastime was making bombs, we would not pause and say “well hold on now, many people are responsible bombmakers, we just need to teach responsible bomb usage to our children and tone down the reckless display of bombing in movies and video games”. This is an inane line of thought.

I am done drawing nuanced distinctions about guns. Throw them out, melt them down, and never look back. That’s the path to a society where we don’t get another mass shooting every month. That’s the society I want to live in. The one where we don’t have to do active shooter drills in elementary schools.

feel-good

so, there’s a lot of these feel-good videos where people do super kind or generous things, or there’s just some moment of raw happiness. this week alone, i’ve randomly encountered:
– a woman getting out of her car to give a homeless man a coat
– a sick kid returning to school getting hugs from all his classmates
– a whole bunch of family and friends going nuts after this kid opens his college acceptance letter

no matter how cynical i get, these are heartwarming. they’re a reminder that things aren’t always terrible.

but i keep thinking about how weird it is that we pull out our phones and record these moments. especially when it comes to random acts of kindness.

i’m just not sure what to think about it. in general, i don’t think it matters much why people do good things. inevitably there are people who volunteer or help others because it makes them look good or makes them feel good. and that’s fine. it’s not great, either, but i tend to think that it matters more what you do than why you do it. that could also be Bojack rubbing off on me lately, there’s a few episodes that riff on that theme.

i remember after the tsunami in Japan back in 2011, there was an initial barrage of disaster / destruction videos on all the blogs I followed because, of course, it was nuts to behold. it was also one of the first major natural disasters since the advent of ubiquitous cameras on all of our devices.

and then i saw the term “disaster porn” dropped, and there seemed to be a sudden awareness that we were collectively rubbernecking over the misery of others. it’s sort of like war photography – there’s a line between telling a story and profiting from destruction.

i don’t think these feel-good videos are in the same category, but there’s something weird about knowing that somebody’s out there getting a little dopamine rush imagining the views and likes they’re gonna get once they post their video of rescuing kittens from a volcano.

i’ve heard people talk in jest about this with babies and weddings, but there was also a shared acknowledgment that it wasn’t … really a joke. the attention feels good.

no slam dunk conclusion here, just something i’ve been chewing on.

holding pattern

I feel like I’ve been in a political holding pattern lately.

Since the brief glimpse of hope offered by the November elections, there’ve been a huge number of setbacks:

– the tax bill, which is a huge leap towards modern class warfare
– the outright give-away of 2 million acres of public parks
– the supreme court temporarily upholding the 3rd travel ban
– net neutrality’s looking mighty grim
– Puerto Rico never really got any (federal) help
– ??? take your pick, there’s so much

Most of this is basically out of reach. These are all decisions made by people who have absolutely zero incentive to heed my concerns.

Traditional political activism feels useless by nature of the fact that I live in Brooklyn. I have literally never met a Trump supporter here. My representatives are already among the most liberal in Congress. That isn’t saying much, of course, but they’re not bad, overall.

Further radicalization seemed like the obvious next step, but as I’ve written previously, I’ve been turned off by what I see from the DSA. I love Jacobin’s insight and rigorous exploration of socialist policy, but then I see platitudes like “eat the rich” touted as a legitimate platform. I don’t begrudge the sentiment, but it’s just such a laughably short-sighted perspective on the problem.

I don’t see any major political actors making strides in the problem of how we dig ourselves out of the situation we presently find ourselves in. What do you do about a constitution that gives the state of Wyoming the same political weight as New York? How can an activist in California have any relevance to the problem of voter suppression in Alabama?

Absent any movement I strongly identify with or find convincing in its short-term proposals for change, I find myself just silently observing, taking notes.

I’ve been a lot more focused on the somehow herculean act of making friends, because I think it might be the case that creating real relationships with other human beings matters way more than keeping track of every ounce of Trump’s bullshit. Or maybe this is a roundabout way of justifying a measure of apathy. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve been absurdly happy the last 2 months. This might be the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. That probably has had a lot to do with finding a community in Bushwick that I adore, and pulling back the throttle a bit on how much energy I devote to the news.

hindsight

The thought I’ve been coming back to the last two days is that, if he hadn’t been elected, I would be less politically engaged. I’m sure the same is true for many others.

To be clear, it’s not like I’m putting in any herculean effort here. I called my representatives for the first time. I marched in my first protest last year. I voted in my first local election yesterday. Maybe I’m reading and writing a bit more. But all it takes to bring change is just a little more engagement from a lot of people.

If Hillary had been elected, would we see anywhere near the same levels of participation? Given how slim the margins have been for these disastrous bills in Congress, it seems quite plausible to imagine that they would pass if there were fewer calls and protests. Does that outweigh the damage from Gorsuch, the executive orders, and his appointments? Perhaps not, I don’t know.

November 2016 was a major shift in my perspective. I spent weeks feeling utter dread. It was so hard to imagine a good future in world where Trump could be elected. I’d never felt such a persistent mixture of disappointment and disgust.

But over the last year, I’ve seen tons of powerful activism, which has stayed strong even though the news is so relentlessly, oppressively terrible. More than ever, we’re painfully aware of the problems in our society. I don’t see anyone with the answers, but I see a lot of people searching for them. More than before. There has been horror, but also solidarity and reassurance in seeing that there are many people as horrified as me.

We’ve survived our first year. This year’s election bodes well for 2018. Nothing is yet broken that cannot be fixed. I wouldn’t go as far to say that I’m hopeful, but I do see plausible routes for our country to recover.

between centers

it’s like, yeah, i get it, she’s out of touch. for such an intelligent and composed person, she doesn’t understand how politics and society has changed. she lacks self-awareness. she is unwilling to acknowledge her own flaws and failures, not that she’s unique in that regard.

but man, nothing makes me less interested in participating with the far-left than the endless stream of vitriol that they spit at her.

one thing that’s clear from listening to her is that she actually believes her “between center-left and center-right” stuff. it’s true, she’s not a liberal, never really was. but in that sense she is totally authentic. she is, to her core, a boring realist who lacks vision, not because she doesn’t care, but she has genuine faith in her milquetoast strategies for change. she believes in the system that we have. this is the game she knows and it’s the game she wants to play.

fuck me for seeing merit in a diversity of political ideologies. do i agree with her? god no, but i recognize she comes from a place of experience and knowledge, that she does offer meaningful insight into the realities of bureaucracy and politics, that she still has value and power even in the shame of defeat. there are people who like and even love her earnestly for who she is, and there is no virtue in shitting on them for that.

mostly i’m just feeling politically isolated. sign me up for that sweet luxury automated gay space communism but leave me out of the endless pissing contest over bernie.

never forget

if you have strong feelings about 9/11, you might want to skip this one. this is one of those days that i can’t nod along and bite my tongue.

“never forget” is an awful motto.

sure, there are countless stories of heroism and selflessness that we get to recount, and that’s what many people will say they refuse to forget.

but the legacy of 9/11, as it will go into history books, is not of first responders running up the stairs and passengers taking down a plane.

“never forget” is a commandment that we stay bitter, harbor resentment, and relive painful memories so that we stay angry and foster ill will.

“never forget” is a cynical phrase used to perpetuate our endless conflict in the middle east and our farcical war on terror.

9/11 is the beginning of my acquaintance with america as a nation that abuses its power on the global stage. someone bombed us, and in return we bombed the poorest nation on earth into oblivion. then we invaded another country on false pretenses because, hey, we were in the neighborhood.

extract whatever heartwarming memories you want from 9/11, but the terrorists got exactly what they wanted. our country has never been weaker or more unstable than it is today. 16 years of unjust war may have something to do with that.

maverick

I see a lot of sudden celebration of John McCain as a legendary hero in response to his diagnosis of brain cancer.

I don’t wish illness or death on anyone. This isn’t about withholding sympathy or empathy. You can be sad that someone is sick or mourn their passing without ignoring their flaws. But our collective willingness to suddenly cast the sick and the dead as heroes is not honest or helpful.

When it comes to the life and death of public figures, it’s a chance for society to reckon with the quality of their character. Famous people, whether they like it or not, become role models by mere virtue of their presence. They are examples of what sort of lives can be lead. How we talk about their example is one of the many ways that we define the meaning of a good life, of a life well-lived. When we speak in glowing terms of someone’s story, there is an implication to everyone listening that this person’s actions are worth mimicking.

I’m not a student of John McCain’s life. All I know is what I’ve seen for the last decade or so.

To me, he’s the guy that picked a woman he barely knew as his vice presidential candidate. He launched Sarah Palin – a dreadful harbinger of Trumpian behavior and rhetoric – into the national spotlight. He’s a guy that frequently goes on television to critique Trump, but still votes with him over 90% of the time. He’s an active participant in the political party that denies climate change, limits civil rights, that actively enacts policies that intentionally harm the poor, the needy, and the suffering.

No doubt, he appears to be a more decent human being than many of his colleagues. He shows respect for others. He has a history of voting across party lines (even if that hasn’t been the case recently). He went out of his way to call Obama a decent human being during the ’08 election. He doesn’t speak with venom or malice.

But that doesn’t make him a hero. It means he’s not a terrible person, that he does what a lot of us do every day of our lives. He looks great because he’s surrounded by such abhorrent individuals.

I think that’s what people are reacting to, more than anything else. It’s not about him specifically, but the fact that the one guy who lets out even a fart of reasonable attitudes might be out of the game. That we’re one step closer to political insanity.

dear FCC

My comment to the FCC on net neutrality:

As a software engineer that works entirely from home, my livelihood is dependent on a fair and open internet. None of my work would be possible if my colleagues and I had to wrestle with bandwidth caps, throttling, or unequal access to the internet. The current proposal to eliminate Title II protections will cause enormous damage to all users of the internet by stifling the growth of new websites, technologies, and communities. Just like electricity and water, the internet is a utility that all of us depend on, every day of our lives. Treat it as such, and preserve Title II regulations.

tweets’n’such

Twitter is easily the worst place for my mental health with its relentless formula of cynicism and groupthink masquerading as irony, but it provides an incredible wealth of information and perspectives on current events.

It took over a year, but I finally curated an excellent mix of people that provide a reliable stream of useful insight with a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives. The direct access it provides to journalists and political insiders is a thing of beauty. It can often be its own, isolated world, where people continually mistake the shared catharsis of mocking opponents with meaningful engagement. But there is legitimate, educational, enlightening discussion going on there. It just takes a lot of digging to find.

I still don’t feel comfortable contributing or interacting on Twitter. I don’t think I have much to contribute in that format, but I’ve also never really tried. I think it would be quite difficult to navigate towards an experience that would be fulfilling rather than soul-crushing.

Meanwhile, Facebook is utterly dead to me as a place for evidence-based discussion. I have seen zero constructive disagreements take place here since the election. At the same time, this is the only reliable window I have towards seeing actual, confirmed human beings express sincerely-held conservative beliefs. Finding that on Twitter or Reddit is impossible, so I do appreciate the occasional glimpse of “my god he really believes that trump is doing the lord’s work” as a reminder that our election was not a joke.

That leads me to conclude that there is still merit in putting thoughts out there as a means of bolstering representation. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll give some words to thoughts that others have not yet been able to articulate.

But it’s important to recognize these efforts for what they are. My posts are little more than thinking out loud, an outlet for the stuff that gets bottled up in my brain over time, a mostly selfish act rather than some benevolent community service. I’m not changing the world with my words. Nobody’s going to be won over or convinced solely by what I write.

paris

It’s hard to keep talking about climate change because it’s depressing and relentless and the more we learn, the more we realize how much trouble we’re in. It’s also challenging from an individual standpoint; we’re each a tiny gear in an enormous machine, and it’s difficult to feel relevant or effective.

That’s why it’s so important for governments to lead the way in taking action. They can set the standard, raise the bar for what to aim for, draft goals and provide the resources to help everyone reach those targets, and most importantly, establish firm rules and take corporations to task that fail to meet those rules. No other entity in the world has the ability to do this. If you believe that market forces will be sufficient, the behavior of oil companies is a very clear indicator that this is not the case. The interest of the shareholders is rarely in line with the needs of the environment.

Trump has abandoned the country – and the world – on this issue, and for no clear reason. No sane person believes that coal is coming back. What’s good for the people and the environment in America is also good for the rest of the world – there is no reason to make this an issue of protectionism.

This is how America ceases to be relevant. This is the sound of faltering progress. History will not be kind to us, and the future will not be kind to our children.

collective dogma

One of the problems with obsessing about politics and society as much as I do is that it means I am constantly thinking about life in an abstract sense. I often ponder about other people’s lives, imagining what it is that makes others happy, fantasizing of the ways that we can eliminate sources of pain and suffering, creating opportunities for people to fulfill their dreams and capture their desires.

When I do this, I try very hard to remove my concept of fulfillment from the equation. I don’t want to be hegemonic, to prescribe my preferences to others, to assume that what satisfies me is at all sufficient for anyone else. I operate on the premise that my life, as I experience it, is not what most people want. Yet I have to recognize that it is dishonest to think that I can be political without being prescriptive. If I have an opinion about public policy, that is a moral stance about what the best way of life is, of what other people’s lives ought to look like.

Yet, these stances do not construct any tangible notion of a life well-lived. My generation has few role models, hardly anyone that we can all point to and say “they did it right, that is the way it should be done”. Is that a sign of enlightenment, that we recognize there is no one path that works for everyone? Or is it a sign of being lost, that we find ourselves without specific or concrete direction?

To many of us, it sounds great that we should each search and discover our own purpose in life. But I find it to be a great irony that we are so strongly driven by individualist ideas of self-determination, of shedding dogma and doctrine, yet we are so eager for a more unified and collectivist society.

panorama

This weekend, I built a prototype for a kind of news aggregation I’ve had on my mind for a while, which I’ve called Panorama.

The idea is fairly straightforward: look for all possible articles on a specific story, across many different sources, then put all the headlines in one place, in chronological order. That’s pretty much it.

For my proof of concept, I picked Michael Flynn, for a few reasons:
1. His brief tenure made it easy to scope down the time range
2. It’s not an ongoing controversy (Turkey lobbying aside), and a relatively self-contained story with a beginning an end is easier to grok
3. Responses to the scandal are mostly polarized

The notion is that, by placing all news sources together, trends will emerge. It should be possible to identify an agenda, for bias to be (more) self-evident when placed in the context of news as a whole.

In terms of methodology, some things worth making note of:

This was all collected by hand. There are certainly errors.
I did a lot of googling and did my best to find every relevant article on the Washington Post, Breitbart, and the New York Times from the election until now. Other sources are just articles I found along the way.
I did not include syndicated articles – AP, Reuters, UPI, etc.. These articles don’t really represent what I’m interested in. Also, it turns out that Breitbart buys almost every syndicated article, no matter how redundant, so there are hundreds of these articles just for the last month of news on Flynn. I assume this is for SEO purposes, since it makes Breitbart much more likely to show up on any given search on a topic.
Just getting reliable publication times can be a huge pain. For all of these, I had to open up the source for a timestamp – sometimes I could get an ISO string, other times I’d have to convert from a plaintext time.
Some articles just don’t have accurate publication times recorded, e.g. there are articles about Flynn’s resignation showing up before he’s actually resigned.

Deeper thought on this experiment to come later.

greatness

One of the understandable but misguided responses that Democrats had during the election was that “American never stopped being great” or “America is still great”.

I get the sentiment. It feels like a natural response to MAGA. It made for a heartwarming speech from Michelle at the DNC. But it is very much the kind of fairy tail that the left must divest itself from going forward.

The cold, hard truth is that America was never great.

We’re a country whose initial wealth came straight from the blood and sweat of slaves, whose children we now imprison at ten times the rate of any other racial or ethnic group in the nation.

Our land was stolen from Native Americans, whose genocide was actively sought by our founding fathers and early presidents. The most aggressive and murderous of those, we still honor with a place on our currency.

Our dominance in the 20th century has nothing to do with our democracy, our capitalism, or our Judeo-Christian values, but the mere fortune of being separated from two world wars by two giant oceans, the pure luck of sitting on enormous quantities of oil that we discovered right as we entered the industrial revolution.

Stop painting the past as a place that we should have any desire to return to. Cease this pretense that our wealth and stability are the result of any genius or invention of our own. It is an insult to the memory of the many people who have suffered and died at the hands of American injustice.

No, America was never great. Not once. Not ever.

But it can be.

We should look forward. The future is a place of enormous possibility. We have incredible luck on our sides. A rare chance to write our own destiny. Fleeting, slippery though it might be, we can turn the tides of climate change, of racial, social, and economic injustice, of bureaucratic gridlock, nepotism, and corruption.

The window is closing. A decade or two of inaction, and our chance will be gone. We’ll find ourselves cast back onto the roiling seas, our fates determined more by the whims of weather and inheritance than our own designs.

too many

too. many. things.

mass coral bleaching

record arctic circle temperatures

dakota access pipeline, ugh

talk about fascism a bunch cause we’re intellectually lazy

every. single. nomination.

the inauguration is coming

brief pause for biden memes

oh god i keep forgetting the supreme court

he’s literally going to run his business from the oval office

the media keeps chasing his stupid tweets

(i mean sure they’re bonafide insanity but this didn’t work during the election, why the hell would it work now)

the electoral college is not going to stop him

a recount is not going to elect her

republicans are not going to disavow him

stop it with these fantasies

breitbart is growing

aleppo is crumbling

another log on the fire of xenophobia courtesy of ohio state

la pen is a nightmare

merkel’s losing her edge

too. many. things.

false media

okay fake news let’s go

1. the term itself is overloaded & ambiguous
2. it implies a false binary between real and fake
3. sometimes when we say fake news we actually mean propaganda
4. poorly handled but factually correct news was at least as damaging in this election as fake news – e.g. instant media freakout over Comey

Nonetheless, fake news is a major problem. I personally hadn’t considered its relevance until the last few months but it fits right in with my current favorite narrative that the relationship between news and social media is toxic. Depending on where you get your news, you could be living in a completely separate reality from everyone around you. Facebook already demonstrated that you can dramatically influence mood and opinion based on the general tone and content of your feed.

To up the stakes, the intelligence community is on the record – multiple times this year – in saying that there are other countries actively promoting fake news in the US. This is one of those issues that i cannot understand why it isn’t front-and-center on every outlet, on repeat.

This kind of attack is absolutely trivial. Botnets are dirt cheap – you can get thousands of computers signing up for accounts on every platform, promoting a simple, unified message. single individuals have been doing this with spam since the beginning of the Internet. this is effectively state-sponsored spam, but instead of ads for dick pills we’re getting propaganda about our election.

Part of me wonders if this isn’t just karma for Stuxnet, PRISMA, and the countless other violations of global trust from the NSA.

Facebook and Google might be more technologically sophisticated than what Russia and China have at their disposal currently, but the notion that Facebook alone can handle this problem is unrealistic. We cannot ask corporations to do battle with other countries and hope that they’ll stay on our side.

We’ve evolved into a system where quality journalism is worth less than clickbait. That isn’t the fault of mainstream media or alternative news or any nation-state. I doubt anyone dreamed up our current state of affairs, saying “yeah I’d love to see a landscape of news where everything is reduced to all-caps headlines paired with evocative stock photos and investigative journalism is nearly extinct”.

But this is where we are. We should not be surprised that there are people taking advantage of this state of affairs.

guilt by association

I have friends that identify as part of the alt-right. I would like to think that I understand their reasons for identifying with the movement. It is a fact that not all of them are racists or sexists. But the window for immunity from association is closing.

This is a movement whose strongest catalysts are actually racist, literally sexist, seriously anti-Semitic, genuinely bigoted. Every single day, Trump names a new cabinet member that is at best, deeply questionable in their commitment to serve all Americans, and at worst, shows active disdain for minorities or anyone who disagrees with them. We have not gone a single day without new revelations about people fundamental to the alt-right movement who are waving loud and proud the banner of white nationalism.

I want to empathize. I want to humanize. I want to understand. But the alt-right – questionable as it was before – is quickly becoming synonymous with white supremacy. We are entering into territory where it is supremely difficult for me to give the benefit of the doubt. And that makes it all the more challenging to know what to do.

burden of proof

There is an ongoing debate in the left, right now, about what conclusions to take away from this.

To my dismay, I am seeing a lot of folks double-down on their contempt for the Trump voter. The ideological divide in this country has never been larger, and there does not seem to be much hope of closing that gap right now. I am genuinely concerned that we could see violence of consequence in the next decade, given our current arms race of outrage and other-ing of entire demographics.

What has helped me reach an understanding of how someone could ever have voted for Trump, is realizing exactly how much they hated Hillary. That, in hindsight, was my largest mistaken assumption over the course of the election. Now, I will continue to argue that the hatred of her is totally unwarranted, arbitrary, and augmented by (if not rooted in) sexism. But in the final days of the election, we had:

– Comey’s absurd double-blunder, wherein he causes a media firestorm over literally nothing, and then further enhances the perception of corruption by retracting it days before the election
– Fox News running a false story based on a tip from an anonymous FBI employee that Hillary was being indicted. This ran for an entire day.
– An endless stream of emails from WikiLeaks. While none of these contained much information of consequence, they drew attention, fueled speculation, and plenty of them were vague enough to inspire all manner of conspiracy theory.

Every one of Trump’s horrifying tirades was buffered on each side by a controversy from Hillary. Yes, this is a false equivalence of the highest order. It’s an insult that we would ever compare the two as equals. But the fact remains: there was a compelling and legible narrative from the right, readily available for all.

What was the narrative from the left?

For all our talk of inclusiveness and equality, what tangible vision of change did we offer for rural working-class Americans? To the person who does not see climate change as an imminent threat, who does not know any black or hispanic or Muslim Americans and thus has little reason to care about how we treat them, who does not see sexism as a relevant force in the story of their lives, whose quality of life is more immediately threatened by the price of gas than nearly anything else – what did we offer?

Look, I’m as bleeding heart liberal as you get. I believe firmly in the policies of the left to bring meaningful, positive change to people in every walk of life.

But my belief in this stems from a vivd, tangible concept of what these possible futures look like. My fear of climate change is rooted in a very clear image of a world with a billion more refugees. My love for basic income stems from an understanding of how soon robots are going to be replacing all of our unskilled labor. My passion for feminism and anti-racism comes from listening and hearing stories from people I care about, learning the ways that my friends have suffered at the hands of bigotry and stereotypes.

You cannot expect people to just get it. Nothing in this world is as obvious or clear-cut as we like to think. It is on us to explain ourselves, to justify our ideas, to fill in the blanks, to populate the imaginations of people across the world so that we can have a shared vision, a unified goal.

It is time for the left to take up the burden of proof and run with it.