jazzfish: an evil-looking man in a purple hood (Lord Fomax)
[personal profile] jazzfish
The paperwork for my credential has FINALLY gone through, so I am actually done with BCIT. Unless I need to get a transcript or something, I guess. \o/

Meanwhile, have some links. Roughly zero percent of these are cheerful.

The culture war is a metaphorical war (for now), but the metaphor is valid makes two points, neither in as much detail as I would like.

One: "We liberals really need to acknowledge that (a) we are in a culture war and (b) we are the aggressors. Racism, sexism, and homophobia have been features of the dominant culture since... well, pretty much forever. We are engaged in a conscious effort to marginalize -- and, if possible, extirpate -- these tendencies, and we are using whatever means we have at our disposal to do so, including the sword of the state."

Two: "...[A] very deep cultural and psychological problem on the liberal-left, which is a pervasive tendency toward various types of Whig history, in which history itself is more or less assumed to move in an inevitable direction, with a sort of vaguely Marxisant or quasi-Christian eschatological faith that in the end the good guys have to win because that’s the ultimate plot line."

I do not, in fact believe that 'the moral arc of the universe ... bends towards justice,' because why would it? Any bending has to be done by us, by people who act to bend it, and in the face of thousands of years of tradition, fear, and resource-insecurity.

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. ... There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
--Hunter S Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"

Related, I Want No One Else To Succeed: "I've been doing this experiment on classes for the past 10 years and not one class has agreed unanimously because there’s always somebody who doesn’t want someone to have what they have because they don’t think they deserve it."

Also related, [personal profile] rachelmanija reviews Dying Of Whiteness: "[W]hite people perceive their own interest as upholding white supremacy and punishing people of color and liberals. They value this so highly that they are willing to deprive themselves of money, material goods, and even their own lives in pursuit of this goal. And they are doing exactly that: literally killing themselves as a side effect of killing people of color, in a kind of cultural murder-suicide." Erik at LG&M reviewed it some years back as well. His concluding words feel prescient. "Until whites stop preferring to kill themselves rather than admit non-whites as full citizens of the nation, fascism will continue to be a serious threat to the rest of us. And to themselves too, but they will be A-OK with that."

Who Goes MAGA?, a fictitious analysis of various personalities. "It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness." (Also links to Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay "Who Goes Nazi?", also worth a read.)

And, in case the previous weren't depressing enough: Assuming the can opener of free fair elections and a subsequent Democratic victory in 2026 and 2028: "Will America’s non-fascist party have the will to purge the government of fascists?" In which the FBI is conducting witch-hunts against employees who were friendly with people on the director and deputy director's 'enemies lists'. Primarily concerned with There Will Be No De-Trumpification:
Imagine it is 2028 and Democrat X has won the presidency. Kash Patel will only be four years into his term as FBI director. Dan Bongino is now a career employee of the bureau. The entire agency will be stacked, top to bottom, with Trump loyalists.

Would a Democratic administration have the will to purge these Trumpist elements from federal law enforcement?

I’m pretty sure I know the answer. And you’re not going to like it.

There will be no housecleaning of any Federal agencies; Trump appointees will remain in place despite their commitment to opposing Democratic governance and priorities. There will be no significant rollback of ICE's increased budget and powers.

We have the model for this: Obama in 2008 declining to go after the banks; Biden's appointment of Merrick Garland to fail to investigate the 6 January coup attempt. Hell, the pardon and rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.

Well. Two hundred fifty years was a good run, I guess.

Oh, cat

Jul. 11th, 2025 10:37 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Caught Yellface with her WHOLE HEAD inside the Fritos bag.

July has already been busy

Jul. 8th, 2025 02:58 pm
azurelunatic: Vivid pink Alaskan wild rose. (Default)
[personal profile] azurelunatic
Susan visited!

Thorn didn't get carjacked by a Bigfoot.

welp

Jul. 4th, 2025 11:24 am
jazzfish: an evil-looking man in a purple hood (Lord Fomax)
[personal profile] jazzfish
In Minneapolis, where it is overly Warm but where there were decent fireworks and a lightning-filled thunderhead last night. Feeling some kind of way about the political situation, for sure.

Have some links.

UPDATE! Breaking News: Everything Is Bad. (This is absolutely worth your two and a half minutes, I promise.)

Edward Gorey’s "Great Simple Theory About Art" is essential reading for writers: "[T]he theory ... that anything that is art ... is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it’s no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating." That last bit puts me in mind of James Nicoll's "I don't object to hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface."

ICEBlock: "ICEBlock is an innovative, completely anonymous crowdsourced platform that allows users to report Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity with just two taps on their phone." US only, and iOS only at the moment. Via jwz, who notes "The cowards at Time wrote a whole article about the app and didn't include a link to it".

methaphone: "methaphone can help you manage cravings and withdrawal symptoms. It can fill that hole in your back pocket. ... methaphone looks like a simple acrylic slab -- and it is." I kinda want one. (I am a sucker for glass and lucite.)

Disentangling...

Jul. 1st, 2025 10:10 pm
rebelsheart: Text: Experience is the name we give our past mistakes. (Experience)
[personal profile] rebelsheart
I'm working on getting myself out of the Amazon ecosystem, or at least less deep in it.

One of the big steps is evaluating new credit cards as I've had an Amazon-branded Visa card from Chase for... a while. That's going well, but is slow.

In the meantime, my other major point of entanglement is photos. As an Amazon Prime member, I've had the pleasure of unlimited photo storage for a while. Over 20,000 photos and videos over the years. As I'm canceling Prime later this year, I needed a new hosting solution... and I didn't want Google or Apple.

After some recommendations from friends, I'm going back to Flickr... which still has my old, old stuff.

The current fun part is I have the Amazon Photos app downloading 20,000+ photos and videos to a folder I've told the Flicker uploader to automatically upload.

This is going to hopefully not take more than all night.

Rebuilding journal search again

Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

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