I am writing in reply to an opinion piece published in your paper recently which culminated with:

They have come for the trade-unionists; what is to stop them from coming for me?

The writer of this piece is ghoulishly appropriating the struggles of trade-unionists to glorify his own life. Of course nobody is going to come for him, he's in such a position of power and privilege that he can be safely writing pseudonymous pieces in popular papers such as yours. The plight of the trade-unionists is tragic, but it is their plight. His slippery-slope argument, that somehow someone else will be come for next, is absurd.

There seems to be some sort of implication that what has been done to the trade-unionists is not limited in its impact to the trade-unionists, but this is plainly false. Has anyone come for him yet? He can publicly laud himself for his victimhood when someone does, but to spin tails of some nebulous fear of a harm that has not been directed at him would seem part of some grandiose fantasy of martyrdom on his part, which he wishes to reap the benefits of without paying the costs. If he's so concerned about the trade-unionists, why doesn't he become one, and get in line for the purges that way, instead of suggesting that the purges will with time make their way to him?

He speaks from a position of comfort, and I have to assume disingenuously. What does he think? That some focused malevolence uses purges of one group in part to warn off or silence the others. How ridiculous! Next he will be suggesting that when people are targeted for violence and, yes, even political purges, it is not that they as individuals are being oppressed, punished or disappeared, but that the entire group itself suffers from those actions. We know that some trade-unionists have been come for, but there are clearly some out there who have not.

His categorical statements are plain falsehoods, and his attempt to spin some fiction in which he, too, is a target, just further down the list, is not only offensive to those who have been targeted, but to those who would be higher up this supposed list. Why is he so important that he speaks out about his eventual fate, rather than the presumably much more immediate one that some others will face? Because there are no others, there is no list. There is no grand plan, and these purges are a message to no one, but are purely functions of what has happened to individuals. If these people have been purged rightly, then why should we stand with them? If, and this is a big if, they are being targeted for political or ideological reasons, to consolidate power or for whatever other reason, then we should stand with them, and not attempt to make their fate about us.

So I posted back in January about changing my tickets coming home from Boston on the Boston to Chicago leg of the train. Amtrak had a bedroom price online that was lower than what I had paid for a roomette and so I called up and changed my tickets. The agent confirmed that I wouldn't have to pay anything extra, that they'd done an even exchange, and that was that. All I had to do was show up on the day of departure and get my new tickets.

So naturally, while running late due to a snowstorm, the station agent informed me that I had to pay the difference in accommodations, which price was now different since it was same-day rather than week-out. I begrudgingly paid the sizable difference because, well, my experience of roomette-vs-bedroom on the travel to Boston had been that I didn't really want to cram all my stuff and myself into a roomette for the next 24 hours.

I talked to a friendly purser (or whatever) on the train, and the conductor, and neither of them had in their records that I owed money. I talked to a station agent in Seattle and she provided me with a printout of the limited information she could see. She directed me to customer relations, since they're the only ones who can see the full audit trail on reservations.

I filed my complaint and I missed a call from them earlier today. I called back and got a guy who couldn't work out why they'd even bothered to call me, because he thought I didn't have a leg to stand on. I'd paid the difference between the fares, what could the problem possibly be? After being condescending and rude (which only Amtrak station and phone agents are; the people on the train are uniformly-wonderful as far as I can tell, except if you're barefoot) he stopped talking over me long enough for us to discuss one of the finer points. He asserted that I had changed my tickets at the station. I told him that I had not, that I'd changed them a week out. He said that was not true. I asked him to check the history of the reservation, and there he saw that the tickets were in fact changed a week before departure.

He said there was nothing further he could do, that the price of the bedroom had never been anything other than the price I was quoted on the day in Boston, and that my accommodations balance had never been good enough. It's certainly possible that that's true and the first station agent had made a mistake, but I have no way to know, and that's the heart of my frustration now. I asked for a copy of the reservation history that he saw, and he asserted that it was the "property of Amtrak" and that passengers are not allowed to see reservation history or complaint notes. He claims to have no supervisors, that there is nobody else I could ask who might be able to release that information. All I can do, he says, is write to headquarters about it. Another complaint. Another, no doubt, dead-end complaint.

Amtrak reservations. How do they work? I have no fucking idea.

I finally understand why the United States is so gung-ho about doing whatever the RIAA and MPAA ask. It suddenly made sense when I saw a headline saying that James Cameron, having gone to the deepest depths, is now going to set himself up mining asteroids.

We have some serious, grave problems. There are sea monsters plotting to destroy us, and asteroids that are hurtling towards us, and quirky entertainment industry rich guys provide spurious reasons to develop weapons delivery systems to the darkest corners of the sea and asteroids flung through space.

The government can't do this openly, of course, but these efforts attract and even require a large amount of public attention. Worse, they require a lot of funding, and the black budgets are already stretched too far from NSA JBODs the size of the Vatican that are being rapidly filled up with all the Internet traffic in the whole world, which is in turn being used by the DHS to predict future crimes.

So they shore up the entertainment industry and lock the American public into a place where their only choice is to trickle dollars up to Hollywood. If you have disposable income, give it to the RIAA or the MPAA. If you don't have disposable income, what little you spend will go to the salaries of people who, if they get any disposable income, must spend it being entertained, since it's now absolutely forbidden for people to entertain one another, especially in public. (And you wouldn't want to let people into your home to entertain them, because then they'd probably turn out to be serial killers or child abductors.)

And then these Hollywood types, placed in this powerful position of public trust without the public knowing it, are out there helping protect the homeland from the threat of sea monsters and killer asteroids. The government must strengthen this feudal protective system, and the systems that support it, at all costs. Otherwise, there won't be a homeland to secure.

It's the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from the facts.

Thank you. Thank you for reading, if you read, the things that I write. Thank you for letting me imagine that you do, or that you might have in the past. Whether you might have skimmed it or read it deeply.

I have gotten so much practice at reflecting on and interpreting my life and the events of the day in ways that are meaningful to me and also which occasionally inspire others, sometimes in very profound ways and sometimes in very minor ones. I have had the opportunity to speak about challenging issues at length, and to do so in ways that are sometimes complex and often deeply personal, and in doing so I have discovered many limits in my own thinking and worldview, I've changed my mind more times than I can count, and I have been so much enriched by the experiences, thoughts, views and challenges of others. Some of you have made journeys with me, in dialogue online, in exploring new ways of thinking and talking about our lives. That's wonderful.

And it's increasingly at the heart of what I am trying to do with my life. I was told at seminary recently that I had a wonderful ability to tell stories, one that they might hope some people will leave with, but never dream that someone might arrive with. I'm not as skilled as some of you, and have learned from your example, but have also learned by allowing myself to feel that what I write matters, and that I have an audience that I am writing to. That's so gratifying, and also challenging, and also motivating. When I have something that I feel like I must write quite desperately, if I do not feel like I can post it here or somewhere else I have a similar (albeit smaller) audience, then it feels very much like a missed opportunity.

The praise I received went on to say that not only could I draw out compelling narratives, but that I was quite good at going from there to personal reflections, theological reflections, etc. I think that for a few years much of the reflecting that I did here was about morality, while overall most of it has been personal, sometimes quite deeply so. Psychoanalysis has been another gift in developing those skills, as it involves a guaranteed audience, and a clear reward for doing so. Longer-lived and more influential, though, is this audience — this place, as it were.

Some people love to hear me talk, and I find that amazingly wonderful and also quite terrifying. With that comes considerable power and with power still greater responsibility, especially in religious contexts, especially in leadership roles. You all have helped me find my voice and encouraged me to do so, and gratified me with your eyes and ears and the reflections you have shared in kind. It is not that I have learned to please my audience as such, but that you as an audience (and of course many have come and gone over the years) have let me play out what comes naturally. I've figured out what works and what doesn't for me, and have been allowed and encouraged to post things that are challenging. Nobody ever comments to say that my writing sucks that day, but I sure know when I think that my writing sucks that day. And I know when it's so good that I can't not post it. And when I treasure it so much that I should perhaps find a different venue, where I can hold it a little more tightly and closely, and insulate myself in doing so. Learning what to withhold is important, too. I have learned things to not say because I will get responses which will be uncomfortable to me in the place from which I would say them. That's not a bad thing, because it's not some problem with anyone else, it's not even a problem at all. I've learned to value and take seriously my vulnerability and my needs.

So, thank you, whether you've been here for a decade (and I don't think any of you have, now) or for a week. Whether you came for the politics, the reflections on morality, our friendship, at the behest of some mutual acquaintance, out of some interest in or other kind of relationship with me, etc. You've let me feel like I can speak through a megaphone when I need to, and in whispers when I care to; directly when it suits me, and abstractly in kind; personally and broadly; intellectually and intuitively. And so on.

I love you all, really.

I found myself looking at my fingernails. Not at the nails themselves, but the nail beds. The half-circle at the base of them, closest to my wrist, in sharp, pale contrast to the to the purple-and-pink just past it, towards the ends of my fingers. From there to the tips of my fingers, the color goes paler and then darker once again, before the ends of the nails themselves.

I have not been biting my fingernails and fingers, for perhaps the third time in memory. I look at my fingers and see something I can only faintly remember having seen before. Not just fingers without cuts, and nails newly deformed or stripped of their upper coating, like so many discarded LCD screen protectors. Those nails are long enough to need cleaning, long enough to need maintenance. Long enough that they are ending up snapping and being short again.

The color and the shapes in the nail beds beneath the nails are really something. Those are precious colors, and I can imagine or remember or both: being a small kid and just delighting in that there was something on my body precisely that color, with that complexity, with gradients and clear edges and all kinds of things. Why don't I delight in this all the time?

And driving along the southern edge of the inlet to the West of me now, coming into Olympia, I sat up in my seat and looked intently at the black hills to the west. The snow scattered across them, making the trees near the places that now lack trees (so that we might lack less timber) stand out in high contrast. It was not the contrast or the height or the shapes or anything that really gripped me. It was, perhaps, just the act of looking at them and feeling tethered to what I could see in a very gentle and certain sort of way. There are those hills. I am looking at them. It is a joy to look at them. It is a joy for them to be looked at by me. And there they are.

When days grow into nights, and the contrast of light and dark in the abstract gives way to the gradient of shadow and shade into black sky, lights are turned on. When I turn them on or off, entering or leaving a room, I find a moment in which to pause. Those actions are so well-learned to be connected that it is fun to pick them apart for the moment. To exist as someone who has entered or left a room and just touched a light switch.

In having done so, in doing so, I can linger on the sound that the light switch makes. Much more so than a car door, it is a sound we surely expect to be a certain way but do not notice. Much like a car door, I am sure someone somewhere makes it their job to know exactly what sound we like, and to make sure that when flipped their switches give proper comfort. Why not let comfort, too, give way to delight? What a sound it is! What a thing it is to notice a sound that is meant to not be entirely noticed either by its presence or its absence.

So I dwell on that, as I have not dwelled on much, and on the pleasure the sound gives me, the act of flipping a switch gives me. I cannot quite conjure up those moments on demand, but by connecting them and writing them down here, I can dwell in them more fully, and also dwell on them, and dwell on what it is about them that dwells in me. So, here, some things I have noticed. Some senses I have used regularly, some things I have done all the time, done ever so slightly differently, in a way that makes all the difference in the world to me. In a way that makes the world I live in and the body I inhabit, the body which is so surely in the world that I could not unstick it if I tried, mean everything to me.

bisextile

corivax think there's something wrong with me for folding a cold slice of pizza into some roti prata dough, and then reheating the pizza by cooking it inside. It's like, pizza murtabak! How could this be a bad thing!?

From a misdirected E-Mail about a vehicle test appointment for some guy who lives in Londonderry:

If you are not the intended recipient of this email you must: (i) not disclose, copy or distribute its contents to any other person nor use its contents in any way or you may be acting unlawfully; (ii) contact Northgate immediately on +44 (0)1442 232424 quoting the name of the sender and the addressee then delete it from your system.

Nobody tells me what to do!

Poll #1818769
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

Check those that are true for you.

I request a short story (or several short stories) in which it is revealed that all of the comments on the Internet espousing viewpoints that you can't imagine anyone actually holding are written by one person.

LiveJournal has broken the sorting of poll replies. I can no longer see them in chronological order, they are in some other mysterious order (perhaps account number?) D:

Watt, who openly admitted he was an “old-fashioned guy,” earlier compared the Internet to Las Vegas, saying there were some who thought that it should remain essentially lawless “what goes on there stays there,” but that it should be treated more like a “pawn shop” and subject to raids from law enforcement.

Um.

I don't think that pawn shops are regulated like Mr. Watt thinks they are. I haven't recently seen the police erect a blockade around any of the local pawn shops, even though it's well-known that they occasionally buy and sell stolen merchandise. Indeed, the police understand that it's inevitable that pawn shops eventually will buy and sell stolen merchandise, no matter the intent of the owner or purchaser. So they may recover stolen merchandise that is discovered. But they don't conduct blockades or raids, and certainly not on the basis of suspicion alone.

No, what Mr. Watt is suggesting is not how pawn shops are treated, but how medical marijuana dispensaries are treated. I would prefer that he use that more suitable analogy in the future. Which is actually comparable to the situation of the Old West, as he no doubt seeks to invoke by referring to Las Vegas. What he wants is actually to make the Internet in the United States rather like Las Vegas in the midst of Nevada — in that it is highly-regulated, tidy and commercialized, while prostitution is legal outside of it, and gambling subject to rather less oversight, amidst all the rugged individualists and/or Mormons. He wants an Internet in which you have a SCOTUS-guaranteed right to distribute and make a profit off of videos of the deliberate torture and gruesome killing of animals for fun, but where if you link to a BitTorrent file (and given hash-based lookups of BitTorrent files can be done, I'd imagine this would include listing a checksum) that may contain copyrighted content (even if said copyrighted content is already available to you in other forms), you get raided and blockaded.

So fuck that "old-fashioned guy".

Poll #1796548
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

Check the lizard people!

What exactly is David Icke a "noted expert" on?

Does this really shock anyone? Hasn't that been rather a staple of science fiction and indeed educational criticism for the past 30 years?

I don't think it's simply that nobody took the doom-callers seriously, I think the people who didn't react simply figured that society would adjust, same as it ever has. Same as how the treatment of horses and the caring of horses vastly changed in terms of function and value after the advent of the automobile. That's not even as good of an example, because it's easy to neither overestimate nor underestimate the need for manual labor in a computer-saturated world.

When I was a kid, of course, it was the other way 'round. People who had basic mechanical skills were, from the Greatest Generation through to the Boomers (Gen. X were still useless layabouts), ubiquitous. They were overabundant, and that level of skill was assumed to be a baseline, and had little value. People with computer skills of any kind, though, were in short supply. You could get a job paying quite well with even a basic idea of how a computer operated. Is it any surprise that as society's trappings have shifted, the pendulum might swing in the new direction? That basic computer skills would be ubiquitous and useless, while mechanical ones might be correctly valued for their critical necessity in society?

Populations don't do happy mediums very well, because it's hard to lead a group to the middle. Teachers when I was a very young kid looked at the world around them and saw the value of people with minimal computer skills and determined that it would be that way forever, and that if they taught classes of 30 kids at a time basic computer skills, we'd all grow up to be millionaires. But us kids surely realized that even the least computer-minded of us were learning the same basic skills. By the time I was in middle school, the emphasis was more that everyone would need basic computer skills to do any job, and not that with them would come an extraordinary windfall.

There are still sectors of society where solid basic computer skills, like the kind you might expect hobby gamers and the like to have, are infinitely-valuable. But is it really so awful if we in industrialized nations shift our baseline skills from generation to generation? If we get good enough at it, we might even try teaching and leading more to the middle, rather than overshooting in the direction of what would have been beneficial just a generation ago. I hear that finding people with basic mechanical skills is cause for excitement, and I find myself excited, because there's nothing really wrong with that. Data entry is the new minimally-skilled labor. Maybe it will swing back in the other direction, or perhaps the next big thing to make dinosaurs of us all will come with it some other kind of shift. I work on computers in buildings built with skilled, mechanical labor; the computers are built with mechanical labor, too. It's easy to imagine that some day I'll be vastly overvalued as someone who actually still remembers how to program what might be called modern computers, when all of your children are off gaining universal skills in living more completely within virtual worlds. I don't know.

But I'm reasonably sure that it's not the case that simply because not everyone in a generation can readily visualize turning a screw Western civilization will forever forget how to build things, how to take them apart and how they work. The hope is just that we will remember how to do them exactly as much as we need and want to and no more. We should not be trying to train up a generation with the skill to work in factories when we seem to have decided that we will not be a society of factory-workers. If that decision changes, so should our priorities, and so would they, I suspect.

I don't honestly believe that texting is to blame for not having learned how best to hold a hammer. It's easy to feel that way when you're talking to someone who seems unresponsive and clueless about what you care about and yet they seem to light up and show their expertise and enthusiasm about something that you don't care about. But that doesn't mean there's a causal relationship between the two. If anything, there's more likely to be some underlying cause that explains both. In this case, I believe it's simply reasonably-shifting priorities and a shifting middle in general-vs-specialized skills, by way of a change in how society works and what society demands.

To put it another way: it's no worse that my generation's children can't figure out how to turn a screw than it is that my parents' generation can't figure out how to not forward a chain letter. What should be troubling is where my generation's children cannot figure out how to not download viruses. Those people are going to genuinely suffer in a society where the cost of technological guilelessness is rapidly-increasing.

What I wonder is: do we also think children are getting stupider? I remember struggling with intelligence tests when I was a kid because I was not as industrialized-intelligent as I was computer-intelligent; the things I can reason about abstractly best involve computerized systems of interaction, not physical ones. My spatial reasoning skills did improve, but I wonder if intelligence tests in this society are still fixated on children who understand the motion of a screw and the packing of geometric objects.

(Which is to say that intelligence tests are useless, but I refuse to digress into that.)

dreamwidth invite codes:

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One used to be able to hit enter in the password field of the alternate journal post page to post. Now it checks spelling, because LJ are fucking incompetent jerks who can't get basic HTML form properties right, which is a pretty fucking low bar.

One used to be able to post to an alternate journal from the alternate journal post page by simply entering the password and clicking post (or hitting enter.) Now it takes one attempt at posting, which will error out with "Client error: Don't have access to requested journal", followed by a second attempt, which will succeed.

I can't stand this crap.

I don't like N-layer (for large values of N, like 7 or 65535) dips for many reasons, which I won't list because I suspect some of you do like them and I don't actually want to imply that if you do like them I think you're a frat boy, or whatever.

You know what would make them a lot better? If they were modularly extruded at an angle. Then if the layers were <beans, guacamole, sour cream, relish, nacho cheese>, I could go all the way to one side and acquire some nacho-and-bean topping for whatever. Movement along multiple axes would be even better.

Really I guess at that point you might as well just have the layers all be side-by-side rather than top-to-bottom, which is already a thing, but I kind of want to see people making sand art-ish extrusions of various dips.

Failing that, though, I don't see what's wrong with hummus.

Poll #1790227
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

Which is closest to what you believe?

Poll #1790090
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

The world would be a better place if most bank accounts weren't interest-bearing.

The world would be a better place if investors made and managed investments individually, rather than through banks and investment firms.

So I guess with LJ's proving that they're utterly unable to deal with operational security and matters of authentication and privilege checking, it's time to give up and move on? Assuming others do so, I'll probably hang on until February so I can hit the 10 year mark, but if LiveJournal's utility disappears, I suspect I'll archive my content and then disappear myself. I'm using a tumblr with the same username now, and I'm on Twitter with the same username, and I do most event-planning on Facebook these days. If this account goes dark, so will other LJs I maintain. Sigh.

If anyone is interested in trying out some other mechanism of group communication, I'm always up for running an IRC server or some such. That's really what I miss most. You all want to give IRC a shot, right? Didn't think so :(

I saw two shooting stars tonight. I didn't wish on them. Reasonably sure they weren't satellites.

When Jobs finally relented, he did not hold back. He told Obama that the United States needed to become more business-friendly if it did not want to lose its edge. He talked about how much easier it was to build a factory in China than in the U.S., where there were too many regulations and needless costs. And he complained about the U.S. education system, saying unions protected bad teachers and kept principals from hiring good ones. [1]

Steve Jobs — liberal progressive hero!

(Homemade) garlic-caraway egg matzot.

Poll #1787132
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

Which is the gothest liqueur?

I looked up, to south and to the west — but mostly up and to the west — along the path of our little drive. There were little rows of four or five condos all huddled together, staggered to give the illusion of privacy to inhabitants looking out their back windows, towards the eponymous lake of Lakeview Court, mostly north, kinda west. There were, I think, two rows of them there on the north side of the road, and down where it met what is now Coachside Drive there were two-or-so others, which were bigger, but more divided. There were wild turkeys that lived in the woods behind those bigger and divided houses, and they were on the other side of Lakeview Court, but not on the other side of Coachside Drive.

Trees along Coachside Drive were occasionally felled to make way for God-knows-what. Once, I went and played in the fort that they made, branches reaching out from trunk to kiss the ground, making great little homes for me to imagine dwelling in. It seems like they had weeping willow whips for arms, like the great tree where the roads kind-of ended and there was a kind-of gravel driveway at the base of the hill that the house-blocks I mentioned in the first place were built into. Building into a hill added to the sense of cozy privacy even as the trees were being ripped away gratuitously and if one could be cozy with anything it would be the sound of one's neighbors' toilets flushing.

The neighbors came and went, but some of them were there to stay. Mostly they kept to themselves, bitter at the reality of their exurban existence, at having to have anything much to do with other people, to say nothing of people they didn't like, at all. Garages were kept closed and locked, lest anyone see what hid within.

Except ours. Ours was often open, and there were gutted computers and printers, and there was the bucket in which I had decided I was making fill for the hole in the road, and there was the petrified blowfish, and there was my grandmother's glasswork desk, and there was the bucket I threw up into routinely when we got home and I was carsick — and I was ever carsick.

The direction I was looking is a strange one. When I imagine looking up at its black sky, it seems like it must be purely south. That is, until I start to think about the garages. Our neighbors one house over, one house in the direction I was looking — why — it seems they must have been to the north.

Those people, I knew some of what was in their garage. A company car and sacks of samples of toothbrushes, toothpastes. Johnson and Johnson — I learned and would recall — a family company. They kind-of embodied the wealth and occupation and demeanor differences between the people who made up that little non-neighborhood, at least insofar as their differences to us. They may've had less accomplishment and wealth, but they had the big company trappings of success. Their art was less good, but it probably had a tangible value, whereas ours was built and drawn by a cancerous, cantankerous and burnt-out Westinghouse engineer.

They had a nanny for their children, who boasted that she or her daughter or somebody was going to become a recurring character on TV. I say children, but now I just remember a girl my age — I think her name was Melanie. And she was kind of spoiled, and I was kind of spoiled, but she was a punishing brat and I merely a punished one. The nanny's name I can't recall, but she taught me bits and pieces of Spanish. My grandmother taught me bits and pieces of German. Her Spanish was better than my grandmother's German, but then it was her first language, where it was merely an ancestral one for my grandmother — and a dubious one at that, as we were never really sure quite where our family had fallen on the dividing lines, such as they are, in Alsace.

They had built in a glorious reading loft and a spiral staircase, and I envy them that to this day, and long for a pair like that of my own. I always badly wanted to go over to their house after watching Indiana Jones smash at the 'x' that did, as audiences knew it had to, mark the spot, in a gorgeous old library with a gorgeous spiral staircase. Books and spiral staircases are inseparable for me.

I'll have to some day guess at what year that was, that I looked up at the sky this one singular time that hangs in my memory. I'll have to scan the records to see which of a dozen half-formed memories might be most true and correct. Was it the closest Mars was coming that decade? Was it the fly-by of some not-so-early space hardware? A comet, a meteor shower?

I would perhaps like to mythologize that moment, to pull it out of time and out of its singular nature. Out of the way that it always comes to mind on nights like this, and I assume that this is a night like this because it feels like the sky might be the right kind of clear and the air is certainly just the right particular kind of cold, though I dare not look and spoil its magic.

In mythologizing, though, I wonder if I can choose the reality that denies something important about me, rather than holding on to something that was important. To wit:

I want to imagine that my mom and I or my mom and my grandfather and I made routine pilgrimages out to the darkness and the openness of the sky right there, looking just so as I did in this opening memory that haunts me and draws me back into it again and again, across all of my life and all of my remembering. I want to think that perhaps there we actually stood together in defiance of all of the awfulness that defines our family and its structure as I look back. That we had the bravery to stand present and exposed and in awe of the universe as I might in the bleak mid-winter here, stepping out naked with the bright full moon shining painfully up from heavy white snow onto every last corner and curve of my body. That we were for a moment so complete and real to one-another and existence as all of that. That we might have talked about the stars and the moon and so many things, that we might have dared to dream and to speak freely and longingly about space travel or any other thing that would later come to terrify me, that I could look back and see my grandfather in, that I could look back and see constant, wondrous childhood awe in and feel like I had at once come dangerously-close to grasping something precious and previously-unknown and also stood far apart from an experience of my whole generation all at once that defined and changed us permanently and profoundly as we felt history move beneath our feet and tell us who we were and who we were to become.

But if I imagine that, then I have to imagine that when the display had ended, or the discussion, or the moment, that we would all go our separate ways. That my grandfather would walk back towards the house, on one side of the road, which now seems sort of one direction; that my mother would mirror her movements along the axis of the road we stood on, along the path our eyes had traced out to the sky — that she would retreat to the garage and to the car; that I would stand there not knowing how to go forward and longing to go up, and find that if I did so I would eventually hit the end of the road, a place of torment, solitude and bad tastes; a garbage bin; a place of burning and manure. My grandfather was an overbearing asshole and still is, and the house was fully under his dominion, and I would find no quarter there. The car was at once escape and terror for my mother, and there I learned what it was to find terror in one's only escape, to be cut off from oneself and the world, to feel perpetually carsick and afraid.

There is a part of me that is very surely still standing there in the night and she is cold and exposed, and not in the wondrous way of being present but in the way of being forgotten like debris flung out and away from a collision in which it had no home. So do I embrace the myths of science and wonder and beauty and expansiveness? If I do so, do I run the risk of forgetting or, worse, denying the reality of the me who cannot leave that isolation, that fear and loathing and closedness?

It is perhaps for the best that the memory doesn't go that far, immersive as it is. It is deep but not very long. The actual experience I anchor it to did have to do with imaging travel towards Mars, but I was not with my family. I was with the salesman, the executive next door, coming home with he and his daughter from something that was entirely for her and entirely not for me. I was so often sick and miserable, but the cold night air sort of cured me, of my sickness at least, and the clear night sky perhaps for a moment cured me of my misery.

And so it has been in my life that when I dare to venture out into the cold, into the night, I am rewarded, except not so much rewarded as made whole and right. But I did not have this routine of going out into the darkness, of being present and exposed. I didn't really learn how to do it, I merely caught a glimpse of it that night. What I caught a glimpse of still eludes me, and though I may not always think or feel able to step outside and into that moment, I've been seeking it and it's been seeking me ever since.

In resin transfer/thermal printing, a ribbon with various colored panels (often CMYK, shockingly) moves in front of a print head which is capable of heating and cooling various fine little points, with pressure applied so that each layer of resin can be applied successively to a surface (either the direct printing surface or a transfer surface, which may give smoother results and involve less movement of the final print surface itself) resulting in the final image. Sometimes a topcoat is added to seal in the resin and give a more refined finish.

I like specialized printers, always have. My grandfather's engineering firm had a color thermal transfer printer in the late '80s and early '90s that produced gorgeous and glossy results with more vivid colors than I've ever seen any other printer produce. I like, as some of you know, ID card printers especially. I have quite a collection at present -- when they were all new, they'd have been worth a total of a few tens of thousands of dollars. The secondary market, however, is substantially kinder in that regard.

One I bought recently came without a print head -- so much for the seller's assurances that it had come from a working environment as-is! (The seller made me whole, but that's irrelevant.) So I bought another of a related model (same print head, differences elsewhere that account for a substantial portion of the price, but I digress) for a low-low price (I've spent more on meals alone without alcohol.) Yanked out the print head, removed a couple of extraneous parts, and put it into service. It actually is towards the end of its life and I'm planning to pick up a lot of similar printers and cobble together the best of their parts, but that's an even less excusable digression.

The printer I got the print head from had come from a working environment. It even had a print ribbon installed, which had only been used about a dozen times! Nice -- those things are expensive.

The thing is, because of how the printing works (obviously) the ribbon is left with a negative of each color layer. Mine came from a small college on the East Coast. It was used to print student IDs. Which I could easily reconstruct, of course. Good thing they don't look to be one of the schools that embeds SSN in the student number, but that's perhaps just my wishful thinking.

So, you know, when you dispose of a thermal printer, don't throw out the ribbon if there's much left. They're expensive and the secondary market will appreciate it. But do cut off the used bits and dispose of them like you would of the materials you printed; if they're sensitive, so is it.

Of course, now I'm making offers to sellers of used printers that clearly have intact ribbons for just the ribbons themselves. I'm no big fan of collage, but I feel like a security-themed spent-ribbon collage with all the bright colors of YMCKT (the T is for topcoat) might be just up my alley. Until then, I'm wearing a handful of students' ID cards like a scarf. It's very, very colorful, and the thin material flutters behind me better than the softest pashmina.

When I was introduced to the concept of victim blaming, it was defined as blaming a person for the circumstances of their victimization, or for its effects. The person who gets assaulted for being somewhere they "shouldn't have been." The person shot in a robbery who could have avoided injury "if they hadn't fought back." It absolves perpetrators of violence, abuse and crime of moral agency and culpability, and places responsibility for vigilance against the actions of others on people who actually have no control over the actions of others. The concept has often seemed most useful where responsibility for the circumstances of victimization involves groups and classes of people who experience victimization disproportionately, who seem to be targeted because of their group membership. Giving women responsibility for the management of rape, giving people of color responsibility for dismantling racism, giving children responsibility for the anger of their abusive parents.

That association with systemic, institutional and group victimization is a powerful one, and broadens the meaning a little bit, but I think salvageably-so, as it still focuses on responsibility for the actions of others, for circumstances. I deliberately don't say "circumstances beyond their control" here, because it is not the responsibility of victims to control circumstances so that they will not be victimized. People have every reason to avoid being victimized, but in only a very small number of circumstances that I can imagine would they be responsible for their own welfare to the extent that if they were to be victimized they would bear some moral responsibility for it. This mostly involves the ability to make decisions about safety vs. the other party's ability to control themselves, and is sometimes tied up with personhood. The ocean is not culpable for drowning victims' plight. They don't merit mention here except to avoid intellectual dishonesty by way of making an absolute argument without acknowledging known caveats.

I've seen in some fora recently, though, a tendency for the meaning to drift further, and to mean that victims do not bear responsibility for their responses to victimization. This seems good on its face; people who are victimized have no responsibility to not be angry, or to be nice. But is "victim blaming" most generally applied to that a categorical wrongness? That is, if you make an argument which holds any victim morally-accountable (whatever that is) for their response to victimization, are you immediately and obviously wrong to do so? It seems to me that even victimized people retain moral agency, with the note that I tend to find actions morally-judgable and thoughts not. A victim is not morally suspect for being mean to their abuser. Being mean more generally not, as a matter of being in a state of mental trauma. Being abusive generally, though, bears more moral culpability. I don't think that vengeance and revenge are moral, even though they may be sought by victims, and I don't think it's useful to apply the label of victim blaming to opposition to retribution. The state has moral responsibility for its punitive treatment of criminals, acting as it is on the people's behalf in response to victimization not just of a person but of the community (assuming an idealized model of modern criminal systems in which thoughts are not criminal.) The state monopoly on violence does not come with freedom from moral responsibility for violence. As it is not an individual, it does not have moral agency; its moral culpability and agency are licensed from and accountable to the people. The moral position of its actors, collectively, is complicated; individually, it should not be.

Another digression: I am wary of the model of physical punishment of children in which violence is meted out dispassionately and detachedly in a micro-state model. One parent is angry, and asks the other to hit, and if the other agrees with the angry parent, the other hits. Parents, like the state, are corruptible. And children learn that violence that comes is always rational and justified, even when it is not. They learn to hate and blame themselves, because the system is clearly just. They learn that they get what they deserve, because it is delivered calmly and without malice. And yet the appeal may be made in malice, the illusory control simply masks the actor. It is not unlike the firing squad that fires only one bullet, that all may believe they did not kill; they all kill, there is not a veil of ignorance that can be put around morality to hide from its view moral culpability, to relinquish moral agency. So, too, when the veil one uses is that of the state, and the violence committed is less fatal to individuals, only utterly destructive to the masses.

I think victims cannot be blamed for wanting revenge. It may be better for them if they did not want it, but that may be to conflate cause and effect. The person who does not want revenge may have transcended victimhood, as it is modeled both in archetypal attackers and victims. I think, though, that they can be blamed for getting it. And the people around them can and must be blamed where and when they enable it rather than providing a community which turns them away from the false promise of retribution and towards whatever it is they may need. And I will add: it is not always, and maybe very seldom, that victimized people need to learn to accept their situation, to find "healing" and quietness so that others may not be discomforted by the reality of their plight. Anger is not the same as retribution, anger can motivate in the service of justice, and seeking justice is a very valid, and often self-sacrificing, way to respond to victimization. Seeking justice, though, is careful work, and requires some knowledge not just of what went wrong, but of how to make it right, or there is nothing to be found but retribution. It may not always be carried out by an executioner and guillotine, but when justice is demanded without any idea of what it is to be just, retribution is always at hand. And seeking punishment inherently has a moral cost; it may be bearable, it may even be mitigated, but it is not removed merely by dispassion or the status of being a/the victim.

Poll #1783253
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 26

Which is best?

Which is better?

Which is better?

Poll #1782975
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33

How do you interpret a deadline of "before Sunday midnight"?

Poll #1782000
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: Friends, participants: 30

What's the most annoying?

Check those that are true for you.

Check those bands whose music you enjoy.

How do you use LiveJournal these days?

Check those social networks, blogging platforms, dating sites and communications services you use regularly.

Warning: incomprehensible networking / embedded systems crap ahead.

This is currently heating my office.

It's an AdvancedTCA shelf with 5 boards installed (out of 12 I now have; only 1 of which seems to be toast.)

Each board is a RadiSys ATCA-7220 with 6 SFP ports and 4 SFP+ ports for data processing. There's a Local Management Processor on each board which is a 1.3GHz PowerQUICC with 512MB of RAM, and attached to that there are two 16-core Octeon 58xx processors at 750MHz for the data path, each of which has 8GB of RAM.

Two of the boards are offline because I can't provide enough power to run them all. If all of them were online, I'd be able to process 200Gbps (the boards can reportedly only handle line-rate on all of the SFP+ ports at once) using the 160 available data path processor cores and 80GB of RAM.

Not bad for $600. Oh, and I actually have two of these (though the other isn't fully set up and I'm not going to try because it is already so hot and gah.)

Soon: porting FreeBSD. Should be fairly trivial!

DS9's wormhole aliens saying "that gum you like is going to come back in style."

I am shorter than I might like on focus, "energy". Long, as ever, on inspiration. So this won't be the post I'd like it to be, because the post I'd like it to be is more like a book, and I don't want to be the one to write that book unless I have to. This is not, this is not a song. This is a shield... This is not really so much a post as it is a placeholder.

I don't like the scientific positivism of Freud. Well, I don't like how Freud's ideas have filtered through the 20th century with a lens of scientific positivism and a distinct bias towards behaviorism for the latter half of that century despite overwhelming popular conceptions, outside of self-help circles, being generally Freudian, or at least so shallowly Jungian that they might as well be Freudian. Would that I were a kind enough person to unpack the bulk of that!

Freud more than Jung, and popular thought as influenced by Freud and behaviorism, believed in one's (his) ability to determine what is going on in the subconscious by observing the conscious, by observing behavior. That is not the sum total of Freud, nor even really a defining characteristic of his work as such, but it is the problematic piece that I feel like we've inherited from him.

Freud talked about the "smutty joke" as being a joke told (presumably by a man) to easily satisfy one's (his) libido. Specifically, telling a joke tinged with sexual innuendo enough to give expression to a bit of pent-up sexual desire. This could mean specifically a man "accidentally" telling a smutty joke in the presence of a previously-unnoticed woman, except that it was no accident. Indeed, the woman was very much noticed and used as a sort of pornographic image or device, with the joke being used to spurt out a bit of sexual energy onto her, concealing and revealing just enough of the speaker's sexual desires to press a bit of sexual impact onto her, wanted or otherwise.

That's definitely a real thing. I've certainly experienced it from both sides, often through a veneer of what one might call flirting. I've seen variations of that dynamic that Freud could have accounted for but failed to, though, as in the case of people telling racial jokes to a similar sort of end, albeit with different factors. Freud was good at digging into the mind in a certain kind of way, but he failed to allow well (in my humblish opinion) for variation in the factors involved, as well as for the motivations involved.

I feel like Freud did that a lot. Jungian apologists for Freud find an easy time by just going back and replacing Freud's specifics with variables, and end up with neat little psychodynamic observations that hold up to scrutiny where social changes may have otherwise made Freud seem distant, irrelevant and incomprehensible.

I feel like a lot of observations of social phenomena are made with some positivism about that ability to dig into motivations in a very Freudian way without allowing a lot of room for variations in internal or external factors. And that huge disconnect leads to total balkanization of social insight. White folks don't want to hear about what some would term Modern Racism, because it sounds a lot like guessing about what's going on in white people's minds. As an Episcopal Bishop says "don't interpret me, I prefer to do that." People are so damn touchy about being told what's going on inside their heads.

And well they should be! But it's hard to figure out what's going on inside your head. Problem is, I'm not convinced it's all that definite that you can reliably figure out what's going on inside someone else's head. I think much of what prevents that kind of analysis internally can also prevent it externally. Michelle Bachmann hears what she wants to hear about HPV vaccines and "mental retardation". I hear what I want to hear about social issues I care about. "Want" there is a problematic word because it anthropomorphizes and attributes agency for processes which are part of, rather than being, a person, but which can operate in such a way that ascribing agency to the person as such is problematic. As I dig into my head to work out why I called someone a "bitch" and find many barriers and defenses, how can it be so easy and correct for someone else to tell me it's because of internalized misogyny?

Saying it's internalized misogyny is, at its most defendable, a sort of externalized answer to a koan; a root cause for something elusive and not entirely comprehensible when given without the context and reflection which illuminated it. Nobody has an opportunity to teach, and I don't expect shouting ISBN numbers at people to garner the respect and understanding for my positions that their reading the books those numbers refer to might create. When I tell someone that I believe a particular incident, or a particular social reality, was born of racism, it certainly may not look like it to them. There's a huge amount of unpacking involved in getting to the point of understanding. "Racism" is a shorthand for those who have understood a very complex social phenomenon. So, too, for "internalized misogyny."

Other people's shorthand may not fit my perceptions, and other people's evaluations of my actions and my internal processes are as likely to be wrong as my own, which are very likely to be wrong. I'm not an observational/empirical positivist, and I'm willing to concede that other people can be right about me where I'm wrong about me. But it's still guessing, even if it's very well-informed guessing.

Which gets to issues of intent and impact. When discussing impact, intent largely leaves the picture, unless there's an extant personal relationship or room to accept an impact was wholly the result of misunderstanding. Intent matters for a lot of things, but it doesn't eclipse impact. Tied up with intent is motivation. Or some other word which allows for introducing some irrelevant and relevant complexities on the side of the speaker. If you believe in predetermination and behaviorism, I suppose intent and impact are all you need (although I still don't understand how people who believe in predetermination can be bothered with issues of morality and ethics.) If someone I know and care about says something hurtful to me, I find it in my interests to figure out why they said what they did. Sometimes this involves asking them about their intent, sometimes I just engage in wild-assed guessing and then privately and/or publicly damn them for my evaluation of their mental state.

I'm losing confidence in my ability to hit my target. There's too many tempting tangents, too many things I feel compelled to not-quite explore or define.

If all you care about is impact, you're probably better off not addressing intent except to say that it isn't what you're interested in discussing. When talking about things like racism and misogyny, there are extra agencies and multiple vectors of pressure that create or color any particular interaction, but to attribute those and specific attitudes towards those entirely to one party and to suggest that that social factor is also the whole of their intent, the whole of their motivations, misses the point, and I think distracts from the possibility of creating real social change or real personal change, while giving the appearance of doing both.

I want so badly to write about a specific interaction to try to make that point, but it's very difficult to do. I almost need some tacky 2-level Transactional Analysis diagram. I want specifically to be able to talk about how often the "reward" for engaging in sexist behavior or saying sexist things is simply to avoid punishment. I want to talk about how regardless of intent and the knowability of internal psychological pressures and processes, a person can become an agent of a nefarious social system.

An alien arrives on Earth, it arrives at the swearing-in of the first woman to be elected President of the United States. It greets her by saying, "bitch." Those sounds mean something rather different in its language. And yet that woman feels the momentary sting of all the other times she's been called a bitch by someone who meant it, right before she was further abused, objectified or trivialized. A million men sitting at home jump online to high-five each other on men's rights websites because that alien totally put that uppity bitch in her place! A million women standing at home feel the same pain the POTUS-elect does.

The goal of sexism is to perpetuate itself, to anthropomorphize it enough to make clear its agency in interactions in which it is present. It threatens men who step out of line. They may be beaten up if they challenge sexism, or they may feel an internalized, irrational fear that they will lose all worth if sexism disappears. Not because they consciously don't feel that they could compete under egalitarianism, but because it is the nature of things like sexism to infiltrate people's minds deeply and litter them with irrational fears, often operating well outside of consciousness, often totally unnoticed. Childhood beatings for not putting women in their place ensure that those fears can even become linked to physiological responses, to the rush of adrenalin — either the triumphal joy of bullying or the panic attack of impending assault. It reminds women always of their places, using the words even of people who don't have any reason to do so, but so much stronger for also using the words of people who can consciously lie about or even be totally unaware of the reasons they might have to propagate sexism more widely.

---

Here, a closing aside, on the off chance I've made an anti-anti-racist feel a little warm and fuzzy by giving them ways to feel good about themselves without actually doing the morally-required thing and taking a careful view at the circumstances of their lives and the inner-workings of their mind:

Being opposed to affirmative action is ridiculous, and the reasons for it seem to me in some psychosocial way tied up in things like this aversion to naming others' intents and motivations, or trying to focus on impact.

There is this sort of naturalistic idea that we are disrupting the natural state of the free market by having things like affirmative action. That we are using deliberate human constructs to warp the natural order of things and disrupt everything from Darwinism to trickle-down economics. (As an aside, this is similar to a lot of extreme environmentalist thinking, in which through a charming Enlightenment worldview, people talk about themselves and other humans as if they are outside of the natural order, outside of the class of 'animals' and outside of the class of 'the ecosystem' and so on. If you're against affirmative action because of a fatalistic-naturalistic ethics, you're making the same kind of logical error that ecomentalists are making. That's really how I feel. And your reasons are less sympathetic.)

Deliberate, intentional, systemic actions were taken throughout the history of the United States, including throughout the 20th century and today, which ensured that Black and Hispanic people impacted by them were in positions of at least relative economic disadvantage. Let's run with an example, so I can resist my urge to say something about everything and end up saying nothing.

Government housing loan guidelines were drawn up with explicit racial limitations so that white homeowners wouldn't end up underwater on their home loans if non-whites moved into the area. This capped valuations, segregated neighborhoods, ensured that non-whites would remain house poor if they could even own their homes at all, etc. It was a deliberate, intentional and explicitly racial action that had enormous implications. And that impact continues down generation to generation.

As a society, we took intentional actions at a government level in the past which were despicable and which explicitly targeted populations by their race. Now that that impact has been had, and many whites saw themselves lifted into prosperity from poverty, we suddenly feel that the best thing we can do is to find a few tokens here or there that prove once and for all that racism doesn't exist. We bristle at the suggestion that we might need to take intentional actions on a racial basis now. Mentioning race is inherently racist! We'd just be telling those people to lower expectations for themselves! Because it's so American to get pushed down and kicked while you're down and to then spring back from that and totally outwit and outcompete the bullies of your past. Except we didn't just do that to a few people who can bounce back stronger than they ever were and show us who's boss. We did it at a population level, and at a population level there's a lot of people who are sort of mediocre, and even a few losers. But those losers who lived in white areas where property values were buoyed by post-war FHA loans saw their ships rise considerably, and their offspring had a better shot at life whether they were losers or not. If you were in a colored area, though, your gorgeous, well-kept, multi-storey house was never worth even as much as a crappy apartment at the edge of the white town. And you didn't get the amenities and investment that followed the influx of people to planned-white areas. Commuter rail lines were built to deliberately have no stops in your neighborhoods, to bypass you altogether, so your kids can't even grow up in the house that you own and take a train to get access to a well-funded library, or a school with the resources it needs.

We must at least take ownership of and responsibility for the intentional actions of the recent past, and not be so cowardly as to throw up our hands at the thought that we could do anything to correct for it. Like that internalized sexism, it's very easy to be anxious that if people of color had it a little better, something disastrous would happen to you, but that's disconnected from reality, and that's ultimately being used to control you and to limit you. Or maybe you're genuinely free of those internal pressures, but you just believe in the wisdom of the free market that much. Except that things like FHA loans ensured that the free market was imbalanced in the past. And you know that when there's those kinds of systemic biases, sometimes you have to break them up with regulation. I mean, are there many people who espouse a belief in the free market who don't actually believe in breaking up and privatizing government-built monopolies?

Don't free marketeers love the early American period? I mean, wasn't post-Revolution when things in America worked the way that they ought to? Church of England clergy in the Commonwealth of Virginia were put in charge of tracts of land assigned to their parish in the time of established Anglicanism in that colony. Not long after the Revolution, Virginia enacted disestablishment. Other religious groups (presumably including the irreligious) lobbied the legislature to seize the glebes (those farming tracts [not that kind of tract]) and the churches built by the parishes created by the legislature under establishment. The legislature did so, and helped along by the sudden death of an appellate judge, that went into force, so that within a generation or so the glebes went back to the communities in their associated parishes, and they were sold off to benefit the Public Good.

The government, in our current understanding, gave an unfair advantage to one group. When confronted by this reality, they took actions to redistribute that wealth, with narrow exceptions (a few of the hundreds of churches in that area have remained property of the Episcopal Church, but most could not meet the standards required to be retained by the church in that way.) That was Virginia in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The free market certainly could've bought out the church at a fair market value, but the public had subsidized the creation of that imbalance and saw fit to correct it; it wasn't about the commodities and the market, it was about what was right.

But today, we can't have conversations about doing what's right. We have to have conversations about maintaining the free market instead. And not really the free market, but the market that ensures that the people who are carriers of the benefits and burdens of its unfairness (as opposed to those who carry only its burdens) don't have to be anxious about what would happen if it were a fair market, rather than a market let run amok without recourse with full benefits given to anyone who can sneak in a little unfairness for themselves and the people in power. Ideals about the Free Market trickle down into every other aspect of life, until our morality is so fucking fatalistic, so patronizingly-naturalistic that it is as condescendingly-complimentarian as wholism. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. No blacks, no bitches.

So I wanted a simple way to generate permutations which excluded any elements which were simply rotations of previous elements. This turns out to be simpler at a rough glance than I thought. For some reason, I thought it would be quite a pain at first, but then realized (after doing a few examples by hand) that all I had to do was check whether any rotation of the word in question was less than (I'm working with unsigned binary integers here, so an integer less than, but the same is true with a lexical compare when doing permutations of words, for example) the word.

Assuming you want all non-rotational permutations of the letters A and B with 4 characters, this would be:

AAAA
AAAB
AABB
ABAB
ABBB
BBBB

For relatively obvious reasons this starts out as just all odd integers. What's interesting, though, is what happens once you have high enough bits set that that starts to break down. Here is the sequence for 32-bit unsigned integers, starting at 1073741823 (and excluding all-ones for trivial reasons.) I thought it was worth sharing.

Poll #1776985
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

Which is the best Depeche Mode album?

"That's flowerwang!"

How long has it been since you used the word "LART"?

Hey Internet people who were so enthusiastic about how we ought to declare jihad perpetual, unflinching war on the ethnic and religious groups to which the Oslo bomber belonged,

Why'd you go all quiet?

Lovingly yours,
caladri

So in response to the E-Mail I sent to the Department of Public Works here about my previous post about the perils of traffic near our house, I just got:

I went out and looked at your location, when the weather permits we will increase the no passing zone south towards Woodard Bay road from your [residence]. Call me if you have any questions.

I am pleased!

So I live on a street where people like to speed. Love to speed. We're on a section of country road right after the last major intersection, so it's mostly a straight line with very few cars entering the road. There's lots of pedestrians crossing the street to get their mail and tons of bicyclists, but non-cagers don't count for very many points so nobody really gives a shit.

Our driveway is right at the end of a segment of dashed yellow line, on the left. The road ahead may be straight, but there's some hilly bits that make passing dangerous. Those start immediately after our place.

So people love to pass slow cars on the dashed yellow between the intersection and us because that's their last chance to get up ahead so that they can go 80mph for the next mile or so. And we've always known that some day, especially if we forget to start signaling out left turn good and early, that somebody's going to decide to do a last-minute pass of us (i.e. a slow[ing] car) and pretty well kill us, or at least the driver.

Today we were really worried about this because there were two trucks behind us of a style that, out here, is associated with people who enjoy ~hauling ass~. And there was a bicyclist in the lane we were slowing for. Apprehensive, we decided to pass the bicyclist, signaling left to go into the left lane to pass the bicyclist, signaling right to reenter the right lane, then braking and signaling left to turn into our place, making sure to be as unambiguous as possible about our plans so that nobody would come to a hard stop behind us causing the bicyclist to slam into them, or actually hitting the bicyclist at some speed themselves.

So we did all of that and then as we were about to turn into our lane, one truck passed us going very fast, not getting over until well past the dashed line ended. So that was terrifying. And then the other one decided to do the same while we were sitting there trying to make our turn, honking at us while doing so.

It only took a few seconds and could've killed half a dozen people quite easily given the ridiculous attitude and driving style employed by the two trucks.

I beg you: don't be a douchebag about passing.

(And if anyone has any clue whether it would be illegal to put up an official-looking sign saying "slow vehicles may be making left turns; use caution when passing" or similar, I'd love to know. It's consistently terrifying.)

Poll #1759155
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

Check those that you enjoy.

Poll #1755503
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

Cultist robes, bonfire, food, sleepover, booze, etc., thing. July 2nd. Olympia, Washington. Will you attend?

Check those that are true for you if you attend.

Something for everyone: check those that are true for you.

Alleluia!

Women who are perceived as being trans (or "really¹ men" in the parlance of our times) or whatever are often denied access to public accommodations (i.e. bathrooms) on the basis that their presence makes those spaces dangerous because they might rape someone.

And yet there are effectively no² cases of trans women raping cis women in public bathrooms.

Cis women³ violently assaulting trans women for, you know, trying to use a bathroom? That actually does happen.

Really.

1: Sometimes the qualifier "biologically" is used instead. That's patently ridiculous and wrong, too. Sometimes "legally" is used to try to give a transphobic argument the air of legitimacy. There is no singular legal definition of one's sex/gender. No, commenters on every article about trans women, birth certificates aren't it. No, it has nothing to do with surgery^a. It's a myth, a fiction, a fabrication. And unlike other legal fabrications that come about from interpretation, there is absolutely, positively, no basis in law for determining, assigning, changing, mediating, etc., a singular "legal sex", as it is so often termed.

2: It may happen. It is highly unlikely that it happens anywhere near as much as violence against trans women in public bathrooms. If it happens at all, that's awful, but there is no pattern of abuse that I am aware of to parallel the pattern of abuse against trans women and the rhetoric about trans women as rapists.

3: I'm willing to take a leap without handy evidence and say that cis men likely do it "to protect the womenfolk", too. I am extrapolating from experience and other events and not entirely pulling it out of my ass, but I don't want to unfairly single out cis women alone. Cis men certainly partake of and fan the flames of bathroom panic and probably claim their share of the violence, too.

a: Insofar as there are countries and states which do not require surgery to change a birth certificate, so the suggestion of some universal (and, thus, reasonable) standard is false.

When life hands you lemons, make lemon sherbet. And then combine it with some orange and lime sherbet you prepared in advance to make rainbow sherbet. Then eat only the orange sherbet because that's what you really wanted in the first place.