swan_tower | Entries tagged with we are political monkeys

Quick synopsis, for those not already aware: this year, Brad Torgersen organized the third iteration of the “Sad Puppy+” slate for the Hugo Awards, which, at least on the surface, was about campaigning to get conservative SF/F authors on the ballot (giving them the place they have been denied by their political opponents). Unabashed racist/sexist/homophobic bigot Theodore Beale/VD++ apparently also decided to organize a “Rabid Puppy” slate, on similar principles, only more so.

Between them, these two initiatives managed to have a huge influence on this year’s Hugo nominations, dominating the short lists for many categories. (Here’s a rundown on what they achieved.) This was met with a great deal of dismay in many corners of fandom.

We all caught up?

+No, I don’t know how that term came to be attached to this. If you know, please enlighten me in the comments.

++I find his chosen moniker sufficiently arrogant that I decline to oblige him by using it.

***

I’ve felt for years now that the Hugos are a thing I should maybe be more involved in. Two things have stopped me: first, you have to pay for a Worldcon membership in order to nominate or vote, and even a supporting membership is a non-trivial expense, at $40. Second, my reading is very disorganized; much of what I read in any given year was actually published long before, meaning I’m not very au courant with the stuff that’s eligible for awards. This latter point makes nominations in particular quite daunting, because there’s a whole swath of stuff to choose from, and I haven’t read most of it.

This year, for the first time, I’ve bought a supporting membership so I can vote on the Hugo Awards. I’d like to talk about why, and what exactly I intend to do with my vote.

( Cut for discussion of details. )

As always, the question is: what now?

There are a lot of proposals to change the Hugo rules in ways that will prevent, or at least discourage, this sort of behavior in the future. Going that route will be hard, though, for two reasons: first, it’s a minimum of two years to introduce any changes to the Hugo procedures (because of Worldcon’s bylaws), and second, many of the proposed changes would disenfranchise a lot of voters who have been participating in good faith. (A fact which, fortunately, I have seen many people point out. The problem is known, and I devoutly hope it won’t be accepted as the price of doing business.)

In the short term, and quite possibly the long one, the better answer is social rather than legislative.

As I said, I’ve bought a supporting membership; if you have $40 to spare and the inclination to officially register your displeasure with this situation, you can do the same. (This also, by the way, gives you the right to nominate candidates for next year’s Hugos — and, as a special bonus, the right to vote on the upcoming Worldcon bids! Look for another post later about the Helsinki bid and why I think people should support it; that’s enough of a digression I don’t want to go into it here.)

What’s the best way to use your vote? Well, the Hugos use an interesting system: instant runoff voting. This is a system built to discourage the triumph of small but dedicated voting blocs over the general sentiment of the electorate as a whole; it means the winner is likely to be a candidate most people thought was pretty good, rather than one a few people adored and a bunch of other people hated.

The Hugos also have “No Award” in every category. When you rank this on your ballot, you are saying that you would rather see no award given in that category at all, if the alternative is to see it go to one of the works you have ranked lower (or left off your ballot entirely: for a cogent explanation of the different effects between those two, see here.) This has happened before, though not recently; the last time No Award won, it was 1977.

I stand with those who say, the problem here is the entire “slate” approach: even if the slate consisted of works I like, I have a profound objection to the entire notion of organized campaigns of followers nominating and voting for the candidates their leaders have selected. That isn’t what the Hugos are for, and if five years down the road we have the Sad Puppy Slate competing against the Social Justice Slate competing against the Can’t We All Just Have Fun Slate, I will consider that a disaster for the Hugos, no matter what I think of the works on the slates themselves.

One way to speak out against the slate approach is to use IRV and the No Award option to register your disapproval. There is a Puppy-free list of candidates here (and if you needed a visual demonstration of how thoroughly they dominated certain categories, there you go). Rank non-Puppy candidates as you feel they deserve; when you’ve run out of candidates you think might be worthy of the rocket, rank No Award. Then rank everything else — Puppy candidates, and anything non-Puppy you thought really was just utter crap — below No Award, or leave it off your ballot entirely.

In other words: say you would rather see no prize given than these tactics rewarded.

This may mean voting against some works you’d ordinarily support. In the case of Dramatic Presentation (Long), for example, maybe you really enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy or The LEGO Movie. But voting for them says, “well, I don’t like slates, but I guess they’re okay so long as they pick things I agree with.” That encourages us to form competing slates in future years, which is precisely what many of us are trying to prevent. If you think it would be wrong to give the rocket to Edge of Tomorrow or The Winter Soldier, then rank No Award first — that’s your decision. But please, don’t support the slate.

Because fundamentally, the slate approach is fundamentally not about fannishness or enjoyment of books. It’s about making sure your side wins. And in this case, it’s also about hurting people who have until now been nominating and voting for works they love, and stroking the egos of a few individuals who have felt disenfranchised by the fact that the Hugo electorate doesn’t like their stuff. (It is not even about supporting the kind of SF they claim to like: both Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem and the second volume of Patterson’s Heinlein biography are right up their alley, and several SP/RP types, including both Larry Correia and Beale/VD, have commented that they probably would have supported those. So even their side gets hurt by this, as the decisions of the ringleaders locked out things their followers genuinely enjoyed and might have wanted to vote for.) It is about championing bigots like Beale/VD and John C. Wright. This is, in short, a move undertaken explicitly to upset and drive away people like me and many of my friends.

I will not be driven away. And I will not reward their efforts.

Is it idealistic to believe the Hugos should be about nominating books you, personally, enjoyed? Maybe. But I will do what I can to support that ideal.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/731902.html

I haven’t yet read the entirety of this dissent by Judge Richard Posner on the topic of voter ID laws in Wisconsin, but the words to describe the bits I have read are things like “searing” and “scathing.” This is a conservative judge who formerly supported laws requiring photo ID in order to vote, but his dissent is a 180% about-face that comprehensively calls out exactly what is wrong with such laws — ranging from the fact that they’re trying to solve a problem that basically doesn’t exist, to the fact that they don’t solve the problems that do exist, to the way they disenfranchise the “wrong kind” of voter.

Nor does he neglect the partisan component here: his dissent points out that all the states with strict photo ID laws and most of those with non-strict laws are politically conservative at the state level, while those which require no ID at all skew liberal. And the kinds of people who are disenfranchised by voting obstacles are also more likely to vote liberal. This is not a “both sides do it” kind of problem, where we can waggle our fingers and move on. Whether or not you agree that it is a concerted effort with the goal of stopping “those people” from voting Democratic, it is a concerted effort with that result.

Here’s a tidbit for you: the poll tax that was outlawed in 1964, adjusted for inflation, is substantially cheaper than the average cost for a low-income voter in satisfying a photo ID requirement. You may not be forking over the cash directly for the right to vote, but when you figure in documentation, travel, and time spent away from work jumping through the bureaucratic hoops, it ends up costing in the range of $75-$175. For people who are having trouble feeding their children, this is an inexcusable price.

I haven’t been following the judicial situation well enough to know what effect, if any, Posner’s dissent might have. The fact that it’s a dissent, i.e. a statement disagreeing with the ruling, suggests that it won’t be much. But I have some hope that seeing a conservative judge come out swinging on this topic might shift the winds a little. There are a number of really scummy things going on in American politics these days, but this is one of the worst: it strikes at the very heart of our ability to make things better.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/699364.html

Sometimes you read something that spins your understanding of a topic around like a whirligig and when it stops, you see things in an entirely new light.

Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.”

Which is really just the lead-in for the part that has very direct relevance for today:

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Crossposts: http://swan-tower.livejournal.com/680912.html

I have no words around the rage this induces in me:

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., [told the Washington Examiner]. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

I have no words for the rage this induces in me:

“We’re not going to be disrespected,” conservative Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., [told the Washington Examiner]. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

There's not a lot I can say here. I've been ignoring political news for a while because I can't bring myself to deal with it; most of what's pissing me off is beyond my ability to affect in a meaningful way, so all reading about it does is raise my blood pressure. (Which sometimes could use it. But I don't think that's a medically recommended method of fixing the problem.)

Other people, however, have said very intelligent things.

First and foremost, Tobias Buckell, on EMTALA and how we got to this point. It says something about political coverage in the news that I? Had not actually heard of EMTALA before this. I had heard about it, sure. I knew that emergency rooms had to treat anybody who came in, and worry about payment later. I knew some (not all) of the problems that had produced. But I didn't know what caused it. I didn't know this was a law from Reagan's presidency, and that legislators at the time had kicked down the road the question of how anybody was going to pay for it.

And you know, if I had the power to change one thing about our dysfunctional political system, that might be it: the overwhelming tendency to kick the payment can down the road. Defer spending on infrastructure and other vital things, until it collapses out from under you. I heard somebody say once that this is a fundamental weakness of democracy, and I believe it. When you need to worry about re-election, you go for the quick and easy points, not the things that need to be done but nobody will thank you for them.

Scalzi, as usual, has things to say, but for me his best line is in the comments. Someone there -- clearly thinking he was scoring points by accusing Scalzi of bad rhetoric -- said "In other words, the explanation for the behavior of your political opponents that seems most likely to you is that they are evil. This seems uncharitable and unimaginative." To which Scalzi responded:

You know what, Leonard? Shutting down the whole of the government of the United States in order to force a change (or indeed repeal) in a law offers access to medical insurance to millions that don’t already have it or can’t afford it, because you otherwise don’t have the legislative majority to make changes, thereby putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work and costing the nation millions of dollars each day? That’s not a bad definition of banal evil.

Now I hear rumblings that these same folks will try to leverage the debt limit in order to get their way on the ACA. If that’s correct, a willingness to destroy the US’ global financial standing, and disrupting the entire planetary economy, would take the action out of “banal” to actual flat out evil.

To which I have to say, yeah. This shutdown is financially and economically destructive, and it amounts to the Republicans throwing a temper tantrum about a law they failed to prevent, because they would prefer we go back to the good ol' days when millions of people went without medical care or died because they weren't rich enough to be healthy.

Two words: Fuck. That.

ACA is not perfect. But this? Doesn't help anybody.

And then I'll just point you at Fred Clark of Slacktivist, who has said many good and important things: "The 'debt limit' Kobayashi Maru," "What the shutdown means: Unnecessary pain," "The longer the shutdown goes, the more it costs us all," and a more general look at "Another proof of bad faith: The inconsistency of blacktracking." (I prefer the term he quotes later, "pulling a one-hatey," because that one's applicable to circumstances other than those involving Obama. But both terms have a certain rhetorical charm.)

***

My entire life as an eligible voter, I have wished that I could respect the Republican Party. I would probably vote Democratic anyway, but I wish I could look at their behavior and say, "I understand where you're coming from and I respect that, even if I disagree with you." But I can't. I just can't. I look at them and see a pack of dishonest, amoral idealogues who cater to the basest impulses in our political discourse. We need a new Republican Party, stat. One that's actually conservative, rather than reactionary. But I don't think we're going to get it any time soon.

You know what, Leonard? Shutting down the whole of the government of the United States in order to force a change (or indeed repeal) in a law offers access to medical insurance to millions that don’t already have it or can’t afford it, because you otherwise don’t have the legislative majority to make changes, thereby putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work and costing the nation millions of dollars each day? That’s not a bad definition of banal evil.

Now I hear rumblings that these same folks will try to leverage the debt limit in order to get their way on the ACA. If that’s correct, a willingness to destroy the US’ global financial standing, and disrupting the entire planetary economy, would take the action out of “banal” to actual flat out evil.

This year, voting is more than just the core responsibility of citizenship; it is an act of defiance against malicious political forces determined to reduce access to democracy.

It sounds like an exaggeration, but after the litany of attempts this year to suppress the vote -- ID requirements, shortened or eliminated voting hours, changes in polling places and the number of machines there, striking voters from the rolls -- I really don't think it is. If you're an eligible voter in the U.S., please go vote.

Nobody here will be surprised to find that I think you should vote for Obama. Of the two candidates, he's the one who stands for economic fairness, women's equality, QUILTBAG rights, corporate oversight, and not just bombing the snot out of any country we decide we don't like. But fundamentally, I care most about us having a functioning democracy. Go vote. Even if you live in a state that's guaranteed to go red or blue in the presidential election, there are state legislative positions, local offices, ballot initiatives, and more in which your opinion really does matter. Go vote. Please.

In light of Romney's self-inflicted gut wound this week, I find myself dwelling on this piece by Jeremiah Goulka, about how and why he ceased to be a Republican.

The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted -- from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.
[...]
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.

Goulka says a lot more, going into detail about how Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War pried the scales from his eyes, but that's the part that I keep thinking about -- because it's the only way I can make sense of Mitt Romney.

I think the man has spent his entire life in a socio-economic bubble so hermetically sealed that he doesn't even realize the world outside it exists. That's how he can see forty-seven percent of this country as moochers selfishly glued to the governmental teat, shirking personal responsibility while the virtuous men of his class keep the country going. That's why he thinks people making two hundred thousand dollars a year are middle class; that's why he can say, with a straight face, that he "inherited nothing." By his standards, those statements are true. But his standards are so skewed, the skew has completely vanished from his field of vision. He's a poster boy for privilege: carrying so much of it, and so utterly blind to the knapsack on his back.

And it means that when he opens his mouth around people from outside his bubble, he comes across as a condescending dick. It's happened again and again on the campaign trail, despite what I presume are the best efforts of his handlers to teach him less counter-productive habits; it happened on a massive scale at that fundraiser, because he never meant those words to be heard by the hoi polloi. It happens when they send Ann out to be his surrogate, because she's been living in the same bubble, a world where she and Mitt were "struggling to make ends meet" back when they were living off his stock portfolio.

During the 2008 campaign, I remember somebody writing a cute post wherein they pretended the presidential election was a piece of fanfic, and criticized it for Obama's Mary Sue qualities and the OOC way John McCain was being written, betraying all his principles in a cynical bid for the win. If 2012 were a workshop story, I'd be bleeding ink all over the page, lambasting the writer for saddling the Republican party with such an unrealistic caricature of arrogant, wealthy, self-interested self-absorption as their candidate. Because even when I can explain Mitt Romney, I have trouble believing that this really what we've ended up with.

Or rather, in which I link you to other people being ranty. I've had some of these sitting around for a dog's age, and I'm never going to wrangle my thoughts into anything like a coherent enough mass to make an actual post out of it, so instead you get other people being articulate for me.

Must the Rich be Lured into Investing? Who are the Real "Job Creators?" -- Supply Side [economic theory] assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it! Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person. Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction. Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer.

How Capitalism Kills Companies -- There’s no limit at all to the amount of growth that the public companies will demand: in 2007, for instance, after a year when Citigroup made an astonishing $21.5 billion in net income, Fortune was complaining about its “less-than-stellar earnings”, and saying — quite accurately — that if they didn’t improve, the CEO would soon be out of a job. We now know, of course, that most if not all of those earnings were illusory, a product of the housing bubble which was shortly to burst and bring the bank to the brink of insolvency. But even bubblicious illusory earnings aren’t good enough for the stock market.

Central Tendency in Skewed Distributions: A Lesson in Social Justice -- The point being, the lesson of the positive skew, is that the distance between being middle class and being poor is very, very small.

Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality -- There is something almost quaint — but decidedly refreshing — about the commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether “corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty of government to restore a balance of power.

Jubilee. Jubilee. Jubilee. -- Reduce the principle, forgive a portion of the debt, proclaim a jubilee. It would save taxpayers money. It would keep hundreds of thousands of families in their homes.

But it can’t happen if we decide to act like jerks.

Person, Person, Corporate Asset.

And one I missed including in the race-related link dump, that you absolutely should read if you have not already: Teju Cole on The White Savior Industrial Complex.

Every time I try to start drafting a post about Trayvon Martin, I run up against the impossible reach of the issue.

There's enough to say about the kid to fill an entire post, about the injustice of what happened to him. But I can't tease those things out from all the other things: Zimmerman and his history of neighborhood vigilantism; Geraldo Rivera and the bullshit about hoodies; the appalling failure to investigate this crime as it should have been, when it should have been; the Sanford Police Department and their previous failures to deal appropriately with this kind of thing; the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and elsewhere (which I had not heard of before, and which makes my blood run cold); all the way out to parenting black children in this country, or ALEC and its influence on the legislative agenda of many states. It's some kind of monster out of Lovecraft, with tentacles reaching everywhere -- and I don't mean that metaphor in a trivializing fashion. I look at this, and feel my sanity die a little. Along with my hope for humanity.

It's too much to take in, let alone talk about coherently.

Especially when my thoughts sweep outward to take in Shaima Alawadi, or the people whose names no one asks about. And skimming through my browser window to find where those tabs had got to, I passed a bunch I'm keeping for a later post, about capitalism and economic inequality and I'm fooling myself if I pretend these things don't tie together down at the root.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist was talking the other day about how depressing The Wire is, not despite of but because of its brilliance: it shows you how deeply ingrained these issues are in the institutions that make up our society, and how near to impossible change is. I haven't watched more than maybe half a dozen episodes of the show because I can't deal with looking that sort of thing in the eye; I need to stay away in order to preserve my belief that we can improve things. But the problem isn't in the TV show -- it's in the real world. And sometimes you can't avoid staring it in the eye.

The Sanford Police Department will likely face some consequences. Maybe we'll get the Stand Your Ground laws struck down in a few places. But hacking out those roots and digging the whole mess out of the soil of our country . . . I don't know how you do that. Days like this one, I wonder if you can.

I had a bunch of things I meant to post yesterday, but ended up getting all political instead. (I am heartened, though, by the news that at least some organizations are seeing a funding surge. And there's at least one doctor advocating for civil disobedience when the law would threaten the rights and well-being of patients.)

But! The point of this is to post the other stuff!

I neglected to mention this on the 16th, but I have my usual post up at SF Novelists, talking about audience expectations, and whether it's better to be wrong or right about where the story is going.

Next, I'd like to point you at a friend's Kickstarter project, for The Urban Tarot Deck. The existing art for this is pretty awesome; I own a print of the Princess of Swords, and

kniedzw has the Magician. I've been hoping for years that he'd be able to finish the deck (and must confess to a hope that if this project is a success, he'll finish his Silhouette Tarot, which I like even more). So mosey on over to take a look, and if you like what you see, send a few bucks his way.

(Okay, full truth? I am sorely tempted to shell out silly amounts of money to be on one of the remaining cards. A bunch of the models for the existing cards are friends of ours, and I love what Rob did with them; it would be nifty to see what he'd do with me. But, um. Kind of silly amounts of money, for something I cannot even pretend is a business expense.)

Third, cogent analysis of why John Carter tanked. I confess that if anybody ever makes a movie of my books, I would love to have control over various aspects . . . but then I see what happens when somebody with no distance from the subject gets to run the show, and I reconsider. I'd like to believe I would be sensible enough to listen to other people's advice, but who knows? I might be just as short-sighted and detrimental as Stanton was.

Fourth, fellow geeks of a certain stripe may be interested in the trailer for a live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie. I have to admit, watching it breaks my brain a little; I've been a fan of the anime for (ye gods) nearly half my life, and Suzukaze Mayo is the voice of Himura Kenshin. The guy in the trailer . . . is a guy. (When a friend told me they were filming a live-action movie, I asked, only half-joking, whether they were going to cast a woman as Kenshin.) But there are things flashing by in the trailer that have me bouncing in my seat; does that gatling gun mean we're going to get Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu stuff? I must watch and see. :-)

And, to make five (non-political) things, I leave you with The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions.

So I've been mentioning lately the situation surrounding women's rights in the United States (and sometimes elsewhere) -- a situation so appalling, that word is utterly inadequate for describing how I feel about it. The best I can do is to point you at Soraya Chemaly's "Legislators: Women Are Not Cows and Pigs," which contains a handy run-down of the various pieces of jaw-droppingly retrograde legislation being pushed by conservative extremists. It's all there, from the suggestion that we should put a woman's life at risk rather than remove a dead fetus from inside her, to the idea that an employer should be allowed to ask why his female employee wants birth control pills, and then fire her if she says it's to prevent pregnancy.

I wish I were making this shit up.

I am not as good at eloquent rage as Cat Valente is. (Go read that post for a fairly accurate picture of my current internal state.) But I wanted to say, that fundraiser I'm doing? I attached it to the WoT blogging because I thought, this stuff usually has more success when it's got some kind of result attached to it, even a silly one. But really, the point isn't for me to eviscerate WoT merchandising. The point is to raise money for the people fighting back against these attacks. The point is to help Planned Parenthood provide health care to low-income women (though that doesn't help much when the state of Texas knowingly chucks those services out the window), or to make sure battered women have a safe place to go.

If you can spare any money for a cause like that, please do. And do the things that don't require money, too: contact your legislators. Speak out. Make it clear that women are not farm animals, that we have a right to privacy and control of our own bodies, that our sexual behavior is no business of the state's. Fight back.

I want to believe these are the death throes of an old way, and we'll break through into something better. But that won't happen if we don't fight.

Originally posted by

james_nicoll at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by

soldiergrrrl at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by

twbasketcaseat Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by

gabrielleabelleat Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Okay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting ~~very little~~ no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later - on a Sunday - thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

- Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

- If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

- You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

- Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

Originally posted by

deathpixie at Signal Boost: Return of the DDoS

For those wanting to know more about the recent DDoS attacks, yes, it looks like it was the Russian government trying to shut down the dissidents again.

As I said last time, while it's frustrating not to have access, LJ is a lot more than a social network platform. From the article:

"LiveJournal isn’t just a social network. It’s also a platform for organizing civic action. Dozens of network projects and groups mobilize people to solve specific problems — from defending the rights of political prisoners to saving endangered historic architecture in Moscow."

So while I know many are considering the move over to Dreamwidth and other such sites, supporting LJ is a way we can help support those who use it for more than a writing/roleplaying/social venue.

Also, as a FYI, LJ is giving paid users effected by the outage two weeks of paid time as compensation.

(I don't know if my addendum is going to get carried over with that "Boost the Signal" button -- which, btw, is a beautiful little device -- but yeah. While I am likely to be fiddling around with my blog setup in the near future, I am not abandoning LJ, and one of my reasons is what's described above. This isn't a situation of "LJ sucks," it's "LJ is used heavily used in Russia for political activism, and those who don't like it keep attacking their platform." Perversely, therefore, every time they attack it, I get more determined to stay. I will likely set up something on my own domain, because I really ought to have my own blog directly under my own control, but right now, I have no intention of leaving LJ.)

Via

fjm and Charlie Stross, a number that puts the tragedy in Norway into perspective: 80 people dead out of their population is the equivalent of 5000 out of the United States. (Though the final number may have changed since that was posted.) That's the scale of loss Norway has suffered.

And it's a very, very targeted loss. The "summer camp" was a political one, organized by the social-democratic Labour Party. The youths killed there were politically engaged, passionate about their cause. Some of them might well have been potential Prime Ministers, Members of Parliament, movers and shakers in the Labour Party's future. It's like killing thousands of the most committed Young Democrats, or Young Republicans.

As most people know by now, Breivik is not an Islamic terrorist (contrary to the utterly unfounded assertions made by various media figures, at least in the United States, immediately following news of the attacks); he is a self-identified right-wing Christian who opposes multiculturalism and the spread of Muslims in Europe. This post, and this quote from it, sums up the inequality of the reactions based on who's to blame:

"[T]hey’re now pleading for the world not to do what they’ve spent their careers doing — assigning collective blame for an act of terror through guilt-by-association."

And this one . . . this one just makes me want to punch people in the face.

But you know what gives me hope? A quote, whose source I have now lost, from (I think) the Prime Minister of Norway, to the effect that "the proper response to an attack on democracy is more democracy." Amen. I hope the Norwegians don't surrender their ideals because of this terrorist's actions.

A really good post laying out the basics of Japan's response to the earthquake and tsunami.

The thing we need to bear in mind (other than the fact that Japan is a very long country, and most parts of it are hundreds of miles from the epicenter) is that there is no place in the world better-prepared for seismic trouble than Japan. Read through that post. Read about the checklists. Read about the architecture and the failsafes and the emergency warning systems. This is still a tragedy and a disaster, and no amount of human planning can completely mitigate that; ultimately, the planet is stronger than we are. But this would be a much larger tragedy and disaster if they hadn't been ready for it. (Even the situation at the Fukushima reactors isn't as bad as it could have been, though I can't confirm if the writer of that post is right about the scale of leakage there. I hope he is.)

Remember this, the next time some politician in your locality or nation proposes cutting funding for emergency preparedness, be it earthquake, tornado, hurricane, volcano, blizzard, or whatever. It's an easy cut to make in the short term, when you're trying to make a political point about "fiscal responsibility." But I put that inside sarcasm quotes because what you're really doing is gambling that nothing bad is really going to happen, and sooner or later, you lose that bet. Japan knows better than to gamble on that; they're home to some absurdly high percentage of the world's earthquakes. But other countries -- like the U.S. -- aren't so sensible, and places like New Orleans pay the bill.

I want to be more like Japan. I live in California, and I want to believe my state is equally ready for when the Hayward Fault blows. But I don't think we are.

After all the doomful predictions of how it would die in the Senate, it appears that the repeal of the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward gays has passed.

Dear Congress: thank you for my early Christmas present. It's about bloody time.

I have so many things piled up in my head, waiting for the time and energy to say them; I decided to start with this one.

There is still discussion going around concerning the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque." (Which is neither, of course -- but "downtown Islamic community center" doesn't sound as scary, no matter how much the word "community" has been beaten up by those who will say anything to score points against their enemies.) There is still debate about its appropriateness. There is still outrage.

Folks, I am one of those outraged.

I am outraged that this is an issue. That people from thousands of miles away, who maybe have never set foot in New York and never will, have decided it's their job to tell New Yorkers (of the Muslim persuasion or not) what they can and cannot build in their own city; that so many of them are willfully spreading lies on the subject so as to drum up more fear and hatred. I am outraged that our national response to this situation has skewed so far toward xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. I am outraged by this, and the later portions of this, and the attitude so ably skewered by this.

Not only do I want this community center, I want one built on Ground Zero. For real. It would have put me over the moon if I woke up one morning and found the internet blazing with the news that the 9/11 memorial was going to be a tasteful stone carved with the names of those who died, surrounded by an interfaith center dedicated to the peaceful co-existence of Christianity and Islam. Toss in Judaism, too, while you're at it. With maybe a few wings for Hinduism and Buddhism and Wicca and all the rest. To get to the stone, you have to walk through galleries that explain the basic tenets of each religion, acknowledging the different interpretations that have been put on those tenets in different places and times. (And to get through the last door, you have to pass a quiz? No, no, we're trying to be welcoming, here.) I want our memorial to that day to be a giant thumb in the eye of everybody on both sides who believes Christianity and Islam are and must be at war, everybody who wants a return of the Crusades. Show our true enemies that their best efforts will not achieve their goals; our commitment to the ideals of the United States is too strong to be broken by lies and fear.

Except it isn't true. I'm not sure it ever has been; this country stumbles rather than strides toward a more perfect union, bettering itself by accident and the occasional spasm of purposeful change. And sometimes, like now, the spasms yank us in the opposite direction. It's happened to one minority group after another: blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese, Irish back in their day. All I can do is try to make sure I'm not out-shouted by the bigots, that I speak for tolerance whenever I can, to give the lie to the notion that "Americans" feel this way or that. No matter what the news may say, not all of us think the community center is a bad idea. My only problem with it is that I want more, and I'm afraid we won't even get a little.

As someone who wouldn't have been able to vote before your passage, I'm very grateful for your existence.

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