Category: Politics

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I’ve long disliked the term “culture war,” partly because it’s tossed around in a way that trivializes the issues and partly because “War on whatever” framing tends to confuse the issues.

But I keep thinking of a line in Cat Valente’s novel Space Opera about what war is. And when it comes down to it, what we’ve got now is a war: It’s about who gets to be treated as a person, and who doesn’t:

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

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Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting Literary Arts, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…

I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.

I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.

*As ebooks through Kobo

Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.

The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.

It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.

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The part that kills me — and I hope that doesn’t turn out to be literal — is that Trump actually won the popular vote on a platform of hurting large segments of the population. It’s not hidden. It’s not some weird bogus claim made by the opposition. He’s been shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s not just Trump, it’s all the other Republicans riding his coattails as they push against civil rights and promise to punish people for the crime of being different.

That means large segments of the American population either:

  • Want to hurt their neighbors (or at least the people in the next town over, or maybe that big city down the highway, maybe not you, you’re an exception, but everyone else there is a horrible person and needs to be punished).
  • Are willing to inflict massive collateral damage for whatever they think they’ll get out of it.
  • Really aren’t paying attention.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it amounts to the same thing: Trump and the people around him can credibly make excuses about having a mandate to hurt people. Lots of people.

I was really hoping that if nothing else, the Trumpist scapegoat-and-punish brand of politics would be discredited. Instead it’s been rewarded.

I hope the people who voted for him eventually realize: He will turn against you too, just as he turns against everyone the moment they stop being useful to him.

You handed power to someone who’s big on retribution and revenge and just got a court ruling granting him absolute immunity from prosecution. What do you think is going to happen?

And don’t count on anything less cruel from the people around him, because they’ve seen that bullying works and they’ll keep going, tearing down everything they can, blaming some group for the problems it causes, promising to punish them, lather rinse and repeat.

Related reading: Last year A.R. Moxon wrote an insightful piece about how Republicans’ own actions have convinced him that Republicans are fascist. And a “what now?” post from Ken White at Popehat.

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If you haven’t voted yet, make sure you vote in favor of Proposition 3. While court cases have *blocked* 2008’s language defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, that language is still in the state constitution.

And as we’ve seen with, for example, Arizona’s pre-Civil-War law about abortion being reactivated when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, all it takes is another court case.

Proposition 3 removes that language entirely and replaces it with an affirmation of the right to marry, future-proofing marriage equality.

Continue reading →

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Last Friday, I dropped off my ballot for today’s primary election. I’ve got to say, I really appreciate the new approach in LA County of mailing everyone eligible a ballot, maintaining permanent drop boxes at relevant locations (libraries, etc.), and opening some polling places early to accept completed ballots.

MUCH more convenient than needing the time on one specific day and, in elections with a lot of turnout, waiting 45 minutes, an hour, or longer.

The longest I’ve waited was when I was living in Orange County, either 2003 or 2004, and they actually had to apply the “if you’re in line at closing time, you get to vote” rule. Someone brought a box of to-go coffee from the Starbucks down the street (I think Starbucks might have donated it, too?) and was offering it either to the poll workers or to those of us still in line.

The first election in which the county implemented early voting and flexible polling places (instead of requiring you to get to the specific place on your sample ballot) was also the week before COVID-19 hit the area. Now that I think of it, they still didn’t send out an actual ballot by mail unless you requested one. That changed when it became clear COVID wasn’t going to just blow over before November. Since then some of the smaller, local elections have been mail-only.

Four years….WTF

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Option 1: will do some things you want, and some things you don’t.

Option 2: won’t do anything you want, will do all the same things you don’t want that option 1 will do, has promised to do more things you don’t want, undo the things you wanted that have already happened, make it more difficult for you to even have these choices in the future, and has previously demonstrated that they’re willing to go through with all of the above.

And yet I keep seeing people say they’re the same picture???

Really????

It’s like…you need to hire someone to fix your heater. One contractor will fix your heater for the advertised price, but break some of your windows in the process and stop taking your phone calls. The other will rip out your entire heating system and your plumbing, and steal the copper phone lines to make it hard for you to call someone else (I know, outdated metaphor), insist that you broke it yourself and charge extra. And they’ll break your windows too.

A bunch of reviews point out that both of them will break your windows, so they can’t be all that different, right?

It would be great to find someone who would fix your heat without breaking your windows! But there’s a glass factory in town that wants more business and gives all the local contractors kickbacks, so your best bet for that is to hire someone from out of town…but they’re booked until summer.

So you can either go with the one who’ll break things even more, or the one who will fix some things and break others, and then deal with the breakage while you still have heating, plumbing, and a working phone.

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The “bipartisan” immigration bill currently in Congress is a right-winger’s dream, but since Trump wants to run on anti-immigration, the GOP is suddenly opposed to it, arguing that it’s not draconian enough.

Nothing will ever be cruel enough for them, no matter how much Democrats do to appease them. Biden could do everything they asked for, and they’d still insist he was being soft on border control. They need it as a wedge issue. Appeasing them won’t win any points with their base, and it’ll alienate those on the left who want asylum seekers and immigrants in general treated like the actual human beings they are.

This bill is probably DOA at this point. But just in case, I sent a message to my rep advocating for more protections for asylum seekers, not less.