![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[sticky entry]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/entry/sticky_entry.png){kind=small}
When you have made enough things that you have trouble holding all the places you've been in your head at the same time, it is time for a welcome post. So welcome!
I'm Kit Harding, writer and podcast host. I write primarily fiction with the occasional review or essay thrown in for fun, and for a while I was a cohost on WNXS News, a Magic: The Gathering news podcast, which you can find over on Nexus.
I consider myself primarily a fiction writer, but you can find all the places I've been (fiction and non), under the cut!
( Read more... )
Hey, Look! Sources!
Jul. 16th, 2026 07:46 pmLooks like that Taylor Farms rumor now has something a little more substantial attached-- NBC says the FDA is actively investigating them.
However, it's also probably not the only cause; there are likely multiple causes of multiple outbreaks in different spots.
Reuters is also talking about it here. And Marler has gotten into some of the history of it all; apparently it's a bad idea to eat the lettuce at Taco Bell just in general. He's also got some discussion of the statistics and specifically how a lot of states' case counts are probably way too low and states are dragging their heels about reporting and admitting to having an outbreak--there's no way Michigan actually has that many more than any other state, but they are on the ball about reporting.
Unrelatedly beyond the general "the world is terrible," I breathed far too much smog while dropping my car off for repair and coming home via bus and walking.
However, it's also probably not the only cause; there are likely multiple causes of multiple outbreaks in different spots.
Reuters is also talking about it here. And Marler has gotten into some of the history of it all; apparently it's a bad idea to eat the lettuce at Taco Bell just in general. He's also got some discussion of the statistics and specifically how a lot of states' case counts are probably way too low and states are dragging their heels about reporting and admitting to having an outbreak--there's no way Michigan actually has that many more than any other state, but they are on the ball about reporting.
Unrelatedly beyond the general "the world is terrible," I breathed far too much smog while dropping my car off for repair and coming home via bus and walking.
In my last post I alluded to panic-researching the cyclospora, and then in the comments of siderea's post I was reminded that one never truly stops being a librarian and "reference reference" is probably my strongest skill. (To a degree where it often takes me a minute to remember that it *is* a skill and that a lot of people couldn't write this post, although I am very much lamenting that I no longer have access to specialized academic databases with all those lovely medical journals intended for the nursing program.) So instead of panic-researching, I am approaching this like a librarian and we are going to start with scientific research and then branch out to more specific reporting on the current outbreak. As always, I will mention it and give specific reasons for including it if I think a source is questionable; absent that specification if I've included it I think the source is reliable. (And I am looking things up; there's at least one article that did not get included because looking into the journal suggested it's a paper mill.) Please bring it up in the comments if you have some reason to think a source isn't reliable!
If anyone's looking for a general, layman's terms description of cyclospora, there's a good one here. (I am accepting Marler as a reliable source because... well, look at his Wikipedia page. Yes, the blog is probably partially about advertising his law firm, but he has serious background in advocacy about this.)
Now let's talk science!
( Click for Science! )
If anyone's looking for a general, layman's terms description of cyclospora, there's a good one here. (I am accepting Marler as a reliable source because... well, look at his Wikipedia page. Yes, the blog is probably partially about advertising his law firm, but he has serious background in advocacy about this.)
Now let's talk science!
( Click for Science! )
One discovers things when one is frantically searching around for information about the cyclospora. In this particular instance, it is apparently inadvisable to wash your produce with dish soap because it can cause stomach upset if you don't get it all off and it's harder to get it all off for produce than it is for dishes. (And presumably also you're not directly ingesting your dishes.)
I had a very strange bout of food poisoning some weeks ago. In my experience most GI bugs travel down, but this did not. It came on as pain leading into vomiting, and it lasted much of a night and was gone in the morning without the kind of lingering weakness I expect of such things. (Beyond, you know, what you get from having had three hours of sleep; I did call into work for a second day from that.) I threw out some suspect things but wondered what could have caused it, especially when there was no large-scale recall of contaminated frozen pierogies in the next few weeks.
But I washed a nectarine with dish soap, which is not an uncommon thing but I was possibly not as careful about rinsing it as I have been prior to that.
So... I wonder if my food poisoning was because of consuming dish soap residue on the nectarine.
(Also apparently if it gets over 100 degrees in your storage area this can ruin your canned goods.)
Meanwhile, I am anxious about the cyclospora, in part because I do not have full control of the fridge. I expect the house I am moving to in the fall will be amenable to being extremely cautious about the cyclospora but this does not help me now. I can cease eating uncooked produce-- I don't eat a lot of uncooked produce to begin with; my body isn't exactly tolerant of roughage-- but this does not do anything about "does other people's uncooked produce contaminate the fridge and therefore the food I am storing in it which I am planning on eating without further cooking, like bread and butter and leftovers of my cooked food." (They do seem to at least be confining their produce to the produce drawers, and in general my shelf of the fridge is mine and only contains my stuff; this is not like that extremely WTF apartment I toured where they allocated amount of fridge space based on how much rent your specific room was regardless of whether you actually used it or not-- the fridge was almost completely empty when I toured it and I was informed that I would, if I took the room, be confined to one produce drawer as the room was the cheapest in the apartment.)
In the interest of continuing to consume vegetables, I have purchased a jar of artichoke hearts to make into artichoke bars, which are sauteed and then baked, and of course frozen broccoli takes to baking quite well.
Canned food is almost certainly safe because they heat it. No real evidence one way or the other on vinegar. The question is whether the Trader Joe's cornichons I have in a sealed jar are safe--ie, is heating it up to a sufficiently high temp part of sealing a jar the way it would be if you were doing it at home.
Do I need to be concerned about surface? Apparently bleach doesn't kill them, which lets out my usual way of dealing with contaminated surfaces.
I had a very strange bout of food poisoning some weeks ago. In my experience most GI bugs travel down, but this did not. It came on as pain leading into vomiting, and it lasted much of a night and was gone in the morning without the kind of lingering weakness I expect of such things. (Beyond, you know, what you get from having had three hours of sleep; I did call into work for a second day from that.) I threw out some suspect things but wondered what could have caused it, especially when there was no large-scale recall of contaminated frozen pierogies in the next few weeks.
But I washed a nectarine with dish soap, which is not an uncommon thing but I was possibly not as careful about rinsing it as I have been prior to that.
So... I wonder if my food poisoning was because of consuming dish soap residue on the nectarine.
(Also apparently if it gets over 100 degrees in your storage area this can ruin your canned goods.)
Meanwhile, I am anxious about the cyclospora, in part because I do not have full control of the fridge. I expect the house I am moving to in the fall will be amenable to being extremely cautious about the cyclospora but this does not help me now. I can cease eating uncooked produce-- I don't eat a lot of uncooked produce to begin with; my body isn't exactly tolerant of roughage-- but this does not do anything about "does other people's uncooked produce contaminate the fridge and therefore the food I am storing in it which I am planning on eating without further cooking, like bread and butter and leftovers of my cooked food." (They do seem to at least be confining their produce to the produce drawers, and in general my shelf of the fridge is mine and only contains my stuff; this is not like that extremely WTF apartment I toured where they allocated amount of fridge space based on how much rent your specific room was regardless of whether you actually used it or not-- the fridge was almost completely empty when I toured it and I was informed that I would, if I took the room, be confined to one produce drawer as the room was the cheapest in the apartment.)
In the interest of continuing to consume vegetables, I have purchased a jar of artichoke hearts to make into artichoke bars, which are sauteed and then baked, and of course frozen broccoli takes to baking quite well.
Canned food is almost certainly safe because they heat it. No real evidence one way or the other on vinegar. The question is whether the Trader Joe's cornichons I have in a sealed jar are safe--ie, is heating it up to a sufficiently high temp part of sealing a jar the way it would be if you were doing it at home.
Do I need to be concerned about surface? Apparently bleach doesn't kill them, which lets out my usual way of dealing with contaminated surfaces.
Compliance
May. 2nd, 2026 09:52 amI've been hearing sentiment of late that the actual reason for the existence of regulatory compliance is because it's a jobs program for people who went and got fancy college degrees and need office jobs that require those fancy college degrees. Which I initially dismissed as Musa al-Gharbi being Musa al-Gharbi--like, I was going to post about it at some point, but I was waiting for Those People to come out to see if he said anything relevant in there--except this sentiment was also mentioned by How Money Works Uncut in their video about why people are unemployable now, and if this is beginning to get around then I have Thoughts.
Now, I do work in a field that requires a fair amount of regulatory compliance. I like to think this gives me useful perspective; I suspect these people would say that makes me biased and unreliable. I am, however, not actually coming here to argue that all compliance is Good and Necessary.
But some of it really, really is.
I would like to put forth four categories of regulations with associated compliance requirements: written in blood, necessary but not immediately going to kill anyone, obstructive, and well-meaning but inefficiently implemented.
( Read more... )
Now, I do work in a field that requires a fair amount of regulatory compliance. I like to think this gives me useful perspective; I suspect these people would say that makes me biased and unreliable. I am, however, not actually coming here to argue that all compliance is Good and Necessary.
But some of it really, really is.
I would like to put forth four categories of regulations with associated compliance requirements: written in blood, necessary but not immediately going to kill anyone, obstructive, and well-meaning but inefficiently implemented.
( Read more... )
Health Insurance Again
Feb. 7th, 2026 05:55 pmMeanwhile, in the category of "ballot initiatives I would never get away with, but want," banning prior authorization. If a service is covered and an in-network physician prescribes or orders it, they have to cover it without further argument or extra paperwork.
Unfortunately I don't think that one is passable as a ballot initiative, not because any voters would be against it but because that would prompt the entire healthcare lobby to unite and spend millions of dollars eliminating you.
Still actively considering how to draft wording for the other one, though.
Unfortunately I don't think that one is passable as a ballot initiative, not because any voters would be against it but because that would prompt the entire healthcare lobby to unite and spend millions of dollars eliminating you.
Still actively considering how to draft wording for the other one, though.
Ballot Initiatives
Feb. 5th, 2026 06:37 pmI am, after today's adventures in inhaler, seriously contemplating how one would go about putting forth a ballot question requiring that health insurance companies cannot deny a drug someone was already on for reasons of a formulary change--ie, if someone is already on a drug, the insurance company must continue to cover it without requiring any extra paperwork whether or not it's still on the formulary. You'd have to word it fairly carefully, because I'd want to cover both the situations of "we don't cover that drug anymore" and the Flovent event where the company stopped making the brand name but there was still a generic that no one covered.
First one needs to write it, and the attorney general's office apparently invites you to submit drafts for them to comment on the wording of, so there's help available with wording it properly.
One needs at least ten registered voters to do the initial thing, who are willing to have their names and addresses published on the thing and also jump through the hoops of getting a certificate of voter registration. You need to file it before the first Wednesday in August of an odd-numbered year. The Attorney General then announces what's been certified on the first Wednesday in September. After which you file for blank petition forms.
And then you get to the part that requires a team effort, which is collecting 3% of the total votes cast for governor in signatures, no more than 25% of which can come from any one county, between getting your petition forms and fourteen days before the first Wednesday in December. At which point if the Legislature doesn't just do the thing you then need to go out and get .5% of the total votes for governor, with the same county percentage rules, to get it on the actual ballot. (It does not specify whether these must be different people.)
I presume if one is taking on healthcare companies one also wants set up a formal political action committee to solicit donations for some sort of advertising budget once you're at the on-the-ballot stage.
But this looks surprisingly doable, assuming one can recruit a sufficient number of people to spend time running around collecting signatures in other parts of the state. I suppose if I am serious about this the first thing to do would be get some draft wording together and then ask around to try to get nine other people.
(If you couldn't tell, I am in the process of my second time having to switch inhalers because of insurance company shenanigans. They will wish they'd just covered my inhaler by the time I'm done with them.)
First one needs to write it, and the attorney general's office apparently invites you to submit drafts for them to comment on the wording of, so there's help available with wording it properly.
One needs at least ten registered voters to do the initial thing, who are willing to have their names and addresses published on the thing and also jump through the hoops of getting a certificate of voter registration. You need to file it before the first Wednesday in August of an odd-numbered year. The Attorney General then announces what's been certified on the first Wednesday in September. After which you file for blank petition forms.
And then you get to the part that requires a team effort, which is collecting 3% of the total votes cast for governor in signatures, no more than 25% of which can come from any one county, between getting your petition forms and fourteen days before the first Wednesday in December. At which point if the Legislature doesn't just do the thing you then need to go out and get .5% of the total votes for governor, with the same county percentage rules, to get it on the actual ballot. (It does not specify whether these must be different people.)
I presume if one is taking on healthcare companies one also wants set up a formal political action committee to solicit donations for some sort of advertising budget once you're at the on-the-ballot stage.
But this looks surprisingly doable, assuming one can recruit a sufficient number of people to spend time running around collecting signatures in other parts of the state. I suppose if I am serious about this the first thing to do would be get some draft wording together and then ask around to try to get nine other people.
(If you couldn't tell, I am in the process of my second time having to switch inhalers because of insurance company shenanigans. They will wish they'd just covered my inhaler by the time I'm done with them.)
Arisia Thoughts
Jan. 25th, 2026 03:02 pmI dislike Discord as a place for serious conversations and I am deeply annoyed with the Arisia Discord server as a whole at the moment. But do feel free to discuss in the comments and link this around, just be aware you will not be able to leave comments on this journal unless you have a Dreamwidth account. (If you're one of the many people who have no idea who I am, I've been around since the mid-2000s although after the thing with Crystal Huff I defected to Mystery Hunt for several years. For the last three Arisias I've been a panelist, mostly on heavier social-issues panels--this past year my roster included the AI art panel, problematic creators, and intersectionality. And a couple of unplanned evening shifts on coat check.)
This was kicked off by someone in the Discord complaining about being made to feel unwelcome for their political opinions and the resulting discussion causing someone else to leave the server (and presumably the Arisia community, being as they were new and had already expressed concern on that point).
So here's my grand insight: the very first choice is that there needs to be a decision, at base, about what discussion will be permitted. Because people who say things like "I should be able to say that it's possible to be racist against white people at the con" as the first thing they bring up, as their main sticking point for a science fiction convention... those people are not interested in having meaningful discussion; those people are interested in beating back progress. Or even if they can be brought around, the place and people to do that are not convention management staff in a public Discord server.
My stance is that there are some positions that we don't argue with, that as soon as you bring them up you just get kicked from the server, because the mere fact of permitting the discussion is itself saying that it's something that can be argued. (For those familiar with the Nazi bar line, it applies to some things besides Actual Neo-Nazis.) You can have the young, progressive people we want to bring in, or you can have the people who think that being allowed to argue dog-whistling points is their main thing, which is a group that consists mainly of people who were ejected from the community for good reason.
(If anyone's about to bring up my free speech absolutism, that's about government censorship. Arisia is not a government. Private communities have the right to kick out whoever they want as long as they're not discriminating against protected classes.)
Where exactly the line is drawn can be a point of discussion. But there needs to be a line and there needs to be swift action upon it, and convention management needs to be a hell of a lot faster to kick people out for expressing a certain set of opinions than they are now. Like, as soon as someone says "I'm being persecuted for my political opinions" they need to be pushed to define which political opinions, and if it's one of the dog-whistle invalidate-groups-of-people opinions, they need to get told that expressing that opinion again will get them kicked from the server and that needs to be followed through on.
And when those people say "we're not welcome here anymore" in dramatic fashion, the response should not be arguing or trying to talk them around or trying to convince them they're wrong. It should be "Yes, you're right, you're not. We don't want people like you. Go found your own con if you want to wallow in your bitterness."
Which brings us to the other reason I'm posting this here: I suspect if I'd said all that in the channel, I would have been spoken to by the mods because we don't run around telling people they're not welcome.
Which is why I have some doubts about Arisia's ability to rise from the ashes. I don't want to have these doubts. I want to believe Arisia can grow and draw in a new crowd. The fact is, that's going to require kicking out some people who've been around a long time and not being apologetic about it and not permitting them to argue the point and not being shy about publicly saying that they were kicked and why they were kicked. And I don't think anyone in Arisia leadership has the fortitude to do that even it means the survival of the con--or even the willingness to consider the fact that it does mean the survival of the con.
(That's my serious answer. My flip answer to the people who complain about no one wanting to accept their political discourse is "skill issue." I have been managing to run around disagreeing with a number of things that are considered Correct Progressive Positions while continuing to not just be welcome but get put on social issues panels. Learn to discourse respectfully and without invalidating the humanity of the people you're talking to/about like an adult.)
Housing, Again
Nov. 22nd, 2025 02:11 pmOne of the roommates who was going to move with us had a change in her personal circumstances and now can't, so I'm now looking for a share of some kind-- room in apartment, needs to be on a T line (any T line; I work downtown where they all converge) and permit me to keep a car, $900 or less, strong preference for laundry in the building. Any number of people. Cannot have restrictions on what foods can be brought into the house--I'm happy to accommodate "this is the cookware that meat/gluten/whatever cannot touch" but I have enough dietary restrictions that I can't do "you cannot bring meat/gluten/whatever into the house at all."
Incidentally, there are a surprising number of apartment listings that are like "no guests." Now, no overnight guests is a little annoying but I'm more likely to go stay with benign_cremator than he is to come here anyway (his house has a cat) so it's not going to substantially impact my life. But just "no guests" is like... why?
(I also saw one that was "no activism" and I was like "Okay, does this mean you don't want to talk about politics at home or does this mean you're a rabid Trump supporter?")
Incidentally, there are a surprising number of apartment listings that are like "no guests." Now, no overnight guests is a little annoying but I'm more likely to go stay with benign_cremator than he is to come here anyway (his house has a cat) so it's not going to substantially impact my life. But just "no guests" is like... why?
(I also saw one that was "no activism" and I was like "Okay, does this mean you don't want to talk about politics at home or does this mean you're a rabid Trump supporter?")
Looking for Housing
Nov. 16th, 2025 05:21 pmHouse is being sold. Have to be out of house by December 31st.
We are looking for a three-bedroom apartment in the greater Camberivlle that's no more expensive than $900 a person and preferably a bit less, or alternatively a four-bedroom apartment and an additional person.
I am also looking for help with the physical elements of moving, given that what COVID did to my heart is going to interfere somewhat with the moving-furniture stuff.
Also possibly a backup place to stay for a bit if I can't find an apartment in that timeframe.
We are looking for a three-bedroom apartment in the greater Camberivlle that's no more expensive than $900 a person and preferably a bit less, or alternatively a four-bedroom apartment and an additional person.
I am also looking for help with the physical elements of moving, given that what COVID did to my heart is going to interfere somewhat with the moving-furniture stuff.
Also possibly a backup place to stay for a bit if I can't find an apartment in that timeframe.
Open-Source Machismo
Oct. 19th, 2025 02:24 pmSo LibreOffice does not come with autosave enabled by default.
It's surprising that it took me this long to realize that, but *autorecover* comes by default (set for every half-hour, which I think is a bit long) so it hasn't really come up until I had a few crashes in ways that didn't trigger the autorecover. What I actually went looking for was whether there were backup copies somewhere, but instead I came upon a bunch of posts in various discussion places of people going "Why is this not enabled by default" and people responding, essentially, "if you can't handle saving manually go back to Windows."
It does *exist*, but you have to go like four menus deep to enable it.
There is no reason not to default to autosave being on except attitude.
Half the time I wonder if open-source people actually *want* uptake of their stuff or if they're hoping they can keep out the undesirables by making it hard to use.
It's surprising that it took me this long to realize that, but *autorecover* comes by default (set for every half-hour, which I think is a bit long) so it hasn't really come up until I had a few crashes in ways that didn't trigger the autorecover. What I actually went looking for was whether there were backup copies somewhere, but instead I came upon a bunch of posts in various discussion places of people going "Why is this not enabled by default" and people responding, essentially, "if you can't handle saving manually go back to Windows."
It does *exist*, but you have to go like four menus deep to enable it.
There is no reason not to default to autosave being on except attitude.
Half the time I wonder if open-source people actually *want* uptake of their stuff or if they're hoping they can keep out the undesirables by making it hard to use.
Assorted Thoughts on Vance
Sep. 4th, 2025 10:48 pmsiderea posted this essay about Vance and now I have Thoughts, because I too have been wondering whether Trump dying and Vance in charge would be better, but apparently from an entirely different angle than most people. Because while I didn't know Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel, I did read his book back when it was first published. He did not, from his memoir, strike me as crazy, but I do remember a lot of people calling him a poser Appalachian who was appropriating their culture while not really belonging to it. I was unclear on what percentage of that was to do with the not-one-of-us from his changing of social class (thinking very much of this essay from siderea, and in particular the part where she mentions her grad school obliquely warning people about how getting the degree might lead to people thinking of them as class traitors, paired with the passage in Hillbilly Elegy where Vance makes a frantic phone call from the bathroom at a fancy law dinner to get someone more used to such situations to tell him what fork to use) versus him genuinely talking about aspects of the culture he hadn't experienced, but I remember the book being both lauded and backlashed at the time. I was also a bit startled by the appearance of Amy Chua as Vance's mentor-- not that I know that much about her, but I was like "Wait, from the tiger mother thing?"
(I startled my coworkers during the couchfucking thing, because I was like "Okay, it's been a while since I read it but I am certain I would have remembered that if it was in there" and they were like "You've read it?")
Again, Vance didn't seem crazy, and he certainly didn't seem like someone who would fall in with Trumpism. One of the things I have been trying and failing to do is reconcile the ideas espoused in the book with committing to being Trump's lackey, because the one really does not obviously follow to the other. Knowing he was subsequently mentored by Peter Thiel makes him make so much more sense.
But even without "how did we get from there to here" making sense, I was not wondering whether Vance becoming president would be a return to sanity in the executive. Vance has hitched his star to Trumpism at this point. Making an about-face return to sanity and respect for rule of law and the courts would guarantee Vance falls into irrelevance. One thing everyone agrees on is that they don't like signs of ideological corruption in their leaders--even people who shrug at actual corruption will get upset if it becomes too obvious that a politician doesn't actually believe the things they're espousing, or won't act on beliefs they claim to hold. (See also why Collins and Murkowski get so much attention. They keep gesturing at sanity but not actually following through on it. If they just voted for things without turning it into a production about how "This is amoral but I'm voting for it anyway for ~reasons~" they wouldn't get nearly so much heat for it from either side.) Vance cannot make any kind of return to sanity and rule of law without it being an outright admission of cold-bloodedly going along with Trump solely for power, at which point the naked power grab is too obvious and uncloaked in ideology for anyone to be willing to play along with it.
No, what I was wondering is whether Vance, lacking Trump's cult of personality, might have less of a stranglehold on Congress than Trump does. Because while Vance is committed, there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who could still gracefully back away, and Republicans are increasingly aware that people hate what they're actually doing to such a degree that they can't hold town halls--and no one likes Vance. They can't take action against Trump without putting themselves at electoral risk--but I wondered if they might be able to rein in Vance, since he isn't exactly popular. If they might be willing, were Vance the one in charge, to do things like revoke the tariffs or hold legitimate threat of impeachment over Vance if he goes too far, since it really wouldn't take that many Republicans backing away gracefully for the Democrats to force the proceedings.
Of course, that would imply that we're not yet at the point where Vance could respond to that by straight-up conducting a military coup, which is unfortunately not a given. Vance, unlike Trump, is competent. Vance, unlike Trump, would probably succeed if he tried a military coup.
This seems to be an unusual angle to come at it from, though, and I'm curious why that is. Possibly some of this is that I've been getting most of my news from The Bulwark, and I really do recommend adding it to your news diet--it was founded by the sane Republicans who stuck to their Not Trump principles, so it is being run by a bunch of people who genuinely adore John McCain. If you are looking for where the "party I disagree with, not the party that scares me" people went, well, several of them went and founded a Substack news site. And they don't talk about Vance much and on the rare occasion they do it's not terribly complimentary, so I already had some signal that he's not a return to Republican sanity. They're all about country over party there but they were Republicans once upon a time and some of them risked a lot, professionally speaking, in the course of founding the site. If they saw signs of rationality in the Republican upper leadership they would be all over it. (My primary news diet, for the curious: the free version of The Bulwark, Heather Cox Richardson's letters, and Josh Barro and Ken White's podcast Serious Trouble. Occasionally I will also watch a TL;DR News video on Nebula, and sometimes the videoessayists and craft newsletterists I follow will take a dip into politics like Lindsay Ellis's Palestine video or Scalzi's intermittent politics blog posts on Whatever.)
Incidentally, this can also be held up as an example of your framing making a big difference in whether people believe you--you've seen me make the occasional annoyed link to someone wandering down the leftist conspiracy rabbit hole. "A subset of the wealthy is deliberately accelerating our progression into complete societal collapse so they can make money off it and there is a man behind the man dictating Trump's behavior" sounds ridiculous when you phrase it like that and you aren't going to actually convince anyone who wasn't already inclined to listen to you. "Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel and has a deep ideological belief that democracy is bad and here are all these examples of these people talking about their plans" is saying a very similar thing--there is a cult of rich guys trying to destroy democracy for Reasons--but it sounds a lot more believable, enough so that I'm like "okay, this makes things I was already observing make sense in a way that comes with receipts and doesn't sound like you're trying to get me to join a cult." (I mean, cults as a general rule also don't sound like they're trying to get you to join cults, but there are no specific actions being prescribed here beyond "don't trust this guy who you already didn't trust," so.)
(I startled my coworkers during the couchfucking thing, because I was like "Okay, it's been a while since I read it but I am certain I would have remembered that if it was in there" and they were like "You've read it?")
Again, Vance didn't seem crazy, and he certainly didn't seem like someone who would fall in with Trumpism. One of the things I have been trying and failing to do is reconcile the ideas espoused in the book with committing to being Trump's lackey, because the one really does not obviously follow to the other. Knowing he was subsequently mentored by Peter Thiel makes him make so much more sense.
But even without "how did we get from there to here" making sense, I was not wondering whether Vance becoming president would be a return to sanity in the executive. Vance has hitched his star to Trumpism at this point. Making an about-face return to sanity and respect for rule of law and the courts would guarantee Vance falls into irrelevance. One thing everyone agrees on is that they don't like signs of ideological corruption in their leaders--even people who shrug at actual corruption will get upset if it becomes too obvious that a politician doesn't actually believe the things they're espousing, or won't act on beliefs they claim to hold. (See also why Collins and Murkowski get so much attention. They keep gesturing at sanity but not actually following through on it. If they just voted for things without turning it into a production about how "This is amoral but I'm voting for it anyway for ~reasons~" they wouldn't get nearly so much heat for it from either side.) Vance cannot make any kind of return to sanity and rule of law without it being an outright admission of cold-bloodedly going along with Trump solely for power, at which point the naked power grab is too obvious and uncloaked in ideology for anyone to be willing to play along with it.
No, what I was wondering is whether Vance, lacking Trump's cult of personality, might have less of a stranglehold on Congress than Trump does. Because while Vance is committed, there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who could still gracefully back away, and Republicans are increasingly aware that people hate what they're actually doing to such a degree that they can't hold town halls--and no one likes Vance. They can't take action against Trump without putting themselves at electoral risk--but I wondered if they might be able to rein in Vance, since he isn't exactly popular. If they might be willing, were Vance the one in charge, to do things like revoke the tariffs or hold legitimate threat of impeachment over Vance if he goes too far, since it really wouldn't take that many Republicans backing away gracefully for the Democrats to force the proceedings.
Of course, that would imply that we're not yet at the point where Vance could respond to that by straight-up conducting a military coup, which is unfortunately not a given. Vance, unlike Trump, is competent. Vance, unlike Trump, would probably succeed if he tried a military coup.
This seems to be an unusual angle to come at it from, though, and I'm curious why that is. Possibly some of this is that I've been getting most of my news from The Bulwark, and I really do recommend adding it to your news diet--it was founded by the sane Republicans who stuck to their Not Trump principles, so it is being run by a bunch of people who genuinely adore John McCain. If you are looking for where the "party I disagree with, not the party that scares me" people went, well, several of them went and founded a Substack news site. And they don't talk about Vance much and on the rare occasion they do it's not terribly complimentary, so I already had some signal that he's not a return to Republican sanity. They're all about country over party there but they were Republicans once upon a time and some of them risked a lot, professionally speaking, in the course of founding the site. If they saw signs of rationality in the Republican upper leadership they would be all over it. (My primary news diet, for the curious: the free version of The Bulwark, Heather Cox Richardson's letters, and Josh Barro and Ken White's podcast Serious Trouble. Occasionally I will also watch a TL;DR News video on Nebula, and sometimes the videoessayists and craft newsletterists I follow will take a dip into politics like Lindsay Ellis's Palestine video or Scalzi's intermittent politics blog posts on Whatever.)
Incidentally, this can also be held up as an example of your framing making a big difference in whether people believe you--you've seen me make the occasional annoyed link to someone wandering down the leftist conspiracy rabbit hole. "A subset of the wealthy is deliberately accelerating our progression into complete societal collapse so they can make money off it and there is a man behind the man dictating Trump's behavior" sounds ridiculous when you phrase it like that and you aren't going to actually convince anyone who wasn't already inclined to listen to you. "Vance was mentored by Peter Thiel and has a deep ideological belief that democracy is bad and here are all these examples of these people talking about their plans" is saying a very similar thing--there is a cult of rich guys trying to destroy democracy for Reasons--but it sounds a lot more believable, enough so that I'm like "okay, this makes things I was already observing make sense in a way that comes with receipts and doesn't sound like you're trying to get me to join a cult." (I mean, cults as a general rule also don't sound like they're trying to get you to join cults, but there are no specific actions being prescribed here beyond "don't trust this guy who you already didn't trust," so.)
Messing with about:config
Aug. 22nd, 2025 08:01 pmI am always excessively pleased with myself when I successfully go beyond the instructions while messing with computers. It's just something about the fact that I figured a thing out by myself, even if it's a small thing. I messed with my settings and it worked! (This is how I justify my use of Linux. I don't do a lot of messing around with its scripts--but I have the option, when something annoys me enough.)
In this case, the problem was actually my browser, not my operating system. I updated Firefox and disabling the AI chatbot was no longer sufficient; I had to disable a new integrated AI summary pop-up. (A profoundly annoying one. I am very disappointed in you, Firefox.)
Now, the thing I originally set to false was browser.ml.chat.enabled. This disabled the AI chatbot.
New update added the AI summary pop-up every time I clicked on a link. The internet suggested that the thing I needed to disable to deactivate the entire integrated AI was browser.ml.enable, so I set that to false.
This did not get rid of the AI summary pop-up.
Rather than go hunting for more precise instructions, I went "hey, browser.ml seems to be common thread here; I wonder what else is under browser.ml?" As it turns out, a lot of things, some of which are bolded and all of which are named descriptively enough that you can tell what their deal is. One of these things is browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, which seemed like it might be thing I was trying to get rid of. So I set that to false and went back to click on some links.
No pop-up.
I am cautiously optimistic that this has fixed the problem.
(Yes, this is extremely basic problem-solving. But it's unusual for me to actively problem-solve my computer rather than go find a ready-made solution on Reddit.)
In this case, the problem was actually my browser, not my operating system. I updated Firefox and disabling the AI chatbot was no longer sufficient; I had to disable a new integrated AI summary pop-up. (A profoundly annoying one. I am very disappointed in you, Firefox.)
Now, the thing I originally set to false was browser.ml.chat.enabled. This disabled the AI chatbot.
New update added the AI summary pop-up every time I clicked on a link. The internet suggested that the thing I needed to disable to deactivate the entire integrated AI was browser.ml.enable, so I set that to false.
This did not get rid of the AI summary pop-up.
Rather than go hunting for more precise instructions, I went "hey, browser.ml seems to be common thread here; I wonder what else is under browser.ml?" As it turns out, a lot of things, some of which are bolded and all of which are named descriptively enough that you can tell what their deal is. One of these things is browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled, which seemed like it might be thing I was trying to get rid of. So I set that to false and went back to click on some links.
No pop-up.
I am cautiously optimistic that this has fixed the problem.
(Yes, this is extremely basic problem-solving. But it's unusual for me to actively problem-solve my computer rather than go find a ready-made solution on Reddit.)
Sinners & Stardust Assaults
Aug. 19th, 2025 09:02 pmSmart Bitches Trashy Books has a timeline (sexual assault; NSFW) of what happened at Sinners & Stardust, which is a convention I was not familiar with until this news hit FFA.
This is, incidentally, where radical-feminism-type thinking leads us: when you believe that all sexual harm comes from The Penis, you wind up in a position where you don't believe it's assault when women do it to men, and... it absolutely can be, and from the descriptions this isn't even questionable. It is absolutely assault. And given that bit with the AirTag, some techno-stalking as well. (Imagine if he didn't have an iPhone; he might never have known about that part, and that part could have been incredibly dangerous.)
This is, incidentally, where radical-feminism-type thinking leads us: when you believe that all sexual harm comes from The Penis, you wind up in a position where you don't believe it's assault when women do it to men, and... it absolutely can be, and from the descriptions this isn't even questionable. It is absolutely assault. And given that bit with the AirTag, some techno-stalking as well. (Imagine if he didn't have an iPhone; he might never have known about that part, and that part could have been incredibly dangerous.)
Leftist Conspiracy Theories
Aug. 5th, 2025 11:45 pmI think it can be as dangerous to overestimate your enemies as to underestimate them. It's more dangerous to slightly underestimate than to slightly overestimate, so you want your margin for error on the overestimation side, but if you overestimate them dramatically it tends to lead to a feeling of hopelessness, of not acting when you really should.
What I'm actually trying to figure out here is why this essay rubs me the wrong way in a way people's frequent comparisons to the Weimar Republic don't. Because they're both predictions, and not even that dissimilar, and both contain warnings that the assumption that democratic norms will prevail is a problem, is hindering the appropriate reaction. And I would agree that much is true, even; there is an assumption that democratic norms will prevail that really isn't warranted and is making it more likely that they won't.
I think it comes down to the assumption of competence. Because she seems to think that there is a coalition of tech bros controlling the situation in a man-behind-the-man way, who are actively pushing things to go the way they're going in order to pick up the pieces out of the resultant crashed society, and that these people are sufficiently competent to stage assassinations once we get far enough along the path that a staged assassination would be politically useful to them. And, like, I don't think that. I don't think anyone here is engaging in any kind of long-term planning. (Among other things, competent people would not be trying to downsize the intelligence apparatus. They might change who we're allied with, but they wouldn't downsize. Being aware of who outside the country wants to destroy it at any given moment is important to every government, including autocracies.)
The rhetorical trap here, I think, is the assumption that they must know what they're doing--that if they're acting in these visibly incredibly stupid ways, there must be a reason for it. That's the root of all conspiracy theories, left and right. The belief that there has to be an explanation beyond the fact that the world is chaos and some people are incompetent. I mean, there's always an explanation in the sense that everyone has motives and no one is the villain in their own story, and I do believe that it's important to try to understand your enemy, but sometimes people are incompetent. Sometimes they manage to rise to powerful positions despite being incompetent. Sometimes they were at one point at least somewhat competent and then got their brains fried by ketamine.
The thing is, them not knowing what they're doing doesn't actually make them less dangerous. It makes it more possible to fight it, in that it makes it possible at all to hope that resistance will accomplish something. But people can be staggeringly incompetent, have no idea what they're doing, and still succeed at taking over the country and building concentration camps and killing people. All you need to do to realize that is look at Operation Paperclip; we imported all these war-crime scientists in order to get science out of them and we got very little science out of them despite forgiving all the war crimes, because the majority of the Nazi scientists weren't actually very good at science. There's this myth of Nazi competence that seems to extend to the neo-Nazis. There's this myth of Soviet excellence that also still exists among a certain breed of leftist. It's easier than going "yup, they totally are this incompetent but also you need to react to them like they're actually good at stuff because you can get surprisingly far by being evil and incompetent if you get high enough in the bureaucracy."
(Also there's a logical flaw in this argument: either the MAGA people are old and dying off and the vast majority of young people aren't Republicans, or the MAGA coalition is now being economically controlled by hiring them for ICE to such a degree that they no longer need Trump's cult of personality. These two things are mutually exclusive.)
What I'm actually trying to figure out here is why this essay rubs me the wrong way in a way people's frequent comparisons to the Weimar Republic don't. Because they're both predictions, and not even that dissimilar, and both contain warnings that the assumption that democratic norms will prevail is a problem, is hindering the appropriate reaction. And I would agree that much is true, even; there is an assumption that democratic norms will prevail that really isn't warranted and is making it more likely that they won't.
I think it comes down to the assumption of competence. Because she seems to think that there is a coalition of tech bros controlling the situation in a man-behind-the-man way, who are actively pushing things to go the way they're going in order to pick up the pieces out of the resultant crashed society, and that these people are sufficiently competent to stage assassinations once we get far enough along the path that a staged assassination would be politically useful to them. And, like, I don't think that. I don't think anyone here is engaging in any kind of long-term planning. (Among other things, competent people would not be trying to downsize the intelligence apparatus. They might change who we're allied with, but they wouldn't downsize. Being aware of who outside the country wants to destroy it at any given moment is important to every government, including autocracies.)
The rhetorical trap here, I think, is the assumption that they must know what they're doing--that if they're acting in these visibly incredibly stupid ways, there must be a reason for it. That's the root of all conspiracy theories, left and right. The belief that there has to be an explanation beyond the fact that the world is chaos and some people are incompetent. I mean, there's always an explanation in the sense that everyone has motives and no one is the villain in their own story, and I do believe that it's important to try to understand your enemy, but sometimes people are incompetent. Sometimes they manage to rise to powerful positions despite being incompetent. Sometimes they were at one point at least somewhat competent and then got their brains fried by ketamine.
The thing is, them not knowing what they're doing doesn't actually make them less dangerous. It makes it more possible to fight it, in that it makes it possible at all to hope that resistance will accomplish something. But people can be staggeringly incompetent, have no idea what they're doing, and still succeed at taking over the country and building concentration camps and killing people. All you need to do to realize that is look at Operation Paperclip; we imported all these war-crime scientists in order to get science out of them and we got very little science out of them despite forgiving all the war crimes, because the majority of the Nazi scientists weren't actually very good at science. There's this myth of Nazi competence that seems to extend to the neo-Nazis. There's this myth of Soviet excellence that also still exists among a certain breed of leftist. It's easier than going "yup, they totally are this incompetent but also you need to react to them like they're actually good at stuff because you can get surprisingly far by being evil and incompetent if you get high enough in the bureaucracy."
(Also there's a logical flaw in this argument: either the MAGA people are old and dying off and the vast majority of young people aren't Republicans, or the MAGA coalition is now being economically controlled by hiring them for ICE to such a degree that they no longer need Trump's cult of personality. These two things are mutually exclusive.)
Stanley Cups
Jul. 30th, 2025 07:00 pmJust curious, has anyone here heard about the Stanley Cup Trend? Apparently this is a Thing.
Media Analysis
Jul. 24th, 2025 10:46 pmI watched this video and now I have Thoughts.
Because she had me until the end. Things are capsules of their time, that's important to look at, and "this media has Issues" really needs to be decoupled from "it is morally wrong to like this piece of media." She coins the term "virtue mirroring" for the belief that the media you watch reflects your internal morality and notes that this belief isn't a good thing and can actually get in the way of robust critical analysis because people wind up in a position of refusing to criticize because they connect their morality
At the end, though, she says something I disagree with: that media which shows problematic behavior must show the characters getting punished for it in some way. She gives the example of someone she knows complaining about You, which I haven't watched, because the last season didn't trust the audience to figure out who the villain was and instead hammered it home very forcefully, and that her response to that complaint is "Well a lot of people didn't get who the villain was so this was necessary." This is, incidentally, the same complaint I have about the last season of Deep Space Nine, in which the writers went way over-the-top on Dukat and Winn because people in the audience had gotten a bit too absorbed in Dukat as being cool and trying to downplay his evil and they were trying to Seriously Drive Home that Dukat is evil.
It is not our responsibility as writers to cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience.
Now, I get that she's apparently had a lot of guys who watched How I Met Your Mother tell her they've taken the date-rapist character as an example to follow, but I also think she's overplaying the extent to which HIMYM caused that versus happened to be the fixation for men who would otherwise have read The Game or something. The kind of man who gets naked without invitation in a woman's apartment in order to get her to sleep with him was going to do something regardless.
It's not about whether you can write a complex or interesting story in which the morally reprehensible characters get punished for their moral reprehensibility. Categorically, you can. But there are specific types of complex and interesting story, stories that are worth being told, that are not like that. Where the characters don't get punished, where the terrible characters go free, where you are expected to do some of the work. More to the point, the insistence that the characters who do bad things must be punished for that undermines the rest of her point: that we need to be able to read media critically. Spoon-feeding isn't going to help with that.
And there will always be some portion of your audience who doesn't get it no matter how hard you drive the matter home. There are people who seriously think Lolita is romanticizing Humbert. You will never have a piece of media that doesn't have some substantial portion of its audience miss the point. Saying that media needs to make sure the bad characters are punished? That's still a kind of virtue mirroring. Sure, the rest of the video is letting you off from punishing yourself for liking the Problematic media, but it's still saying media needs to live up to a certain type of virtue or it's automatically contributing to what's wrong with society.
It's still encouraging exactly what the rest of the video purports to be arguing against.
Because she had me until the end. Things are capsules of their time, that's important to look at, and "this media has Issues" really needs to be decoupled from "it is morally wrong to like this piece of media." She coins the term "virtue mirroring" for the belief that the media you watch reflects your internal morality and notes that this belief isn't a good thing and can actually get in the way of robust critical analysis because people wind up in a position of refusing to criticize because they connect their morality
At the end, though, she says something I disagree with: that media which shows problematic behavior must show the characters getting punished for it in some way. She gives the example of someone she knows complaining about You, which I haven't watched, because the last season didn't trust the audience to figure out who the villain was and instead hammered it home very forcefully, and that her response to that complaint is "Well a lot of people didn't get who the villain was so this was necessary." This is, incidentally, the same complaint I have about the last season of Deep Space Nine, in which the writers went way over-the-top on Dukat and Winn because people in the audience had gotten a bit too absorbed in Dukat as being cool and trying to downplay his evil and they were trying to Seriously Drive Home that Dukat is evil.
It is not our responsibility as writers to cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience.
Now, I get that she's apparently had a lot of guys who watched How I Met Your Mother tell her they've taken the date-rapist character as an example to follow, but I also think she's overplaying the extent to which HIMYM caused that versus happened to be the fixation for men who would otherwise have read The Game or something. The kind of man who gets naked without invitation in a woman's apartment in order to get her to sleep with him was going to do something regardless.
It's not about whether you can write a complex or interesting story in which the morally reprehensible characters get punished for their moral reprehensibility. Categorically, you can. But there are specific types of complex and interesting story, stories that are worth being told, that are not like that. Where the characters don't get punished, where the terrible characters go free, where you are expected to do some of the work. More to the point, the insistence that the characters who do bad things must be punished for that undermines the rest of her point: that we need to be able to read media critically. Spoon-feeding isn't going to help with that.
And there will always be some portion of your audience who doesn't get it no matter how hard you drive the matter home. There are people who seriously think Lolita is romanticizing Humbert. You will never have a piece of media that doesn't have some substantial portion of its audience miss the point. Saying that media needs to make sure the bad characters are punished? That's still a kind of virtue mirroring. Sure, the rest of the video is letting you off from punishing yourself for liking the Problematic media, but it's still saying media needs to live up to a certain type of virtue or it's automatically contributing to what's wrong with society.
It's still encouraging exactly what the rest of the video purports to be arguing against.
4th of July Songs
Jul. 4th, 2025 11:06 amSo this year I have two songs to plug for these times. The first is my annual suggestion of Lucy Wainright Roche's "Fifth of July" which has been getting ever more relevant in these times. It's a commentary on the duality of America, and a patriotism that's about worrying about the direction of the country. ("And I'd like to just run but when all's said and done, I'm still in the business of trying.")
The other one, new for this year, is Sassafrass's "Somebody Will," which I would not normally consider a Fourth of July song. It's about the quest to form a Mars colony, after all. But what it's also about is striving for a future you are never going to live to see, and staying on track with not giving up on that future just because you won't live to see it. And the reality is that bringing the country back from this experience is going to be a generations-long project, something most of us won't live to see. I might, if I'm not killed outright by whatever comes, but I might not, and most of my friends are older than me and probably never will. But you do it anyway so other people might live to see it.
The other one, new for this year, is Sassafrass's "Somebody Will," which I would not normally consider a Fourth of July song. It's about the quest to form a Mars colony, after all. But what it's also about is striving for a future you are never going to live to see, and staying on track with not giving up on that future just because you won't live to see it. And the reality is that bringing the country back from this experience is going to be a generations-long project, something most of us won't live to see. I might, if I'm not killed outright by whatever comes, but I might not, and most of my friends are older than me and probably never will. But you do it anyway so other people might live to see it.
Observations on Safety
Jun. 14th, 2025 10:03 amYesterday two things happened: I went to my first Dyke March and I had an interesting conversation with my boss about trans rights.
The second one was directly related to the first one, as I mentioned what I was doing with my evening, which resulted in my explaining what it was ("Pride's more radical cousin") to another coworker, and I discovered that my boss has an odd opinion on trans rights which I have never heard anyone express before, which can be summed up as "people should pick a gender and stick with it." People transitioning have always been there, she is aware (because she knew them when she was young), but you used to have to put effort into transitioning, and she's firmly behind that. But once you have put effort into it then you're fine, as long as you have a somewhat conventional gender expression for whatever gender you pick.
Which is very much not a version of this argument I have ever heard anyone advance, and one I very much disagree with. (And I think she's conflating "people on the internet" with the majority of queer people.) But not a discussion I felt unsafe during, even as I disagree with the perspective, and not one I will be complaining to anyone about-- part of my relief that no one at my job is scrutinizing everything I say in a bid to take it in the most offensive way possible is extending that same grace to other people.
So then I went to the Dyke March and was unprepared for how very Palestine-forward it was going to be. (And can I just point out how weird it is that everything is so Palestine-forward these days? It wasn't even focused on queer Palestinians, just "we are gathering for this wholly unrelated issue and we need to make sure that everyone knows we are in favor of freeing Palestine!" We are apparently allergic to issue-specific gatherings now.) I was expecting some amount of "free Palestine" stuff, partly because of that everything and partly because Jews at Pride was becoming an issue even before the current escalation of hostilities; witness that debacle a few years back with Jewish Pride flag. The Dyke March has more radicals and with more radicals comes more people who are fixated on Palestine. But I wasn't expecting it to be so very forward that I felt unsafe just being there.
To be clear, it's not that I approve of Israel's behavior in Palestine; I absolutely do not. However, in that particular crowd, I am acutely aware that many people--maybe even a majority of people--are mentally adding "by destroying Israel" to the end of that chant, and that those people are lumping in "all Jews that don't think Israel should be destroyed" with Israel itself. And so when I'm walking in a march that is much more acutely a protest than the Pride parade, waving a "Genitals =/= Gender" sign, and suddenly everyone around me is chanting about freeing Palestine... well, one becomes aware of walking in a crowd that would forbid you from attending if they knew what you are. That thinks your very existence makes them unsafe. That would justify it if someone killed you.
And the thing is, if it weren't for that, the Dyke March would be more my scene than Pride itself. Smaller, the tables are mostly local artists or community organizations, and it's more overtly a protest. (Also apparently more people selling books. Pride this year was curiously devoid of booksellers.)
And I just find it interesting that I felt entirely safe having a conversation with someone who very much does not like the way transness is currently manifesting in the world and felt quite unsafe in the crowd of people who are supposedly my community.
(I am tempted to get one of the Jewish Pride flags for next year. Walking around with one of those is kind of inviting trouble, and I don't think I'd try it at the actual Dyke March-- I think just wearing it might in and of itself be enough to get kicked out--but I am quite tempted.)
The second one was directly related to the first one, as I mentioned what I was doing with my evening, which resulted in my explaining what it was ("Pride's more radical cousin") to another coworker, and I discovered that my boss has an odd opinion on trans rights which I have never heard anyone express before, which can be summed up as "people should pick a gender and stick with it." People transitioning have always been there, she is aware (because she knew them when she was young), but you used to have to put effort into transitioning, and she's firmly behind that. But once you have put effort into it then you're fine, as long as you have a somewhat conventional gender expression for whatever gender you pick.
Which is very much not a version of this argument I have ever heard anyone advance, and one I very much disagree with. (And I think she's conflating "people on the internet" with the majority of queer people.) But not a discussion I felt unsafe during, even as I disagree with the perspective, and not one I will be complaining to anyone about-- part of my relief that no one at my job is scrutinizing everything I say in a bid to take it in the most offensive way possible is extending that same grace to other people.
So then I went to the Dyke March and was unprepared for how very Palestine-forward it was going to be. (And can I just point out how weird it is that everything is so Palestine-forward these days? It wasn't even focused on queer Palestinians, just "we are gathering for this wholly unrelated issue and we need to make sure that everyone knows we are in favor of freeing Palestine!" We are apparently allergic to issue-specific gatherings now.) I was expecting some amount of "free Palestine" stuff, partly because of that everything and partly because Jews at Pride was becoming an issue even before the current escalation of hostilities; witness that debacle a few years back with Jewish Pride flag. The Dyke March has more radicals and with more radicals comes more people who are fixated on Palestine. But I wasn't expecting it to be so very forward that I felt unsafe just being there.
To be clear, it's not that I approve of Israel's behavior in Palestine; I absolutely do not. However, in that particular crowd, I am acutely aware that many people--maybe even a majority of people--are mentally adding "by destroying Israel" to the end of that chant, and that those people are lumping in "all Jews that don't think Israel should be destroyed" with Israel itself. And so when I'm walking in a march that is much more acutely a protest than the Pride parade, waving a "Genitals =/= Gender" sign, and suddenly everyone around me is chanting about freeing Palestine... well, one becomes aware of walking in a crowd that would forbid you from attending if they knew what you are. That thinks your very existence makes them unsafe. That would justify it if someone killed you.
And the thing is, if it weren't for that, the Dyke March would be more my scene than Pride itself. Smaller, the tables are mostly local artists or community organizations, and it's more overtly a protest. (Also apparently more people selling books. Pride this year was curiously devoid of booksellers.)
And I just find it interesting that I felt entirely safe having a conversation with someone who very much does not like the way transness is currently manifesting in the world and felt quite unsafe in the crowd of people who are supposedly my community.
(I am tempted to get one of the Jewish Pride flags for next year. Walking around with one of those is kind of inviting trouble, and I don't think I'd try it at the actual Dyke March-- I think just wearing it might in and of itself be enough to get kicked out--but I am quite tempted.)
I set DOM popups allowed to a null value. I essentially did what I did with NoScript: forced it to make me whitelist individual sites. Because I am the sort of person who prefers to brute force my internet blocking. (Doing scriptblocking this way is extremely customizable, subverts some types of paywall, and blocks a whole host of annoying things--yes, you have to spend time whitelisting multiple bits of every site you go to because it requires whitelisting scripts at the individual level, but every time I use someone else's computer I marvel at how annoying the internet is because I have rid myself of so much of it.)
Except that while this worked for a while, it abruptly stopped working, and I cannot figure out why, because the field is still set to a null value, but it doesn't block pop-ups anymore.
Except that while this worked for a while, it abruptly stopped working, and I cannot figure out why, because the field is still set to a null value, but it doesn't block pop-ups anymore.
