kinesthetic chutzpah

trying to guess at how bad things might get keeps making me extra-sad about how bad things already are. we were already living under a lizard-person; we just gave him a pass on it because he was such a gosh-darn nice guy.

it sounds really tinfoil-hat when i put it that way, and i don't mean it literally. (that i know of!) but…

i keep seeing links to this article saying that trump plans to deport or imprison up to 3 million immigrants. which is horrible! and would put him right in line with obama, the deporter-in-chief, who deported 2.5 million not counting this year. which is not to say that deporting 2-3 million people isn't a lot; it's to say that obama was epically draconian about deporting people, way more so than past presidents. so where are all the protests in front of the white house about it?

but at least he opposed torture, right? well, no, he declared officially that we'd stop doing it, but also that there would be no investigation into past torture and no consequences. basically setting the precedent that it's fine if it's what your president happens to like.

but at least he's supported a strong first amendment, which trump famously opposes. except the obama administration doesn't like the first amendment at all (and has set precedents weakening or anulling it) if you're advocating for a terrorist organization. well, that's fine as long as you're not a terrorist, right? but a terrorist means nothing more or less than anyone the government says is a terrorist. though currently only foreign organizations. so it doesn't apply to, say, black lives matter. yet.

or the new york times.

not even getting into universal surveillance, or setting the precedent that it's perfectly fine for the president to order an american citizen executed by drone, with no trial, and the courts cannot have anything to say about it. or the continued national shame of guantanamo-- now blessed by both political parties!

almost tangentially, i've long been confused and pissed by obama's refusal to reschedule marijuana, to at least allow the states to make their own decisions about it. and lying about it, pretending he didn't have the authority to order the dea to stop ignoring all its internal studies saying it should be rescheduled. hell, he kept presiding over massive federal drug raids in medical-marijuana states after promising repeatedly to cut that shit out. it's now clear of course that the momentum in the country is towards repeal of the marijuana ban; if he'd rescheduled it even at the start of his second term it would be irreversible now. i almost wonder if trump will have it rescheduled, since it would solidify for him a lot of swing-state stoner votes and the only people still in favor of the ban are career politicians (who he doesn't care about), big pharma (likewise), and the prison guards' union (who he can mollify with a few speeches about how blue lives matter and beating prisoners is good clean fun). it would take the boot off the neck of the poor a little bit, especially people of color who bear the brunt of the drug war, but i'm sure he could find other ways to stick it to them.

at this exact age-- they're about a week and a half old-- it's possible to juggle baby quails. their wings have developed enough that they're pretty excited about being in the air, and they flap their wings happily; but they can't yet significantly change their trajectory as they gently fall.

this won't still be true tomorrow, or probably even by tonight. the oldest ones (a day older) can change their trajectory as they fall, already.

down side: at this age, baby quails poop every few minutes (which, considering how fast they go through food and water, isn't very surprising). wash hands after juggling.

this was fun! saw it with kids, who i think enjoyed it very much. of course it is way better on the sexism front than the original, with its romantic subplot about how if a woman isn't interested in you the thing to do is keep pursuing her and be a complete ass to her and she will eventually come around, because chicks dig that (sigourney weaver, why?)

according to a friend's review, it was even better if you were much more of a ghostbusters geek than i ever was. and there were cameos and nods to the original all over and blah blah blah. and also some pointed shout-outs to the controversy over the remake in the first place. :)

i did think that compared to the original, it gave up some plot and characters and emotional range in favor of more explosions, which makes me a little sad because i like those things even more than i like explosions. i've seen reviews expressing gratitude that it didn't have a romantic subplot, which is fine, but i would have liked it to have a subplot of some kind, even if not a romantic one.

still, a+, plan to see again, etc.

an article about yet another database on police killings, this one trying to capture more details about what happened in each and why the police were involved in the first place.

i feel like the status quo on police killings in the u.s. is: imagine there's no ntsb, but commercial planes have pilot ejector seats, and inquiries into plane crashes begin and end with asking whether the pilot was within their rights to eject.

… was this written before polyamory was invented? the characters seem otherwise very liberal in their sexuality, but…

it has that same embarrassment-humor-about-watching-people-do-a-jigsaw-puzzle-blindfolded feeling that a lot of pop media romances give me because obviously the way to create dramatic tension is to have a character attracted to two people at once, because how awful would that be? shocking!

i feel like there's some thing about pushing at cultural blind spots, in stories. we're utterly fascinated by stories where a character falls in love with two people at once and has to choose! because of course you can't have both! i think in eastern cultures, and maybe even here until some time in the past (because i think the scarlet letter is this type of story too), it's considered perfectly possible to be in a situation where you're presented with only two choices and both of them are not just equally bad, but equally immoral, so immoral that you genuinely deserve death for being such a horrible person as to choose either one. and so there are a lot of stories about that.

like, you know, your lord commands you to do something immoral and so you'd deserve death for doing it but also for not doing it. here in the u.s., we don't hold with that, these days, so i don't think the contradiction holds as much fascination for us. (but i think it's why the scarlet letter was so frustrating for me, because it just alternated between "we are terrible people for having done this!" and "we could not possibly have not done this!" and i just wanted them to pick one and live with it already.)

yeah, this is simplistic and underdeveloped. it's not like anybody knows an easy button to push to make institutional racial bias go away. but i feel like there's a lot of… whatever the economic equivalent of potential energy is… there somehow, and we seem to need that right now.

(the link that spurred this thought)

at least in the simplistic view, there used to be this big thing about the blue-collar workforce. take care of the blue-collar workforce, set them up with jobs and a good economic deal, and the country would prosper. then plants closing and manufacturing jobs moving overseas torpedoed that, and the whole middle of the country is hollowed-out and desperate, and nobody knows how to fix it.

but what if fixing racial barriers was the next big simple piece? if we could stop shooting and arresting young black men, and help them start businesses instead. (and black women, of course, though we shoot and arrest them slightly less often, but we certainly don't let them do things, as a policy.) there's a whole demographic sector that we've not only failed to develop but actively suppressed, for years. if we could just figure out how to get out of their way… how to welcome them into the already-developed parts of the economy that have shut them out…

i'm not sure what that would look like. but i have a feeling there might be something there.

i wanna see somebody do the racial equivalent of moneyball. though that's a little too single-industry. but institutional racial bias means we must be consistently undervaluing a lot of workers of all kinds, a lot of business ideas, a lot of students. when you find a market consistently undervaluing something that means there's an opportunity to make a shitload of money.

… when you're practicing throwing knives and the bunny rabbit whose hutch is a few feet away from your target comes out to ask for head scritches.

fear me! fear meeeee! oh, nevermind, sigh. *scritchscritchscritch*

there's a weird ambiguity or paradox in the law-- or maybe the law's clear and i just don't know the answer-- that i keep running into in news stories like this one about journalists breaking into a tesla battery factory.

note first of all that the journalists have their own version of the story in which the security guards (or someone) also did significant damage to their vehicle. i can't figure out when in either version of the story that damage would have happened, which makes me think the whole thing didn't go down quite as anyone is telling it.

but reading between the lines, something vaguely like this seems to happen relatively often: 1) an altercation involving someone in a car and one or more persons outside the car; 2) the people outside the car attempt to get close to harangue and/or grapple the driver, and/or deliberately step in the path of the car to keep it from driving away; 3) the driver attempts to drive away anyhow; 4) driver charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

the ambiguity is: if you deliberately step into the path of a car to try to box it in with your body, does it make sense to charge the driver with "assault" for failing to back down from the game of chicken that you initiated? something about that doesn't seem right to me.

moominmolly and n and i got memberships at brooklyn boulders, a nearby indoor climbing gym, for the winter, as a way to get some exercise despite the world being cold and, ultimately, snow-bound. since memberships at climbing gyms are pretty expensive, we proceeded to climb a lot. i've been most days this year so far.

unfortunately i think i overdid it a bit, and strained some of the tendons in my fingers. i'd read this was a thing that could happen but i didn't think it was something that happened at the relatively low levels of difficulty i climb at. apparently so. i'd also read that small "crimp" holds were the main cause, so as soon as i noticed i swore to only climb things with big very convex handholds, which are apparently called "slopers", until the problem went away. that was a couple of weeks ago and it hasn't gone away, so maybe i need to hold off entirely for a while.

( but before quitting for the season, i managed to climb my first-ever v4 bouldering route last week.Collapse )

and then i came home and tried juggling clubs in the back yard for the first time since spring began. it hurts to catch them. not okay.

apparently the most pernicious pervasive myth propagated by action movies and tv is not that cars explode when they crash or that shootouts are glamorous and bloodless; it's the myth that torture works to extract information.

this shows up all over the place. it's taken for granted; it's always assumed that the debate around torture is about whether to do it despite moral qualms, with the absolutely unquestioned assumption that if you were to do it, it would get you what you want. in the movies, it's always the grim grizzled veteran of the world's struggles who assures us that our delicate sensibilities are only liabilities in the "real world" where someone has to be willing to torture people, spy on all electronic communications, send drones to bomb weddings and funerals, in order to protect society, and if you disagree, it's just because "you can't handle the truth." but these brave martyrs sacrifice their own morality and your regard in order to keep you safe.

bullshit.

our government's torture program following the 9/11 terrorist attacks has made us less safe in every possible way. it didn't tell us anything useful that we couldn't have found out other ways, but it did cause us problems negotiating with other nations, and give a lot of people excellent reasons to take up arms against us. it gave terrorists opposing the u.s. a great recruiting tool; it gave terrorists who didn't especially oppose the u.s. a reason to start to. it literally gave aid and comfort to our enemies.

from the snowden documents it seems as if a lot of the dragnet nsa spying has done the same thing: made us new enemies, and eroded our regard in the world's eyes, our "soft power," without getting us anything in return.

it's hard to say much about the drone program, except that the fact that it's a big recruiting tool for al qaeda and has caused us a lot of foreign policy hassles is public knowledge; and if it had made any great successes, the government would certainly have publicized them by now (unlike the spy programs, there would be no reason to keep them secret).

the shittiest feeling in the world, of course, is compromising your morals and then discovering you got nothing at all in return for it.

but that's where we, as a nation, are.