Monkinetic Weblog

RT @paulengelhard: "White genocide", y'all. https://t.co/edQ2q1VcVf

Ethan Marcotte has a new website:

> When the world’s on fire, and the fascists are at your door, stop waffling and just redesign your blog.

Good advice, and the site is lovely.

[[ embed_post url=/unbecoming-redmonk.html ]]

7 years ago at this writing, I sold the redmonk.net domain to RedMonk, after a friendly 7-year conversation with RedMonk's El Hefe, James Governor. His blog post on the occasion:

7 Years To Secure A Domain Name: a tale of web identity

> But he also mentioned he would consider a reasonable offer... whoa. This was a big big change. Consider a reasonable offer? Not just a flat out no? And it only took me seven years to weaken his resolve...

Wow, I've "known" James for 14 years? I'm a fossil.

Testing a new reblog feature.

In honor of the astounding array of department heads Trump is nominating for his cabinet -- a majority of whom are anti-thetical to the proposed mission of their department -- I present a playlist of appropriate R.E.M. songs to get you in the right headspace.

Playlist of the Transition

1. PEOTUS - World Leader Pretend, Green, 1988
2. Scott Pruitt, EPA - Cuyahoga, Lifes Rich Pagent, 1986
3. Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury, and
4. Wilbur Ross, Secretary of Commerce - Exhuming McCarthy, Document, 1987
5. Rep. Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services - Country Feedback, Out Of Time, 1990
6. Retired Gen. James Mattis, Secretary of Defense - Orange Crush, Green, 1988
7. Retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Secretary of Homeland Security - Welcome to the Occupation, Document, 1987
8. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Attorney General - Swan Swan H, Lifes Rich Pageant, 1984
9. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of the Department of Education - Begin the Begin
10. Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development - Oh My Heart

Bonus Tracks

1. For the Lot of Them - Ignoreland, Automatic for the People, 1992
2. For the Rest of Us - Finest Worksong

> The typeface on the Air New Orleans’ checklist is 57 percent smaller than that recommended by human engineering criteria. This smaller typeface reduces the legibility of print even under optimum conditions.

Pro Publica and Source: How Typography Can Save Your Life

Good writeup of how critical a component typography is in clear communication.

A distraction from life, from Tourfilm (1990):

In my head he's singing World Leader Pretend, my all-time favorite R.E.M. song.

RT @WeAreGirICodes: he's preaching nothing but the truth https://t.co/iFqQgRU941

Since the election I've been trying to figure out what I can do long-term to participate in protecting the freedoms we enjoy in our society, and encourage the propagation of, rather than the inhibition of, those freedoms for those who currently lack them. One thing I can do is join and donate to organizations who are equipped to reach out to affected communities and make a difference. These include:

• The ACLU - They have been fighting to protect all our liberties for over 50 years.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center - The SPLC's mission is to "monitor hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and expose their activities to the public, the media and law enforcement."
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation - "Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development."

In addition, as a small gesture in encouraging you to get involved in helping these and other organizations, I'm adding links to this site, right on the home page, that will let you help too.

Don't give up.

This site has a new domain, again.

Daring Fireball

Google

Daring Fireball

Google

I took a step today I've never taken before: I called the offices of my 3 Republican representatives in Congress (John McCain and Jeff Flake in the Senate and Representative Matt Salmon in the House) and asked them to speak out against the appointment of known white nationalists to the Whitehouse staff and Cabinet.

I was nervous - I've generally been a lackadaisical citizen (to my shame) and this was a first step at real engagement. I used Who Is My Representative (kudos to the creators for a dead-simple single-purpose site) to find the names and contact information for each.

I also wrote a quick script for myself to help with nerves. I didn't use it verbatim but writing it out really helped:

> Hi, my name is Steve Ivy and I live in the [district, state].

> I'm calling to ask [member] to speak out against the President-Elect's appointment of white-nationalists like Steve Bannon to his staff and cabinet. This is not what our country should be about. I believe [member] has our [district, state]'s best interest at heart, and silence on this issue sends the wrong message to residents and members of marginalized groups here that he isn't watching out for their best interests.

I made sure to "click-through" to a staff member (the three I talked to sounded pretty harried) rather than leave messages. Senator Flake's staff person was clear that the Senator has received significant feedback on this issue from his constituents, so - go AZ.

RT @DabAggin: FYI: Here are the men responsible for killing 9 cops this past month. I think it's past time for their community to denounce…

My state, y'all:

> Phoenix’s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60—one polling place per every 21,000 voters.

> Reducing the number of polling places in Phoenix had catastrophic consequences in the March 22 primary.

From There Were 5-Hour Lines to Vote in Arizona Because the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act (emphasis mine).

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was created during the Civil Rights movement in response to southern states passing laws that kept huge swaths of African-Americans from voting, through a variety of techniques. The VRA required certain states with a history of these practices to submit any voting law changes to federal oversight.

(NPR's piece on the Act gives a good history and the real problems with disenfranchisement it was intended to address: Block The Vote: A Journalist Discusses Voting Rights And Restrictions)

This year, election officials made a bunch of changes to processes and polling stations that (for whatever reasons were given at the time) resulted in voting difficulties that disproportionately affected non-white voters. From the Center for American Progress (CAP), Preventing Problems at the Polls: Arizona:

> In Phoenix -- which is a majority-minority city and the largest metropolitan area in the state -- there was only one polling site per 108,000 residents, whereas some predominantly non-Latino white communities had one polling site for as few as 8,500 residents.

CAP goes on:

> A 2014 Center for American Progress report found that in Arizona and 15 other states in 2012, counties with the most voters of color used the most provisional ballots.47 Arizona State University’s Cronkite News stated that voters "in precincts with higher percentages of minorities had a greater chance of casting provisional ballots."

I love living in Arizona, but this kind of behavior from our elected officials is criminal, and I'm wondering how to help our state get back on track.

Donald J. Trump is having a rotten impact on relationships in my life.

That's a sentence (among many) I never thought I'd be saying[^1].

A while back my wife and I had taken to occasionally asking each other questions from the Ungame at night before bed. It was a nice slow-down from the day, often interesting and often funny. We're doing it almost very night now because it gives us something to talk about that isn't Trump or politics, topics which get us both steaming and frustrated.

My in-laws are in town and I know they voted for Trump. I love them dearly and know why they voted the way they did. It doesn't take away the sting of knowing I can't really talk about or process the election with them without causing more harm than good. I may yet get to where I can be civil about it, but that's not yet.

I'm mostly off Facebook these days. Seeing family, church friends, and people in my wider network sharing pro-Trump posts - I've even seen Breitbart links - just discourages me to no end. It literally saps my will to even engage on the platform. I haven't deleted FB yet from my phone but I've thought about it.

I'm conflicted. My inner demons are hassling me about being a rich white whiner, but I'm also just depressed and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to get through this.

[^1]: I would have assumed that if I were ever discussing any impact Trump had on my life, it would be a negative impact, but not for the reasons we're now discussing.

I've had a few ideas for posts recently that were more light-hearted, movies I've seen, etc.

But this election thing has killed me. Every time I think about writing about the fun stuff I just can't. I'm all funned-out.

I made it clear that I was voting for Hillary, and why, in a post earlier this year. I was skeptical of the huge lead most of the polls projected, but I still thought she'd beat the foolish candidate of racism and misogyny.

Boy did we screw that up.

I've been grieving for the last 36 hours, and am just now starting to come to terms with the new reality, and what I'm going to do about it. Right now everything in my head is a mess, but I need to process it, and writing is as good a way as any. So, the following is a very-loosely-connected set of links and thoughts.

Liberal White Shock

Courtney Parker West wrote a piece on Medium about the shock and dismay that liberal white voters are expressing at the "racism revealed" by the election. I have to count myself among them (perhaps more independent than liberal, but that just means I had an even more rosy view of the state of racism in our culture) and Courtney's article kinda broke my brain.

On “Woke” White People Advertising their Shock that Racism just won a Presidency

> But the real trigger has been the shock. The absolute unpreparedness. The need to proclaim this astonishment and all but out yourself as having been blind and truly unbelieving of what we already done-told you was our reality — all whilst being down for the cause.

(Emphasis mine) Courtney is spelling out that those of us who are out-and-out clutching our pearls over the racism unleashed in public during this campaign and in the aftermath has always been there, and people of color have been telling us about it since before there was a nation here.

> Don’t tell me you “just can’t imagine” because some of us — my little black and Indigenous ass — have a real big imagination when it comes to the racism and bigotry that has ruled our country for hundreds of years.

There's more I'm still digesting, in particular the bits on institutionalized racism. Read it.

Scalzi on Racism

So... I did not personally vote for our President-Elect, but I have family and friends who did, and had a few things gone differently in my life, I might have as well.

John Scalzi (science fiction author of the Old Man's War series and others, and general good thinker) came up with a metaphor to help us understand how we can't separate our intentions/personal reasons for making a choice from the result of that choice.

The Cinemax Theory of Racism

> Pop quiz: In this scenario, did you just subscribe to Cinemax?

You can guess where it goes from there:

> And you say, no I’m not, I hate racism.

> And others say to you, but apparently you like these other things more than you hate racism, because you agreed to the racism in order to get these other things.

I know the exact reasons that some people did vote, and I would have voted in the past, for Trump. But there are disastrous consequences to not hating the evil enough to give up some hoped-for modicum of good.

Going Independent in Arizona

On a side-note, I've been a registered Republican for as long as I've been a voter. This year I marked a bunch of Ds on my ballot (but not all) and today, I re-registered as an independent in Arizona ("No Party Preference"). Arizona has open primaries, and you can bet I'll be taking part in the future. To my shame, I stayed home for the primaries this year, not believing in the slightest that Trump had a chance.


Sullivan on Trump

Via Dave Winer: Andrew Sullivan writes in New York Magazine, The Republic Repeals Itself:

> This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication.

Don't expect a power-seeking narcissist to embrace reason after a victory.

> They will not let [the levers of power] go easily. They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart — and generate pseudo-stories and big lies that, absent any authoritative or trusted media, will dominate the new centers of information, Facebook or its successors.

Don't forget that Stephen Bannon, head of the "Alt-Right" (far-right racists, misogynists) publisher Breitbart, was Trump's most recent campaign "CEO".

Andrew points out, rightly, that Trump's promises to the far- and alt-right cannot all realistically be kept. But rather than face backlash, he and his supporters will be ready with a host of "others" and "outside forces" to blame:

> The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept... But hope fades in turn when you realize how absolute and total his support clearly is. His support is not like that of a democratic leader but of a cult leader fused with the idea of the nation. If he fails, as he will, he will blame others, as he always does.

> so there will have to be scapegoats — media institutions, the Fed, the "global conspiracy" of bankers and Davos muckety-mucks he previewed in his rankly anti-Semitic closing ad, rival politicians whom he will demolish by new names of abuse, foreign countries and leaders who do not cooperate, and doubtless civilians who will be targeted by his ranks of followers and demonized from the bully pulpit itself.

As with all these links, take the time to read Andrew's piece -- it's dark, but paints a not-unrealistic picture of what may come.

Winer on Sullivan

Dave goes on to share some notes responding to Andrew's piece. In particular, he outlines a few ways that Trump can actually build on, and take credit for, Obama's successes in healthcare and immigration -- all while convincing his supporters that he's fulfilling promises to tear down and dismantle. This is a man adept at taking credit for others' work.

> He can repeal ObamaCare by getting rid of the worst parts (so he will say) and replace it with TrumpCare which contains just the good parts. He'll present it as something all new. What he'll care about is putting his name on it...

> People don't know that Obama is deporting illegals. Trump won't tell them. He'll just provide the numbers that he's deporting and say they're the worst ones, real rapists and murderers, and call it progress, and that "issue" will fade away too.