If you're familiar with what Brianna Wu has been up to since Gamergate, you're probably at least vaguely aware of the way she sucks. If you're familiar with Brianna Wu only up to Gamergate, well, buckle up.
⚠️ Content Note: transphobia
Brianna Wu is a transgender woman who, regrettably, has a platform on Twitter. I've been pretty negative about her and her opinions on trans people, politics, and trans politics and have bluntly urged people to not, under any circumstances, follow her advice on transitioning.
Recently she posted her views in a way that concisely illustrates how feckless the trans politics she's arguing for are. Here's the tweet:
No more conflating non-binary with actual transsexuals.
No more trans women in sports.
No more access to women's spaces for people not medically transitioning.
And a unified voice in protecting dignity and health care for actual transsexuals medically transitioning.
I'm sure some cis people, even cis people who are pretty accepting of trans people, think this sounds reasonable. If I bend over backwards to be charitable, I guess there's a version of half of these I technically agree with. Yeah, the trans people she calls "actual transsexuals"1 have different needs and experiences to some extent than non-binary people. (Although to be clear, non-binary people transition medically, too.) Yeah, it's good to protect dignity and health care for trans people who are medically transitioning.
But overall this is a political strategy of throwing people under the bus in hopes that the bigots will be mollified and not come after you. While this obviously isn't good for the people you're throwing under the bus, it's not good for you either. For one thing, this is corrosive to any trans community larger or more functional than a clique of you and your mean t-girl friends 2. For another, the bigots won't be mollified.
Lastly, what does this supposedly get you? Dignity and health care are actually things worth striving for, sure, but what kind of gatekeeping is lurking behind "actual transsexuals"? I'm not saying there's no value in seeing doctors and psychologists for what is a medically and psychologically involved process, but the kind of gatekeeping I'm talking about, which attempts to identify "actual transsexuals," is bad for everyone. Even if you emerge with a scrip for hormones in hand, the process is pretty degrading. Maybe she would forswear those parts of the process and that's what she means by "dignity." But her embrace of terms like autogynephile makes me doubt that.
And it sucks for trans women to not be allowed in women's sports! I participated in cross country as my assigned gender well before I transitioned, but it was nonetheless a good experience. If I had transitioned earlier, I'd hate to give that up or be outed by being the only girl in the boys' race. I don't run competitively anymore (and to be clear, was never an elite athlete), but I think there's something corrosive about just knowing I've disallowed from the women's division on the basis of being trans. Similarly, I'm not going to be using the restrooms in the U.S. Capitol anytime soon, but there's something a little bit degrading about the fact that I would be supposed to use the men's restroom. Wu doesn't support bathroom bills like that, but I think her (apparent) blanket exclusion of trans women from women's sports would have a similar result. And as she herself has noted, most of the people pushing bans on trans women in women's sports are not concerned for female athletes (or even cis female athletes), which is why you'll see bans for trans women in the women's division of chess. Obviously, trans female athletes, congressional staffers, and chess players are most affected by these bans, but I think it a subtler way, it affects us all.
I can't help but think back to when Brianna Wu posted about how she's not a "biological woman." If that's just a weird way of acknowledging there are differences between her and cis women broadly speaking, some of them biological, fine. But I don't think that's what she means. I'm not going to psychoanalyze or speculate about what the thought process behind that might be, but it's hard to not read it as a concession to transphobia. Suffice it to say, I refuse to have my womanhood seen as some sort of special dispensation granted by benevolent cis people.
The reason I'm writing about this is not to point out that she sucks.3 It's because I don't think she's alone. I don't think I'm going to wake up tomorrow to find that all the trans women who already have access to medical transition have joined her or anything, but people are swayed by this false promise. I'm particularly concerned about newly out trans people who haven't seen what this kind of gatekeeping represents being swayed by Wu's veneer of reasonableness. With Christian nationalism's growing power in American politics, we need to stick together more than ever.
I personally don't mind the term transsexual, at least when used by trans people, but the whole "actual transsexual" thing? Ick. No.↩
this joke is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any actual transsexuals, living or dead, is coincidental.↩
okay, it's a little cathartic to point out that she sucks.↩
This past Wednesday, I received the unwelcome news that GitHub was rolling out Copilot to my account. Obviously, tech companies being very excited about a feature you have no interest in is par for the course, but I've gotten pretty tired of AI1. I did want to figure out whether they had picked me randomly as part of the endless A-B testing that is pervasive online now, so I headed to their blog and found the study that is the subject of this post (and target of my ire) "Does GitHub Copilot improve code quality? Here’s what the data says."
"Study" might be a bit generous for a blog piece written by a company about its own product. To its credit, it did involve people with relevant expertise. The author, Jared Bauer, does have a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, and he apparently got the input of two other people with PhDs, one in social psychology and the other in economics. They provided "support on the study design and statistical analysis," which is not very specific, which could encompass anything from bouncing Slack messages back and forth to substantial feedback and review.
I don't have time to dive too deeply into this, but another piece, Does GitHub Copilot Improve Code Quality? Here's How We Lie With Statistics covers the article more thoroughly. Perhaps the most relevant criticism from that post is that this task is skewed toward AI, in that it involves a task probably well-represented in its training data set (writing CRUD endpoints for a toy server using Python). Part of me wonders whether the users with Copilot were slightly less bored out of their minds because they had Copilot to keep them on track (and maybe the additional novelty, if they hadn't used it before) and thus were more focused or gave up less quickly.
That piece also observes that some of the percent improvements are pretty small. All the subjective ratings improved by a small percentage, between 2.47 and 4.16 percent. This would be a nice benefit if the intervention was was "turn a few switches on in everyone's linter config" but is pretty paltry for something as (supposedly) game-changing as AI.
While there is a methodology section, it's frankly pretty sparse. Going back to the precipitating incident of this post, I can't tell if the users who used Copilot had access to the models they just advertised to me (GPT-4o and Claude 3.5), larger and more expensive ones, or older models that have since been phased out. I also have no idea how long they spent writing the 80-some lines of code. Did the people whose tests passed just spend more time writing the code?
I can't help notice that they seemingly only present significant findings. In a way, this is good—they're not hyping up results that could be noise purely because of statistical chance2. I also noticed every finding favors Copilot (with a couple of exceptions). Again, this could be to the strength of their argument, that AI's benefits are consistent. However, it does make me wonder what analysis they did that was not significant and whether there were any results that showed a significant benefit of not using AI. It also makes me wonder what kind of p-hacking may have occurred.
They do mention that the commits and lines of code changed in the Copilot group was "significantly higher" but did not give absolute or relative numbers. It's hard to say whether that's a negative or neutral change without knowing the actual size of this difference, so I guess it's possible they did report all their findings and just buried the ones that aren't obviously positive by putting them in a paragraph without any graphs or specific numbers.
Programming research tends to be pretty dubious, so it's not surprising a study at the intersection of generative AI ( a hype-laden field if there ever was one) and programming is dubious, even before considering that this is a study about a product paid for and published by its vendor. Maybe I'm shooting fish in the barrel, but some of the issues are a bit subtle, so they're worth writing up.
I imagine some environmentally minded material scientists feel the same way when they see a new type of plastic. Probably interesting to learn about, but the environmental concerns make it unappealing to actually use, if it even has a benefit. The classic text in this vein of AI antipathy is, of course, "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again".↩
of course, they could be due to noise for other reasons.↩
It's common to talk about echo chambers, but sometimes I've noticed a certain reverse pattern where people hyperfixate on people they disagree with, sometimes within their own ideological group or adjacent to it. Rather than seeking out a pocket of agreement, they seek out one of disagreement. It's actually more specific than hate following, since I think it's often a whole community (or subcommunity or subsubcommunity) that the hate follower is seeking out.
In the extreme case, this leads to warping your opinions around your opposition, in particular, opposing things just because your opposition supports it, regardless of what you actually feel about them. I can't find references to it, but I've heard this called negative polarization. ("Anti-fandom" is a similar but ultimately distinct concept.) A symptom is often shorthanded as "Bitch eating crackers." The idea is that you become so obsessed with someone and so filled with loathing (or just plain anger or frustration) that you pick apart totally benign actions, like eating crackers .
It's common for people to disingenuously present themselves as being pushed right by far-left extremism when either they were straightforwardly right-wing all along or had bigotries all along that became less acceptable on the left and center. People are well aware of this, so when someone comes out saying they've "left the left" or whatever, a common reaction is that if you are 99 percent a progressive or whatever, but some protestors pissed you off a few times that you throw away your 99 percent progressivism, were you really all that progressive in the first place? There are political and rhetorical reasons to present yourself as a lapsed member of an opposing group so there's definitely reasons to pretend that you changed your mind.
Still, genuine political shifts do happen. The podcast Know Your Enemy profiles a fair number of conservative thinkers who were left-wing or leftish earlier in their career. And looking at social media dynamics, it's not hard to see how it could happen today, with some pretty public examples. I fully believe that some people will, out of a sense of pettiness or grievance, throw away their political commitments. If you've submerged yourself in the 99th percentile inanest part of the discourse for years, I could see that making you react pretty negatively to all of it and start to paint The Left or Democrats or Progressives or whatever as all perniciously bad. All the more if you start cultivating hate followers in return and become a target of harassment.
I've had my own experiences of this (not on either end of the harassment, thankfully). There's certainly people whose tactics or rhetorical framing or specific stances frustrate me despite me broadly agreeing with them, or honestly frustrate me because they broadly agree with me. I don't want to relitigate any of those discussions now, so I will mostly be vague1, but I can sense in myself the seeds of some sort of embarrassing overreaction that the left is not serious on that issue, not because I've actually identified an actual broad issue with the broader left (or progressives or democrats or left-of-center people broadly) but because there's niche groups that get under my skin, particularly on social media where you're disproportionately likely to be exposed to bite-sized or out-of-context takes.
"Gender critical" spaces are like a particularly pathological example of this. They combine both the echo chamber and the almost compulsive need to seek out examples of the people you despise.
Natalie Wynn made a video (transcript) exploring some of the dynamics around hate following, anti-fandom, and negative polarization. In some cases, they are probably driven by self-loathing, a desire to distance oneself from things you feel ashamed of that you feel others are not only embracing, but embracing it publicly. She compares what she, a trans lesbian, cringes at, mostly privately, to what Kalvin Garrah, a trans man, spent many years publicly cringing at:
You know it makes me feel ingroup cringe about an identity– trans lesbianism, which for me is already a pain point of insecurity, embarrassment, and shame. So Kalvin [Garrah] maybe, and again I could just be projecting, but maybe, that's kind of like how you feel about these trenders. When you make videos condemning them as not really trans, aren't you essentially exiling them from the ingroup, so that you no longer feel the pain of ingroup cringe?
Or perhaps, Kalvin Garrah, what you're really trying to destroy is the trender within.
By bringing up this example, I don't want to be overbroad. I think these situations of "ingroup cringe" can drive particularly strong reactions to people you'd otherwise sympathize with or agree with. Yet, I think simple frustration over tactics can be enough.
Let's bring this back. You, my reader, are probably not going to publicly humiliate yourself by taking on increasingly dumber stances transparently motivated by ingroup cringe or petty grievances or being too chronically online. Still, there are more minor versions of this that I think more people fall prey to. Thinking about past political primaries, there were definite narratives about candidates and their supporters (Bernie bros and the K-Hive are two that jump out). While I won't say it's impossible that those are reflective of the campaign or whose interests they're serving, even morally exemplary people (which the candidates were not, to be clear) can develop very toxic fans. Thus, deciding who to vote for because of dumb comments posted by a tiny subset of their supporters seems like a subtle way you can let this kind of frustration sway your actions in a way that you aren't necessarily conscious of and probably is disproportionate to how you'd want that factor to weigh in.
Besides documenting trends that I find interesting, my hope is that naming this helps. But most of the solution is going to have to be the work you already know. Touch grass. Be a part of communities. Lift some weights or something. Work on creative projects. And so on. And so on. And so on.
Except in the case of trans issues below. There are so many people who fit that description and anyone reading this is probably on board and already familiar with the specifics. Also Democratic presidential primary candidates. But I didn't have much of an emotional stake in whether so-and-so's supporters were actually toxic or whatever.↩
I've been reading a lot about old technology, particularly old games at The Digital Antiquitarian1. (The reason I've needed a distraction for the month of November should be obvious, I trust.) Anyway, one thing I missed as a child starting to play computer games was what a mess of requirements there were by the tail end of the MS-DOS era. By the time I started to play more "serious" and recent games, like Civilization III above, there was plenty of jargon, but the dizzying array of sound card and video card names had passed.
I vaguely remember seeing references to SoundBlaster, probably as a part of edutainment software that mostly targeted the least common denominator and didn't necessarily get updated regularly.2 (Although I haven't been able to find a piece of edutainment I played that referenced specific sound cards.) That or abandonware my brother and I would download sometimes.
2001 may actually be a bit early to say the era of confusing lists of graphics cards had completely ended. I noticed Doom 3, well into the DirectX era, provided a list of chipsets on the box.
Anyway, for a good example of how confusing this could be, here's a box from 1990, Super Solvers: Outnumbered!:
There are actually fewer requirements than for Civilization III above, but they're presented more confusingly, in my opinion. This is edutainment, which means the task of getting it to work probably frequently fell on non-technical teachers and parents.
I don't know enough about this era to say why they emphasized the Tandy 1000. My sense is it sold well and was well-regarded, so perhaps it made sense that if you were going to single out a model, it would be the Tandy 1000. Looking at a few other boxes from the same time period, they will often mention Tandy in one way or another, but don't emphasize it so much.
While the format of system requirements has been standardized and we also have websites that have stats about how games perform on specific graphics cards and even entire PC builds3, they seem less relevant than ever. I feel like my current process is to not really look at the system requirements, except for the rare game I buy new that seems like it might push the envelope for graphics. (I'm pretty sure I did that last for Frostpunk 2.) If I upgraded my PC more recently and spent a little more when I did that, I might not even have to do that.
If you liked this, you'll love LGR's video on it. You can definitely tell it was from 11 years ago, but it's still a good video. Also, if you want to look at box art that actually includes, MobyGames is your best bet.
I think this was the "lowest common denominator" because targeting SoundBlaster compatibility was pretty common.↩
I'm a little unclear on how much estimation or interpolation this involves, and how accurate it is in the end. It occurs to me that Steam could show you whether your machine meets the requirements or even integrate similar functionality to estimate the FPS it can handle, since they already collect hardware data as part of their hardware survey.↩
Recently-ish, I've encountered not one but two Python game development libraries/tools/frameworks that have caught my interest. This is noteworthy because historically I haven't been too impressed by the available tools for making games in Python, despite me liking the language. 1
The first is LiSE. It was on my radar for some time, but I had mistakenly thought of it as being mostly for life simulations, taken literally in the sense of games like SimEarth. It is for that, but it's also for a variety of other detailed simulations. It's rule-based, which is a paradigm for developing game logic I've liked to try for a while. It also has a time travel feature, allowing you to see the steps that led up to the current state. This seems hugely useful for debugging and exploring the consequences of different design decisions, particularly the intersection of different design decisions. The time travel feature also apparently handles save files for you, which would frankly be a nice thing to not have to worry about in a game with that much state.
It isn't a game engine, though, so there's not that much in the way of a graphics or sound API as far as I can tell. The README says "ELiDE is meant to support repurposing its widgets to build a rudimentary graphical interface for a game." That's a smart choice designwise2, although if you don't want to use that interface3 it means you have to pick from one of the frankly underwhelming options for Python. Still, it's a really cool idea so maybe I'll brave one of them.
LiSE can also act as a server, so in theory a game could be written in whatever framework or engine and then spawn the server that handles the logic. I don't think it's a bad idea to split logic from the other elements of a game, but having those two parts have to communicate over HTTP(S) might be a bit awkward. I think you'd also have to be careful about how much state is passed and how serialization is done to avoid blowing past the 16.667 ms deadline for a 60 FPS game. Also, I could see the server-spawning part being kinda annoying, but once I got it working reliably it would probably be fine?
The other is Pyxel. I just did a game jam in TIC-80, and I had a lot of fun. The limits really help during a game jam, and it was fun to play with pixel art for the first time. Pyxel is designed similarly, being inspired by TIC-80 and PICO-8. As much as I like Fennel (and I want to like Lua), some of Lua's weirdness and limits leak through, so I could see myself enjoying Pyxel even more. My impression is that it is not as oriented around a single "cartridge" file and has slightly larger limits for graphics but similar limits on audio. I could see these differences going either way, although I don't think they'll be make or break. The cartridges sometimes feel a little gimmicky and come at the expense of being able to organize your project into multiple files, but they're a fun kind of gimmicky and are a viable distribution method. Similarly, having more space to play with graphics could be fun or could take away some of the useful limitations.
I should clarify I have yet to either try these in practice, so this is mostly gleaned from reading the documentation and taking a (very shallow) look at some examles. I'm also writing from a hobbyist perspective, so I'm under no illusion that either of these mean Python will take the big budget or even indie game dev world by storm. (Although I guess renPy has kinda done that for another niche, so perhaps these could take a niche by storm.) It would be neat to see it succeed alongside Lua and JavaScript for hobbyist game dev, though.
I had a reasonably positive impression of renPy for what it is, but I haven't been that interested in making a visual novel.↩
the README lists Crusader Kings, Democracy, Dwarf Fortress, and The Sims as games in its definition of "life simulation." I think you'd be hard-pressed to design an engine that serves all of those well.↩
I added this based on a correction/clarification from Clayote. Thanks for the correction, Clayote! (And thanks for LiSE!)↩
I had the misfortune of having a dumb take retweeted into my feed. Now you get to enjoy it!
The piece, "It is all about the superstars" is a prime example of inverted logic. Perhaps the best illustration is the part where they bemoan the lack of ability for EU corporations to "respond to AI" due to labor laws.
In the U.S. firms have been decisive:
“The rapid success of ChatGPT triggered immediate responses: Microsoft streamlined its workforce, invested $10 billion in OpenAI, and more in its own AI infrastructure. Meta paused its metaverse efforts, laid off 20,000 employees within months, and boosted its AI investments, spending a whopping $37 billion on computing infrastructure in 2024. 41 Similarly, Google, facing challenges in search, halted major projects, laid off 12,000 employees, and accelerated on AI by ramping up its R&D investments to $43bn in 2023, including hiring tens of thousands of engineers with AI background.”
You may have noticed that a lot of "responding to AI" is laying people off. Even if we ignore the human cost of flooding labor markets with tens of thousands of employees, the stress it causes each of them, and the fact that they'll have to compete against each other 1, does this make a lot of sense? Even if you think a lot of AI is useful, there's still a bubble. Also, where are you going to find all these "engineers with AI background"? Wouldn't it make more sense to train some of your existing staff on what is apparently an extremely lucrative new field rather than try to find a bunch of new engineers suddenly? Also, who is going to test, document, market, and sell the AI those engineers are creating (not to mention developing the non-AI parts)?
It's telling that Meta's "metaverse efforts" only get a passing mention. The metaverse was a much earlier bubble, and it has amounted to even less than the current round of AI. How much human labor was wasted by both Meta pursuing a dud and and rapidly pivoting to and then from said dud?
We also shoot right past Google "facing challenges in search." Many people have bemoaned the drop in quality of Google. It's pretty subjective and hard to measure, but it definitely seems to have gotten worse. While Google might think AI will address their issues in search, I'm more skeptical. And even if it does, it's not necessarily going to be a fast process. Also, surely having the ability to tap into a very powerful conventional search would be a powerful way to distinguish your AI from everyone else's?
Some people have attributed large layoffs to companies realizing they've been hiring too aggressively or wanting to cut costs. This would transform this article's premise "weaker labor protections are good so large companies can be more nimble" to "weaker labor protections are good so large companies can fix their hiring mistakes," which makes the argument seem even weaker.
Perhaps the author, Pieter Garicano, would counter that these are irrelevant to his point about superstars being key to the economy. But I would argue it's relevant to whether these superstars are actually worthy of the name. If the "superstars" are making a huge mistake, isn't it actually good to have something preventing them from suddenly laying everyone off?
The piece is somewhat ambivalent, seemingly acknowledging some of the obvious downsides of the American system, but it seems strikingly credulous of capitalist narratives to just assume large layoffs are good for innovation.
This is relatively small in the grand scheme of the U.S. economy, where in a typical month, millions of workers quit or are laid off, which is currently balanced out by a slightly larger number of people being hired. However, for a specific job (mostly software developers and a few related positions) in a specific place (mostly Silicon Valley), it's substantially tougher. Obviously, as workers go, many (most? all?) of those laid off are extremely privileged. Still, this sucks for these people!↩
The conventional wisdom among left and left-leaning folks (and possibly center folks) is that you shouldn't run anti-trans ads strategically because it makes you look like a weirdo (derogatory). Nonetheless, the weirdos (derogatory) in the Republican party prevailed as they always seem to1, and the Trump campaign spent a shit ton on anti-trans ads. And then, as you may have heard, Trump won.
I don't think I need to convince anyone reading this that trans people are good and deserve to not have the machinery of state and capitalism and society generally run roughshod over us. So this is not a case against the ads, in which I observe they are filled with cruelty and lies. You already know that! This is looking at a different question: Is it effective to cater to the anti-trans weirdo base?
Before I get further, I should point out Julia Serano's piece. You should probably read her piece over mine if you're only going to read one, but we take slightly different approaches so I think our pieces are complementary in the end. Hayes Brown and Chrissy Stroop have also written on this.
The inciting incident for this post is some people are pointing out a poll by Blueprint. If you read the pieces I just linked, you'll find links to others saying the same thing. Anyway, for that poll, they basically showed people a bunch of pairs of issues and asked them to pick the one that's more relevant. The highest for swing voters was "Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class."
It's a little hard to know what to make of this, since "transgender rights" is listed as an example of a cultural issue. Presumably that example resonated at least somewhat with the people picking it, but it's possible if it was phrased to be just about transgender rights, people wouldn't have been as quick to support it. It's also possible people were mostly reacting to the "helping the middle class" part, since that is an economic issue, which we know motivated people this year (and basically every election year).
Certainly, it's possible that the tide has turned on trans people and people will get riled up to vote purely out of hatred for us, which is (unfortunately) what happened on immigration in the last year. This has nothing to do with the righteousness of the cause or even the long-term trajectory of public opinion on the issue. There's a plausible argument that gay marriage amendments turned out evangelicals and helped Bush win in 2004, for example. Eventually of course public opinion turned around pretty decisively on that issue.
In contrast, a lot of polls I've seen put transgender really low on the list of issues. I'm not going to dig up all of those now, but here's one that went around more recently:
The fact that Democrats rated this higher than Republicans suggests that Democrats might even lose more votes by distancing themselves from trans rights. Maybe they wouldn't vote for Republicans, but keep in mind that Democrats who still prefer the Democrat in their heart of hearts but stay home don't help you.
As another data point, the AP's exit polls shows a lot of independent think trans rights have gone "too far":
Of course, that doesn't mean a lot. Do they think things went way too far or just a little too far? Is it one of their top issues? In fact, a fair number of Harris voters (24 percent) apparently think trans rights went too far, so either it's not a dealbreaker for a lot of people or they still trusted Harris on that issue.
Another data point is that anti-trans ads against Tammy Baldwin also ran in Wisconsin, who won. I'm not aware of any ads that specifically pointed out that Baldwin is a lesbian (although I did see a few saying she and her wife are out of touch), but I suspect a cisgender LGB politician might be particularly vulnerable to being painted as too pro-trans, in addition to being vulnerable to plain old homophobia on the part of anti-trans voters. It was one of her tightest elections yet, though. Similarly, Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to the House of Representatives won in Delaware, with a (slightly) better margin than Harris.
The other factor is that Harris didn't really talk much about trans issues except to repudiate the anti-trans ads once or twice. I'm honestly not sure whether focusing on stronger issues helped or hurt her. On the one hand, the campaign kind of left those attacks unanswered, but on the other hand, if you want to convince people you're not over-focused on trans people at the expense of the middle class, isn't it best to not to focus on trans people? Regardless, you can rebut the attacks without throwing trans people under the bus, which is more or less what they did in the (very few) times they addressed the issue.
Similarly, I'm not sure ignoring it helps or hurts trans people. It doesn't feel good to let those attacks pass unanswered, but I want our humanity to stand on our own terms, separate from politics. Still, our humanity has been made political, so maybe it would be in our best interest for the party that's nominally on our side2 to actually stand up for us? I'm not being sarcastic here—I'm not entirely sure on the best strategy.
Overall, I'm inclined to say these ads probably weren't all that effective, and it was mostly Trump's edge on other issues that carried the day for him, rather than anti-trans ads being good strategy suddenly. Still, the anti-trans propaganda is clearly at least somewhat effective, alas, as evidenced by continued sympathy for takes like "trans rights have gone too far" among the voters. So we definitely have to combat this propaganda. Progressive and liberal politicians have a role in that, but it's not to give up ground on this issue.
statistically, they're not all weirdos, at least not in the sense i mean. but this subtype of homophobic/transphobic/misogynist/xenophobic weirdo is basically running the show now.↩
And to be fair, they are sometimes substantively on our side.↩
Letter from Félix González-Torres to his lover copy here
Félix González-Torres created this art installation, which consists of a painted wall and two clocks. There are actually two works with this name and a similar design, one dated 1987-1990, the other dated 1991. The above is the one dated 1991.
Sarah Urist Green offers a helpful entry into this superficially trivial work:
The title clearly asks you to consider these clocks to be a metaphor for lovers and how two individuals with hearts beating, like the ticking of clocks, can be in perfect sync and then inevitably fall out of sync. The title further suggests that the lovers remain perfect, even after they've fallen out of sync.
As Green and many others will tell you, González-Torres was a gay man. His partner, Ross Laycock, died the same year this work was created, 1991. González-Torres lived longer and died of AIDS in 1996. It's stirring to think of the clocks still ticking to this day, even after both of them have died.
The clocks are to be installed above head height. I wonder if it's even possible to hear the ticking when you're standing in front of it? You can see the artwork in context at its page from the Museum of Modern Art, which owns the 1991 work.
One interesting thing about this picture, which I got from Wikipedia, is that there's a slightly different shadow on the two clocks. The two lovers are side by side, identical, but the impact of the surrounding conditions are ever so slightly different. This version also shows the clocks as being ever so slightly out of sync.
as we probably could have guessed, following Kamala Harris' defeat to Donald Trump, many progressives and leftists are saying that, clearly, the Democrats needed to embrace progressive and leftist politics in order to win.
i'm being snarky, but i completely agree on one level and disagree on another. in fact, i actually made a similar argument before the election in a local op-ed:
By playing into the framing of immigration as a security issue, rather than a humanitarian one, Harris and other Democrats have long set themselves up to seem weak on the issue when compared to a party of anti-immigration hardliners.
i think there's a strong case (and stop me if you've heard this before), in this era of politics, Democrats are too frequently playing defense. there are exceptions. Democrats have pushed their advantage on abortion and generally refused to play ball with "post-birth abortion" nonsense. they've mostly dropped their "safe legal and rare" mantra that is needlessly apologetic and stigmatizing toward abortion. honestly Harris is one of the most effective politicians on abortion rhetorically that I can think of. they've also refused to take the bait and debate trans rights for the most part. (we'll see if that changes after the election.)
however, whether that's a good strategy over the long term (i think it is) is separate from whether it would have won Harris this election. in a few ways, Biden has already adopted progressive politics1—see what the administration is doing on labor rights and antitrust law—and Harris didn't back away from any of that. and Harris also pushed for raising the minimum wage and an increased child tax credit. she also promised to include long-term care in medicare, which is a healthcare policy with enormous salience economically. lastly, i've already highlighted how Harris has been on abortion.
she didn't do that for immigration. she faced a public that largely thinks there is too much immigration. given her campaign started in July, could she have changed this? i'm not sure. maybe pushing hard on the humanity of immigrants, their historic role in America, who deportation would actually hurt, etc., in sort of a mirror of Trump's campaign would have won people over, but i'm not sure.
similarly, while a lot of voters are (rightfully!) unhappy about her role in the administration arming Israel, others were concerned they weren't going far enough to support Israel. would doing the right thing (or at least a less bad thing) here help her? i'm not sure, either. that's not a good reason to not do the right thing! but i think we need to be realistic about whether doing the right thing is enough to win.
given that so many people apparently concerned about the economy voted for someone promising tariffs, a policy that will definitely bring more inflation, i find myself agreeing with the discourse saying it's an information problem. i suspect part of the reason Republicans can stay on the offense is that they have this huge right-wing media machine generating outrage and narratives and soundbites that benefit them. i think crime and DA elections might be a good analogy here. you're never going to be able to consistently have progressive DAs in office or divert police funding if a majority of local media, social media, and politicians are hyping up crime every six to twelve months.
i think Democrats need to rebuild their credibility on labor, reorient the conversation on immigration, and (of course) end the unconditional military aid for Israel. Biden started on the first, but (obviously) not the second or third. if Democrats do those things, particularly maintaining their commitment to labor, and reform undemocratic institutions, i think we could start see the ground shift enough for progressive politics to establish lasting wins. while i've focused on the electoral side, honestly what will be more important is people pushing Democrats to not move right, pushing against Republicans, organizing their workplaces, and otherwise building community and solidarity. as worried as i am about what Republicans are doing, i am hopeful about that.
hey friends, gonna start this one off with a request: i’m currently without stable housing and without employment, and i’m in extremely dire financial straits. as of this writing my account is overdrafted and i have very limited options for fixing that. i…
