Author: Stagger Lee

(6) PENITENTIARY OF TENNESEE VILES 65

VANDERBILT 66

FINAL

NEVER BELIEVE IT’S NOT SOOOOOOOO

I find it interesting that we’re staring to see Trump pitching slurs against DeSantis. It’s pretty clear that the whole USP for DeSantis is “Trumpism without Trump”, and the only way for Trump himself to strike back against that is to say that the governor of Florida is not a real true believer. It’s pitched at the level of a third grade schoolyard spat – but then, that’s the intellectual level of Republican politics for the last quarter-century or more.

The standout feature of this kind of politics is how much it relies on not only stupidity, but weakness. Donald Trump prevailed over a field of fifteen other candidates simply because none of them could get traction in that huge a swamp, and therefore all of them were waiting for someone else to fail. And they all thought ”well Trump will lose eventually, and I can pick up his supporters and vault to the top of the pack.” And that is the weakness. Everyone is afraid to stand up to Trump, to stand up to those who support him. Had just one candidate confronted him and said “you’re wrong and you’re going to lose it all for us, and I’m not having it”, and had the Never Trump people all rallied behind this single candidate, and had the press not been high on the daily fart of another Trump appearance, he never could have won the nomination.

But everyone was too weak to stand up to him until it was too late. And now, here you have DeSantis. DeSantis, who won Florida by twenty points in the middle of the biggest Republican national El Foldo in a midterms in decades. DeSantis, who the New York Times is dying to anoint as Not Trump (speaking of stupid and weak, but we’ll get to that). DeSantis, who has made no secret of wanting to be the nominee in 2024 and whose entire policy program revolves around giving Fox News viewers special feelings in their chicken parts. And he will not denounce Trump. He will not tell off Trump. He is standing on the bridge of the ship while Trump teeters on the plank and he doesn’t have the balls to push him, because he is terrified that personal attachment to a whining Yankee who is electoral poison is somehow a greater draw in the South than open racism and hippie-punching.

Stupid and weak.

And that’s the other thing we come back to. The GOP has won any national success in the last twenty-five years on gerrymandering, technicalities and war panic. Trump is not that popular. His policies are not that popular. And yet, for fear of his supporters, the mainstream press insists on telling us how much we all hate Joe Biden, how much we all hate Hillary Clinton, how bad the economy is and how out of control inflation is – when individual commodity prices can be easily shown to be a product of supply chain breakdown, or avian flu (for eggs), or OPEC manipulation (for gas), and when corporations are laying off employees by the thousands at a time when profits are through the roof. Yet after fifty years of being mau-mau’d by the right, the stalwarts of the mainstream media are in thrall to providing they’re not liberal and as a result bend over backwards to tongue-bathe the most easily disproven liars among us.

Stupid and weak.

And it’s no wonder that Trump’s strongest state is Alabama. The state of the big mules, the state of company coal towns and sharecropper scamming, the state where the poor have to be kept down below the salt in the pickle barrel so that Alabama Power and TCI and Blue Cross and Georgia Pacific can have their way with a nice healthy bidness environment. A state where the great and the good have fallen about themselves for decades to keep people weak and stupid and offer them nothing in return but Baptist-fried racism and the promise that you’re better off than the darkies and your reward is coming in the next world. It is a mentality that the GOP has taken national with Trump as its flag-bearer: you just believe whatever we say and we will give you someone to shit on.

Stupid and weak.

Because what’s the platform at this point? What are the issues? What are the things that are the highest priority? Trans people are gross and icky? The cops should be allowed to do murder without explanation or consequence? White people should never be limited in how much firepower they can accumulate? Children must never find out that someone might be different from them – or worse, that they might be different from someone else?

Stupid. And. Weak.

I don’t want to live in a country where stupid and weak is aspirational.

Sometimes, in idle moments, I think about what it would be like if I were actually able to retire someday. A small walkable village somewhere in the west of Ireland, or even on the coast somewhere between Pacifica and Aptos, maybe. And I think that I would need the AppleTV for things like BritBox and PBS and Disney+, and my Kindle for reading, and maybe a HomePod that i could ask for music from Apple Music or SomaFM or maybe even RTE, depending…

And then I start to think about what I would need from the phone in that situation. Music? Well, a good bit of the local stuff I rely on could be on an SD card converted to MP3, and Twitter is dead and half my friends are barely on social media in any way that can’t be managed by group chat, and…could I get by with a modern Nokia flip phone? And my hand strays toward the order button until I realize I don’t have a personal SIM to put in it any more, let alone an excuse for it when the iPhone is work phone, personal phone and shutdown night phone all in one. And then it occurs to me to think about how many phones I went through in that span between late 2000 and mid-2007, and how many more I wanted and never got hold of, and how stale the world of phones is, and…

Did the iPhone actually ruin everything?

I’ve made much of the fact that the phone crossed the finish line ten years ago. Yes, nicer screens, yes better camera and faster networks, but what new features have descended on phones since NFC payment and different biometric unlock? (This is a good spot to point out that the Moto X not only supported swipe or PIN login, but NFC-based login where you could tag a sticker on your desk or a little clip on your pocket to unlock the device, something I haven’t seen anyone else ever adopt…and lest we forget it took 7 years for Apple to mostly approximate the feature set of that original Moto X.) The iPhone 13 mini which I intend to ride to its death does everything a little better than the original iPhone SE that it eventually replaced as my personal phone, but what does it do that the SE couldn’t (albeit slower or fuzzier, I grant you)? And what did the SE do that the iPhone 4S couldn’t? That 4S, free as a warranty fix in the spring of 2012, had Siri and shot HD video and had GPS and was one-handable.

I guess MagSafe? Maybe? MagSafe isn’t bad, especially for a battery booster, but then, I used to carry a SonyEricsson Z520 that went four days between charges. I also used to carry an iPod alongside it, but now, in a world where I don’t get out much and don’t work remotely…would it be enough to say “hey Siri, play the St Patrick’s Day Essentials playlist on Apple Music” and let the fabric thing on the desk do the job? If I lived in a place where the pubs all had their own trad – or the carefully-curated Pandora stream at Trials – maybe?

In the end, the biggest thing that made the old tools viable is that they only had to be a phone, or a Kindle, or an audio player. The new phone has to be everything, but it also has to be a lifeline in a world where all of the Castro Street Dining Consortium have moved away, and Vox is a news site instead of an LiveJournal successor, and the only way to digest news is second hand through foreign podcasts. Technological solutions to social problems don’t exist, more’s the pity.

It would feel nice to think you could still get by with a flip phone, though.

There’s a lot going on. Very little of it actually good. A lot of holding breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This kind of anxiety is like asthma – you have medication, inhalers, you know what to do if you’re going to Tahoe or going on a plane or what have you; soon as the hills are all on fire and the air quality is 300, though, your regular coping mechanisms are not going to be sufficient and you can either shelter in place or go outside and get hit hard.

The flames aren’t all around us, but there are a lot of flammable goods between us and the fire, and there’s a lot of crossing fingers and hoping the winds don’t shift before we can get some hoses or dig some trenches or what have you. it’s both micro and macro, made worse by the kind of people who always told you “well that could never happen” and then, years after it did, have the gall to say “well that could never happen again.”

One place that apparently didn’t learn those lessons is a little conservative-arts school on the west side of Birmingham. Comes today the news that BSC has to come up with $200 million over the next three years in order to survive, of which they have only raised about $46 million – and want another $37 in state, federal and local money ASAP or they might go under next academic year. There is a very real chance they will commemorate my 30th anniversary by ceasing to exist.

This is hardly surprising. The fool who succeeded Neal Berte as President went frog-sticking without a light, demolishing the athletics program because it was too expensive but adding football and an on-campus stadium, while simultaneously kicking off a wave of building and eating the seed corn to do it – and then came the 2008 financial crisis, and then the revelation of accounting irregularities and the financial hit from that, and then a decade later, C-19. And now all of a sudden the bills have come due and the money isn’t there any longer.

Which is not surprising. In my day, BSC was mostly for people whose daddy owned half of some Lower Alabama county, so they could sit on the front porch of the frat house for four years before going back to take over the business. Most of those people just go to Bama now, I suspect. The balance of the student body was filled out with people who had one thing in common: a rejection letter from Vanderbilt. (Come on – black and gold colors, basketball first, stole the alma mater word for word, lots of red brick – you tell me.) The problem is, BSC was always only suitable for fitting you out for a life in Alabama, and ideally in Birmingham. And if you wanted to be a politician, you were at Bama anyway. If you wanted to be an engineer, you were at Auburn or UAB. If you wanted to be a doctor, you were at UAB or maybe South Alabama. If you were gonna make a preacher, you’d go to Samford. If you were a person of color, you were anywhere else at all. Even within the state, Montevallo (the hated rival) and Spring Hill College were on the come-up, and there wasn’t a huge delta with any number of other private schools that they would play in football – Millsaps, Rhodes, even Sewanee was a decided step up.

Ultimately, it begged the question: what is Birmingham-Southern College for? I don’t think there’s really an answer for that any more, or at least, not one that would compel people to throw cash in quantity. Might be better off as an adjunct of UAB, the way Peabody became for Vanderbilt or Oxford College is for Emory. Or maybe the plans from the mid-70s will finally come to fruition, and Miles College will finally get its new campus after all. That honestly might be the best solution: a new combined institution, more HBCU than not, fit for a modern 21st century Birmingham.

Something like that might actually get me to claim them again.

#15 Arkansas 84

Vanderbilt 97

FINAL

“Never believe it’s not sooooooo…”

Almost nine years ago, I wrote “don’t rely on the fact of a white line to stop a truck.” That was in reference to tech companies doing what was within the law and contract, despite objections based on what everyone thought the cultural and moral guardrails were. And that was in 2014.

Well. That certainly held up.

At this writing, we are on a sixth ballot for Speaker of the House, which is already predestined to fail. With only four or five votes to spare, the Republicans’ presumptive leader keeps coming up 20 votes short of what he needs to formally be made Speaker. And there is no obvious solution to this, because he spent the last two months groveling and offering up his hindquarters to the worst people in his party for the sake of grabbing power – and they still won’t play ball with him.

Some of this is actually structural. When Newt Gingrich tried to make himself Prime Minister of the United States in 1995, he concentrated power in the Speaker’s chair to an extent unseen since the days of the giants like Cannon and Rayburn – and more importantly, took it away from committee chairs and those with seniority. At the time, it was about undercutting the old fogey Republicans who were not on board with the bomb-throwing insurgent approach. Now, almost thirty years on, the bomb-throwing insurgents are all there is, and they are chafing at the authority of anyone who might be able to tell them no. If you felt particularly generous and charitable, you could frame this as an attempt by elements of the house GOP to return to a more committee-centric model where power devolves to individual chairs and members rather than being controlled by the iron fist of a single Speaker.

Or you could tell the truth: there are only three kinds of Congressional Republicans. Fascists, Brazilians, and those too weak to stand up to either. the motive force in the GOP are the people who came to Congress to own the libs on Fox News. There is no policy platform, there is only performative ignorance and weaponized redneckery. The one thing that has been accomplished so far is to take the metal detectors away, because this is a party for whom the terroristic mobs of January 6 were righteous American heroes. Every Republican in Congress either believe it or is too chickenshit to say they don’t.

And so now the “you will praise us for standing on your dinner table and trying to piss in our own mouths” caucus is holding Kevin McCarthy hostage with no demands, no counter-arguments, just the endless barbaric yawp of the toddler: “NO”. There’s no obvious solution, because the Republicans have a majority of the House. The sole hope is that there might somewhere be found half a dozen members who would declare themselves independent, caucus with the Democrats and flip the script entirely – because no Speaker elected with Democratic votes will survive in a GOP majority and we’ll be back where we started.

This is only really a problem for two reasons. One is because you need to pass a budget to keep the federal government open, even if it’s just a continuing resolution of the type we’ve mostly relied on for years since the GOP stopped even trying to pretend to govern in regular order. The other is the debt ceiling, a pointless construct that should long since have been eliminated after the shenanigans of 2011 (and would have been but for the Dumb Fuck Twins in WV and AZ). If we don’t have a working House of Representatives by Labor Day, we might have real problems. Well, more than we already do.

This is the natural final result of an entire party that has as its sole organizing principle “I should always get my way no matter what.” Now it’s bit them in the ass, to the cost of everyone else. At some point, the grown-ups have to take charge and put these people outside of power once and for all…because if there’s one thing the United States government has proven since 2016, it’s that no amount of lines of any color will stop a truck.

I don’t know if it was meant to be pejorative or not, but someone compared the state of Mastodon three months ago to LiveJournal. And complained that it seemed very much like it was meant to be a private space for like-minded people, unsuitable for viral activism of the kind that took off in 2020.

Which, at the risk of seeming insensitive: well, duh.

Mastodon was not intended as a Twitter replacement. It was intended as a Twitter alternative. The features it eschewed were specifically those that had been used to harass and troll the sort of people who defected from the birdsite, and it was meant to reduce reach: reduce dunk-quoting, reduce brigading and dogpiling, provide something that would be a safer space while still social. And the interoperability between instances was a bonus convenience – one gets the impression that the main focus was on intra-instance activity, where the specific rules and norms of the instance would prevail.

Phony Stark bought Twitter because that was the only way to build a hugely successful right-wing troll site with plenty of potential victims. As with anything in modern conservatism, the cruelty and domination was the only point, and the failing of Gab or Truth Social or Parker was that potential victims were unlikely to migrate there – leaving them with only their own kind posting pictures of their own feces. So Musk merely bought Twitter and handed it over to the worst in humanity, and did so in a manner so financially unsustainable that it’s tanked the primary business he’s supposedly built his genius on.

but back to Mastodon. It’s not in its final form, and probably never will be. But it started off as a phenomenon built for people who wanted top opt out of Twitter and the prevailing social media, which made it explicitly unlike Twitter. And now that people are trying to reproduce Twitter, it’s becoming apparent that there is a conflict between people who expect thing to work like they used to and those who don’t want that.

There are actually good arguments on both sides. the problem, as with so many things, boils down to the fact that technical solutions for cultural problems are a myth. There’s no way to build encryption that only the good guys can break, and there’s no way to build viral enhancements that allow the public to dunk on assholes without making it possible for assholes to dunk on innocents.

At some point, there has to be human moderation, and it feels like the Slashdot system needs to be tried again: after a while, random trusted users occasionally receive mod points to boost or bury a reply, and their mods are themselves meta-moderated for correction and future mod privileges. If you do this for replies (and presumably quotes as well), pretty soon you will locate, identify and bury trolls – not with an algorithm, but with the aggregated consensus of the community, randomly sampled repeatedly.

This could be a per-instance thing, modifying posts from other sides – one user repeatedly flagged? Block them. One instance as a constant source of downvoted posts? De-federate them. One person constantly making bad mods? Cut them loose. And by doing it on a per-instance basis, each instance is shaped by those who use it, and you can move around to one that is as freewheeling or heavily mannered as you like. (To some extent, this has happened already, with certain thoroughly racist instances cast into the void to yell at each other.)

Too many people are going for the TELSTAR approach – Terminate Elon, Let’s Start Twitter Again Right – but trying to use Mastodon as the new Twitter is like trying to use your Camry to plow the field. It’s going to take some serious modifications, and at the end of the day it may not be the best tool for the job. I’m getting more comfortable with Mastodon, but it’s not Twitter. Then again, it took years before Twitter was Twitter. I suspect we may speed-run the uptake process this time, but there are a lot of teething pains ahead.

For a brief moment this afternoon, I could almost see a 3D-shadow effect on the white letters on a slate blue background in my laptop menu bar. I don’t know if it’s deliberate, or if I hallucinated it, but I was suddenly put in mind of Kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope was a project by Greg Landweber, a Harvard hacker who famously cooked up Greg’s Buttons as a landmark piece of Mac customization shareware. It gave you options to change colors and fonts and the like in the classic macOS in the early-to-mid 90s. But Kaleidoscope was a leap beyond that – originally called “Acid,” it proved to be the fulfillment of something Apple was promising in Copeland: a way to customize the entire windowing system.

System 7.5 was no place to try to tinker with your OS and expect stability, but God knows I was doing by best. RAMDoubler, Speed Doubler, any number of things to try to max out the performance of a PowerMac 6100 on a grad student’s budget. but I couldn’t help customizing the look. He had separate extensions to try to mimic the appearance of the BeBox or of Copeland itself, but I always ended up with something in black and gold or graphite and silver or some other wild combination, and I stuck with Kaleidoscope all the way to the coming of MacOS X.

And then there were the various appearance themes for that, even. Some built in, some less so, but you could use Unsanity’s ShapeShiftter to get similar results, or even find one or two stray Apple beta themes – but those were gone for good with OS X 10.4 and later, it seems like, and that was an end of Mac customization. And nothing of the sort ever appeared for iOS at all, until the coming of iOS 16 and the handful of color and font options for the Lock Screen.

While I’m all for consistency, I would almost rather have some sort of tools for tweaking up the look of the OS than I would an external App Store framework or some of the other nonsense that’s apparently going to be forced on Apple by the EU. I don’t have any intention of opening up my phone to un-gatekept software, if only because every hack of iOS I’ve been aware of depends on jailbreaking and I like being secure. But it would be nice to be able to trick up the look with more than just a bunch of Shortcut icons. Moreso even than the PowerBook of yore, what’s on your iPhone is you. (Although to be fair, I never found anything that really suited my requirements for customization on Android 5 with my Moto X. Maybe it’s different now.)

And you may as well. It’s not like it’s going to scratch the CPU capability. Open iOS to arbitrary third party code and appearance consistency will be the least of your worries, so why not make it official? Then again, whimsical customization might keep me on my mini another year instead of sighing and biting the bullet and buying the iPhone 17 Pro whose smallest size is 6.4” and starts at $1199…and it’s hard not to think this ends with an Apple Watch Ultra on my wrist as the remote control for the ridiculous-size phone I never take out of my jacket…

By 2013, I was already making a habit of going up to the city during that break between Christmas and New Year’s. In fact, we generally went up earlier in December, to see the Christmas lights and see the Fairmont gingerbread house and stay in the St Francis like we did on our honeymoon. I could get a drink in the Clock Bar, or Irish coffee at the Buena Vista as we rode the cable car to the end of the line, and when I made my solo trip there would be a drink at Zeki or Fireplace Bar or the Mucky Duck on the way out to an inevitable end at the Riptide, where I could sit by a wood fire and read quietly two blocks from the beach.

It was different back then. There were half a dozen cocktail establishments I wanted to frequent – Bourbon and Branch, Local Edition, Rickhouse, Swig, you name it. There were places I aspired to shop – Wingtip, Unionmade, the little shoe shop in Noe Valley where I kept eyeing the steel-toed Blundstones I wouldn’t buy until 2017. The search for American-made wardrobe was still in its early days, and I hadn’t been gifted the Aldens or turned over my entire daily wear to American Giant above the waist and LC King below. Hell, I’d only just settled on an actual surplus peacoat to replace the ill-fitting Gap one.. A surprising amount of my outerwear – the Filson, the Rickson, the tweed, the M-65 and all the AG work shirts – were still in the future.

The city was different back then. The Valley was different. We hadn’t fallen into the bottomless dumb-money pit that made this place the new Wall Street. Maybe it was because I hadn’t quite turned 40, but I was not yet overrun by the sense that this place was no longer for the likes of me. Could have been wishful thinking on my part, or it could have been that the city was scratching an itch that was going unsatisfied after the Europe trip and not realizing we wouldn’t be abroad again until 2015.

Or maybe there was something there I just wanted to connect with by staying at our friend Doug’s place in China Basin and getting around entirely on MUNI before going home on Caltrain. Even in DC, my experience was more genuinely suburban than urban – living in Ballston was more like life in the Avenues, if we’re being honest, and my upbringing was far more vehicle-exurban than I ever realized at the time – and to live in San Francisco, however briefly and temporarily, felt like picking up on a bit of the road not taken.

I don’t know exactly when the wave broke and rolled back for good – maybe in 2015, when Santacon pursued me all the way up on the train and then all the way down the California line when I’d rather have been watching the Army-Navy game in front of a fireplace with a maple old fashioned. Or maybe in 2016, when we began the new tradition of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus matinee Christmas show in an attempt to push back against the encroaching dark. But the combination of layoffs (and an end to the winter break) and the ensuing pandemic put paid to it for good – there are no random galavants around the city after January 2019, because the opportunity isn’t there any more. It’s a pity, but that’s the size of things when the 4 rolls over to a 5.

I bailed off Twitter today. I announced my departure and where to find me on Signal, Insta and Mastodon, and yanked the ripcord.

It’s transparent at this point. GamerGate, the alt-right, the whole Trumpiss ecosystem is all of a piece. There is no daylight between QAnon and Elon Musk and antivaxxers and the whole miserable miasma. And I am tired of being even tangentially complicit.

I’m down to only about half a dozen people I don’t really have available in another social media. It sucks, because the friends in my phone have been the bulk of my friends in recent years as everyone moves away. And it doesn’t feel good to go back to Insta, even protected by the mobile web interface. But what Twitter brings to the table isn’t worth what it takes off any longer.

It’ll suck, it’ll be difficult, but at some level it also feels like my soul just took a three pound shit. And now we wait to see what happens – because the future survival of Twitter depends on what people are willing to countenance and what comes of their willingness. At this point, though, it’s safe to say it will probably be necessary to destroy Twitter in order to save it.