Author: Scott

A Foolish Nation Repeats Its Folly

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Like a dog that returns to its vomit Is a fool who repeats his folly.
–Proverbs 26:11

There may not be a better symbol just how thorough this nation’s retreat from multi-racial democracy has been than inauguration of an insurrectionist on the holiday honoring the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr–a man this nation murdered. Alabama and Mississippi have also chosen this day to celebrate Robert E. Lee, the general who led the Confederate army in the very first insurrection against the federal government.

I did not bother to “bear witness” to the travesty of inaugurating a convicted felon and thief of classified information. Instead, I read Michael Harriot, who encouraged us “Do not die” in a nation which has made clear it wants us to. I read the eloquent words of Rod Serling about Dr. King after he was assassinated from a letter he wrote to the LA Times on April 8, 1968 (h/t to @lizzslockeroom.bsky.social). Here is an excerpt (also available on goodreads):

In his grave, we praise him for his decency – but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own. When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun – we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right.

Now we acknowledge his compassion – but we exercised no compassion of our own. When he asked us to understand that men take to the streets out of anguish and hopelessness and a vision of that dream dying, we bought guns and speculated about roving agitators and subversive conspiracies and demanded law and order. We felt anger at the effects, but did little to acknowledge the causes. We extol all the virtues of the man – but we chose not to call them virtues before his death.

And now, belatedly, we talk of this man’s worth – but the judgement comes late in the day as part of a eulogy when it should have been made a matter of record while he existed as a living force. If we are to lend credence to our mourning, there are acknowledgements that must be made now, albeit belatedly. We must act on the altogether proper assumption that Martin Luther King asked for nothing but that which was his due … He asked only for equality, and it is that which we denied him.

Today is just day one of a years-long parade of indignities this country–especially those in its marginalized communities–will suffer. Mass deportation is coming. Some in leadership of state National Guard troops, having already decided they will be Trump’s Gestapo, are anonymously rationalizing future obedience of illegal orders in the press. A parole program which had temporarily allowed migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to come here has already been terminated. Assaults on birthright citizenship are coming. Further assaults on voting rights are coming. The erasure of trans people is coming. And that’s before we get to the imminent pardons of a great many violent January 6th insurrectionists and their release back into society.

It is cold comfort in this moment, but remembering that black people in this country have survived worse–and following their example–may be the only realistic way forward.

Marcus Garvey, Posthumously Pardoned

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Photo taken 21 July 2016 by Alan Stanton of a bust of Marcus Mosiah Garvey at the since-renamed Marcus Garvey Centre in South Tottenham. South Tottenham is an area of the London Borough of Haringey.

On this last full day before leaving the White House, President Joe Biden granted a posthumous pardon to Marcus Garvey. A letter written by Yvette D. Clarke (representative of the 9th congressional district of New York) and co-signed by 19 of her Democratic colleagues appears to have been the final plea which led to this result, but was by no means the first. When you dig into the facts of his 1923 conviction on mail fraud, numerous arguments that the conviction was unjust become apparent:

  • misconduct by the prosecution
  • lack of evidence
  • biased judge
  • all-white jury
  • J. Edgar Hoover’s multi-year effort to deport Garvey

While the inauguration that will take place tomorrow will accelerate the retreat from multi-racial democracy that the United States has engaged in going back to Donald Trump’s first election, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby vs Holder, and earlier, at the very least will remove an unwarranted stain from the biography of a key shaper of Pan-African thought, and an inspiration to the parents of the man we know today as Malcolm X. It was also a small bit of good news to share with my parents and cousins.

Farewell To Threads, And What Comes Next

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I deleted my Threads account today. Meta’s previous announcements about the end of third-party fact-checking and changes to moderation rules (to enable more abuse of people from marginalized communities on its platforms) and Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko speaking out regarding the danger of the changes prompted me to turn off the fediverse-sharing feature on my Threads account. At the time, I was unsure if I would continue to have a Threads account.

Meta’s announcement today that they’re immediately terminating DEI programs inside the company gave me the push I needed to delete my account from an app that frankly isn’t that good. The tech industry I’ve worked in since before Facebook ever existed didn’t treat people who weren’t white and male very well for decades before that. DEI efforts across the tech industry were largely belated, token efforts at most companies, that didn’t meaningfully increase the diversity of rank-and-file employees or leadership. Meta retreating from DEI feels like yet another slap at black folks who have already endured far more than enough between the death of affirmative action in higher education, a legal settlement that literally prevents black people from giving away their own money to black women the rest of the venture capital industry ignores, the outcome of the presidential election, and everything else that comes along with what we should have left behind from Trump’s first term. I don’t even want to imagine how awful it must have been for Meta’s now-former chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, to see Mark Zuckerberg casually nuke a decade of her work.

What’s next (as detailed in an earlier post) is more financial support for decentralized social media and efforts to create more hospitable online spaces for black folks (like Blacksky) and other marginalized communities that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, (and others) have targeted for abuse. My Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) administrators opted to defederate from Threads in the interest of protecting their users who are part of marginalized communities. I expect many other Mastodon instances of varying sizes to follow suit, or apply some moderation to Threads accounts. Deleting other Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is much harder than deleting Threads because of how many meaningful relationships I have with people that social media makes it easier to maintain. Perhaps this will be a year of seriously seeking alternatives–and making more efforts to connect in real life.

Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 2)

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This will wrap up my annual charitable giving post that I began on Christmas Eve with a Part 1.

Other Charitable Giving (continued)

Additional charitable giving recipients not listed previously include the following:

Other Giving

In addition to giving for charitable purpose that are tax-deductible, I’ll highlight a few tip jars, Patreon memberships, and other avenues I’ve taken to support people and causes that I find worthwhile.

  • The Contraband Wagon
    I initially met him through Twitter, and he’s taken on the exceedingly difficult challenge of creating constructive conversations on the issue of race. I had the honor of being a panelist for one of the live conversations he moderated on the issue of race in the tech industry. You can find clips of his conversations on YouTube and join his Patreon to get the full-length conversations.
  • Mastodon
    I began supporting the Mastodon project through Patreon in November 2022 after Elon Musk took over Twitter. As we’ve watched Musk turn Twitter into a propaganda and disinformation platform to (unfortunately successfully) elect Donald Trump, those of us with the means putting money behind efforts to help decentralized social media networks succeed will only grow more important. They recently began selling merchandise which also helps support their operations, which gave me an excuse to buy a stuffed version of their mascot.
  • Hachyderm
    Hachyderm.io is the Mastodon server I moved to in 2023 after initially joining the much larger mastodon.cloud. I began sponsoring them this year with a small monthly contribution via GitHub.
  • emptywheel
    The blog of independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, she’s effectively become the ombudsman of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets. She doesn’t just call out shortcomings and failings in their coverage, she clarifies issues that might otherwise be confusing. She’s one of just two journalists I value enough to support directly.
  • Blacksky
    Created and maintained by Rudy Fraser, it is effectively its own social media network for black folks on Bluesky that leverages the AT Protocol. I began contributing to his work this month via Open Source Collective, a fiscal host for numerous open source projects I used back when I was still writing software full time including webpack, vue, ESLint, and thousands of others.

Giving Plans for 2025

I don’t anticipate any changes in my financial giving plans next year beyond possibly giving a bit more to charities I already donate to, and to my church. Once I’ve completed a leadership training program I’m currently taking (in June 2025), I will look for an opportunity to regularly donate my time and expertise to a cause that needs them.

Charitable Giving in 2024 (Part 1)

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My final post of last year talked about charitable giving, but this I’m starting a bit earlier. This annual post is as much of a self-reminder to donate to worthy causes as it is to encourage those who read them to do the same.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

In addition to donating to my home church and my high school alma mater, I gave a bit to the Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington. If you’re in the DC/Metro area and are looking for a cause that helps families in need, consider them as a recipient for your year-end giving.

Other Charitable Giving

Last year’s merger between CIR/Reveal and Mother Jones didn’t change how they accepted donations. Researching this post gave me the opportunity to restart monthly donations to them which had lapsed. 2024 turned out to be a year of mainstream media taking a step backward in quality and/or being acquired by right-wing ideologues. January brought the purchase of The Baltimore Sun by the owner of Sinclair Broadcasting. So the advice I gave last year to find and consider supporting a local non-profit newsroom was advice I had to follow quite quickly myself. The Baltimore Banner covers what happens at Maryland’s state capitol quite well. It’s now my only written local news source since I dropped my Washington Post subscription after they got scooped on Justice Alito’s insurrectionist flag-flying despite having a multi-year head start.

HBO/Max opted to cancel their deal with Sesame Workshop for new episodes so they’re seeking a new partner. Since then, Sesame Workshop has become very active online seeking donations, and I responded. Sesame Street was a substantial part of the TV programming I consumed as a kid (because it was on PBS), and my children have too.

Another new recipient of charitable giving this year was the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I visited in-person during the week of Thanksgiving to see the Code Switch exhibit before it closed, and bought a bunch of books in their bookstore before I left (all purchase proceeds support the center itself). You can also give directly to the New York Public Library system.

Other charitable giving recipients so far this year included the following (in no particular order):

A follow-up post after Christmas will cover the rest of my charitable giving for the year and plans for 2025.

The Return of White Impunity for Black Death

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Merriam-Webster defines impunity as exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss. With their acquittal of Daniel Penny on the charge of criminally-negligent homicide in his killing of Jordan Neely, impunity is what the jury granted him. Jordan Neely was lynched for having a mental health crisis while black, poor, and homeless. A jury of Daniel Penny’s peers showed him the mercy that he didn’t show Jordan Neely. It didn’t matter that that Penny’s Marine instructor testified that he executed the hold incorrectly. It didn’t matter that at least one passenger is on video warning Penny that his chokehold was going to kill Neely. It didn’t matter that Neely had no weapon and didn’t harm anyone on the train before Penny literally choked the life out of him. The video of Neely being asphyxiated is a modern-day lynching postcard now.

I’m old enough to remember watching video footage of Rodney King being beaten within an inch of his life on video. I remember watching broadcasts of the destruction that resulted from people enraged by the verdict (and some opportunists too). Fast-forward almost 30 years and one of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynchers leaked the video of his crime thinking it would help him. He and his co-conspirators will likely spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. Video of George Floyd’s excruciating death under the knee of Derek Chauvin will keep the man in prison for nearly 2 decades from now. But just 4 year later, a vigilante can strangle a man to death with impunity.

My cynical mind wonders how the jurors who acquitted Daniel Penny responded to the broad daylight murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Perhaps the response to his murder (which has included very dark jokes and applause on social media) and the response to Neely’s lynching are two sides of the same coin.

Either way, we are (and have been for far too long) a nation too comfortable with violence, too numb to the suffering of those who are most often its victims. This puts everyone in a marginalized community at greater risk—not just from police (who will operate with even greater impunity than they already had once the second Trump administration begins), but now apparently from white vigilantes also.

A Nation Without Mercy, Revisited

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Yesterday, a mutual on Bluesky shared this news:

How can you be deadlocked when HIS HAIR PROBABLY SPEAKS AFRIKAANS BY ITSELF?!!

[image or embed]

— Ash Higgins (@ashhiggins.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 3:48 PM

It reminded me a post I wrote last year about just how broken this allegedly Christian nation’s understanding of the parable of the good Samaritan is. “He had to die, just in case” may yet spare Daniel Penny up to 15 years in prison that a manslaughter conviction could yield as a sentence. Like the trial of those who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, the only reason there was a trial at all was some public outcry that Penny was initially released without charges after he was first questioned by police. While Penny is also charged with criminally negligent homicide, the maximum sentence for a conviction on that charge is just 4 years. It’s also possible (if not probably) that the jury will will show Penny the mercy he lacked for Jordan Neely and find him not guilty–despite video evidence of him slowly but surely squeezing that man’s life out of him.

In the time since I first wrote A Nation Without Mercy, the “active and ongoing dehumanization and criminalization of the poor and mentally-ill” has continued. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public–even if the cities offer no alternative shelter. In a country where homelessness is rising, a housing shortage persists, and Trump is returning to the White House with a government unified under GOP control, the likelihood of homeless people ending up with fines, criminal records, and even prison terms seems uncomfortably high.

We Are Going Back

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I hated the “zombie Palpatine” storyline for awhile on social media, but the United States of America willingly chose to reenact this in real-life by reelecting Donald Trump. But in a result even worse than 2016, he won the popular vote–a feat he failed to achieve in two previous runs for the White House. Votes are still being counted as I write this, so we don’t have a full picture of the final outcome, but it seems likely that the GOP will control all three branches of the federal government again. Trump appears to not have grown his vote totals from 2020 much at all–but some 11 million fewer people voted for Kamala Harris this cycle than voted for Joe Biden four years ago. To the extent there is any silver lining in this election wipeout, my home state is sending its first black senator to Washington, along with keeping my House representative Jamie Raskin in his seat.

Every post-mortem of Kamala Harris’ loss that I’ve read sucks–except Michael Harriot’s. It seems that black people in this country are nearly alone in believing in the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr for racial equality in this country–and that is why we are going back. The only question which remains to be answered is “how far back?” The Trump rally in Madison Square Garden before the the election suggests a return to the 1930s, when the pro-Nazi German-American Bund met openly and freely in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere before World War II began. Trump (and JD Vance’s) blood libel of law-abiding Haitian migrants in Ohio and elsewhere and their campaigning on mass deportation and border camps sets this country’s return destination to the 1950s, and Operation Wetback–the largest mass deportation in this country’s history. We can be certain that the same administration which birthed the child separation policy at our southern border–a policy that years later has left hundreds of children growing up with strangers, separated from their real parents–will devise a sequel to Operation Wetback which makes the original look humane by comparison. The end of birthright citizenship–another part of Trump’s xenophobic plans–along with the return of the Muslim ban of his first term intimates a return to an 1860s United States after the Civil War but before the ratification of the 14th Amendment. This is just a small sample of the threats which await in the future. We don’t know if the Affordable Care Act will survive. We don’t know if the Department of Education will survive–along with the oversight and mandates it provides which ensure that my son gets support in public school for his special needs. We don’t know what will become of the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or any other federal agency responsible for protecting Americans from threats to their physical or financial health.

From January 20, 2025 onward, things will change. The coming days, weeks, and months will bring negative impacts that Trump’s non-wealthy supporters did not anticipate. Tariffs are certainly returning, along with the inflation that comes from companies increasing their prices to maintain their profit margins. I’m good on the appliances front myself, but I might be upgrading more of my personal technology earlier than I planned to avoid the price increases that tariffs will bring. The mass deportation plans, possible Affordable Care Act repeal, and other aspects of Project 2025 may create infighting, backlash, and enough pain nationwide to create a small window to mitigate some of the damage in 2026–if elections remain a thing we still have in this country. That hope may be a dangerous thing, but I will nurture it nonetheless.

Despite these future threats, I have decided to focus more on the present. What can I do today to make sure I’m ok, that my wife and kids are ok, and that the people who matter to me are ok? Answering those questions and doing as many of those things as possible, and repeating that cycle the day after that is what I can do. In addition, I can figure out what I can do beyond voting to make the spaces I inhabit and have influence in a little better. It may not be much, but it feels like a more productive and sustainable alternative than despair.

My First YouTube Video

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A hastily-made tutorial for sharing your screen and sound in Zoom by yours truly

I made the tutorial you see above entirely with the following tools:

  • QuickTime Player
  • iMovie
  • Zoom

The reason I made it was a recent struggle one of the presenters of our weekly Zoom Bible study had to get their sound shared along with their screen for the music and videos that were part of the presentation.

As long as I’ve owned Macs, it wasn’t until trying to figure out how to capture what I was doing in Zoom that I learned the QuickTime Player also has a screen recording feature. So with that new (to me) information, I wrote myself a little script and followed it to record my demo.

Once I captured the demo (and the Zoom recording of the brief solo meeting I used to demonstrate screen and sound sharing), then it was time to combine them into a single video. This is where iMovie comes in.

First I pulled in the two clips and trimmed them to the desired places. Next I threw in a cross-dissolve between them. I also tried adding a voiceover to clarify that the video after the cross-dissolve was the Zoom recording created during the first part of the video but I didn’t get that voiceover audio to come through.

Still, not bad for a first effort—and it helped the very small audience for which it was intended.

Past Tense

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We are reaching and surpassing dates in real-life that were formerly part of our science fiction. The screenshot which leads off this post is from part 1 of Past Tense, a time travel episode from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Given what the episode is about, it is even sadder that barely two months before the date in the screenshot the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bans against sleeping outside do not violate the Eighth Amendment.