Tag: Commentary

Salman Rushdie Talks Writing, Democracy, History & More

Posted on by Scott

I recently listened to David Remnick’s interview of Salman Rushdie–his first since barely surviving attempted murder by a young man not even born at the time Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination in 1989. He took the opportunity primarily to talk about his latest book, Victory City, but along the way talked about the attack on him, the impact of the fatwa on him, and democracy and history in India, England, and the United States. There are many places to listen to and/or watch the full interview, as well as reading Remnick’s piece in The New Yorker. 

Toward the end of the interview, Rushdie’s response to one of Remnick’s questions did an excellent job of summarizing the danger democracy faces in all the places he is connected to by birth, education, and citizenship. I’ve attempted to transcribe Rushdie’s spoken words below, emphasizing what stood out most to me:

The problem in India is this, that the current government, which to people of my way of thinking is alarming, is very popular. It’s the difference for example between India and Trump. Trump was only just about popular. And his level of unpopularity was at least as high as his popularity, that’s not so in India because the Modi government is very popular in India, has huge support. And that makes it possible for them to get away with it.  To create this very autocratic state which is unkind to minorities, which is fantastically oppressive of journalists, where people are very afraid. Which in a way it’s getting to be difficult to call it a democracy.

A democracy is not just who wins the election, it’s whether you feel safe in the country whether you voted for the government or not. India has a problem. The way in which this book just marginally engages with it is that it takes on the subject of sectarianism, and tries to say this is not the history of India. The history of India is much more complicated than that.  It’s not that there was an ancient culture that another culture came in and destroyed, that’s a false description of the past.

And as we know we live in a world in which false descriptions of the past are being used everywhere to justify terrible behavior in the present. England pretending there’s a golden age before any foreigners showed up, and completing ignoring the fact that they were <expletive> over foreigners in their countries in order to make possible their wealth and affluence at home.  America, talking about being great again. I want to know when was that? What was the date? It was obviously before the Civil Rights Act. Was it before women had the vote? Was it when there was still slavery? What are we hark[en]ing back to? A fantasy past becomes a way of justifying bad behavior today.“

David Remnick interview with Salman Rushdie from February 6, 2023

India’s Ministry of Finance searching the offices of the BBC in New Delhi and Mumbai and accusing them of tax evasion so soon after their airing of a show critical of Prime Minister Modi is exactly the point Rushdie was making about oppression of journalists. Shireen Abu Aqla was shot in the head and killed in the West Bank, likely by a soldier in the Israeli military (according to their own investigation). Here in the U.S., police arrested, shot, and tear-gassed numerous journalists covering protests that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Ali Velshi and his team of journalists were shot by rubber bullets from police during a live broadcast. A photojournalist named Lindo Tirado was shot by police with a non-lethal round and lost sight in one eye as a result. At least one journalist was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away while in the middle of a live broadcast. Nearly three years later, I haven’t seen any evidence of disciplinary action against the cops who did all this shooting.

Rushdie’s definition of democracy was an especially interesting one to me. My parents’ native Jamaica has a long history of political violence where the party you supported could have the most serious consequences for your physical well-being. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has written about mob violence and vigilantism occurring w/ the knowledge and consent of political parties not just in India, but elsewhere in southern Asia (https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/03/political-violence-in-south-asia-triumph-of-state-pub-82641). Here in the U.S., video from some of these school board meetings, heavily-armed people protesting COVID restrictions, threats and harassment of election workers, voter intimidation, and the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 make me worry that we’re returning to the sort of political violence which was once the stuff of history books.  

What Rushdie says about false or fantasy pasts being used to justify bad behavior in the present resonated the most strongly with me because of how much present bad behavior it explains. Putin comparing himself to Peter the Great as he rationalizes his continuing invasion of Ukraine is a present example. The MAGA movement led by Donald Trump (though leadership of that movement is being quite vigorously contested now) is certainly another. The conservative Christian groups I’ve written about previously are certainly harkening back to a pre-Civil Rights Movement point in American history as the place to which they want the entire country to return. In retrospect, even some of the rulings of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court are explained by this framing. As I wrote last year after the leak of Alito’s draft opinion which would ultimately overturn Roe vs Wade, black men and women had no rights the government was bound to respect and (white) women were scarcely better off than that. I’m old enough now to remember a culture warrior from decades earlier, Pat Buchanan, harkening back to what (in my memory at least) was probably the Revolutionary War with his “ride to the sound of the guns” catchphrase.

Beyond Rushdie’s clear-eyed views of India, England, and the United States, his life speaks volumes regarding how petty and small what we call “cancel culture” today really is. The list of detractors regarding his novel The Satanic Verses is quite long, and included Prince (now King) Charles, John le Carré, Roald Dahl, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary, and Jimmy Carter, among others. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) agreed with the fatwa calling for Rushdie to be murdered. Remnick’s piece includes the following shameful remark from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper:

I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.”

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, by David Remnick, The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue

Trevor-Roper’s remark can only be seen as more gruesome in the light of attempted and successful murders of translators of the book into Italian and Japanese, the attempted murder of the book’s Norwegian publisher, and the firebombing of bookstores that carried it. In light of the rough reception his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid would receive less than two decades later, I wonder if former president Carter ever revisited and revised his opinion of Rushdie’s book. Rushdie proves far more gracious to at least one of his critics than they were to him:

Meanwhile, the New York Times published a defense of J.K. Rowling–using Rushdie as an example of what could happen to her if she continued to be criticized–just a day after hundreds of current and former New York Times contributors published an open letter critical of the paper’s coverage of trans people. Rowling, like Rushdie, was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper’s Magazine a couple of years ago. The ways in which the two signatories choose to use their free speech (one to attack trans people, the other to write novels) couldn’t be more different, but the New York Times (predictably, in my view) treats them as the same. I still believe, as I wrote then, that the signatories of the Harper’s letter were asking that “controversial” speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. But Rushdie has paid a far higher price for his art–from other artists and his own government (beyond the one that actually issued the fatwa)–than Rowling has paid (or will ever pay) for using her substantial platform to punch down at a community that has been, and continues to be under siege.

From “Quiet Quitting” to Loud Layoffs

Posted on by Scott

One of the more loathsome inventions of the business press in this pandemic-impacted era of work is the term “quiet quitting”. Ed Zitron is far more eloquent than I in expressing his fury regarding the term. But here is my own response to an article about a CEO complaining about the backlash he received to a LinkedIn post about firing 2 engineers who were working multiple full-time jobs:

“The Business Insider piece is kinda trash because they let the CEO posture and moralize. There’s an obvious double standard for what CEOs are allowed to do versus regular workers and they didn’t interrogate that at all. Perhaps some people work parallel jobs to make ends meet, but there are definitely folks taking advantage as well. The collusion of the press with business to invent this concept of “quiet quitting” still makes me angry. Having seen and been subject to layoffs [myself], stingy benefits, and being underpaid relative to my experience and skillset for a good chunk of my career, it’s laughable to me that these companies expect loyalty for how little they offer in return. Even though I wouldn’t do the parallel jobs thing myself, I can see how people rationalize it. They’re just being as transactional with employers as employers have been with workers for decades now.

me in an online chat with friends from October 2022

Fast-forward to today and the news is filled with layoff announcements. PagerDuty literally quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr as part of a blog post laying off some 7% of their workforce. Friends of mine at 2 other companies regularly in the news are now out of work. My own employer laid off a little over 2% of the workforce. While I am still employed, a number of people I’ve done great work with over the past 5 years are now out of jobs. As far as I can see, these layoffs do not have a thing to do with performance. And given the profit numbers some of the most prominent companies in layoff news have posted over the past couple of years, these are not cuts needed to ensure the survival of these companies.

Ed Zitron’s take on what should happen to the CEOs laying off all these people seems extreme at first, but is it really? Microsoft posted record results for fiscal 2022, but they’re still laying off thousands. Is it really the fault of all those workers Google, Facebook, and others hired during the depths of the pandemic (as if consumer habits were going to remain that way forever) that the pandemic loosened its grip and consumer behavior moved back toward pre-pandemic norms? Perhaps we aren’t being skeptical enough, or critical enough of cuts of this size and scale. As often as we’ve heard about and/or read about “the business cycle”, CEOs who make the kind of money they do ought to know better than to assume that

I survived more than a few layoffs back when the internet bubble burst (leaving an internet consulting firm for a new role just months before it declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy). The company I joined, a telecom equipment manufacturer, turned out to be at the height of its headcount. Over the 4 years I was there, they shed well over half their workforce (even as they acquired failing competitors). The friends of mine at those companies that lost jobs never seemed to lose them because of performance. The RIFs I would be on the wrong side of in later years never seemed to be either. In a world of work that long ago replaced pensions with 401(k)s, we are just numbers when push comes to shove.

Not every company is as honest as Netflix in modeling themselves after a professional sports team, and all that entails about the short shelf life of the average player. I’ve been working more than long enough to know that any company that refers to itself as a “family” is a company not to be trusted. This season of layoffs is just the latest reminder that what matters most in life are the people who matter to you and the people who treat you like you matter in return–regardless of the work you do for a living, be they family or friends. When it comes to work, we should enjoy it and do it well, but not at the expense of what matters most. If we’re going to give loyalty, let it be to people who have earned it and reciprocate it, not to institutions.

Insurrection Anniversary

Posted on by Scott

On this day, the second anniversary of the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, I took a look back through what I posted on Facebook on that day, as well as some of what my friends posted in response.

I shared the following from my friend Brian:
“I just heard that the police are slowly, peacefully, and methodically dispersing these insurrections that breached our capitol, vandalized it, and desecrated it. Now compare that to how the police acted when they were dispersing BLM supporters in front of Lafayette Square so Trump could get a photo opp in front of a church while holding a bible upside down. Do not tell me that there is no such thing as white privilege. It cannot be more vividly illustrated than it has today.”

I appreciated Brian’s comment a lot because he’s white, but especially because he’s written at length about just how conservative he used to be. The two years that have elapsed since Brian posted this comment have only reinforced his point. Police in the U.S. set a record for the number of people they killed last year. Two years after the murder of George Floyd by 4 Minneapolis police officers and all the talk of racial reckoning, the police are just as unreformed as before and black and brown people remain in just as much danger.

I posted the following myself:
“Right after they finish certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory, Congress should impeach Trump again.”

This sentiment found a fair amount of agreement among my friends (as well as some whataboutism from a former classmate who also works in tech).

My last post on January 6, 2021:
“By the way, Ted Cruz is still going to object to the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory after all this. On behalf of a man who called his wife ugly, and called his father a murderer. To call this man spineless is an insult to actual invertebrates.”

As it turned out, Ted Cruz had a lot of company–5 other senators and 121 House members (all Republicans) challenged the electoral results in Arizona (a state first called for Biden–correctly–by Fox News). Additional GOP senators and House members also challenged the Pennsylvania results.

Fast-forward to the current day, and as I write this the House has started the 12th round of voting for the next Speaker of the House. All three GOP nominees for speaker (Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and Kevin Hern) are among the 147 Republicans who voted in favor of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election–the very objective of the insurrectionists who invaded the U.S. Capitol and sent them running and hiding for their lives. In the wake of a 2022 election which gave the GOP control of the US House of Representatives, twice-impeached Donald Trump is once again running for president (an outcome which would have been avoided had he been removed from office and disqualified from holding future office).

The continued absence of accountability for any elected officials who gave rhetorical aid and comfort to the insurrectionists 2 years after it took place is sad, but unsurprising unfortunately. Also unsurprising is accountability (when it has landed) landing most heavily on the foot-soldiers of the insurrection. Particularly for former members of the military who participated in this attempted coup, the punishments meted out have not been sufficiently severe from my perspective.

Also lost in the coverage of the U.S. Capitol insurrection is a similar incident at another state capitol–Olympia, Washington. Even if there weren’t other such incidents at state capitols 2 years ago, the comfort level on the political right with threatening and/or enacting anti-government violence, whether by those who plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan over COVID restrictions, or the Bundy clan and their abuses of federal land is far too high.

Owning My Words, Revisited

Posted on by Scott

A few years ago, I wrote this brief post, after Scott Hanselman re-tweeted one of his blog posts from 2012. In the wake of last year’s takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, I’ve been pointing people to Hanselman’s decade+ old advice because I’m seeing it repeated in various forms by others (Monique Judge of The Verge is the most recent example I’ve read). In the time since that November 2019 post, I’ve published at least 60 posts (with a couple dozen more still in drafts). But the best-written and fiercest piece I’ve read on the subject is this Substack post by Catherynne M. Valente.

Her piece is well worth reading in full and sharing with friends. I’m just 5 years older than Valente, and reading it gave me a flashback to the very first page I ever put on the web. It was probably back in 1994, since the Mosaic browser had just come out the year before. I was a sophomore computer science major at University of Maryland then, so it would have been wherever they let students host their own pages. It was just some fan page for the team they used to call the Washington Redskins.  I somehow figured out how to take an image of the team’s helmet and make it look debossed under everything else I put on the page.  It was the first time I got compliments from strangers for something I did on the internet (in a Usenet newsgroup for fans of the team).  Usenet is how I joined my first fantasy football league.  Many of the guys I met online in that league back in 1993 are still friends of mine today. I later met a number of them in-person when I visited the Pacific Northwest for the first time (and I’ve been back a couple more times since).  Usenet is how dozens of us Redskins fans ultimately met in-person and attended a Redskins game together in San Diego (LaDainian Tomlinson’s rookie debut in 2001, and Jeff George’s debut as Redskins starting QB).  So much life has happened since then that until I read a post like Valente’s, it’s very easy to forget all the different ways in which much less sophisticated tech than we have today proved to be very, very good at helping us make meaningful, durable connections with each other.

The 12-point plan of how online communities are created and ultimately destroyed is the heart of her piece. A lot of the friends I first made on on Usenet, or even email distros have migrated through a lot of the same sites Valente listed as having fallen victim to that plan. The migrations to Mastodon (or Instagram, or Slack, or Discord, or Reddit, or SMS groupchats, etc) sparked by Twitter turning into $8chan (as some only half-joking call it now) is a reminder of many previous site & app migrations. Personally, I’m splitting the difference–spending a bit more time on Slack with friends, an ongoing chat with my cousins via GroupMe, and more time on Mastodon in favor of a bit less time on Twitter (less doomscrolling at least). Particularly in the depths of the pandemic (which sadly still seems far from over), some of my Twitter mutuals found and formed a real community in a direct message group. There are nearly 20 of us, all black, in business, tech, academia, science, and journalism among other fields. They’ve been some of the most encouraging people regarding my writing beyond my own family. One of them gave me the opportunity to be a panelist on a discussion of diversity in tech. I continue to learn from them through our ongoing conversations and value our connections enough to have shared other contact info with them if Twitter does go down.

Some of us have already learned that the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere when it comes to social media. What’s being done to Twitter by Elon Musk right now–as much value as I still personally gain from using it–has been an opportunity to reconsider how I engage with social media. I’ve been much more selective about who I follow on Mastodon (just 85 people vs over 800 on Twitter) and am seeing a lot more technical content as a result. This change in my social media experience is intriguing enough that by this time next year I may be one of those people who went from having just a basic grasp of how Mastodon worked to self-hosting an instance and writing all about the experience.

2022 Year in Review

Posted on by Scott

Some highlights from this year:

  • Very strong year-end review (best ever at my current employer)
    • Substantial pay raise
    • RSUs added to my compensation package for the first time in my career
  • Promoted to senior manager at mid-year
  • Returned to the office
    • Hybrid model of Tuesday-Thursday in-office with Mondays and Fridays still remote
  • 11th wedding anniversary
  • Twins turned 7 years old
  • I lost about 10 pounds
  • Wrote 22 blog posts (including this one)
    • Moved this site to Amazon Lightsail (more on that in a future post)
  • Finally updated my library card so I can borrow books with Libby and in-person
  • Completed some reading for pleasure, including:
    • Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies (by Dick Gregory)
      • Borrowed physically from the library
    • The first three books of Mick Herron’s Slough House books
      • Slow Horses
      • Dead Lions
      • Real Tigers (borrowed via Libby)
    • They Called Us Enemy: Expanded Edition (by George Takei)
    • Black Cop’s Kid: An Essay (by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
  • Completed Building Microservices (by Sam Newman) in technical book club at work
  • Took an actual solo vacation (Philadelphia)

Some lowlights from this year:

  • Ending contractor terms early for performance reasons
  • Navigating a headcount freeze (which will persist into 2023)
  • Not enough exercise

Charitable Giving in 2022

Posted on by Scott

As the end of this year gets closer, and more non-profits reach out for charitable donations, I thought it would be a good time to look at the organizations I’ve donated to throughout the year and share some of the reasoning behind my giving.  The majority of my giving is religiously-motivated, while the rest isn’t.  When it comes to other giving, an increasing amount of that non-religious charitable giving is focused on non-profit journalism.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

I’ve been a baptized member of the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church since elementary school.  My parents sent my younger sister and I to the same SDA elementary school and high school.  My sister earned her undergraduate education degree from an SDA university as well.  We grew up returning tithe and giving offerings to our church, and I’ve tried to be faithful with that practice, even through the pandemic.  This year, as in previous years, my denomination and my home church will be the largest recipients of my charitable giving.

Another charity I donated financially to this year, and to which I’ve donated my time in the past (through assisting with ESL courses and teaching technology courses to seniors) is Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington (ACSGW).  This charity was founded in 1983 by 3 SDA churches located in Takoma Park, MD and Silver Spring, MD.  

The most recent change to my giving is the addition of my high school alma mater to the list of recipients.  A fellow alum reached out regarding donations to projects at our high school and I chipped in a bit of money for one of the projects.  Giving to my high school is something I plan to do more regularly in 2023 and years to come.

Other Charitable Giving

I’ve donated regularly to my local public radio and TV stations, WAMU and WETA respectively, for many years. I grew up listening to and watching them both, and I make sure that my children get at least of bit of PBS kids programming in their media diet regularly.

ProPublica received my earliest donation specifically for non-profit news back in 2010. Since then, my non-profit news donations have expanded to include Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. ICIJ and ProPublica get monthly automatic donations and I need to put Reveal back on that list as well .

This year included a bit of giving to tech-focused non-profits:

One of my longer-running monthly automatic donations has been to RAINN. I first learned about the charity through the experience and music of Tori Amos (specifically the track Me and a Gun, from her Little Earthquakes album). Over the decades she’s continued to speak out as a survivor of rape and do other work fighting on behalf of sexual assault victims.

Edit: After I published this post, I discovered the software I use to track my expenses mischaracterized one of my charitable donations. Friends of the Library Montgomery County is a charity that supports the public libraries in Montgomery County, MD. Given how the culture wars have begun to negatively impact both public libraries and school libraries, putting additional funds (beyond tax dollars) toward libraries is more important than ever.

Charitable Giving Plans for 2023

I hope to give more, and more consistently to the causes I’ve written about above. I’ll also look to resume giving to charities I missed this past year. Capital Area Food Bank is one such charity. Kiva is a non-profit microlending platform through which I’ve made loans to borrowers in 13 different countries over the years. I’ve also donated funds from time-to-time, but not as often or consistently as the sort of work they’re doing probably needs. I donated to The Bail Project and the Equal Justice Initiative in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police officers in 2020 but unfortunately haven’t done so in subsequent years.

I feel very fortunate to have the means and opportunity to give, and hope to encourage whoever may read this to give as well.

The [Tech Bro CEO] Strikes Back

Posted on by Scott

What Elon Musk is doing to Twitter right now is what happens when someone with the same ideology and worldview as James Damore has enough power and money to be in charge of a company instead of just a worker. When I first wrote about Damore a little over 5 years ago, I wrote about the ways in which the ideas in his muddled, poorly-written manifesto were easily disproven. Subsequent years have demonstrated that Damore’s worldview has plenty of representation not merely within the rank-and-file of tech companies, but at the very top as well. While Damore did not use this term in his manifesto, with today’s perspective it’s clearly recognizable as an a long accusation about the ways in which the Google in 2017 was too “woke”. His manifesto is still available online, along with much of the criticism of it, but for the purposes of this piece I will summarize the tech bro worldview this way:

  • The status quo composition of our companies, with its relative lack of women, black people, brown people, etc is the “natural order” of things
  • Diversity initiatives require a “lowering of standards” and are therefore not meritocratic 

The tech bro worldview bears enough similarities to the worldview of those who lead businesses outside of tech, hold political office, lead certain of our religious institutions, and those who populate newsrooms and shape popular opinion that Damore’s manifesto even found a defender on the opinion page of the New York Times. Despite Brooks’ call for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign, the National Labor Relations Board found the company acted lawfully in terminating Damore’s employment for violating the company’s code of conduct (an unsurprising outcome in my view, given the way at-will employment works).

There is plenty of evidence to debunk both the “natural order” and “lowering of standards” assertions (to say nothing of the idea of meritocracy itself). Nor can the timing of this particular conflict realistically be separated from what was happening in our politics at the time. But let us proceed to another example of how these false assertions nevertheless shape the thinking and actions not just of rank-and-file tech bros, but of those who typically lead them.

Fast-forward to April 2021, and I’ve been asked to be a co-panelist for a discussion on the intersection of race and technology. This discussion occurred just a day after Jane Yang (a now former employee of Basecamp) wrote an open letter to the founders while on medical leave. Yang was responding to the decision of the CEO (Jason Fried) to ban “societal and political discussions” from the company’s internal chat forums. Yang’s letter painted a picture of Basecamp’s leaders that looked very familiar to me from my own experience with similar people in the industry. The letter is well-worth reading in full, but here is paragraph that makes it clear Basecamp’s leaders were no different than those at other companies they’d criticized for years:


“But there were also some yellow flags. Whiffs of smoke that I was starting to pick up on. Your disproportionate, chilling response to a retrospective that you asked for. The whispers of how you had handled a prior company discussion when someone raised the able-ist language in the title of a recently published company book. The continued mourning years later of an executive who had centered the employees as her job, and then was summarily fired for not living up to the additional expectations of working miracles in marketing. The quiet departures of women and people of color, all of whom held their heads up high and left a better place behind than they found it.”

from Jane Yang’s open letter to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Fried and Hansson also announced the end of committees (including a committee for diversity, equity, and inclusion) and the end of 360 reviews (among other changes). As it turned out, Fried and Hansson were dealing (quite poorly) with an internal reckoning over a long-standing company practice of maintaining a list of “funny” customer names. The founders knew about the existence of this list for years, and predictably, the names that Basecamp customer service reps found ripe for mockery included Asian and African names. Particularly because of how public and opinionated Fried and Hanson have been regarding workplace culture–to the extent of having written five books on the subject, including a New York Times bestseller–and held up their own company as an example of how to do things better, it was (and still is) quite difficult to ignore the rank hypocrisy of their choice to shut down internal discussion of a significant cultural failure that they allowed to persist for years. The company all-hands called by the co-founders to try and mitigate the blowback from their decisions instead resulted in the departure of one-third of the entire company.

Over time, marginalized groups (and some of their allies) have mastered online tools and social media and leveraged them to amplify their voices. We saw that mastery at work in the responses to Damore’s manifesto. At Basecamp, marginalized people used these tools to challenge the worldview of the company founders. Fried and Hansson’s attempt to squash the backlash by fiat failed miserably.

While Coinbase didn’t figure prominently in our panel discussion at the time, that’s one of a number of companies whose lead Basecamp was following in being “mission-focused”, and supposedly apolitical. So discovering that barely two years later, CEO Brian Armstrong has decided that politics is ok when it comes to tracking the “crypto-friendliness” of politicians prior to the recent midterm elections here in the U.S. was … interesting to say the least. People and companies advocating for cryptocurrency have been far from apolitical when it comes to targeting black and brown investors, so the same groups targeted by unscrupulous operators in the mortgage space prior to the crash of 2008 have piled into crypto in disproportionate numbers relative to other investors–and have taken disproportionate losses as cryptocurrencies have plunged in value and multiple crypto companies have gone bankrupt.

Now we’re just over a month into Twitter’s takeover by Elon Musk–a takeover entered only because he faced certain defeat in Delaware Chancery Court. Musk has fired half the staff in layoffs so haphazardly executed that he ended up trying to rehire those not correctly identified as critical. He undermined the company’s current verification scheme by pushing the launch of a feature enabling anyone to be verified by paying $8/month, only for numerous pranksters to pay the fee and impersonate numerous brands on Twitter like Eli Lilly. Musk’s ultimatum to remaining Twitter staff to be “hardcore” or be gone resulted in a wave of resignations much larger than anyone anticipated, not unlike Fried and Hansson’s attempt to mitigate the damage from their attempt to squash internal dissent. The same thin-skinned reaction to criticism displayed by Fried and Hansson has been even more on display from Elon Musk. He’s fired those who tried to correct his ill-informed assertions regarding the ways the tech behind Twitter actually works–and mocked the skills and intelligence of the people he fired after the fact. Musk blames “activists” for the precipitous drop in ad revenue instead of being accountable for his own poor decision-making.

The reaction in various quarters to Musk’s floundering incompetence as CEO of Twitter has been very telling. According to the reporting of Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer, some tech CEOs are hoping Musk succeeds. The same Hansson who not long ago “encouraged employees to read Between the World and Me, a memoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s exploration of the racist nature of mass incarceration”, is now writing tributes to Elon Musk cheering the likely end of affirmative action in higher eduction. Hansson even touts John McWhorter’s Woke Racism these days, and speaks favorably of the likes of Glenn Loury and Bill Maher. Loury and McWhorter are regularly quoted by white conservatives too cowardly to share the stereotypical views of black people they already believed anyway without a black conservative to hide behind. We’re already starting to see layoffs across tech, and as economic conditions change and COVID-19 (hopefully) recedes, these CEOs almost certainly see an opportunity to re-establish their worldview within their spheres of control without having to account for marginalized people. That desire is almost certainly behind the persistent belief in some quarters that what Elon Musk is doing is on purpose.

There is plenty of criticism that can and should be leveled at Mark Zuckerberg (particularly his continued pursuit of the failed metaverse strategy and cavalier approach to customer privacy). But when it comes to how to handle layoff news, he delivered a masterclass in how to handle layoffs professionally not long after Musk’s deliberately cruel and haphazard ones. Other tech CEOs rooting for the man who treats his employees the worst will definitely be a trend to keep an eye on as time progresses.

Waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]

Posted on by Scott

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power finally debuted on Amazon Prime, and right on cue came the complaints from white fans of Lord of the Rings about “wokeness”.  What seems new about this latest iteration of the “waiter, there’s a [brown person] in my [fictional world]” phenomenon is the deliberate decision of the mainstream media to legitimize these complaints about said fictional world.  The tweet below is a great summation of the journalist malpractice being engaged in here.

When you lead off a piece with complaints about a fictional world with the deputy managing editor of redstate.com, that’s bad enough.  But it’s even worse when you conflate fans of Tolkien with actual scholars.  Running a story like this–which elevates the weakest of arguments from people with thin credentials at best–seems to be a preview of what we can expect from the new, “neutral” CNN.

I’ve written only briefly about Star Wars being my earliest fandom.  But nearly as old as my Star Wars fandom is my love of The Lord of the Rings.  I came to it first through watching the Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit in the early 80s, then the books.  The Lord of the Rings definitely contributed to my becoming a D&D player later on (and a reader of many other books in the fantasy genre).  In college, I took the comparative mythology class taught by Dr. Verlyn Flieger (a well-known Tolkien scholar) because it gave me an excuse to read The Silmarillion for credit instead of just for fun.  It’s been nearly 30 years since I took her course, but I still remember it because to her credit she gave us what would later be called a trigger warning regarding the depictions of Gollum in Tolkien’s work (which wasn’t perceived as racist by many people then, but likely would be now).  I don’t recall if she gave us a similar warning regarding the descriptions of orcs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did.  N.K. Jemisin (the 1st and only sci-fi author to win 3 consecutive Hugo Awards for best novel in the genre) has definitely made that criticism of Tolkien’s description of orcs.

When Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, my fellow Tolkien nerds and I made sure to see all three movies at The Uptown, the best theater in the area at the time.  I bought and watched the extended editions of all three movies on DVD, and am overdue to add to my collection whatever 4K version of the trilogy my XBox One X will play.  I even watched the not-as-good Hobbit trilogy.  The books of the trilogy, The Silmarillion, and an old copy of The Tolkien Reader are on a shelf in the home office where I’m writing this right now. I’ve read The Children of Hurin (a copy from the public library anyway), but have not yet added a copy to my collection.

Richard Newby is a longstanding member of the black Tolkien nerd tribe, and he’s written the only piece worth reading on this subject.  So rather than write an inferior version of what he’s already written, I’ll write more broadly–because these complaints from white fans aren’t new.  Moses Ingram had to deal with these same people when they objected to her presence as an inquisitor in Obi-Wan Kenobi.  At least Disney (and her co-stars) seemed to have learned something from their failure to stand up for John Boyega when he first showed up as a black stormtrooper in The Force Awakens.  Disney failed Kelly-Marie Tran in a similar way.  Marvel has attracted much of anti-woke ire in recent years, for everything from Black Panther, to She-Hulk, The Eternals, and Ms. Marvel.  Steve Toussaint gets cast to play Corlys Velaryon–cue the anti-woke whining.  Now it’s Sir Lenny Henry’s turn, and Ismael Cruz Cordoba’s turn to contend with toxic fandom.  Toxic fandom can suspend disbelief for magic, dragons, laser swords, faster-than-light travel, and time travel–but not for brown people–human, elven, dwarven, or harfoot in this case.  Even as I write, these sad know-nothings are arguing on Twitter about “the author’s vision” with the likes of Neil Gaiman–who in addition to being a great and prolific fantasy author himself (American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Sandman, and countless others)–has such a deep knowledge of Tolkien’s work that Christopher Tolkien personally thanked him for explaining a reference his father had written years before.

Before the internet, being a black fan of science fiction and fantasy was a lonely pastime.  Depending on where and when you grew up, you might not have had many other black kids as classmates at school or friends at church to begin with.  Add to that an interest that not many other kids might have and you had to be prepared to like or love that thing on your own.  You had to cultivate an appreciation for these stories despite the absence of characters like you playing parts in them at all (except as stereotypes and/or foils for whoever the hero was).  You don’t realize that’s what you’re doing as a black fan of these genres (because you’re in middle school when this starts, or younger), you only see it in retrospect when you’re an adult.  I was most recently reminded of that mental work when I watched Lovecraft Country, and again when I rewatched the Far Beyond the Stars episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these stories impact me the way they do, both set in the 1950s United States, when black people continued to be treated as second-class citizens at best.  Decades after these stories were set, self-appointed gatekeepers are still trying to keep us out of “their” genre–despite the fact that we know and love as well and as much, if not more than they do.

When I listened to this episode of Throughline, and heard how the work of Octavia Butler impacted–and still impacts–the life of an NPR co-host (who is originally from Iran), it reminded me of how thrilled I was to read Wild Seed and know that someone who looked like me had written it.  I only watched it in syndication, but still remember how important it was to see Nichelle Nichols play Lt. Uhura in the original Star Trek.  Seeing Billy Dee Williams play Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back, LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn play Geordi LaForge and Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Avery Brooks play Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really mattered–not just to my childhood, but into the present.  Deep Space Nine in particular has yet to equaled, much less surpassed in the genre, for its positive representations of black manhood, father-son relationships, even romance between a black man and black woman who are peers (Captains Sisko and Yates).

Today, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, and other black authors are putting out some of the best work on offer across the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.  Twitter hashtags like #DemDragons allow black fans of these shows to enjoy them together in near real-time.  Facebook groups and private chats (and their moderators) do the work of keeping toxic fans away.  And even when Hollywood makes mistakes, like firing Orlando Jones from American Gods, or policing the language black writers use, we are finally getting to see ourselves more and more in the work of this genre–and the work is better for it.  Studios and fans are fighting back against bitter review bombers.  And while such defenses shouldn’t have to be made, at least they are being made.  Toxic fandom may not like us in their fictional worlds anymore than their real ones, but we aren’t going anywhere in either one.

Who Is Worthy of Forgiveness?

Posted on by Scott

Plenty of people aired (and are still airing) their opinions regarding this question in the wake of President Biden’s long-anticipated decision to cancel some federal student loan debt.  But when I skip the “free at last” responses (from those grateful for the federal student loan debt relief) and dig beneath the specifics of the various responses, they are ultimately judging whether or not the recipient of the debt forgiveness is worthy of receiving it.

Quite a few of our fellow Americans believe those who are getting some (or all) of their federal student loan debt forgiveness are unworthy–undeserving.  Those responses sound a lot like “what about those who already repaid their loans?” and “it’s not fair”.  Publicly expressing my happiness for those eligible for debt cancellation on Facebook prompted 1 negative response from my friend list along exactly those lines.  Sadly and predictably, there are many Christians in that chorus, despite what we claim to believe about forgiveness–despite being undeserving–and what the Bible says about forgiveness, debt, and debtors.  We claim to believe in a Bible with multiple verses about cancellation of debts after 7 years and in a jubilee year and this is how some of us choose to respond?  It’s beyond merely sad, but a poor representation of what Christianity is supposed to stand for.

Ironically, the bulk of the opposition comes from people who very likely supported the Republican president and the Republican Congress who passed the law which made Biden’s action possible:

What really highlighted the fact that this federal student loan debt was really about the worth of the people receiving the relief (instead of the fiscal implications) is the response of critics to being called out as hypocrites by a thread from the official Twitter account of the White House:

Half a dozen Republican congressional representatives were found to have received hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars of forgiveness for Paycheck Protection Program loans. Leaving aside the absurdity of congressional representatives applying for and receiving these loans in the first place, this shabby defense really stood out:

This particular defense reminded me of Mitt Romney’s 47% insult about Obama voters when I first saw it. But after some more thought, it occurs that a better analogy for what David French is doing here is being like the older son in the story of the prodigal son. French (and at least some other self-proclaimed conservatives) see themselves as responsible, faithful, yet neglected while those receiving debt forgiveness are undeserving profligates. Here’s Ted Cruz making essentially the same argument in a far less subtle and far more deliberately insulting fashion than David French:

But when I actually looked for information regarding whether or not the Paycheck Protection Program we’re being told to view as disaster relief actually served that purpose, what I found was not very encouraging. Only 25% of the PPP loans actually protected paychecks as intended. Of the 77% of businesses which received funds, nearly half cut staff anyway. Just one investigative report by Fox43 News in Pennsylvania found numerous examples of this. Despite this (and numerous instances of PPP loan fraud, including $268 million recently recovered by the Secret Service) some 94% of PPP loans granted by the federal government have been forgiven in full.

I found this summation of the way that federal student loan forgiveness will actually work in practice particularly compelling:

And that’s before you get to student loan forgiveness programs that predate Biden’s latest action by years.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz makes a persuasive argument that this program will help the economy instead of harming it. He also turns the discussion to a much more useful place than whether or not the recipients of the forgiveness are worthy, but to whether or not it is beneficial to the country at large. One of the online friends I discussed the loan forgiveness plan with had the following thoughts on it:

I’ve noticed that American discourse tends to frame universities as a place that hands out goodies individuals (access to jobs and prestige) vs a place that expands the human capital of the nation. One way to look at Biden’s plan is it releases a lot of highly educated people to do more risk taking things like open businesses and more altruistic things like work for non-profits. It’s not just good for those people but possibly everybody else in society.

This comment gets at the heart of a very particular way in which too many of today’s political leaders fall short when compared to their predecessors. Instead of elected officials (particularly those in the GOP) using their positions to govern in a way that benefits as many people in their particular sphere of responsibility as possible, many choose instead to validate and amplify a false individualism. They deliberately heighten the “us vs them” dynamic that already exists in the country to retain their own power, defining more and more Americans (those eligible for student loan forgiveness in this case) as an unworthy “them”. However imperfect Biden’s debt forgiveness plan is, it at least attempts to do something for the benefit of a broad set of Americans who can use the help.

MLK Day 2022

Posted on by Scott

The third Monday in January is here, and once again people who oppose everything Dr. King stood for are abusing the one line they know from the I Have a Dream Speech (because they don’t know any others) for their own political ends.  This annual whitewashing of King’s legacy only succeeds to the degree it has because the people doing the whitewashing don’t dare venture beyond the confines of that line in that speech because too much of what he written stands in direct opposition to their political aims.  This applies not just to the secular, but to the religious as well.

One of my cousins read his children Letter from Birmingham Jail yesterday.  This letter is where we can find the phrase “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”    This letter is also where we can find this phrase: “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider“.  You can be certain that none of the hypocrites quoting King today will quote that.  Decades after this letter was written, we’ve seen how this country continues to treat and talk about certain immigrants.  Decades after this letter was written, the segregation and police brutality of which King wrote in 1963 are still problems in this country today.  Actually reading his letter reveals that direct action was chosen as a last resort, only after the local leaders they negotiated with broke their promises.

This passage from the letter is sadly relevant once again in the wake of GOP measures to make it harder for those in the electorate who oppose their program to cast votes:

An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically structured?

When you read the letter written by eight Alabama clergyman that King was responding to, the motivation for this paragraph becomes crystal-clear:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

One key insight among many in King’s five-and-a-half page letter is the different ways in which the black community responded to the stubborn persistence of Jim Crow & segregation: adjusting to it, being desensitized to the problems of those black less secure economically and academically than themselves, or bitterness.   His warnings about what could happen if the nonviolent efforts for justice he supported were rejected would unfortunately become true–not just in the immediate wake of his assassination five years after this letter, but many times in the wake of police violence resulting in the death of someone in their custody (and/or acquittals as the result of the rare court trials officers faced for such violence).

King’s decades-old criticism of the contemporary Christian church in the America of his day should shame today’s Christian church:

The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s often vocal sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust.

The hypocrites referencing King on this day are doing things like invoking his name in support of “All Lives Matter”, or to support their bans on Critical Race Theory (which could pretty easily prevent children in our public schools from actually learning anything about King’s letter).  Some More News has a hilarious, profane, and correct take on the annual whitewashing of King’s legacy.