Tag: Commentary

Murder on the F Train: Vigilantism is America’s New Normal

Posted on by Scott

On May 1, 2023, Jordan Neely breathed his last breath on the floor of the F train after another passenger, Daniel Penny, held him in a chokehold for approximately 15 minutes (a few of which were recorded by a freelance journalist named Juan Alberto Vazquez). As is seemingly always the case when a black man dies a violent death in this country, we very quickly learned every possible negative thing there was to learn about Jordan Neely: his mental illness, his dozens of arrests, time spent in prison, previous violent assaults, even a verbal attack on the LGBT community. Even learning Penny’s name took quite a bit longer to learn than the entirety of Neely’s life story, despite his being questioned by police and released without charges.

Despite Neely’s past (none of which Penny could have known before he murdered Neely), the most physically-aggressive action he reportedly engaged in during this encounter was throwing trash at other passengers and throwing his own jacket on the ground. Beyond that, he yelled about being hungry and thirsty and verbally threatened to hurt anyone on the train. And for this–not even a wound to another passenger–Penny attacked Neely from behind and strangled him to death while other passengers watched and two reportedly helped Penny hold Neely down, ultimately leaving him to die on the train floor in his own waste as he’d involuntarily soiled himself as he died.

As I write this on May 8, social media continues to be filled with ex post facto rationalizations of Neely’s murder. The volume and frequency of these pro-vigilante, pro-murder takes was such that it brought to mind a literal, Biblical description of the degree of wickedness that prevailed in the world before the flood:

Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, Listen to my voice, you wives of Lamech, Pay attention to my words, For I have killed a man for wounding me; And a boy for striking me!”

Genesis 4:23, NASB

An uncomfortably close parallel to the words of Lamech in Genesis might be those of Filemon Baltazar, who Neely assaulted in 2019.

Everyone in different situations has reasons for what they do. The Marine shouldn’t be punished. Who knows what that guy might have done to other people,” Balthazar said of Neely, who he insisted “should have been in some rehab center.”

Alec Schemmel, The National Desk, May 5, 2023, CBS 6 Albany News

At least he suggests that Neely should have been in a rehab center. Others lack even that modicum of sympathy.

Here’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, an opinion editor with Newsweek:

Note the complete absence of any connection between what actually happened, and the hypothetical she’s spinning. Note also the shot at men who “just sit there and pretend it’s not happening.” For Ungar-Sargon, what happened to Neely doesn’t happen enough.

This execrable New York Post opinion piece leads off by saying Neely’s murder followed “a struggle with other passengers” and uses his death to advocate for involuntary commitment, despite the decades-ago push for deinstitutionalization of the mentally-ill led by Ronald Reagan as governor of California, and again by Reagan as president at the federal level. Reagan signed a bill repealing the vast majority of The Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, signed into law by Jimmy Carter. This legislation would be the only attempt at the federal level to improve mental healthcare in this country for the next 30 years.

Beyond the usual bots and low follower count trolls on Twitter amplifying longstanding political, racial, and other divides the country has, two commentators stand head-and-shoulders among the chattering class in their response to this murder: Thomas Chatterton Williams and Conor Friedersdorf. Both have displayed over the course of days levels of ignorance, cynicism, and moral bankruptcy I still find shocking despite their previous displays of most of these same qualities in different circumstances.

LARPing is “live-action roleplaying”–Williams is accusing people protesting Neely’s murder of pretending to be concerned. He goes on to blame “the state” for Neely’s death (instead of Penny, who actually murdered him). Friedersdorf goes on to display an ignorance of the impacts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott so profound, so fundamental, that I actually felt despair that someone so illiterate in this country’s history continues to have the platform he does to shape the viewpoints of people who actually hold power in this country.

Conor Friedersdorf being clueless about the impacts of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Today, Williams exceeded his previous heights in advocacy for vigilantism with this gem:

When I read this, I was reminded of Tucker Carlson’s defense of Kyle Rittenhouse’s vigilantism in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Like Ungar-Sargon, he refers to Neely’s past actions–which no one on the train could have known about beforehand. Williams projects these past actions forward as a justification for Neely’s murder. Instead of seeing Minority Report as a cautionary tale, he sees it as an affirmative path to take only worse–because civilians should feel justified in using deadly force against someone who *might* do something.

Thankfully, Janelle Bouie pointed to Williams’ admitted violent past to highlight the manifold flaws in his hypothetical.

William’s response is not merely inadequate, it fails to even acknowledge the numerous examples of youth not being a defense when you are black and male. Trayvon Martin was just 2 years older than Williams (and hadn’t assaulted a girl in front of multiple witnesses) when George Zimmerman decided to follow him (and ultimately kill him). Ahmaud Arbery was just 25 years old when he was lynched by 3 men attempting to “detain” him for a crime they believed he’d committed.

In my view, Neely’s murder, the recent wave of shootings of people who accidentally went to the wrong house (or car, or driveway), or were playing hide-and-seek too close to the wrong home, and a recent attempted vehicular homicide against homeless people are all connected. So is the militia movement that has taken it upon itself to “police” the southern border, and those who volunteer to “protect businesses from rioters”. More and more often, these vigilantes are aided and abetted by officials elected to maintain law-and-order and/or paid and trained to do so (such as the police). NYPD tacitly endorsed Daniel Penny’s vigilantism by not taking him into custody. Governor Hochul’s comments effectively blamed Neely for his own death. Hochul does not share a political party with Greg Abbott, but her comments about Neely are no less dehumanizing than his regarding the victims of a recent mass shooting. He called them “illegal immigrants”, completely ignoring the fact that they were victims of murder in the state he is governor of. The proliferation of so-called “stand your ground” laws not only remove any requirement for those who own guns to demonstrate competence in their use, they eliminate prosecution and penalties for incompetent use–even if it results in the death of innocents. Despite the strong correlation between weaker gun laws and higher rates of gun violence and gun death, states controlled by the GOP continue to weaken the laws further.

Despite the high-minded talk of those who claim to value life, all the available evidence points to life being even cheaper than ever. The backlash against the “racial reckoning” that some thought would happen in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police has proven so strong that we’ve retreated to the point where a black man like Thomas Chatterton Williams is loudly advocating in favor of a vigilantism that has often claimed black men as victims not just in this country’s long-ago history but in its recent past and present.

Reading The South Through the Lens of Caste

Posted on by Scott

I recently finished reading Adolph L. Reed, Jr’s memoir of life in the Jim Crow South and afterwards.  Having read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste just before (and The Warmth of Other Suns years earlier), I went into Reed’s slim volume looking for points of agreement and points of conflict  between it and Wilkerson’s previous works.

I hadn’t read any of Reed’s book-length work prior to The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, but from a few of his articles I understand him to be a left-wing critic of anti-racism and identity politics.  The memoir focuses far more on the way Jim Crow functioned in practice than on criticism of anti-racism and identity politics in the present.  Like Wilkerson’s previous works, Reed’s memoir highlights the arbitrary nature of the penalties to blacks people for challenging the social and legal structures of Jim Crow.  The capriciousness of enforcement is heightened by Reed’s stories of travel from points north to places where Jim Crow governed expectations of behavior even after it was officially repudiated.  As depicted by Reed, the level of effort black people had to go through to comply with the strictures of Jim Crow was substantial, and a thing he only realized in retrospect. 

Reed doesn’t soft pedal the apartheid system Jim Crow was in the least, nor the nature of the chattel slavery system that preceded it. He quotes at length from the infamous Cornerstone Speech, references other ordinances of secession from southern states,  and makes clear that the South shot first with the aim of preserving slavery.  White supremacy clearly undergirds both slavery and Jim Crow in Reed’s telling.  But ultimately, Reed’s memoir reinforces his “class-first” worldview and that of others on the left (including his preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders). 

Reed’s account of life under Jim Crow and afterwards is very enlightening. His lived experiences across decades and regions of the United States are both broad and deep, including New York City, DC, and parts of Louisiana (including New Orleans), Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Georgia. That said, I think there are limits to the power of the Jim Crow experience to explain the present. Reed’s book was published just last year, in the wake of a Trump presidency (a direct repudiation of the nation’s only black president) Trump’s role in encouraging an insurrection to remain in power, and the continuing engagement in overt appeals to white nationalism by numerous GOP pols and those in their orbit. I find it difficult to square these facts with assertions that “race essentialism” on the part of black folks is the real problem.

Wilkerson’s Caste, published in the summer of 2020, does a better job of capturing the subtleties and nuances of how we engage with each other by broadening our vision beyond race (race and class, instead of race or class). I still remember her interview with Terry Gross, and being initially skeptical of the book because of her response to the question of why the apartheid system in South Africa was not included in the book.

My response on Twitter in a thread with Thomas Chatterton Williams regarding Wilkerson’s Caste

Actually reading the book revealed not only a larger number of commonalities between the way race and class interact in the U.S. and the way caste works in India than I realized, but a wealth of research in the U.S. during Jim Crow which studied it from the inside and called it a caste system. Some of the takeaways on Caste I took note of separately (so as to keep the copy I borrowed from the public library as pristine as possible):

  • Dalits had an equivalent to the sharecropping system some black farmers endured
  • W.E.B. DuBois and Bhimrao Ambedkar corresponded at least once regarding the similarity of the position of their people in their respective countries
  • Madison Grant (a popular eugenicist of the early 20th century) saw India’s caste system as a model to be emulated
  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr was seen by Indian untouchables as an American untouchable
  • Among the earliest of the people to use the term “caste” to describe segregated schools in Boston was abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner.
  • Gunnar Myrdal (Swedish social economist) and Ashley Montagu (British-American anthropologist) used the term “caste” to describe the the way black people (and others) were treated in the U.S.

While I have seen pushback elsewhere regarding aspects of Wilkerson’s book (mainly people attributing causes other than racism to the personal experiences she recounts in the book), the only place I really disagreed with Wilkerson’s book was the suggestion that the indigenous people of America were exiled from the caste system. From reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle, I learned (among other things) that the Five Civilized Tribes fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War and owned black people as slaves.

Wilkerson’s book is a lot longer than Reed’s, but no less valuable to the reader attempting to increase their understanding of the American experience for black people. Reading them close together in time provoked thoughts and revealed insights I suspect I would not otherwise have had.

Is American Christianity Due for a Revival?

Posted on by Scott

Timothy Keller believes renewal is possible. He laments the decline in church membership and the closure & repurposing of former churches he first encountered in New York has spread nationwide. He then describes five factors as necessary for renewal and acknowledges that even those five will not be enough on their own. But only fairly late in the piece does he fully acknowledge the nature of political engagement of the white evangelical American Christian church:

American evangelicals have largely responded to the decline of the Church by turning to a political project of regaining power in order to expel secular people from places of cultural influence.

Keller, Tim. “American Christianity is Due for a Revival”. The Atlantic, February 5, 2023

More than “turning to a political project”, Christian churches have been violating the law regarding endorsement in elections, and only retained their tax-exempt status by virtue of the IRS abdicating its enforcement responsibilities.

As a Christian, and not withstanding the recent revival at Asbury University that began just days after Keller’s piece ran and continued for weeks, I have serious doubts about the prospects for a broader revival of Christianity in this country anytime soon. Keller cites Émile Durkheim and Jonathan Haidt as secular social theorists who “who how religion makes contributions to society that cannot be readily supplied by other sources.” But entirely absent from Keller’s piece is any acknowledgment of the ways in which the Christian church as an institution, and those who lead certain individual congregations, has not only failed to be a positive exemplar of how to treat its members, but has reflected and reinforced some of the worst practices of the secular world in its treatment of women, children, and those who are part of marginalized communities. This goes beyond the sex abuse scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention, or similar cases in the Catholic Church going back decades, to the arguments we are somehow still having even today over whether or not women should be ordained and function as pastors.

Twenty-seven countries are currently led by a woman in the role of president, prime minister, or chief executive, and dozens of countries have elected women as leaders since 1960, nearly 10 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 were led by women CEOs as of 2021, but some Christian churches have decided that only men should exercise their spiritual gifts in the office of pastor–regardless of our claim to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who has granted the same spiritual gifts to women as well as men. Our churches claim to believe in a Bible that depicts women as prophets, political leaders, business leaders, and ministers in the days of antiquity but denies their evident spiritual gifts in the present-day. These are not the actions of institutions in a faith ready for revival.

GenXJamerican.com Moves to Amazon Lightsail, A Follow-Up

Posted on by Scott

One change I missed after migrating to Lightsail, was ensuring that all the posts with images in them were displaying those images on the new site the way they were on the old. A scroll backward through previous posts revealed the problem quickly enough, but life is busy so it took awhile until I had enough time fix it. The steps I expected I would need to take to resolve the missing images issue were roughly the following:

  • Start up the old EC2 instance
  • Download the old images
  • Upload the old images to the new instance on Lightsail

Because I only stopped the previous EC2 instance instead of terminating it, I was able to re-start it. To download the old images, I’d have to find them first. Having self-hosted WordPress for awhile, I knew the images would be in subfolders under wp-content/uploads, so the only real question remaining was where exactly the old Bitnami image rooted the install. Once I “sshed” into the instance, that location turned out to be ~/stack/apps/wordpress/htdocs/wp-content/uploads. Images were further organized by year and month of blog posts. To simplify the downloading of old images, I had to knock the rust off my usage of the tar command. Once I’d compressed all those years of images into a few archive files it was time to get them off the machine. I used this Medium post to figure out the right syntax for my scp commands.

Once the archive files were on my local machine, I needed to get them onto the Lightsail instance (and expand them into its uploads folder). But just as I did compressing and pulling the files down from the EC2 instance, I had to figure out where they were in the new Bitnami image. As it turned out, the path was slightly different in the Lightsail image: ~/stack/wordpress/wp-content/uploads. Once I uploaded the files with scp, I had to figure out how to move them into the years and months structure that would match my existing blog posts. Using the in-brower terminal, I was reminded that the tar command wouldn’t let me expand the files into an existing folder structure, so I created an uploads-old folder and expanded them there. Then I had to figure out how to recursively copy the files there into uploads. It took a few tries but the command that ultimately got me the result I wanted was this:

sudo cp -R ./uploads-old/<year>/* ./<year>

Now, every post with images has them back again.

Salman Rushdie Talks Writing, Democracy, History & More

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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

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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

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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.