Two pieces of good news today.
First in Florida:
Florida's Jim Crow era felon disenfranchisement law blocks 1.5 million people from voting, including 1 in 5 African-Americans in state. Voters can now overturn it at the polls in 2018 https://t.co/I2ArmJzWXz
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) January 23, 2018
And then in Michigan:
Ballot language submitted to ease Michigan’s absentee voting rule (from @AP) #mileg #2018 https://t.co/DZ3v6zIhZ2
— David Eggert (@DavidEggert00) January 23, 2018
Open thread
Baud
Thanks. Hope those pass. Will be big for 2020.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
This is good news.
More good news on the front for Pennsylvania:
From the FTFNYT, Penn Supreme Court orders a new congressional map drawn by Feb 15.
ruemara
Go team voting!
David Rickard
Expand the electorate? That’s sheer lunacy! Next you’ll be suggesting that tax rates could go up!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Oh, there you are. I cleaned up that hyperlapse from this morning, and produced another of the Chinese Garden footage(timelapse shot with the hyperlapse thingie on the phone).
germy
I blame Obama:
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Can’t wait to try it out myself.
Baud
@germy: Inflicting preventable diseases on others makes me horny too.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@germy:
Holy shit.
debbie
A citizens’ group is working to get an issue on the November ballot in Ohio to force correction of the disgraceful gerrymandering. The State Legislature has decided to take them seriously and is rushing an amendment onto the spring ballot (citizens’ proposals can only be on fall ballots). I hope there are enough smart people in this state who will see through the Legislature’s pathetic move.
JPL
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Let’s hope so.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: My advice: turn on gridlines and walk very slow if you’re actually shooting a hyperlapse(as opposed to a fixed position timelapse and then use a tripod).
WaterGirl
It’s wrong that you can run for senate and the house (or stay in office if already elected) if you have been convicted of a crime but you cannot vote in an election. That makes no sense.
Jeffro
Kinda boring (no porn stars! No tweets!) but SO important ?
zhena gogolia
Love Tim Heidecker’s song “Sentencing Day.”
Mary G
I’m still impressed with Voters, Not Politicians, who used volunteers only to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures to amend the Michigan state constitution to allow an independent board to set districts, rather than allowing the legislature to gerrymander them. I just checked the MI secretary of state’s website, and it’s on there, despite Republican efforts to disqualify it.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: That is very un-Mahatma like.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mary G: Sounds like what we did here in CA.
Annie
Re expanding the electorate: someone around here has mentioned an organization that helps people comply with voter registration requirements (helping with IDs, etc). Anyone remember the name of this outfit? It’s hugely important to challenge disenfranchisement, but while we’re doing that I think we should also help people comply with whatever the regs are.
geg6
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
So psyched about this. This is about the PA Constitution, so SCOTUS has nothing to say about interpreting it. It’s up to the PASC. Which just so happens to be majority Dem. ?
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Annie: SpreadTheVote and VoteRiders are both good orgs to check out for that.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: And since this ruling was based solely on the PA state constitution, it’ll get kicked quickly if the PA GOP tries to file suit in Federal court to overturn this.
raven
And today is the 50th Anniversary of the Pueblo seizure.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I’m wondering if the current situation calls for Genghis Baud! rather than Mahatma Baud! Need to focus group that.
Kay
Ballot initiatives are very satisfying for volunteers. Everyone should work on one in their lifetime. There’s so much clarity, because it’s just The Issue. None of that messy, “imperfect human being” candidate stuff. There’s stages too- there’s the first “victory” when you get it on the ballot and then the next, when you win.
ruemara
@Annie: Let America Vote & VoteRiders.org. Your friendly not able to vote immigrant who is obviously invested.
zhena gogolia
@raven:
I said this to my husband and he said, “I was just thinking that.” He remembers stuff like that.
raven
@zhena gogolia: It’s easy to remember when you were close enough to the Imjin River to throw a rock into it!
lamh36
Evening BJ…I”m taking a breather from LA trip planning…to catch up on the interwebs, too busy a day at work to be able to check the net like I usually do on break.
I did check it a bit this morning though, and I’m still as geeked out about the news I heard this morning as I was when I read it in this…morning. In fact, I was so shocked, I actually out loud said “well I’ll be damned” in the line at the coffee shop, and got a weird look or too…lol.
The news that geeked me out: I’ll be damned!!! Wolverine got nominated for an Oscar!!!!
Logan…was really good and both Jackman, but especially Patrick Stewart gave EXCELLENT performances…that deserve more recognition that they got (ya konw cause it’s a comicbook movie, after all…eyeroll).
So yep…I geeked out…lol
The other big news was the number of nominees this year from people of color, including Jordan Peele for all the Get Out noms, and for Mary J Blige…Hip Hop R&B Royalty!!!
Now back to checking the interwebs…see ya on the flip side
Major Major Major Major
Have we talked about this article?
Adam L Silverman
@geg6: And which just so happens to be who handed down the decision.
zhena gogolia
@raven:
Yeah, guess so.
tobie
Kudos to all the people who organized the campaign and collected signatures for these ballot measures. Well done.
@Annie: League of Women Voters has been registering voters across the country for a long time. They’ve got field offices in all 50 states.
dmsilev
Sad news: R.I.P. Ursula LeGuin.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: It frustrates me to no end that people are declaring winners and losers while the game is still being played.
Marcopolo
Hey fellow jackals, since this is a thread on expanding the vote let me challenge everyone here (who lives in the US) to go out and register five (5) folks to vote this year ahead of the midterms. The stated goal of Sat/Sun’s March to the Polls was to register 1M new voters in 2018. The more folks pitching in the faster we get there.
And, yes, I am a politinerd but my goal this year is 100 registrations.
Lots of excellent signs & news out there—let’s add to it!
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: We won the round, though, on policy (although the polling shows the Dems taking a large portion of the blame). People are acting like it’s the whole game. Charitably, perhaps many don’t know better, but the professional commentators riling them up sure do.
@dmsilev: Oh noes!
LurkerNoLonger
@germy: Yeah, this fucko is not long for congress and I’m glad about that.
Mary G
I know it’s the FTFNYT, but there is a fantastic piece by Tina Rosenberg there today about all the organizations in different states working on this, headlined “Putting the Voters in Charge of Fair Voting.” It mainly focuses on Voters Not Politicians, which sprang from one woman’s Facebook post having 70 people show up to the local library, into a giant operation. Here’s an example:
I am so proud that so many women are taking things into their own hands. Men, too, but I think the media is really missing how pissed off and determined to fight so many of us are.
Adam L Silverman
@Baud: Just give them all a participation trophy, a slice of pizza, a cupcake, three game tokens, and call it a day.
Adam L Silverman
@Marcopolo: What if we’re agoraphobic and anti-social?
Mary G
@Mary G: I forgot the link. but here is another story in a different state from the piece in my comment at 69:
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Hate to say it, but Rahm was dead on about the professional left.
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
Also, RIP Hugh Masekela
Jim, Foolish Literalist
How many of these voting rights cases will go to the Supreme Court ?
Neil Gorsuch, Mrs McTurtle and… a few other Senate colleagues.
Three branches, one party and no problem at all!
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: To be fair, Garland wasn’t exciting.
ruemara
@Mary G: YES!! Git ’em, Rose! Love it! Thanks for bringing that story to our attention, Mary.
I’ve spent all day on a much needed news break, enjoying some back to back live Beck concerts. I like some of his songs, but I have to admit, I enjoy his live sounds way more. Also, I’m thinking of buying tickets to Buddy Guy’s performance in Sac. He’s the housemate’s fave bluesman (that’s alive) and I want to surprise him.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G:
Exactly. You’d get a dozen old white idiots on hover rounds and homemade Revolutionary War cosplay, almost all of them guys, and the news media were tripping over themselves to declare a revolutionary wave remaking America was loose upon the land.
5 million plus women show up to march a year after 3 million plus did, as well as having women organize and register people to vote and run for office up and down ballots all across the country and it’s “look at the women showing up to demonstrate”. I may be wrong, but my professional assessment of this as a non violent revolutionary movement is that it is going to take a lot of people by surprise come November. There are a lot of headwinds, some of them are woven into the system at all levels, but we’re watching something we’ve not seen before. Not even in the fights for suffrage or temperance (Ladies: you all did great work on the former, not sure what you were really thinking on the latter) were like this.
Marcopolo
@Adam L Silverman: Agoraphobics can set up a table inside somewhere. Anti-socials—I think if you participate at BJ you could still be misanthropic but probably not anti-social.
zhena gogolia
@Adam L Silverman:
this is a heartening analysis.
Adam L Silverman
@Marcopolo: I just write here because I hate you all!//
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I understand why people like ballot initiatives, but I think they’re a terrible way to legislate. They tend to be written by a handful of people, often people with gigantic axes to grind, so there’s none of the normal give and take of legislating. The take-it-or-leave-it nature of the initiatives means the authors think they can get away with including unpopular things they want together with something good they think the public will want, and there’s no way of writing the bad parts out.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some wonderful things that can be achieved by going around the legislature. I don’t think California ever could have gotten an independent commission for our redistricting without it. But going around the legislature is something that should be limited to special circumstances rather than an ordinary way of doing things.
Marcopolo
@dmsilev: That is sad news. I have my weekly old friends get together tonight. I’ll make a toast & drink a beer to all the joy & thought her fiction & non-fiction has inspired in me since I first discovered her reading The Dispossessed so so long ago.
lollipopguild
@Baud: I am looking for Franklin Roosevelt Baud.
Marcopolo
@Adam L Silverman: That’s when you whip out the outprocessing and onboarding language, yes?
Or maybe it was inprocessing—either way pure torture.
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore:
Yeahhhh, California’s not the best example of the good that can be done by ballot initiatives (as I know you know ;)
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, I agree. And the ballot initiative process has been abused here. I love it when two similar measures are put on the ballot and set up so that voting for one automatically kills the other. Or ballot initiatives so confusing that a No means Yes, etc.
But the ballot initiative process was created as an ultimate citizen solution to a corrupt or “do nothing” legislature.
Baud
I find nation states advertising in MSNBC to be weird.
Baud
I also can’t get used to MSNBC hosts interviewing other MSNBC hosts about the news on each other’s shows.
Mary G
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, I just wrote a comment on Douthat and Frum’s discussion of whether Twitler is an authoritarian or a clown (I know, I don’t usually read that dreck, what the hell was I thinking?) The same comparision came to me: ho hum, women waving signs in pink hats again, now let’s talk about something else, versus endless pictures of that idiot in the tricorn and breathless coverage of tea party events that drew many fewer people, is infuriating.
Douthat issued this parting shot:
I hope Tom Levenson has the time to take him back of the woodshed, but I defended Oprah. (For Mnem: He refused to apologize, he disparaged her legacy.) What a dick. Oprah has affected people’s lives for the better a trillion times more than Douthat has.
BlueDWarrior
@Adam L Silverman: While I do think the shut-down fight could have gone better messaging wise so far, I think it would be a mistake for too many organizers to just immediately fall back to the old saw about “DC Democrats selling activists out”. There is precious little you can do to change the fact Dems are a Congressional minority and can’t set the legislative table, except what they are doing right this moment.
So while I don’t blame anyone for being angry, let that further fuel the movement rather than cause it to derail into the same old “activist vs. insider” fight we’ve had in the party since the party was a party.
Adam L Silverman
@zhena gogolia: I may be wrong, but there is something happening that is being under reported. We talk about it here. It is covered on social media some. Some women journalists like Joy Ann Reid and Rebecca Traister and Michelle Goldberg and others are covering it, but because this is a movement led by women primarily of women (amazingly, most revolutions also involve a lot of leading by women, even if they’re not doing the fighting). And a lot of the women are women of color. The US news media, the political media, and most politicians are socialized to not pay attention to this type of thing.
Major Major Major Major
@Mary G:
Also, people who are devout-to-the-point-of-self-parody members of a corrupt Roman death cult shouldn’t throw stones.
Adam L Silverman
@Marcopolo: If it’s a recipe post it may be puree torture.
joel hanes
@dmsilev:
Ursula K. LeGuin
The wisest and most humane writer of SF, ever.
Her body of work will endure.
If you haven’t read The Dispossessed or The Telling, do so now; then read The Left Hand Of Darkness
patrick II
@Mary G:
I would love to see those posterboards. Thirty for thirty is serious business., I wonder if she could do a youtube presentation?
chris
Hopes and dreams…
Patricia Kayden
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Good. Then SCOTUS can’t stay this decision like it’s doing in other states.
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G: I’m just concerned about Surgeon General Oz, Secretary of HHS McGraw, and Secretary of the Treasury Orman.
Yarrow
@Adam L Silverman:
Yep. And that’s why they will not see what’s coming until it happens.
debbie
@Mary G:
Someone sounds snippily jealous…
Major Major Major Major
@chris: we still got kings.
divF
@dmsilev: I just saw that. Her writing has been a companion for me for nearly half a century, reading and re-reading.
ETA: She has also been a neighbor, in a sense. I drive past her childhood home regularly, and (I think) my office overlooks her old grade school.
dmsilev
@Marcopolo: I came to her work first through A Wizard of Earthsea. I was, I dunno, 13 or so. I tried The Dispossessed soon after and bounced off it; probably too young to appreciate it. Later in life, I read a bunch of her other works and was better able to appreciate them.
Mary G
@Adam L Silverman: Oz became a lunatic later, he was great in his early days on Oprah. They turned me on to neti pots.
chris
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, but the divinity has worn off.
Mary G
@dmsilev: This quote of hers is life in a nutshell:
Steve in the ATL
@Major Major Major Major: on an unrelated note, I am on the ground in SanFran.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Major Major Major Major:
How? The Repubs control the Senate with a majority.
Patricia Kayden
@Adam L Silverman: And it’s important to remember that the rise of the Tea Party was orchestrated and funded by Rightwing billionaires. The MSM tried to portray Tea Partiers as grassroot, spontaneous protesters of President Obama’s alleged overreaches which was not who they really were.
Lapassionara
@Baud: that’s a money saving feature of their programming. Be happy, at least they are not talking to Kellyanne Conway
BlueDWarrior
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Because a lot of people are conditioned to never blame Congressional Republicans when bad things happens legislatively. Everything is either the fault of the President [regardless of party] or the Democrats in Congress.
Now how this has happened is anyone’s guess, but ever since Gingrich took the House in ’94, it’s been one of those screwed up dynamics that seem to take hold every electoral cycle.
Major Major Major Major
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: many people are stupid. The polls show Trump and then Dems taking the blame.
@chris: not in Thailand, off the top of my head.
@Steve in the ATL: woohoo! We need a thread. Welcome.
dmsilev
@Mary G:
(Link, if by chance you’ve never read it)
Adam L Silverman
@Mary G:
The first 8 ball is always free. Once you’re hooked and come back, then they start charging.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: Get up, you’ll get your clothes dirty.
Patricia Kayden
@Marcopolo: Great suggestion along with donating to organizations who work to address voter suppression tactics such as the ACLU. Can’t stand when we wait until close to the election to bring those up and am glad to see so many organizations fighting that issue now.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: this is why you’re a front pager. The national security stuff is just gravy.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: Yep. No argument here.
Steve in the ATL
@Adam L Silverman: this is not why you’re a front pager!
Kelly
It seems that prisons are often located where the non-voting prisoners can bump up the population of red districts. It’d be kinda sweet if we passed an inalienable right to vote that upset that. I think it’s a good idea if prisoners voted. It would help keep them part of the community. The only felon I know personally is a nephew. When he was convicted my sister committed to having someone there at every visiting day. Her husband and her went about 90% of the time. I went three times. One person said they’d go and didn’t show up and is dead to us all. He’s been a good citizen ever since he got out. Having people serve their time in big, rough places far from home is a recipe for recidivism.
Frankensteinbeck
@Baud:
The crucial point, to me. We won that round precisely because the game is still being played, so we got CHIP essentially for nothing. February 8th is not far away, and McConnell is entering this round with a black eye and a bloody lip.
@Adam L Silverman:
I think ‘socialized’ is a key word, here. While some no doubt have ulterior motives, I think we’ve seen proof lately that the national news is a misogynistic culture where women are considered inferior. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them think the marches this year were tiny, because that’s the way they assume the world works.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: shame about the brain-eating amoebas though.
chris
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ll give you that one. In Canada the ultimate theoretical authority is Liz2; in practice, not so much.
Kathleen
@debbie: That is good news. Voters passed Issue 1 which changed process for how state legislative districts are drawn. I believe the new process for that will be effective by 2020. LIke many other states, voters in Ohio cast more votes for Democrats than Republicans but still Dems captured very few seats. Now the state is looking at redrawing Congressional districts. Oh to be rid of Congressman Combover (Steve Chabot). Here’s a little more background on both initiatives (published prior to the signature campaign):
http://www.cantonrep.com/news/20170530/proponents-of-redistricting-in-ohio-get-green-light-to-circulate-petitions
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
What I find particularly bad about the ballot initiative system is the way that it constantly erodes the authority of the legislature. For what I accept as good an necessary reasons, passing a ballot initiative prevents the legislature from changing whatever a ballot initiative touched on. But that has the effect of putting more an more of the law off limits to the legislature, at least without requiring a rubber stamp from the electorate even for minor technical fixes. The net effect is to make ordinary legislating harder and harder each time a ballot initiative is passed and thus to make ballot measures more and more necessary.
It reminds me of something Fred Brooks said about fixing bugs in software. He said that bug fixes are pro-entropic, in that they tend to make the code they’re fixing more and more disorderly. The longer you stick with a codebase, the more and more chaotic it gets, and the more likely each bug fix is to introduce a new bug, until finally each patch averages introducing more bugs than it fixes, at which point you need to throw the whole thing away and start over*. Ballot initiatives do something like that. They’re constantly breaking down the coherence of the constitution and legal code. At some point, the whole edifice is going to be so heavily patched that the legislature won’t be allowed to do anything, and we’ll have to throw the whole thing out and start over with a new constitution.
*I understand that this was written before refactoring was a thing, but that isn’t really relevant to the analogy, since ballot initiatives also prevent the equivalent of refactoring.
frosty
@geg6:
I’m psyched too. It was unanimous Dem until the last election when 1 Repub won. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: we also have a law against sitting or lying down. (Laying?)
PaulWartenberg
the Florida ballot could pass (gotta reach 60 percent) but will it be implemented in time for the 2020 General Election?
frosty
@Baud: Hmm. How does Baud! feel about driven men and lamenting women? That could be a factor to swing the decision.
Sab
@dmsilev: OMG!
Major Major Major Major
@Roger Moore:
Showing my lack of age here, but huh?
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: They’ve got to eat.
frosty
@Mary G:
Wow!
Yarrow
Interesting.
PaulWartenberg
@dmsilev:
I read some of her works, but not Dispossessed. I *need* to read it asap.
Baud
@Yarrow: Two birds, one stone.
Mary G
@dmsilev: : I like her refusal to blurb an anthology with all male writers:
debbie
@Kathleen:
I love how Rosenberger “needs more information.” Suddenly, the expert legislator is suddenly unaware of the legislative process. Bullshit.
Millard Filmore
@chris: The new Thai king is not nearly so popular as the old one.
chris
@Major Major Major Major:
Seriously?
Major Major Major Major
@Millard Filmore: nor so adept at playing puppetmaster. Bhumibol was a very interesting person.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as of twelve minutes ago
Major Major Major Major
@chris: San Francisco civil sidewalks ordinance
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: Bhumibol’s literal translation would be Earth speaks. Funny seeing the remnants of Indian influences in east Asia.
Kelly
@Roger Moore: Living in Oregon, second state to adopt the ballot initiative my discomfort is with how they are often too simple minded to work well in the real world. The property tax limits that were so popular in my youth come to mind. This Florida initiative however seems like a good end run around a fierce gerrymander
chris
@Millard Filmore: He has cool tats, what’s not to like?
Adam L Silverman
@Major Major Major Major: Shouldn’t that ordinance be about uncivil sidewalks? I would think civil sidewalks wouldn’t be causing much of a problem.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: We better beat them in hockey next month. Otherwise, it’s not fair.
debbie
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Interesting. That Trudeau’s a real troublemaker!
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: it’s all over Southeast Asia. The Thai alphabet/syllabary is in the same family as well.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: The alphabet doesn’t look like Devnagari (the script used for Sanskrit) but more like Tamil, which I cannot read.
Ken
@Baud: Is Genghis Baud! the one that plants his throne in the middle of the Mall on a pyramid of the heads of his Congressional opponents while the Reflecting Pond runs red with blood? If so, please send me your newsletter.
marcopolo
@dmsilev: Back from eating dinner. I started with the Dispossessed, the the Left Hand of Darkness, then the Earthsea Trilogy (now quartet IIRC). Earthsea was fun and a great change of pace from Narnia & Middle Earth but it was those first two books that really gave me shit to think about. I will definitely miss her voice.
chris
@Major Major Major Major: Wow. Are there no workhouses?//
Just One More Canuck
@Adam L Silverman: channeling Cole?
Kathleen
@Adam L Silverman: I know Jerry Springer bashing is popular, but when he was an anchor at WLWT in Cincinnati he delivered nightly commentary , one of which I’ve never forgotten. The topic was the surprising passage of the Cincinnati School Levy in the early 90’s, which had failed many times and which conventional wisdom deemed DOA in the latest election. Springer said that the untold story was how the African American community, rallied by the churches, engaged the community, got voters to the polls and succeeded in passing the levy. He went on to say that that story was never reported in the local media and that was because media did not report on African American neighborhoods. I cannot imagine hearing anything like that in today’s media.
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: it’s a big family.
marcopolo
@Adam L Silverman: Three women are the leadership of my Indivisible St Louis group. Two of them were fairly non-politically involved prior to this. One just divorced her husband because “he didn’t get it” (which I think meant he was not supportive of the time, effort and money she is putting into the effort). They are knocking it out of the park. Just sayin’.
Sab
@dmsilev: OMG! I was just thinking lsst night about who my favorite writers ate, and she has always come nearthe top of my list,up thete with Faulkner and Shakespeare.I first came to her writing through “Wizard of Earthsea”, whichzzI very much love, but is still mostly but after I read “Left Hand of Darkness” I decided that if I was a writer and I wrote that, zI would just stop. Could not be better.
Kathleen
@debbie: But of course!
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
Wow.
B.B.A.
In the sort of pathetic half-step I’ve come to expect from my esteemed governor, Andrew Cuomo has proposed “automatic voter registration” for this year’s New York State budget. Only digging into the details do I find that “automatic” means switching from having the DMV form say “check this box to register” to having it say “check this box if you don’t want to register.” In a state with a sizeable population of non-drivers, I don’t expect this to make much of a dent in registration rates. How about we register everyone who files a state tax return, or signs up for welfare? If it’s good enough for jury duty it should be good enough for voting.
Not to mention this will probably make a lot of non-citizens accidentally commit deportable felonies when they get their drivers’ licenses.
Okay, end of rage at local DINO.
Robert Sneddon
@chris: Betty Windsor is the ultimate authority in Canada but she has no power, that’s what makes it work. It’s the same in the UK too, of course. She’s a pivot, the nation’s government and institutions change around her as a fixed point but fixed she must remain.
SiubhanDuinne
@dmsilev:
Oh, that really saddens me. On Sunday, while I was waiting in line at the local upscale cinema to see the Bolshoi Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet, I found myself behind a mother and young daughter who were both totally grooving on the poster for the upcoming Wrinkle in Time film. Although I was well into adulthood by the time the book came out, I loved it and will probably go see the movie.
It is so nice to know that Ursula LeGuin’s great imagination transcends the generations. Rest peacefully among the stars, Ms LeG!
SiubhanDuinne
@Mary G:
That is beautiful and brilliant. Thank you for finding and posting that quote!
clay
@SiubhanDuinne: A Wrinkle In Time is by Madeline L’Engle, not LeGuin.
Both excellent writers, though.
Marcopolo
Off to my weekly olds meeting. Before I go, though, did this news get any front page action?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/satanic-temple-challenges-missouri-s-abortion-law-religious-grounds-n839891
If not, Adam, you might want to put it up for shits & grins. I gotta laugh out of it and it is also a serious legal challenge.
chris
@Robert Sneddon: For the moment anyway
Jim, Foolish Literalist
easy for me to say, I acknowledge, but isn’t “I’d rather not answer a question I consider inappropriate” the better answer?
ETA: Time for Dems to start making noise about the interview being recorded. Clinton’s was, IIRC, and released almost in real time, no? Anybody remember better than I?
Yarrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Isn’t whether or not you voted a matter of public record? Not who you voted for, but the fact that you voted. If he didn’t vote isn’t that information available?
Baud
@Yarrow: I think it is.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Its fun going through the similarities between Sanskrit and English (both belong to the Indo-European language family). I find the similarities between languages separated by millennia fascinating.
Igneous ==Agni ==fire
name == naam
Saint == sant
and so on
@Major Major Major Major I knew about the Indo European language family but not about the script.
Fair Economist
I shall miss LeGuin. I loved her writing, and loved her quotes too, as exemplified by the one Mary G cited. A few years ago I heard a radio interview with her on her (I guess) last book and on the issues of aging. She was just beautifully well-spoken and insightful, even at 85. She must have been a delight to those who knew her.
Emma
@dmsilev: Yes, but the child still suffers. The only piece of her work I have always hated.
Yarrow
@Baud: I guess he could have voted for candidates or initiatives down the ballot and not for President and that wouldn’t be obvious.
In either case, it’s inappropriate for Trump to ask him that question. Smacks of a loyalty test.
(((CassandraLeo)))
I wrote this about Le Guin for another forum; may as well repost here. (Lightly edited to remove a response to another poster, which isn’t particularly relevant out of context.)
Ah, for fuck’s sake. She’d been my favourite living author. If I were in a more coherent frame of mind, I’d write a much longer tribute, but… well, I’ll try to collect some observations about a few selected works. I don’t know how comprehensible or well organised this will end up being, but hopefully it’ll explain at least some of what made her so unique.
First of all, her novels are almost unique among science-fiction and fantasy novels in that violence rarely ever appears, and when it does, it rarely if ever solves anything. Her novels also rarely have outright villains. There are occasionally political forces that are depicted as malign influences – neither of Urras’ dominant political entities is depicted particularly favourably, but the people living on Urras are mostly just trying to get by as best they can. Similarly, there are a few characters who act as antagonists in The Left Hand of Darkness, but in most cases, it’s not out of malice; it’s merely out of a genuine difference of opinion.
That seems almost quaint these days, but at the same time, I’d say it’s an entirely necessary counterbalance to the cynicism of the modern age. An awful lot of modern science fiction is largely about why humanity sucks. Le Guin instead writes in the venerable tradition of Star Trek and other utopian science fiction: it’s about how humanity can do better.
The Dispossessed is, quite honestly, the single greatest work of utopian science fiction I’ve ever read. The expected literary qualities are major contributing factors – characterisation, plotting, world-building, prose – but what puts it above all the others is, simply, its realism. It’s a vision of how humanity can do much better, but it doesn’t pretend that we can ever be perfect. Anarres is, overall, a vast improvement on modern human society, but the novel doesn’t pretend that any society will ever be perfect. Violence, sexism, and various other social ills are, for all practical purposes, absent, but while the society purports to be anarchist, offering perfect freedom and equality for all who live there, as the novel progresses it becomes apparent that Anarres has nonetheless developed a de facto government that restricts dissenters’ freedom in meaningful ways. And yet, when contrasted with the dominant political entities of Urras (which are not at all subtly veiled analogues of the United States and the Soviet Union) – and, of course, with our own world – it still is unquestionably a utopia.
Her other indispensable novel-length contribution to the genre, to my mind, is The Left Hand of Darkness, which, in addition to being a superb artistic creation on every conceivable level, also serves as a book-length attack on preconceived notions of gender. Society still hasn’t caught up. Popular culture still has at best minimal awareness of the existence of non-binary gender identities. The society depicted in Left Hand consists entirely of non-binary gender identities. It’s a superb conceit for a novel: the adults of the otherwise humanoid species in the novel’s setting are androgynous for three weeks out of the month, and for the fourth (referred to as kemmer, which also gives them an extreme urge to copulate), they’re either male or female – and each individual can be either one in any given month. Much of the novel is an examination of how radically different this (alongside the extreme austerity of its climate) makes their culture from any existing human culture, and as a result, it’s one of the few novels I’ve read where the aliens actually do come across as genuinely alien. The novel also depicts substantial influence from Taoism (Le Guin was one of the most notable Western Taoists, and even produced her own edition of the Tao te Ching, though she didn’t consider it a translation).
She has probably dozens of other noteworthy works, and I must confess to having read to far too few of them. Earthsea is also justifiably considered a classic (though I’ll cop to not having read this series in its entirety yet, either), but the other work I want to discuss is her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, which is one of three science fiction stories I can think of off the top of my head that is absolutely perfect (the other two are “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut).
I’m going to provide a spoiler warning here, but if you haven’t read it, it’s on the Internet here (though unfortunately, with occasional typos), and you should really just go read it now. It won’t take long; probably five minutes. Moreover, the twist of the story is by now so well known that it probably doesn’t qualify as a spoiler any more than Rosebud in Citizen Kane does.
Anyhow, the idea behind the story is that the titular setting, Omelas, is seemingly perfect; everyone is happy, no one wants for anything, and there is essentially no conflict. But it carries with it a terrible secret: in order to maintain this state of affairs, it requires a child to be kept in horrifying misery. The title refers to the people who discover this and just… walk away.
The story doesn’t examine what happens to them, or where they go. And the narrator directly admonishes the reader for believing it’s impossible for a seemingly perfect society not to have a dark secret. Some of the most profound lines I’ve ever read in literature are found in this story to this effect:
The story continues in this vein for some time before coming to the city’s dark secret. I’d held off describing one of the finest features of Le Guin’s work thus far, which is her prose. She is one of the finest writers of prose of the twentieth century, alongside Pynchon, Joyce, and perhaps De Lillo. Besides those three, I can’t think of anyone else I’ve read whom I’d place in her calibre. There are certainly plenty of others, with Orwell the standout example, who were extremely skilled with prose, but Le Guin was one of the few authors who genuinely made prose sing – who, essentially, turned it into poetry. We see this above and throughout all her greatest works.
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” doesn’t answer all the questions it raises – arguably, it leaves most unanswered. Beyond the obvious ones – where are the people of the title going? What happens to them? – there are more philosophical ones: Are they admirable, or are they cowards? Does their act of departing the city relieve them of complicity in child abuse, or are they simply turning their eyes in a different fashion? It’s possible that they are physically unable to help the child in some fashion, but the narration doesn’t specify either way. The story has applicability to phenomena like the bystander effect and labour abuses, and this, of course, is one of its many beauties. And the story is also a direct attack on our cynicism, and this, too, is one of its many beauties. But I cannot hope to speak to them all.
While Earthsea is justifiably also considered a classic, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed are probably her most revolutionary book-length works, and are likely to be the cornerstone of her legacy. I must also confess that it’s long been one of my dreams to see both adapted to the screen. I haven’t abandoned that dream, but it’s rather disappointing to know now that she won’t live to see them.
There was probably no one else like her in literature. Her works were ground-breaking in far more ways than I could have hoped to capture in the above text; while other authors now follow in her footsteps, there are, frankly, far too few of them, and I doubt any of them will ever replicate her strengths exactly. An irreplaceable loss.
It might also be worth providing a link to give her the final words – this interview with her from just last month proves she maintained as sharp a mind as ever right up to the end.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Me too. When I was younger, I was very into linguistics.
Adria McDowell
I don’t know if it’s been posted here at BJ, but the folks at LGM had a post about this, and this kinda shit just pisses me off.
https://www.freep.com/story/sports/college/michigan-state/spartans/2018/01/23/larry-nassar-scandal-joe-ferguson/1057931001/
Remember, kids, D1 football and basketball are faaaaaar more important than caring about some gymnastics chicks being sexually assaulted. Gymnastics isn’t a real sport- just like women aren’t real humans.
Adam L Silverman
@Kathleen: You won’t. Same reason that Lacy Peterson’s murder got a lot of coverage, yet the pregnant Hispanic woman of Afro-Caribbean descent who was snatched off the street in San Francisco proper, not the burbs, reportedly by someone in a light colored van (what was initially reported as being seen lingering in the neighborhood of Peterson’s house), and whose headless body washed up on the shore of San Francisco bay and was determined by tidal patterns to have gone into the water near where Peterson’s body is supposed to have been dumped got no coverage. Until the Peterson murder. And until the woman’s mother annoyed the local media enough to cover her daughter’s disappearance and murder.
This murder has never been solved. The most likely explanation is that a serial killer did both and has gotten away. Either to murder in other jurisdictions. Or was caught for something else and is now prevented from committing further offenses because he’s incarcerated. Or because he is dead.
Why Peterson’s husband’s attorney’s didn’t hammer this I have no idea. But as a criminologist I can tell you that my theory of both crimes – the work of a serial killer – is plausible and troubling.
Adam L Silverman
@marcopolo: Excellent!
As I’ve indicated to others here several times, if they need any consulting/advising on issues pertaining to national-security, homeland security, and/or foreign policy for the candidates they’re backing, please have them contact me. It would be an honor and privilege to help out.
different-church-lady
Open vent: we apparently now live in a world where all information passes through Facebook, people only get their news from Twitter, and nobody shops anywhere but Amazon.
Kurt Vonnegut would find something to say about this.
Adam L Silverman
@Marcopolo: I’m honestly amazed more of these haven’t been challenged by Jewish-American women. Judaism requires an abortion if the life/health of a mother is in jeopardy. Some of the Ultra-orthodox sects have tried to side step this and argue abortions can no longer be permitted given the Holocaust, but that’s not theology, that’s BS to suck up to politicians like the VP.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: FBI interviews are generally not recorded.
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: “if I were a younger man I would write a history of human stupidity.”
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Emma: I go into this in greater detail above, but I really don’t think we’re supposed to see the people who walk away as actually being significantly more admirable than the people who remain. Amongst other things, the story reads to me as a commentary on the bystander effect. On the other hand, telling us that they’re not admirable isn’t really Le Guin’s style. While she does upbraid us for our cynicism, on the whole, on the whole she seems far more inclined to depict a setting, characters, and events, and then let readers draw their own conclusions – not just in this story, but indeed in most of her work. Show, don’t tell, as it were.
To be honest, I don’t know if I’d find the story to be as powerful as it is if its narrator began opining on what the correct way to deal with the society’s intrinsic injustice would be. That does mean that a lot of its condemnation of injustice is implicit, but at the same time, if the narrator turned it into a rant on ethics, it would ultimately read to me as a rant on ethics and not as a short story. And while the ethical dilemma it paints is significantly more complicated than the narration superficially makes it seem, most real-world ethical dilemmas are far more complicated still.
No, telling people what to think isn’t usually Le Guin’s style, and it’s not mine either. I should note, though, that several of my other favourite works are also commonly misinterpreted because readers didn’t pick up on their authors’ subtle condemnations of various trends they depict (for instance, Slaughterhouse-Five is commonly read as endorsing fatalism, even though the novel contains many signs that Vonnegut’s stance is actually the exact opposite, while Dick’s subtle condemnation of dehumanisation in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which he explicitly wrote with the intention of examining the mindset that led to the Holocaust, is missed by almost everyone who hasn’t read any of Dick’s other novels before – which, since the popularity of Blade Runner means it’s the first of his works many people read, is probably at least half of them), so my aesthetic preferences in literature may not be particularly practical when it comes to expressing one’s intended meaning.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Major Major Major Major: That may honestly be my favourite ending to any novel ever written. Which, again, might tell you something about my aesthetic preferences, since its exact meaning isn’t explicitly spelled out (though in this case, it’s about as obvious as it could be without being made explicit).
Steve in the ATL
SanFran peeps: I will be free of work responsibilities around 6 pm local time. If anyone wants to connect, let me know!
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: I have a feeling Baud! may need some assistance in that area but is too proud to ask.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
The idea of refactoring code is quite a bit newer than the idea of programming. Particularly back in the days before GOTO Statement Considered Harmful, the idea of restructuring code just to make it more maintainable hadn’t really been invented yet. It still wasn’t being taught when I took programming classes in the early 1990s. As an example of how recently it’s taken over, consider that back in the late 1990s, Netscape decided to throw away their whole codebase and rewrite the whole web browser from scratch because their code was so ugly. So yes, refactoring didn’t used to be a thing.
eemom
@different-church-lady:
To what “now” do we owe this particular lamentation?
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: My primary consultant is myself. I have a very good brain.
Kathleen
@Adam L Silverman: Ignoring murders of women of color has always been always media modus operandi. I’m also not convinced that police have felt great sense of urgency to resolve those crimes either.
Immanentize
@Adam L Silverman:
Very true. But FBI protocols encourage (nearly require) that such interviews are conducted with two Agents present. Then, after the interview is over, at the first safe opportunity, the two go over the whole interview and reduce their collective memory to one memo. That is then the official record of the interview from which neither Agent thereafter strays. It is a very powerful and impressive interview technique.
SgrAstar
@Annie: Hi Annie: vote.org, brennancenter.org, voteriders.org are among the groups preparing voters for the mighty battles ahead.
joel hanes
Florida’s Jim Crow era felon disenfranchisement law blocks 1.5 million people from voting
I’m always late to the thread, but I want to point out that this was the very law that enabled former FL Secretary of State Kathleen Harris to “cage” tens of thousands of eligible voters in the year 2000 Presidential election, and prevent them from casting a ballot. (The eligible voters’ names were deemed “similar enough” to the names of felons to be stricken from the rolls, and they had names like Clay and Washington and Rodrigues that were considered to make them likely Dem voters.) That made the FL vote close enough that the Rs could send the issue to a partisan SCOTUS, who selected W to be President despite the fact that Gore won the popular vote.
In short: without this law, Al Gore would have been clearly elected President in 2000,
and the world would be a much better place today.
If there’s any way that the rest of us can support the campaign to overturn this law, we should jump on it with everything we’ve got.
JR
@Major Major Major Major: The polling structure is stupid. They create a false choice — Trump OR the Democrats OR the Republicans.
An honest appraisal would put Trump AND the Republicans in the same camp.
Emma
@(((CassandraLeo))): I don’t have many ethical quibbles when it comes to severe, ongoing child abuse. The story enrages me. Mind you, I admire it. It is poetry in prose, perfectly written. Just cannot emotionally stomach those adults walking away.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Oh, please. Whence the false modesty? Baud has a great brain, the best brain, a brain like you’ve never seen. Baud will be such a brain you will get tired of all the braining. You’ll say, “Please, Baud, no more brain!” That I will tell you.
Adam L Silverman
@Immanentize: Yep. It most certainly is.
Sab
@Sab: I was going to edit my comment but my sister called with family crisis, so it went out with typos and all. I type better on a keyboard than I do with myfat fingers on a tiny android touchscreen.
Miss Bianca
@Mary G: I think this woman is my new heroine.
SiubhanDuinne
@clay:
OFFS. Of course you are right, and I apparently had a massive — one might almost say, debilitating — brain fart. My shamed apologies.
Sab
@Emma: Isn’t that the whole point of her story? We all make tradeoffs, and invariably some child (not ours) suffers. Isn’t that what this whole week in American political idiocy was about?
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman:
To be fair to the temperance-ists…which is hardly my inclination, seeing that I’m looking to brew for a living…I do believe that they were responding to a real problem. They were, perhaps, attacking the symptom rather than the cause, but stories of the ubiquity of alcohol, and how its abuse was justified, with horrific results for women and children (of course!), make the Prohibition movement look like a real response to a real problem. The fact that we hairless apes appear to be addicted to the stuff to the point where the solution became worse than the problem, well…who knew?
(((CassandraLeo)))
@Emma: I was probably too measured in my previous response (decades of dealing with dumb Internet drama have led me to err on the side of avoiding strong statements, which is probably a good thing most of the time, but with certain issues, and abuse is one, it’s probably a failing).
I honestly suspect that’s actually the exact reaction Le Guin intended the story to provoke – outright fury at everyone who enables the abuse, including the ones who leave. But again, actually saying “This should infuriate you” isn’t her style. If anything, the fact that “Omelas” doesn’t more commonly infuriate its readers reads to me more as an indictment of society than it does of her story.
The LGM story @Adria McDowell linked above reads to me as further evidence of this, as it’s emblematic of an all-too-common reaction to abuse – which, in fact, one of the commenters explicitly compared to “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Which, naturally, spurred a discussion of Le Guin’s work overall. It’s a particularly bitter irony that the LGM story came out on the exact day of her death, but such are the times we live in.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@(((CassandraLeo))):
…too late to edit, but the fact that I tempered each opinion in that excerpt with “probably” seems demonstrative of the exact point I was making about how I express myself. If I’d had more time to revise, I’m sure each of my comments here (except the first, which had already undergone fairly heavy revision because it came from elsewhere) would’ve ultimately read somewhat differently. (I’m not really used to the five-minute edit window; the other communities I’m on allow at least a day to edit posts, and some, including anything with Disqus, allow editing indefinitely. I tend to find it difficult to revise something until I properly see it on the screen – the input field isn’t good enough for this purpose – and AFAIK, BJ doesn’t currently have a preview function.)
laura
@germy: That lame-ass bs, dog ate my homework, king of the junior high quad, did not have sex with that underage staffer, the Lord has forgiven me, and my spouse joined me in confessing my sins, we are asking for privacy because family tired old save my career/grift dog and Pony show has worked my last nerve.
Hurrumph.
Don K
@Mary G:
Sounds like we’ll have three good proposals this year in MI:
No-excuse absentee voting (already legal for seniors … hmmm … wonder why that is)
Redistricting reform
Weed legalization
I can think of so much more that needs to be done via initiative in this state, but this will do for the time being I suppose