Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The Math Demands It!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Word salad with all caps

How has Obama failed you today?

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

Just a few bad apples.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

This is a big f—–g deal.

This blog will pay for itself.

Mission Accomplished!

A snarling mass of vitriolic vicious jackals

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Where tasty lettuce and good mustard aren’t elitist.

Lighten up, Francis.

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

I showered with Rahm and all I got was this shitty blog.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

We still have time to mess this up!

All your base are belong to Tunch.

You are here: Home / Archives for Major Major Major Major

Major Major began writing at Balloon Juice in 2018.

Bonus Last Reminder: NYC Meetup Today!

by | 17 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Samwise will be too busy doing this to make it…

…but for the rest of us, here are the details one last time!

The place: Tír na Nóg, 254 W. 31st Street
(across from Penn Station, just east of 8th Avenue)

The time: Beginning at 6 p.m.

Should you need it to find the table, reservations have been made under the name Jack Alfolk. (Say it out loud.)

Looking forward to schmoozin’ with y’all.

I may be as late a 7:00, but I have faith you will all survive the harrowing hour before I appear.

Open thread, I suppose!

Bonus Last Reminder: NYC Meetup Today!Post + Comments (17)

Lovely Weekend For The Park (+NYC Meetup? pt. 2)

by | 17 Comments

This post is in: , ,

As I am generally asocial, I’ve spent my very long weekend reading, writing, playing video games (Hollow Knight for me, FFXIV for the husband), and wandering around. I got some gorgeous shots of Central Park.

Oak Bridge facing south
Oak Bridge facing south
Somewhere in the Ramble, looking out on the lake
Somewhere in the Ramble, looking out on the lake

It’s been a touch on the hot side, but the park is nice and cool if you stay out of the sun.

So speaking of New York City, let’s try to nail something down for a meetup this month. NotMax will be in town!

Checking on interest in a NYC area meet-up.

Shall be arriving in the area July 23, leaving August 7. Only date I know of at this point which might be iffy is the 28th.

Would be satisfied with the same spot as last year as it is convenient to all mass transit, but certainly not married to the idea.

Possible dates, time and location all subject to jackal recommendations, consensus and convenience; please, please chime in.

My preferred dates are July 26/27, or August 3/4. No preference on venue, although I hear the place from last year was good.

Open thread as well, I suppose. Bonus Samwise below the fold…

show full post on front page

Lovely Weekend For The Park (+NYC Meetup? pt. 2)Post + Comments (17)

Late Night Open Thread

by | 83 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

It’s Pride Saturday night here. What this means for me is that I’m home alone making fussy green tea and reading Iain M. Banks. Fortunately, I’ve got the company of Nature’s Perfect Killing Machine.

It’s been a smidge hot lately; that’s how much energy Samwise could muster for greeting me after brunch. We keep the AC on in the bedroom, but I guess he decided the muggy living room was more his speed.

Happy Pride! How are you all? Got any Netflix/Hulu/Prime recommendations? I’ve been watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, which holds up surprisingly well.

Parting observation: Marianne Williamson has suddenly taken on a huge memetic presence in my Twitter feed. One of my Very Online friends even bought her shirt. You know, ironically.

Late Night Open ThreadPost + Comments (83)

Recommended Reading #5: Armageddon, With Social Justice & Rock Wizards

by | 166 Comments

This post is in: 

Welcome back to Recommended Reading! I hope your Sunday is going well. I woke up to a short story rejection, so I lopped off 350 words and sent it in to another place. Excelsior!

To some, today’s trilogy needs little introduction. Each book won the Hugo Award, three years running, the first time an author had accomplished this feat. And the author, N.K. Jemisin, has been central in the fight to get the vocal alt-right trolls in the speculative fiction* community to shut the fuck up**.

In an acceptance speech that’s being hailed as one of the best ever made at the Hugos, Jemisin defiantly raised a “rocket-shaped finger” (a reference to the rocket-ship design of the massive Hugo statue) to the racist rhetoric that positions the recognition of her work as being about identity politics rather than her own talent.

“It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it,” she began. “A hard few years, a hard century. For some of us, things have always been hard. I wrote the Broken Earth trilogy to speak to that struggle, and what it takes to live, let alone thrive, in a world that seems determined to break you — a world of people who constantly question your competence, your relevance, your very existence.”

The Broken Earth trilogy takes place in a world called the Stillness, where geological cataclysms periodically decimate the population, through both the initial events and the ensuing nuclear winters. Some people, called orogenes, are born with the power to harness and redirect the earth’s energy. They are hated and feared, and the dominant imperial power collects them as children, to break them and train them to serve the empire.

One day, after deciding such a civilization is unfit to continue, an orogene of immense power rips the continent in half.

show full post on front page

Recommended Reading #5: Armageddon, With Social Justice & Rock WizardsPost + Comments (166)

Pence Administration Cracks Down on Nefarious LGBT Plot to Have Children

by | 173 Comments

This post is in: ,

As you are no doubt aware, same-sex couples cannot conceive children the same way opposite-sex couples can. While many choose to adopt, others choose to make what my husband and I call Science Babies. For male* couples, this usually involves one partner’s sperm and a surrogate; for female* couples, one provides the egg (and often womb), and then there is a sperm donor.

In a small but nasty administrative decision, the Pence wing of the administration has combined forces with the Trump wing to begin challenging birthright citizenship for gay couples who have Science Babies overseas:

Last summer, the State Department issued new rules unilaterally changing the department’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a 1952 law that, along with the 14th Amendment, codifies eligibility for U.S. birthright citizenship.

“The U.S. Department of State interprets the INA to mean that a child born abroad must be biologically related to a U.S. citizen parent,” the State Department’s website says. “Even if local law recognizes a surrogacy agreement and finds that U.S. parents are the legal parents of a child conceived and born abroad… if the child does not have a biological connection to a U.S. citizen parent, the child will not be a U.S. citizen at birth.”

Under the policy[…] children born via gestational surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered to be born “out of wedlock,” in the State Department’s words—even if their parents, like Roee and Adiel, are legally married.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that these new rules only seem to apply to children born to same-sex couples.

For parents of non-traditional families, the policy change has been a disaster, leaving them to navigate the labyrinthine immigration legal system with little guidance from the State Department and, at the moment, little recourse for appeal. Children of U.S. citizens are put at risk of deportation or even statelessness—despite no textual legal basis for the policy.

[…]“Assumption of parentage,” as the State Department calls it, now seems to LGBT parents to be reserved solely for heterosexual married couples.

Indeed, friends of ours recently had a Science Baby who was born in Thailand, and they had to jump through a number of hoops, including several genetic tests, to get the kid a passport. The whole article shows just how much of a mess the administrative state is for same-sex couples right now. The pretzels we had to twist ourselves into pre-Obergefell and Windsor have ramifications that will echo through our lives until this is cleaned up by actual laws. Which will not happen any time soon. In the meantime, administrations which decide that they can reinterpret the law to their liking, since nobody is likely to stop them, will do so.

What’s most galling for me is that this is not a large number of people. Many of these people are servicemembers. There is no legitimate reason to do this. I can’t even imagine what they’ll cook up in court to make it seem like there is. In the Trump era, they don’t even have the goddamn courtesy to give us a pretext any more.

*Chromosomal sex

Pence Administration Cracks Down on Nefarious LGBT Plot to Have ChildrenPost + Comments (173)

Online Privacy and You

by | 54 Comments

This post is in: 

tl;dr: scroll down to the part in bold if you just want a pro-privacy action item.

Digital privacy has been in the news a lot, though you’ll be forgiven for missing it. About a year ago, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became active. You may have noticed that you received an email about updated privacy policies from every single website you’ve ever had an account with. The California version of those regulations (CCPA) was passed a few months later. What do these laws do? Well, a lot; Wikipedia has a good summary of the CCPA:

The intentions of the Act are to provide California residents* with the right to:

  1. Know what personal data is being collected about them.
  2. Know whether their personal data is sold or disclosed and to whom.
  3. Say no to the sale of personal data.
  4. Access their personal data.
  5. Equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights.

Writ large, these sound like good ideas. I will note that this is in conflict with how many of us experience the Internet today**.

Right now, companies are announcing very small changes to privacy settings, largely for PR purposes (Vox: Google’s Privacy Changes Are Mostly Marketing). They’re basically hoping that enough people won’t opt out of data collection to affect their business model. I recommend opting out! Here’s how to change your browser settings to limit your exposure to the tracking ecosystem:

  • Safari: Safari -> Preferences -> Privacy; check “Prevent cross-site tracking” (checked by default after a recent update)
  • Firefox: Follow the instructions to disable third-party cookies
  • Chrome: Don’t use Chrome if you care about this issue. Would you use a browser developed by Facebook? However, if you must: Settings -> Advanced -> Privacy and security -> Content settings -> Cookies; turn on “Block third-party cookies.” Like I said, Google is not particularly interested in you checking this buried option.

You can also do this on mobile devices, though the instructions vary by device, so I’d recommend looking that up yourself. Note that some sites use these in non-nefarious ways; they will probably tell you if you’re causing a disruption in your service. Notes below the fold.

show full post on front page

Online Privacy and YouPost + Comments (54)

Cat Cake Open Thread

by | 43 Comments

This post is in: ,

It was my birthday last week, and the people at work got me a cake:

Seeing this cake cleared up a strange moment from the week before. I’d walked into the conference room, and there was a picture of Samwise up on the big screen. My team lead forgot he was projecting from his laptop and quickly switched to a different window.

“Was that a picture of my cat?” I asked.

“…no,” he said.

“Why do you have a picture of my cat? Not that I’m complaining.”

“I… don’t?”

Then the meeting started.

Politics-allowed open thread! Bonus Samwise pic below the fold.

show full post on front page

Cat Cake Open ThreadPost + Comments (43)

Handsome Devil Open Thread

by | 127 Comments

This post is in: ,

Took this last night.

I wonder what he’s plotting.

I don’t know about you all, but I had a hell of a week and am exhausted. Super ready for the weekend! I’m going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for an early look at the cherry blossoms on Sunday, if the weather holds. Looking very forward to it. What’s everybody else getting up to?

It looks like it’s too early for a respite open thread, so consider this a normal open thread with non-political content strongly encouraged.

Handsome Devil Open ThreadPost + Comments (127)

Most People Aren’t On Twitter

by | 192 Comments

This post is in: 

As somebody who is Very Online™, I find it helpful to sometimes take a step back from the outrage du jour and remember what most people actually think. So, I was excited to see that Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy have a piece in The Upshot today outlining the difference between ‘online’ Democrats and ‘non-online’ Democrats.

Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke” left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.

The outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don’t post political content online, according to data from the Hidden Tribes Project.

For example:

Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was pummeled on social media after [the yearbook pictures came out], and virtually every Democratic presidential candidate demanded his resignation.

Yet the majority of ordinary Democrats in Virginia said Mr. Northam should remain in office, according to a Washington Post/Schar School poll a week later. And black Democrats were likelier than white ones to say Mr. Northam should remain.

I know that we’re all familiar with these facts, but they’re worth repeating:

The rest of the party is easy to miss. Not only is it less active on social media, but it is also under-represented in the well-educated, urban enclaves where journalists roam. It is under-represented in the Northern blue states and districts where most Democratic politicians win elections.

Many in this group are party stalwarts: people who are Democrats because of identity and self-interest — a union worker, an African-American — more than their policy views. Their votes are concentrated in the South, where Democratic politicians rarely win.

There are lots of good figures in the article, as well as links to source data for those so inclined. Below the fold here, you’ll find screenshots of the topline demographic differences between meatspace and the Internet.

show full post on front page

Most People Aren’t On TwitterPost + Comments (192)

Glamour Shot Open Thread

by | 62 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I was playing Spider-Man when this goofball sat on the coffee table and started watching the teevee. It was a good opportunity to snap some glamour shots that show off his new collar.

How’s everybody’s Friday? The weather gave me half a migraine earlier, so I stayed in. I worked on short stories for an hour or two, and now (as you can see) I’m playing video games with the cat. Really living it up in the big city.

Open thread!

Glamour Shot Open ThreadPost + Comments (62)

Guest Post: Transgender Day of Visibility

by | 88 Comments

This post is in: , ,

(This is a guest post by valued commenter Sister Golden Bear.)

As I mentioned in the comments, today is Transgender Day of Visibility, held every March 31, intended to honor and celebrate transgender and gender non-conforming people (GNC) — both those visible and those invisible.

It started a decade ago but only took off a few years ago, and is intended as a complement to the annual Nov. 20 Transgender Day of Remembrance, which honors the memories of that year’s victims of anti-trans violence — usually always all trans women, the vast majority of them trans women of color, in particular Black trans women. For years, TDOR was the only national/international event for trans people, and while it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this, it’s also, needless to say, more than a bit depressing. Hence TDOV, which focuses on the living.

It’s all too rare that trans/GNC people have chance to celebrate who we are, and it’s also a chance to express our defiance of attempts to eradicate us from public life (the Talibaptists have a literal five-point plan to do so, and under the Trump administration, and red state governments,  they’ve made significant progress on several fronts).

But perhaps the most important aspect is being visible. These days roughly 37 percent of Americans know someone who’s trans/GNC. Think you don’t know someone trans, well you actually probably do. There’s still an unfortunately-huge number of us who never leave the closet, and for those who do, there’s can often be a desire to fly under the radar, to blend in. For those in red states, this can be a matter of literal survival. But it’s also because — unlike coming out as LGB, which tells who people who you are — coming out as trans, invariably puts the focus on who you were. At least for a binary trans woman like me, i.e. I’m someone who prefers to be seen as a woman who’s trans.

show full post on front page

Guest Post: Transgender Day of VisibilityPost + Comments (88)

Meanwhile, in China

by | 53 Comments

This post is in: ,

The Telegraph has interviewed eight former detainees from China’s Muslim concentration camps, where roughly one million Uighurs and Kazakhs are detained. This is one of the least-horrifying things described:

In order to receive a small portion of rice at noon and 6pm he, like all the others, must praise the Chinese president and shout “Long live Xi Jinping!”

Those who refuse are electrocuted with a cattle prod that causes their limbs to spasm uncontrollably.

For some reason this detail leapt out at me:

One detainee the Telegraph interviewed[…] received a receipt after being required to pay for her meals in detention – 10 yuan a day, totalling 1,800 yuan (£202.50).

The concentration camps are only the tip of the iceberg in Xinjiang, where more than a million mostly-Han Chinese have simply moved into Uighur households to spy on them. A database of facial-recognition information, GPS tracking data, and further information on more than 2.5 million Xinjiang residents was recently discovered on the open internet. Something very, very bad is happening in northern China.

You have to register with the Telegraph to read the article, so I’m going to provide some excerpts. I’m also going to put them below the fold. They are very disturbing. We should not let such evil go unnoticed, but I’m not going to subject you to it randomly.

show full post on front page

Meanwhile, in ChinaPost + Comments (53)

Liz Warren: Let’s Break Up Big Tech

by | 244 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Senator Warren announced yesterday morning that she thinks we should break up the big tech monopolies. She focuses on Google, Facebook, and Amazon in particular, though there are obviously other companies that would also fit this description.

Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation.

One focus is on how companies use mergers and acquisitions to limit competition, like how Facebook snaps up every available messaging company. This seems pretty self-explanatory. The other main focus of her Medium post, which I find more interesting, is that companies which own networks should not be allowed to participate in those networks. This one’s a little less clear to the layperson, so she lays on some history.

But where the value of the company came from its network, reformers recognized that ownership of a network and participating on the network caused a conflict of interest. Instead of nationalizing these industries — as other countries did — Americans in the Progressive Era decided to ensure that these networks would not abuse their power by charging higher prices, offering worse quality, reducing innovation, and favoring some over others. We required a structural separation between the network and other businesses, and also demanded that the network offer fair and non-discriminatory service.

Her plan:

My administration would restore competition to the tech sector by passing legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.

[…] Amazon Marketplace, Google’s ad exchange, and Google Search would be platform utilities under this law. Therefore, Amazon Marketplace and Basics, and Google’s ad exchange and businesses on the exchange would be split apart. Google Search would have to be spun off as well.

This is an interesting idea! And it’s high time we had this conversation at a presidential-campaign level. (I’m sure this was eaten by various shitstorms in yesterday’s news, but still.)

She sort of talks about how we also need to deal with privacy, but it’s not included in this plan, which is fair. The post says the same about preventing foreign tampering. To me, the big thing that’s actually missing is how to handle the infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. Those two service umbrellas undergird a great deal of the world’s technological infrastructure, including that of the American government. In the case of Amazon, they also provide most of the actual corporate profit, I believe. The cheapish, on-demand infrastructure they provide is actually pretty helpful to small innovators too.

Anyway, this, the co-determination bill, the CFPB, are all good examples of what I love about Warren. Her “making capitalism work for everybody” shtick just really resonates with this neoliberal shill.

I was originally going to post this yesterday afternoon, but my flight had terrible wifi, so now you’re getting it after dinner from Tokyo.

Liz Warren: Let’s Break Up Big TechPost + Comments (244)