MJ Paxton | Unusual Velocity

Blog

  • Thinking about Iain M. Banks’ Culture books

    The last few days, I’ve been thinking about one of the Culture books that I read 7 or 8 years ago. (I think the book was “Player of Games,” but that might be wrong.) A member of a far-future society is explaining to an outsider that there is no police or prison system in their domain. When asked about violent crimes like rape & murder, they say that you might not get sent to prison or executed but “you wouldn’t get invited to parties” (which, in this society, means that no one is talking to you at all).

    I keep comparing this to the present, where if you commit rape, murder, or treason, the mostly likely scenario is that 1/3 of society will attempt to shun you, 1/3 will praise you and said you are the victim of injustice and actually deserve praise and power, and 1/3 won’t notice.

    How is it that the least believable part of a book set in a post-scarcity far-future utopia with sapient drones is that society might move past partisanship to a set of shared values?

  • Reading about substack and shaking my head

    This morning I read a write up at Vox and a post by a soon-to-be-former Substack newsletter writer, and I’m equal parts bemused and frustrated. It seems like people keep wanting to recreate blogs, but are chasing the new shiny instead of just, you know, dusting off their blogs.

    Someone I no longer want to promote (despite them having said some smart things, when they weren’t being an asshole offline) said it well: post on a platform you control, and then syndicate it elsewhere.

    For now, I’m settling in to see whether this turns into stories/reels/fleets/etc where every platform has some variation of a blog distributor/newsletter, or if people will just go back to FB/Twitter posts (like they did when their audiences didn’t follow them to Mastodon).

  • Why Indiana has Republican supermajorities

    [compiling & adapting a birdsite thread here for preservation]

    I turned off a radio program in anger today when @Brian_Bosma claimed Hoosiers elect Republican super majorities bc we love @indgop policies and not bc his party gerrymandered the fuck out of our state.

    Election results are easily accessible on Wikipedia: For the Indiana house, @INDems took 40% of the vote but only won 29% of the seats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indiana_House_of_Representatives_election

    In the governor’s race, almost 12% of the electorate voted Libertarian. We have 0 Libertarian elected officials at the state or federal level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Indiana_gubernatorial_election

    At the federal level, just 58.5% of Hoosiers voted for Republicans candidates for U.S. Representative and 57% for president. Accordingly, the GOP won 77% of the congressional races and all of our electoral votes.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Indiana
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election_in_Indiana

    So don’t let @Brian_Bosma or anyone else lie to you about why we have Republican supermajorities. It’s because the @indgop drew a map they couldn’t lose.

  • Hoosiers: tell your legislators that you’re opposed to HB 1577 and SB 353

    Just called the legislative assistants for my state representative and state senator about HB 1577 and SB 353. Indiana already has some of the most restrictive laws in the country on abortion and voting access, and these bills are attempts to make us a worse place to live.

    If you call today, odds are you’ll get a voicemail box (since the legislative assistants are dealing with the same snow as the rest of us). Leave your name, address, and phone number, and say that you’re opposed to these bills. If you feel like giving more details, I said that HB 1577 is “bad for personal liberty, and bad science all around,” and that “Indiana already has some of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws and SB 353 would make us worse, which I think is bad in a democracy.”

  • Banging the drum for RSS feeds again

    Part of me is excited by the (slow, far too slow) trend of people starting to back away from social media and moving to formats that are more under their control, and longer form (hopefully thus with more nuance, and less algorithm-bait).

    Part of me then dies when they’re moving to email newsletters instead of blogs. Google’s decision to murder Reader is still reverberating… people don’t even realize what a good RSS reader would do for them. I get my friends’ social media posts, favorite authors’ blog posts, a few birdsite hashtags, some fandom feeds, lots of news feeds, and the youtubers I follow, ALL IN ONE PLACE. FREE FROM THE ALGORITHM.

    I suppose newsletters can do some of that, if you’d rather be in your inbox than a feed reader. Not sure that’s quite as versatile, but if that’s your preference as a user, you do you. For me, it’s a bit lacking. With a newsletter, there’s no way I can check a few samples to see if it’s something I’d be interested in, the way I can with a public feed. Once I sign up, I may get the first email that week or it may be months. Or it may be defunct, and the newsletter owner never took the form off of their sites… unlike a blog, I don’t have a timestamp for the most recent post to see whether the author has touched it since 2018.

    I guess that’s my final take – newsletters are better than social media, but less useful than RSS (assuming they are for public consumption).

  • Recommended Reading: The Failed Dianas

    Over lunch, I just read “The Failed Dianas” by Monique Laban over at Clarkesworld Magazine. It’s a short story about the conflict between identity & parental expectations, and I’m not sure how to say more about it without getting into spoilers. But it’s a fast read, so you would be better off just reading it yourself anyway.

    I haven’t read anything by Laban before, but I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.

  • Links post for 2021-01-28: agender bookmarks

    That is, bookmarks I tagged “agender” or “gender.”

    What It Means to Identify as Agender – I like to think of a person’s gender as a piece or collection of artwork hung in a part of their brain; for me, that wall is blank.

    Nonbinary.wiki: Agender – I keep this bookmark handy because I can never remember what the agender pride flag’s colors represent. Good flag, though; I have one hanging in my workout room.

    Genderbread Person v4.0 – A useful visualization for lots of topics. To me, agender meanss having the “gender identity” settings zeroed out (though as the Teen Vogue article indicates, that’s not universal).

    5 Things You Should Know About Your Agender Acquaintance – I’m not sure how common these misconceptions are, but this is still a good quick read.

    Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe – gender queer and agender aren’t the same, but I feel like we’re cousins. I love this memoir about taking a while took figure out why the labels don’t feel right, until you find the ones that do.

  • Hoosiers call your reps: 2021-01-15 edition

    Gotta say, the aides answering phones are very friendly (even when I’m calling to say I’m opposed to two bills my state senator co-authored). 5 bills I just called my state representative and state senator about (and whether I was in support or opposed):

    House Bill 1006 – Support. Criminalizes turning off a body cam (something I’ve said is necessary for body cams to have any effect; otherwise they’re just costume jewelry), and requires better employment history sharing between law enforcement agencies.

    House Bill 1123 – Oppose. Restricts the governor’s emergency powers. Gov. Holcomb didn’t do enough to respond to the pandemic in 2020; limiting future responses to even less is a bad idea.

    Senate Bill 141 – Oppose. Restricts the budget of IndyGo. My sense is that Indiana can’t get public transit the thrive because we keep strangling the budget at key moments; we need to set it up to succeed.

    Senate Bill 168 – Oppose. This amounts to a state takeover of IMPD oversight. Local governments should control their local departments, (excepting consent decrees & civil rights interventions). If a Democratic state legislature tried this with a predominantly Republican city, the authors on this bill would lose their shit.

    Senate Bill 222 – Support. Ends cash bail & indefinite detention for non-violent misdemeanors.

  • Hoosiers: Tell your state reps to not block funding our lives

    The Indiana General Assembly has just started the 2021 session, and there are (at least) two bills I think you should be asking your representatives to oppose: Senate Bill 42 & House Bill 1070.

    The bills have slightly different digests (and so I assume different wording), but the purpose is the same: to block local governments from reducing the budgets of police and fire departments. As I just told the aides who were answering the phones, I think that’s a very bad idea when education and infrastructure budgets keep shrinking and rural hospitals are closing. Local governments should be able to set their own budgets.

    Info on the senate bill is here, and info on the house bill is here. You can find the contact info for your representatives at IGA website. (The House phone lines seem to be closed this morning; I had to call the number on my house member’s website instead of the one listed at the IGA.

    Incidentally, I’ll keep singing the praises of the IGA aides who answer the phones. On the rare instances I’ve spoken to someone (instead of going straight to voicemail) at the office of our US Senators or my US Rep, the aides have sounded uninterested and like they just want to get me off the line. The IGA aides have been personable & helpful, and very easy to talk to. Please be kind to them, even if you disagree with the policies of their bosses.

    (What I didn’t say in my comments but add here is that including fire departments is blatantly a fig leaf so that the proposing legislators can say it’s not a pro-fascist response to protests against over-funded & misused police.)

  • I wish I could hope

    Things I said today:

    “We’re watching what is arguably the most significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 19 years, against both the processes and symbols of democracy itself. Call it what it is.”

    “Turns out social media has not improved the experience of real-time terrorism since 2001.”

    “I hate knowing nothing is going to change.”

    I’d really like to hope the United States proves me wrong on that last one. I’d like to hope that GOP voters and officials will put an end to their alliance with white supremacy. Nothing in the last 50 years makes me think they will, though.

    I’d like to hope that Democratic voters and officials will make systemic reforms to protect democracy, act against systemic racism, and protect marginalized peoples, instead of trying to win the next election while working with the GOP to prevent any viable third parties from existing. Nothing in the last 50 years makes me think they will, though.

    I’d like to hope that white people who have been in denial about how their actions reinforce racist and anti-democratic systems will be shocked into realization and reformation, into realizing that patriots act by working hard to win elections and not by commit acts of terrorism in the Capitol Building while carrying Confederate battle flags, into realizing that white “protestors” are more likely to be rioters and terrorists and black “thugs” are more likely to be peaceful protestors and yet the police response is entirely backwards. Nothing in the history of our country makes me think they will, though.

    Keep moving forward. Keep doing the good you can, where you can. Try to leave the country a better place than it was before you.