MJ Paxton | Unusual Velocity

Blog

  • In which I learn the Libertarian Party’s position on abortion

    So earlier I was reading a WFYI article about Indiana gubernatorial candidate positions on abortion, and read “Libertarian Donald Rainwater said it’s unlikely a total abortion ban would ever reach the governor’s desk – but said he’d probably sign it if it did.”

    I was getting ready to post a single snarky tweet about this as blatantly contradicting the Libertarian principles of personal liberty, and got curious what the actual Libertarian Party position was. Turns out that it goes directly against the stated Libertarian Party position on abortion.

    There’s a lot wrong with Libertarians (like anarchists, I think they have an ahistorical faith in the goodness of humanity and a system based on their principles would be an oppressor’s dream; also, take a look at the convention photo on their platform page – everyone there is white or white-presenting, and I count 6 femme-presenting people in the sea of faces) but “government should be kept out of the matter” is a refreshing take on abortion.

    And, to go full circle, Donald Rainwater should not be governor of Indiana. I’ve been donating to Dr. Myers, and I hope fellow Hoosiers will vote for him.

  • Twitter posts aren’t essays, they’re mumbles in a crowded cafeteria

    Opinion: if you’ve only posted to Twitter about it, you’re not allowed to say “I have written elsewhere about __” (doubly if you don’t link to it)

    With the algorithm and search functions, you’ve said something to yourself in a noisy room, and some of the people at your table might have heard, some will get the people next to them to repeat it, and most will never know or be able to find out.

  • Cranky about memeified economic discourse

    Sometimes (often?) I think that people who blame everything bad on capitalism don’t realize that greed and oppression predate it. By a lot?

    I’ve been cranky about memeified anti-capitalism at least since the rise of the Bernie Bros in 2016… because I feel like if these people would actually talk to me about what they want we’d agree about most things. But their communication seems to start and stop with “capitalism is fundamentally toxic and the root of all evil” at best and more often just “ugh, capitalism.”

    Which leaves me feeling like there are two extremely vocal groups; one thinks I’m a socialist who wants to ruin their life and hates America, and the other thinks I’m a capitalist who wants to ruin their life and hates poor people.

    I want socialized medicine, education, roads, internet, & other utilities (and probably other things not on the top of my head). I want regulations keeping workers and consumers safe. I want universal basic income. I want essential workers to be paid like they’re essential, not disposable. I want safe clean housing for everyone, and I want renters to have more rights than landlords. But I also want self-employment, mom & pop shops, even mega-corps if they can get big while playing by the rules, because no one’s ever told me why I should care that no one has more if everyone has enough (we’ve never been in a status where everyone has enough).

    And since the right can’t abide regulation (and is big into oppression these days), and the vocal parts of the left are religious about the shibboleth of anti-capitalism, I feel isolated.

    Maybe growing up in one evangelical environment has made me more sensitive to dogma… I’ve certainly left various groups because they reminded me too much of toxic religion.

    Maybe I just want us to be for something, and not against the boogieman du jour.

  • Master passphrase resource

    My password manager nudged me to update the master passphrase this week; apparently I’ve been using the same one since 2016 (!). Which definitely isn’t a best practice. Thought I should share the tool I use to generate a passphrase that’s both random & memorable. Probably still hackable by brute force, but not by figuring out my pets’ names.

    I’ve been using Diceware Passphrase for quite some time… it’s a list of thousands of short words, each assigned a number. The numbers are all 5 digits long, each digit between 1 & 6. Which means that you can use a 6-sided die as a random number generator. Roll the die a bunch (I go 30 times), then use the word list to map the numbers to words. You now have a very random passphrase, but instead of having to memorize 30 digits you only have 6 words (and I’m not a cryptologist, but my understanding is that words are harder to brute-force than just digits?). I’ll also throw in a 7th word that does have personal meaning, mixed with punctuation & numbers, just to be thorough.

    (In the interest of not-victim blaming, if you get hacked you are not the one at fault. The hacker is, pure and simple. They’re the baddie. And since humans are not inherently ethical and there are baddies prowling in the ecosystem, I believe in helping people set up defenses against them. But I don’t think that saying “here are the ways you can mitigate your risk” is the same as “if you don’t do this, you’re to blame,” and I hope you don’t take it that way.)

  • One More Voice – a resource for Indiana voting

    Check out https://onemorevoice.com/ if you live in Indiana and are eligible to vote (sorry, nibblings). They have resources for getting registered, and learning about your candidates.

  • Were we overreacting in February? (I don’t think so)

    This isn’t about toilet paper.

    In February, based on advice I was seeing from early alarm raisers, I bought a bunch of canned food and ramen, and other foods with a long shelf life. People were saying that the novel coronavirus would wreak havoc with food distribution and cause shortages. Now I’m starting to hear people saying that all preparation stocking up omg February and March was overreacting, and things didn’t wind up being that bad.

    But like when people point at analysis from 2016 and say “polls aren’t trustworthy,” I feel like this isn’t accurate. The issue seems to be that people saying to stock up had too much faith in governors and the president, and didn’t anticipate them forcing meat-packing plants and other supply chains to stay open, to keep bringing people in to get sick, in order to not inconvenience the rest of the country.

    We weren’t wrong about the food crisis coming, just about those in power redirecting the harm to vulnerable workers.

  • Thoughts the morning after the Hugos ceremony

    I’ve never watched the stream of the Hugos ceremony, and that continued last night. Instead, I tend to skim twitter for announcements, look for the reactions related to winners I was rooting for, and check the full list the next day. So I didn’t see the verbal assault of GRRM’s hosting or racist presenters last night, but I read about it as it was happening and again this morning.

    (And I’m already pre-angry about the “people are being mean to me!” non-apologies we’re gonna get from the people who made racist, transphobic, & sexist comments, which really outweighs “acting like presenting is about them and fuck the nominees” but that deserves a bullet point too, since we’d be talking about it if the really horrible shit wasn’t there)

    What gives me hope, though, are the winners. I haven’t watched the speeches yet, but I hear they’re good. And looking at the list of winners, who were selected by the community and not by a convention’s management team, and comparing them to the host and (some of) the presenters, I see a dichotomy.

    The community is heading in the right direction, often slowly and in need of a kick, but in the right direction. The establishment is not.

    Which is an indictment of the establishment, and a reason to stay involved in the community. I hope.

  • 7 Word Reviews: The Old Guard

    Another good violent movie for cognitive dissonance.

  • Disclosure on Netflix is very good

    After seeing people in my feeds praising the documentary Disclosure last week, I watched half of it on Monday and finished it tonight. Powerful in so many ways, I really really recommend it.

    Agender is under the non-binary umbrella, which is under the trans umbrella, but as a person without dysphoria and not much motivation to put effort into my gender presentation (how do I actively present a blank wall?), I know that I have a tremendous amount of relative privilege in these communities. So I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the fears of violence from strangers, from “trans panic,” from hateful family.

    I’m just going to keep supporting my trans brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings, and trying to make the world a better place for all of us.

    Also Disclosure is very good and you should watch it.

  • Thinking about violence in media

    NPR: Pop Culture Happy Hour re-aired their episode on John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and it’s causing me to revisit my cognitive dissonance about these movies (and violent media in general).

    Over the last few months, I feel like I’ve seen an uptick in people referencing studies that indicate “violent media does not make viewers [or gamers] more violent.”

    In the past, though, the studies seem to be looking at a specific viewing or gaming session – take a survey, watch a movie or clip or play a video game, take the survey again. And in that level of dosage, their evidence indicates that the media do not affect the subjects’ propensity for violence.

    I keep wondering, though, whether this is applicable to being steeped in violent media throughout an American lifetime. It’s much harder for me to believe that when almost every Marvel hero wins through violence, when Star Wars makes politics a boring interstitial to the fight scenes, when our fantasy books are about using magic in exciting combat sequences… doesn’t that teach us on a subconscious level that violence is an appropriate or preferable solution to problems? That peaceful resolution is boring and impotent and you need a (usually white male) hero to kill someone to make a “real” difference?

    I don’t have a resolution or settled position on this, but I keep thinking about it.