Bit Parts

I make this point about modesty culture in general, not just during Pride, so ...

Stomach-churning recent news out of Lebanon:

... and yes, I hope that somebody, somewhere who was justifying Israel over this can no longer handwave the evidence, admits this happened, and, as the old comedy sketch goes, finally asks themselves "are we the baddies?" But y'know what? There's something about this that underscores something else that's important to me that's just as true about the US, Russia, and other countries, here in the 21st century:

I think a lot of world leaders, and their supporters, have forgotten why the Geneva Conventions exist. Why the Nuremberg Principles exist. Why the UN Charter exists. It's not just moral revulsion, however useful that sometimes is: it's just pragmatic facts.

The reason why deliberate attacks on non-combatants in general, and medical personnel treating civilians (or, even, former combatants rendered unable to continue fighting) is defined, by a whole host of international treaties, as one of the worst crimes, as something nobody can be allowed to get away with, is that (a) it's easy, (b) it advantages neither side, and (c) no matter who wins, it makes the victory, as well, as the loss, worse, and makes things worse for a long time.

Is blowing up the other side's ambulance drivers, first aid workers, hospital crews bad for the other side's war effort? Obviously. But there's also nothing you can do to stop them from doing it to you. If you're winning by so much that you can prevent them from doing it back to you, you don't need to do this. If you're losing, and it's always the losing side that does this first, then doing this isn't going to change the outcome, once they start doing it to you. It's just going to make things worse for everyone.

Let's let pass the issue of whether or not Jews need a guaranteed Jewish-run state and whether or not it has to be in this particular blood-soaked war-haunted strip of land. Even if you believe that? That they're repeatedly and remorselessly targeting rescuers shows you that Israelis themselves know that they're losing. Just as every side that has resorted to banned tactics of war when they were losing knew. But those tactics never, ever saved the losing side.

That's why it was so easy to get treaties where everybody agreed in advance not to resort to these tactics. Not only were the outcomes stomach-churningly revolting, they didn't even work.

So when I say that everybody involved in giving these orders, from Netanyahu all the way down to the missile and bomber crews who carried out these orders, needs to be tried and sentenced as all those treaties require, the rest of the Israelis also need to start figuring out how to negotiate some kind of surrender that they can survive.

Because breaking those treaties are their enemies' best recruiting tactic. And their enemies may not even have to sweep those treaties aside, and treat Israel the way it treats its residents and its neighbors, but if they do, the Israeli people are not ready for the horror they unleashed coming home. Nobody could be.

So about 30 years ago, I was working at one of the most famous fintech companies in the world when we had a particularly horrific sexual assault scandal in management. Rather than let the company just pay the victims off, the judge overseeing the settlement demanded that the company bring in a court-approved HR consultant and put every single employee through an anti-sexual-abuse training seminar.

So I ended up in a conference room with a dozen-ish sullen coworkers I don't know and this HR consultant, and she opens the actual seminar with a question:

When is it appropriate to sexually proposition a subordinate?

And as usual, nobody wants to go first. So I wait a long time, by my standards, and stick up a hand and get called on, and gave the answer my dad raised me with:

Never. Don't look for meat where you make your bread. Don't fish off of the company pier. If your written job duties don't include sex with co-workers, don't have sex with your co-workers.

You would have thought I'd endorsed human sacrifice. Everybody on both sides, the consultant and my co-workers, stared screaming at me all at once, and then in relays, and it was made clear that nothing else was going to be discussed, the Maoist self-correction circle was going to continue, until I admitted I was wrong. Nobody who knows me will pretend to be surprised that I stuck by my guns and wore them down. I lost that argument, but I didn't surrender.

And I was told, by both sides, that that was unrealistic. That busy working professionals only go two places, work and home, that they're either working or sleeping. So where else are they supposed to meet prospective partners? (Church? Neighborhood associations? Referrals from friends or family? Hobbies, for Christ's sake? "Unrealistic. Nobody does that.")

But remember, I was staking out a broader principle, the actual question that was asked wasn't "co-worker," it was "subordinate."

So when the consultant grudgingly went on and gave the "right" answer, the court-ordered and approved answer was, "as many times as you want until or unless they explicitly tell you to stop." I asked for and got clarification on that, and no, she didn't mean until they say "no," because what if they change their mind? It's not sexual harassment, abuse, or assault until they in as many words explicitly say "stop asking me that." They have to use those words.

So I asked, "And how do you know if they want you to keep asking, or that they mean it when they say 'yes,' if you're in a position to fire them if they say no? How can you tell the difference between a coerced versus an un-coerced silent consent?" And that bitch actually said to me with a straight and stern face, "That is the risk we all take."

Fuck that noise.

I've learned even more in the last thirty years that just makes it more obvious to me that as a species, we are far overdue to have some hard conversations about what is okay and what is not okay.

For one thing, experimental psychology has shown that if you give one person any even trivial amount of authority over another, they are statistically more likely to mistake minimal politeness for flirtation. Both genders are vulnerable to this, no matter how they were brought up, which makes assuming "they're really into me" not an even vaguely safe assumption.

But when you combine it with the other well-known fact that all of us in general, but also women more than men, are taught to fawn over superiors? In a species were any even trivial obsequiousness is commonly mistaken for sexual interest?

There's a phrase for the result of that combination, and I don't care how much the worst people in the world hate it: that's rape culture. If you propositioned someone who wouldn't necessarily feel safe saying no or feel safe leaving, whether they said yes or no or just kept their mouth shut, even if it was because they did want it you don't know that.

You may well have been the rapist, the assaulter, the abuser, whether you know it or not. And if you value your own self-respect, let alone the safety of others, that's a stupid risk to take.

Don't look for meat where you make your bread. Don't fish off of the company pier. If your written job duties don't include sex with co-workers, don't have sex with your co-workers. And if you're afraid those rules mean celibacy, get a life.

Let me play you out on a song, Emeline's "What it means to be a girl."

... Be polite, spend the night / Call it self-defense. / Got the time of his life at my own expense. / But even if he were my man / He'd never truly understand / What it means to be a girl ...

Ever since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, a hair over 30 years ago, my angriest, darkest fantasy is that a war in the Middle East would spin so out of control that Israel started lobbing nukes, that Pakistan would respond with their nukes, and the whole "holy land" would be so thoroughly irradiated and gassed as to render it completely uninhabitable for decades, so that we could finally stop fighting over it.

Since the Crusades, that tiny little profoundly unimportant land has been fought over with every advance in the history of warfare by people whose attitude is that God will punish them if they let anybody but their own militant ethno-religious sect live there. They think that if they can't have it, then nobody can have it and on that one last narrow point, I've long since passed the point where I agree with them: nobody should have it. Kill them all, and ruin the land more thoroughly than Rome destroyed Carthage during the Punic Wars.

The words "holy land" are history's most concise yet deadly cognito-hazard. I've long since come to terms with the idea that, contrary to my early impression, what religion people profess doesn't correlate all that well with their personal morality, for better or for worse. But believing that there is such a place as the "holy land" tends to create remorseless killers. Infectious remorseless killers.

Would it be unfair to the civilians? I'm not sure, dammit. You look at the polling data out of every one of those religious and ethnic nationalist regimes, and it gets painfully clear that basically everybody there who actually wants peace has fled. So as a friend of mine summed it up when I was ranting to him the other day, "Wouldn't it be great if all of the worst people who ever lived agreed to get together in one place and kill each other off?"

As I've been complaining for a while, fascism, the movement that spontaneously re-emerges whenever ethno-religious nationalism adopts militant strong-man authoritarianism, is having a moment right now. It's stronger than it's ever been. Strong-man authoritarian ethno-religious nationalist parties control my country, the USA (for hopefully not much longer, the polls do give some cause for optimism) but also Russia, Poland, Hungary, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And almost all of those countries are at Holy War, quite often with each other.

(We're all losing our minds over the Middle East, and properly so, but do enough of you even realize how close India and Pakistan are to nuclear war with each other over Afghanistan?)

I'm going to preface and follow this with an even more important announcement: any time we Americans are spending, this year, on arguing about 2028 is, potentially, an absolutely unaffordable distraction from the far more urgent question of how are we going to make our votes count this year, when there is a civilizationally important election already going on that we cannot afford to take as lightly as the average mid-term. That being said ...

I'm seeing an intense argument among my fellow progressives and liberals about what are we going to do, starting January '27, about the Gavin Newsom Problem. Because as much as the reactionary centrists want us to nominate someone even worse in '28, like Josh Shapiro, they want a commitment from us now that even if he or, almost as bad, Gavin Newsom rises to the top of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, progressives will still show up to vote for him. Because, if not, they're just going to write us all off as ignorable, unlikely to vote at all.

So let me say what I've already had to say a couple of times on Bluesky:

I am going to vote straight-ticket Democrat in both the '26 and '28 elections, no matter how dogshit the candidates are, because stopping the rise of ethno-nationalist authoritarianism is the most urgent issue we face, and not just here in the United States, and there is nothing I'm not willing to sacrifice to stop the MAGA movement from doing any more harm.

But I need you to understand something.

I am close friends with two separate couples my own age who have trans daughters and am still distant friends with another couple with a trans son.

If I vote for Gavin Newsom in November of '28, I'm going to have to look those parents in the eye and tell them that sacrificing their children's safety, maybe even their lives, was a price I was willing to pay to stop the far-right-wing extremists. That's going to be, to put it mildly, hard.

I've used her as an example when talking to (sigh) family who vote republican, because they are stuck in the echo chamber and although both of them are smart enough, educated enough, and worldly enough to know better, they keep falling for the malinformation that spews so often and so widely from this administration and the people supporting it. These are people who are the last people that share most of my DNA, and I point out to them that these people want my daughter dead. But it doesn't make a difference. I will vote for whatever person on the ballot that opposes "MAGA" and has a realistic chance of winning. Sitting it out because we don't have a perfect candidate is how we got here in the first place.

Supervisor: Worker 72094. You failed to meet your quota for 3 weeks in a row now.

Worker 72094: I can explain!

Supervisor: You're clearly burned out. I heard you moved recently. Take a mandatory two weeks paid vacation to readjust and report to me then.

Worker 11335: Is it because I badmouthed the company during lunch?

Shadowy Board Member: That is correct. We are very displeased, Worker 11335...

Worker 100100: What's with the mask?

Of course. All Hopeless Inc. employees are due-paying members of Mindless Drones United.

But the kid are absolutely unfazed, arguing that "it's alright they will be together again soon". The normie are so sad for the "children clinging to vain hopes" until Morticia and Gomez get married again two weeks after the divorce.

In the meantime Mama and Uncle Fester fight about which one of them will go to whose custody.

They pretend to argue in court and at meeting with lawyers over the splitting of the properties but that's mostly Gomez insisting to leave more and more thing to his wife in an angry voice.

At home they decided not to talk to each other so Lurch has to (begrudgingly) transmit messages from one to the other, even when they are sat on either side of the table.

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

Back when fanatical anti-abortion judges were getting appointed in Trump's first term, people on Facebook asked me how scared should they be? And I drew the comparison to the role that the Fugitive Slave Act played in the run-up to the US Civil War, to lay out three levels of alert, because repealing Roe would be your third-to-last warning.

If Roe v Wade was repealed, I said, have a discussion with your loved ones and dependents where you try to get them to imagine having to flee, and come back to it, if not every night, often enough to keep the possibility in mind.

When the first attempt is made to extradite a doctor or pharmacist or other volunteer from a free state to an anti-abortion state, for a crime not illegal in that state, I said start active preparations in case you're going to need to flee. (More on that in a bit.)

When that extradition request fails, and it will fail, you should expect a Republican Congress like this one to pass "Fugitive Slave Act 2.0," requiring free-state local law officials to assist out-of-state law officials and/or bounty hunters in bringing "abortionists" to justice, just like they did last time, and expect this Supreme Court to uphold it. When that happens, get yourself and your loved ones to safety in a free state or, honestly, abroad if you can. Because ...

The last time these very same states tried this, they found that private citizens and local law enforcement in the free states went to extreme lengths to buy time for escaped slaves to escape, delaying out-of-state bounty hunters in every way, the Supreme Court be damned.

If you're still here when that bridge is crossed, you volunteered to live through a civil war. Because the anti-abortion states are going to find out that it is physically impossible to enforce their will on free states while remaining in the United States.

The outcome will be the same, because the conditions haven't changed. The army will take their side? Nearly the whole army took their side last time, too. Didn't help once the food and bullets ran low, which will happen again this time. Last time it ended with their cities shelled and burned to the ground, their economy in a shambles that it still hasn't recovered from, and there's no plausible story that ends the next civil war, if they're determined to have another one, on any other terms.

Yesterday ...

... a Louisiana grand jury issued an order to extradite a New York pharmacist for remotely prescribing mifepristone to a patient in Louisiana. Not only was that legal, but New York state has a shield law, requiring local law enforcement to defend the pharmacist or anyone else so indicted. And it's just what I predicted, because that's what they did last time.

With this Congress, expect a "Fugitive Abortionist Act." They'll have to suspend the filibuster in the Senate to pass it, so there's some hope yet. But by the time it passes, if it does, you will need:

Up-to-date travel papers. A passport is best, but for Gods' sake at least have up-to-date REAL IDs for yourself and your dependents. And ...

Cash. Preferably stashed off-premises, maybe diversified, and at least some of it out of the country or in a local credit union in the free state you're going to if that's your choice.

A transportation plan. Where are you going and how are you going to get there? And, finally, and most importantly ...

An agreement. Promise each other, in advance, that once physical resistance to extraditions ordered under the Fugitive Abortionists Act (or whatever they end up calling it) makes the news? Screw inertia, screw work, screw the fact that you might not have a plan for a place to live when you get there, screw all the reasons to stay, you need to promise each other that, if that day comes, you are going to implement your escape plan, and not wait another day.

About 15 years ago, I had a minor moment of Internet fame when I wrote a lengthy essay series on LiveJournal called "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God." In it, I argued that right-wing evangelical "Christianity" was literally Satanic by scriptural standards, was literally the cult of anti-Christ that Jesus prophesied in Matthew 25:31-46, that they were literally worshiping a made-up guy with the same name to justify cruelty, just like Jesus predicted they would the week before the crucifixion.

And at least half of the people who read it and praised it called it excellent satire. They saw my point, thought I was onto something, but couldn't take seriously that I literally meant what I literally said.

"Do not commit the sin of empathy."