The Grey Tribe

There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except about Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, 8 and 9 years old in schools, were asked to do this. Well, they set her free. Although she didn’t haye a rough time in this country, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents—but more important, a group of Czech dissidents—addressed an appeal to her: “Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You now have such authority. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for these persons in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?” Angela Davis answered: “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” That is the face of communism. That’s the heart of communism for you.

There’s lots of talking about police and prison abolition lately, so I wanted to reiterate one thing: the police is bad not because of some magic property that taints the hearts of men being part of the group specifically called “the police” with vile darkness, they are bad because they wield unaccountable power. A rose by any other name, having this power, wuld be just as capable and willing to beat, choke, harass, taze and shoot people for the hell of it. No matter if it’s name is Police, People’s Militia, or whatever euphemism you’re gonna cook up.

Otherwise you get a situation where abortion isn't protected but giving patients medical misinformation from a position of trust is protected so long as they're pregnant, and where being gay isn't protected but people will try to argue discriminating against gay people is.

Much more straightforwardly, "separation between church and state" works differently for a majority religion and a minority religion. The minority religion is probably already separate from the state, but you can imagine a state that has independent restrictive structures for multiple religions (Ottoman Empire), or separate deals with multiple churches (Nazi Germany).

Before covid, vaccines were never discussed as being for the purpose of lessening the severity of an illness. They have always been to prevent infection. The polio vaccine doesn't make polio survivable, it makes it so you don't catch it. Cases of polio dropped.

Even when the covid vaccines were first released we were told it would prevent infection and therfore the spread. Only when that became obviously untrue did it shift over to "that's not actually what vaccines are for, they are to lessen the severity."

And then later there were dumb legal arguments about whether you can refuse service to the unvaccinated if the vaccinated may also be infectious, completely ignoring that the unvaccinated are more likely to be much more infectious, and this is all a matter of degree, viral load, my immune system, your immune system, how long we meet, and where...

Geordi drops names of cool sciencey concepts as bonus, but the words mean different things

Data explains made-up science

Data explains the real astrophysics state of the art of 1987. It's not relevant to the plot though

Before all the conservative hand-wringing about groomers, right up until the Charlie Kirk types started to use the word, there had been all kinds of social justice discourse about age gaps and power imbalances and "grooming". People went insane about a 50 year old dating a 34 year old, or a 34 year old dating a 27 year old, or a 23 year old dating a 19 year old.

Then, suddenly, everybody on the left pretended that this had always been a right-wing talking point. Now we're at a point where tumblr social justice is making weird pronouncements about age gaps again.

There's a specific class of argument I need to point out now, not because it was pervasive, but because it was often implicit in many think pieces, if not stated outright, but if you spell it out clearly, it sounds like a troll. It goes like this:

To a nineteen years old woman, a single man who is twice her age with a dead-end job and a car and no social life is the perfect boyfriend. She wants a man who wants to party and fuck, and it's him. This is bad. We could frame this in terms of harm or consent or power dynamics, but the problem isn't that. The problem is that the woman doesn't know what she wants. Wait, no. She knows what he wants, but she's wrong. The man is a terrible match. She has potential, and he has peaked.

Confirmed.

"training AI on a book without paying for it is stealing" -> "fine, we'll buy the book"

"if you pay for one copy you can only keep one copy" -> "okay, so we'll shred the physical copy and keep the digital one"

"now nobody can read it!" -> "you couldn't read our copy anyway, because we're not interested in selling it, and you've set up a legal framework where you can't read books without paying for them"

Point 3 has been a problem as long as books and markets have existed. Point 2 is the most common legal solution for digital lending libraries. The only thing that's new is point 1, and that's a direct response to lawsuits that people on this website have long cheered.

anyway the reason they are destroying books is because it's simply MUCH easier to get a fast and clean scan of a book's pages if you cut off the spine and can scan the pages flat.

The process, known as “destructive scanning,” involves cutting the spine from a book so its pages can be fed through high-speed scanners before the remaining physical copy is discarded.

[from a fortune article about the same subject, not paywalled for me but there might be a paywall if you read too many articles idk]

in contrast, the non-destructive scanning by the internet archive is an extremely slow, manual process with significantly more complicated equipment required (and often a worse result! text near the spine can end up warped just from the way the pages are pressed and photographed)

it's easy and satisfying to laugh at failure, whether it's small scale (the reflecting pool has algae) or huge scale (the Iran war is dragging on), just as it makes sense to lampoon hypocrisy (he said one thing but did another) or simple grubby dirt (crypto scams, the Epstein files).

technically none of that is partisan or threatening to power in the sense that it's just judging people by their own public statements and goals: Trump saying he will discipline Iran quickly then failing to do so is a target of mockery regardless of what you may think about the relationship between the US and Iran!

but would a late night host be willing to claim that the enthusiasm of the entire US establishment to attack Iran goes way beyond Trump and that even a successful war would have been criminal, that planning such an attack is the ultimate crime against humanity for which men were hanged at Nuremberg, and that "of course Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon" is how people justify atrocities?

it's not all empty laughter, like Jon Stewart (or one of his identical clones, I forget) rightly pointed out that the White House Correspondents' Dinner is an appalling idea, not because Trump bombed at it but because it reinforces a cozy dynamic in which the journalists get overly friendly with the bastards they are supposedly there to keep honest, the carrot and stick of precious access to power mattering more than truth or justice.

we went through this whole rigamarole under Bush, with Colbert giving a monologue at the '06 dinner and Bush panned for his bit pretending to search for lost WMDs at the '04 dinner, and it's certainly no better twenty years on; arguably the only reason to even keep it going is to give the public a chance to rush the stage with a [redacted] or something.

he brought up the idea of "why don't you all band together to ask questions?"

and the answer is, at least sorta, they did. there was an effort on the part of the wh press corps where. if one reporter asked a question, and it wasn't actually answered, the next reporter called on would repeat the question.

and that was in Trump 1.0 and Biden.

so now, Trump 2.0 has revoked press credentials of real reporters and stuffed the press room with fringe right wing podcasters and shit.

However, the "trauma description" genre of writing is so common because it is favored by publishers, workshops, and the culture of literary writing, which values intense disclosure and "vulnerability" from the artist

People write this way because of ideas they absorb about what writing is for, about what things are valuable to write, about what is considered worthy of writing. It's a problem that is reinforced in all parts of the literary writing ecosystem.

And then there's a bit right at the end of the story as the wife and the husband are walking out of court:

Jill turned abruptly. "What is your name? Your real name."

The man's gray eyes flickered. He smiled a little, kind, gentle smile. "I'm afraid you would not be able to pronounce it. The sounds cannot be formed..."

Jill was silent as they walked along, deep in thought. The city lights were coming on all around them. Bright yellow spots in the gloom. "What are you thinking?" the man asked.

"I was thinking perhaps I will still call you Lester," Jill said. "If you don't mind."

"I don't mind," the man said. He put his arm around her, drawing her close to him. He gazed down tenderly as they walked through the thickening darkness, between the yellow candles of light that marked the way. "Anything you wish. Whatever will make you happy."

And I. God. There's something there. A soupcon of monsterfuckery. To tell your partner in a moment of intimacy that yes, you're something so inhuman that the lips you're stealing can't speak your actual name. You're a parasite that not only had the ability to burrow under this man's skin and take over his life, but you were so desperate to escape a dead, dry, blasted planet that you did.