dorchadas | Entries tagged with article (記事)

I Feel: pensive
I Hear: The Birthday Massacre - Without You

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here.

Most Americans, having not lived under authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, don't actually know what they're like. They imagine doors getting kicked in, social chaos, constant warring gangs or warlords, that kind of thing. But the truth is that society basically functions the same way it does everywhere else. People go to work, they go to the movies, they meet up at restaurants and go to religious services and form clubs. Very few people just disappear.

But everyone knows that people do disappear, and that if they're not careful, it could be them, and they act accordingly.

Americans mostly haven't internalized that yet because they think it can't be them. Oh, those people being sent to foreign prisons were foreigners/criminals/radicals/communists/antisemites/American-haters/whatever, there must have been some reason. This is America and we love freedom, the government wouldn't just scoop someone off the street and bundle them out of the country for no reason. There must be a reason. If there's no reason that would mean that it could happen to me, and for my own psychological safety I cannot consider that I am subject to having my life ruined in an instant due to things I have no power to affect, so there must have been a reason.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.[...]

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.[...]

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."
-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

I wrote after the 2016 that we were in the final days of the Republic, it would just take some time for the country to die. Maybe we'll find a miracle cure, but I suspect not.

Appropriate ("appropriate") that this all happened on Pesaḥ, the holiday where as part of the Seder we repeatedly say "Once we were slaves, but now we are free."

I Feel: annoyed
I Hear: Nothing

Elon Musk accused of giving ‘Nazi salute’ at Trump inauguration celebration.

Hope you're happy about who you voted for, frummies.

I Feel: confused
I Hear: Voronmrak - Fire Dance

( American politics )

I Feel: calm
I Hear: Illenium - Fragments ft. Natalie Taylor

The polls always showed that Trump had a good chance of winning and Trump always performs over his polling.

I think the really damning thing is the polling on the issues. Among people who said the economy was their most important priority (31% of respondents), 79% voted Republican. Among people who said that Immigration was their most important priority (11% of respondents), 89% voted Republican. There are similar breakdowns the other way around for abortion rights and "the state of democracy" (76% Democratic and 81% Democratic respectively), but obviously not enough to overcome the people who voted Republican. Though I should say, the results are bad enough that any attempt to point to a single cause (or any causes that are tightly connected) is probably a bad idea.

Just to pick one, those Republican state of democracy voters would absolutely not agree on what the threat to democracy is with the Democratic ones.

I've also seen a lot of people saying that the conspiracy is that Trump will be sworn in, almost immediately hit with the 25th amendment, and then President Vance will transform America into a theocracy and that's baffling to me. No president has ever been forced out under the 25th, so the process would be a nightmare, and there's no way in the world Trump resigns quietly no matter what they offer him. An attempt to do that would lead all of Trump's devotees to claim that the "swamp" was trying to throw him out. I'm not saying that some people aren't planning it, or that they won't try it, but it wouldn't be quick or easy.

We'll see if term two is mostly standard bad Republican governance like term one was, or something worse.

I Feel: frustrated
I Hear: Dark-o-matic - Zugzwang (Unity One Remix)

NaNoWriMo being paid to say it's fine if a soulless machine writes your story was not in my bingo card:

"NaNoWriMo does not explicitly support any specific approach to writing, nor does it explicitly condemn any approach, including the use of AI. NaNoWriMo's mission is to 'provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.'

[...]

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

[...]

"Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. "
-What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

If you're unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo (that seems unlikely on Dreamwidth, but you never know), in the past the position of NaNo--or at least, of most participants--was that the quality of the story was not particularly important because the point was to have the experience of needing to write a certain number of words per day, every day, in order to reach a goal. I've seen plenty of posts about how you should make everything a dream, kill off the main character, totally change genre, abandon the previous plot, turn everything that happened into a story that a new character was writing and then make the story about that character, whatever it takes to get to those 50,000 words. After all, you can always go back and edit a finished first draft, but if you don't have a finished draft you don't have a book.

They say that it's classist not to use AI because a lot of people can't afford an editor, but the NaNo I remember actively discouraged editing during the month, because if you're editing you're not writing new words.

This is a perfect example of the tendency for bullies to co-opt whatever the dominant language of their social group is. Reminds me of the Ana Mardoll thing, where Ana's whole persona was "im just such a smol bean uwu" while they constantly accused people who criticized them of ableism, classism, transphobia, or other bigotry, and then it turns out they're in their forties, got hired to work for Lockheed Martin due to family connections, and were just using social justice language as an in-group-acceptable way to be a massive jerk to people. Bad actors will find whatever the easiest, most effective way to act badly is.

It's similar to the discussion about difficulty in games like Dark Souls that require that you engage with the game a certain way and play with a certain precision and if you don't, you can't beat the game. Is it ableist to say that specific games must be played a certain way? Is the creative vision of the game designer(s) more or less important than the experience of the end user? This isn't a totally abstract thing for me, since I made a popular mod for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead with a particular experience that I intend for it to create, and people keep mixing it with other mods that dilute that experience. Admittedly, I also created a bunch of tweaks to change that experience myself, the same way that a game like Celeste has a ton of possible difficulty sliders you can adjust to make the game much easier and require less technical precision. On the other hand, even if you use the settings to slow the game down, have infinite jumps, and skip stages you can't beat, it's still you playing it. Having an AI write even parts of your story is like watching a Let's Play of a game, a morally neutral activity, and then lying and saying that you played it and so you have a first-hand opinion on how it feels to play.

Okay, now that we've had that discussion, let me bring up the actual reason they did this--because they literally sold out to AI advocates:

Here’s a boring sentence I wrote: “Quinn entered the dark and cold forest.”

And here’s a sentence Rephrase gave me: “Quinn shivered as he stepped into the cold, dark forest, the air thick with the scent of damp earth.”

I can build off that! Now I’m more excited to write this scene that was feeling bland.

Sign up for ProWritingAid to get access to Rephrase and more than 20 in-depth writing reports.
-How to Unstick Your Camp NaNoWriMo Project

That sounds like it was written with AI, to be honest. This reminds me of that children's "book" ""author"" who generated some slop, generated some pictures to go with it, self-published the book and then said that they wrote a children's book. Just an insult to anyone who's actually ever created anything.

In looking up things about this I've learned that NaNo has gone through a lot of scandals in the last couple years for non-Butlerian reasons, though, so maybe this is par for the course.

Edit: hahaha

“It can’t be reasoned with. It can’t be bargained with. It will never stop.”

“Can you destroy it?”

“Ngl, pretty classist of you, tbh.” pic.twitter.com/mSOlnWjQrx
— Casey Stegman (@cstegman) September 2, 2024

I Feel: full
I Hear: Nox Arcana - Pax Terra

Chinese food.

Yesterday we went to Ming Hin, where

arsduo in years past had held his Erev Christmas gatherings. He's moved to Toronto to be with his partner, but I decided after three years to take up the mantle and continue the tradition. I invited a bunch of people, some of them could come, and at 6 p.m. we met up for Chinese food:

2023-12-24 - Ming Hin Erev Christmas 2023

Delicious.

I was hoping to have a Russian-speaking contingent there (shoutout to

aguart), since

tom.hen.12's wife is Russian,

dinaraua is Khazak and speaks Russian, and

maptekar is Ukrainian and speaks Russian. But both of the latter couldn't come, so my plans were foiled. Someday!

After dinner, the others stood around outside while I gave

sashagee some time to have a grown-up conversation and chased Laila around--she saw a maybe seven or eight year old jumping from small stone bench to stone bench and demanded that I help her make the same jumps. Then we went to Uni Uni for boba, I got a coconut milk taro tea with coconut milk jelly that was AMAZING, and we all went home. Laila didn't get to bed until 10 p.m. but by 8 a.m. she was awake and demanding to be let out...and then took a four hour nap. So it goes.

Today, as our first full day back at home, we did absolutely nothing. I was going to go shopping, but I was foiled by Whole Foods being closed, so we...ordered Chinese food. The Halaḥah is clear--while it is permissible to eat it on the 24th, the 25th is praiseworthy, though there is a maḥloket on some issues:

While the rest of the questions above are good she’elot, poskim generally hold that the food must be either purchased from a Chinese restaurant or recognizably Chinese, but ideally both. If your food is in one category but not the other, the accepted practice is to eat a fortune cookie (the symbol of American Chinese restaurants) in order to rule out a safek of any kind.

So if you’re on a diet, sushi would be fine (b’dieved) as long as it was purchased from a Chinese restaurant and not a specifically sushi establishment, as long as you also ate a fortune cookie.

Judaism is like that.

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends!

I Feel: listless
I Hear: Mario Kart 64 - Toad's Turnpike

Penn President Liz Magill to resign amid backlash over antisemitism controversies.

The first Penn president to resign for reasons not involving government appointment, apparently.

I watched the testimony she gave in front of Congress and sure, Elise Stefanik was grandstanding to a conservative audience because she wants to be the next Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the reason the question got such a visceral reaction is that everyone knew Magill's answer was weasel words. As opposed as I am to the idea of advocating for my death, you could come at it from a free speech maximalist position and say, "While I personally find the idea of advocating for Jewish genocide abhorrent, academic freedom requires that individuals be allowed to express unpopular ideas so that those ideas can be refuted in reasoned debate" or something like it.

She didn't say that, of course. She said "It depends on context," the probably most universally-hated answer in the world, and then made herself look a lot worse when she said, "if the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment," which, well, we're talking about genocide here. It's nice to know that if someone turns calls for genocide into action, Penn will at last step in.

(You can argue whether "intifada revolution" is a call for genocide or not, but under the Impact vs Intention model, many Jews absolutely experience it as that)

One of the major points of a president is to provide university leadership and to encourage donations, even for universities that have as gigantic an endowment as Penn, so when I saw that a $100 million donation was being withdrawn, I knew her days were numbered. And there's also a reasonable debate to be had about the influence of capitalism on university administration even for universities with enormous operating endowments--Penn's endowment is currently $21 billion.

Personally, especially after listening to some Jewish Penn students talk about things they went through, I'm glad she's gone. We'll see if it changes anything.

I Feel: sick
I Hear: H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast

Chicago's air is currently the worst major city in the world.

The sky is a whitish-grey color and my throat feels unwell. I have a slight headache and last night I kept waking up with a cough and needing to drink a ton of water, so I just closed the windows. We had them open earlier because

sashagee loves the breeze but it's too much now.

Feeling bad for the construction workers across the street!

I Hear: Aviators - No One Will Save You

The WoW token has come to classic.

From Blizzard's website:

WoW Tokens provide players with a convenient, sanctioned, secure way to exchange gold for game time or Battle.net Balance directly through the in-game Auction House. Getting gold has never been simpler!

Bluntly, it's pay to win, the exact scourge that is corrupting all of modern gaming with monetization and deliberately making games worse but letting you pay to make them okay again. Not necessarily by default, but Classic is full of GDKP runs--raids where people spend their in-game gold to bid on item drops. Being able to spend real money--at a $20 per token to 15$ WoW subscription price, no less--ends up with more power. And this is especially funny because Blizzard decided not to put the automatic dungeon finder into classic to maintain the community feel, even though the automatic dungeon finder was introduced during the original Wrath of the Lich King, but they are putting in the WoW token because they're throwing up their hands at combatting RMT and gold sellers. If you can't beat them [scammers and thieves], join them [scammers and thieves].

Especially funny because Blizzard president Mike Ybarra's guild sells raid boosts. I think they weren't so reluctant to introduce the WoW token as they claim.

Yeah, I don't think I'll be buying Diablo IV.

I Feel: neutral
I Hear: Anamanaguchi - Up To You

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
-Frank Herbert, Dune

Strange coincidence that I simultaneously saw this article entitled We must declare jihad against AI and also went to a work seminar today about the use of AI in healthcare. The latter mentioned the recent JAMA article about physician vs AI empathy.

I've been an AI skeptic for most of the last decade and for most of the last decade I've been right--I remember arguing eight years ago with someone who laughed at my insistence that we would absolutely not have direct brain interfaces within five years--but I think that's less likely in the future. Nothing is going to constrain AI because there's too much money to be made from out-of-control AI and the social consequences be damned. Look at how much damage has already been done through social media algorithms designed simply to keep people's eyes on the platform--the promotion of outrage engagement, Instagram Face, depression and anxiety in Gen Z, people at risk of having a single bad interaction go viral, etc--and imagine it with programs more sophisticated than the stuff on Amazon that says "Ah, I see you bought a toaster, would you like to buy a dozen more?" That was the point of the Dune quote I posted above, since AI isn't going anywhere so we'll need to manage its social effects.

People talk about AI destroying whole swaths of jobs and that may happen in the future but it's not going to happen currently due to AI's tendency to confidently make up nonsense. It's like Laila--she has a lot of words she says, but she also makes sounds that I'm sure mean something to her but which aren't English (or Japanese, or Hebrew, or French, or any other language she's been exposed to). Like, she's lately switched to pronouncing banana as "bahlahlah." She says it consistently, she knows exactly what it means, but who knows where she got it from. AI is like that. I remember reading a rebbe.io answer where the AI confidently stated that eating poultry and milk together was allowed, which isn't true under any interpretation of halakhah. I just asked it about eating kiniyot during Pesaḥ and it told me this was a matter of individual custom and to consult your rabbi, which I'm a little unsure is the answer an actual Chabad rabbi would give. But it gives those answers confidently and seems to provide reasoning to support them, and it reminds me of that scene in the sealed chamber in 2001 where Dave and Frank decide that if HAL was wrong about the antenna, what else is it wrong about, and if it's wrong about anything, then they need to shut it down to prevent misinformation from jeopardizing the mission. Which is exactly the same reasoning HAL uses to shut them down, which is part of the point of the movie (who is more robotic, the literal computer, or the humans?) and part of the point of the presentation I went to. AI needs to be guided in right thought by humans to really be useful.

To pick an example, if you look at the example interactions that were rated in that JAMA article, you'll notice the most obvious unifying point is that each of the AI responses is twice as long as the human responses. No wonder they were voted more empathetic! There's an immediate perception that the AI is spending more time on the response because it's longer, and since Americans have an extremely common complaint that they barely get to see their doctors and when they do, it's more only a few minutes, that the AI seems to be more attentive. But what if the AI was used as an aid, listening to the doctor-patient conversation and taking notes, filling in the EMR in the background, and the doctor checked the results at the end but otherwise spent the time talking to the patient instead of looking at a computer? Wouldn't that make the doctor seem much more empathetic? And this could be an aid to doctors elsewhere too, since the average of twenty minutes per visit in America is actually on the extreme high end globally. In Bangladesh people see their doctors for an average of less than a minute!

Sure, AI will still sometimes produce nonsense. I remember reading a teacher saying they took psychic damage from reading an AI-written essay that the student had gone at with a blind-idiot thesaurus afterwards, leading to phrases like

Unused York City

but also human medical error kills at a higher rate than anything other than disease or cancer. If AI can assist humans in reducing that even a little...

I don't think we're in danger of getting paperclip-maximized any time soon. It's lazy thinking, or not thinking at all, that'll do us in.

I Feel: contemplative
I Hear: Perturbator - War Against the Machines

You might have heard of the collapse of FTX, a crypto trading firm that went from a $32 billion valuation to zero in under a week. This post is only about that tangentially, because I found an article linking to Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison's Tumblr, and reading through it I found this post about interacting with non-rationalists which links to this post by someone else about the differences between approaches to rationalism, those who think "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, I shall revolutionize the world!! Emoji cackling laughter

" and "I have discovered a new approach to human thinking, but maybe there's a reason there's no long historical record of people acting this way."

And that led me to thinking--what are the actual successes of rationalists? Their stated principles involve trying to use reason instead of appeals to tradition or emotion in order to guide human behavior, but what social ills have they alleviated? What government reforms have they proposed? What companies have they founded that effectively reduce suffering? Are there any billionaires who have pledged to give most of their wealth away (following the "earning to give" effective altruism proposal) that are actually less rich than when they made the pledge? I admit that I'm biased here, because from my point of view the primary output of rationalists is long blog posts, but one could make a reasonable argument here that the problem is crypto, not rationalism or effective altruism. There are plenty of other crypto exchanges or projects that have gone bankrupt or stolen their customers' funds with no tie to rationalism at all.

On the other hand, rationalism does seem to keep reinventing bog-standard bigotry from "first principles." I remember the SlateStarCodex reddit banning discussion of trans issues outside the designated Culture War threads, despite several trans people commenting that these were real issues that effected their lives, not just a political issue--and that tells me that in 1930s Germany they would have been having serious discussions on the Jewish Question, and in 1870s America about whether freed slaves should be full members of society. The linked Tumblr above repeats uncritical claims about how the entire gender pay gap is explained by work experience and job choice, and while you can explain that by noting Ellison is a self-described former aspiring Catholic tradwife who became an agnostic rationalist, how much Catholic tradwifery is still influencing her thoughts?

Plus there's the whole "AI will go rogue and kill us all! Emoji Awesomeface Cylon

" obsession among rationalists despite there being no evidence that AGI will happen on any reasonable timeframe or is even possible. And I'm not even talking about soulless machines here--human cognition is inextricable from human biology and absent that biology, how would one emulate cognition? This is not an unsolvable problem but it is an extremely difficult one!

I am curious if there are any famous examples I'm missing.

Edit: This interview with Bankman-Fried about how most of his public statements were bullshit and done for PR reasons also seems relevant.

I Feel: amused
I Hear: Shogun's Castle - Knowledge (知識 Chishiki)

Title from this famous twitter thread.

I've been watching Elon Musk thrash around like a bull in a china shop for a week now, from making himself king of twitter to deciding on the price for Twitter verfication by haggling with Stephen King to firing half the company (possibly by stack-ranking, which is mind-boggling) to blocking the president of MMA Global. They rolled out the new paid-for blue check and it didn't work, and then they got it working but said that they were going to implement a NEW "verified" display that does what the old blue check used to, and then it showed up on people's profile for a few hours and then disappeared, and then:

I just killed it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2022

Okay, so Musk is the king of Twitter and just makes snap decisions and makes his staff--which he's reduced by half, mind--try to implement them. But then:

elon is now talking about potentially giving people high yield interest accounts to get them to store their money on twitter
— Ali Breland (@alibreland) November 9, 2022

This seems like madness but it is actually part of a plan. Musk wants to turn Twitter into WeChat, the Chinese app that combines social media, messaging, and banking. The difference is that WeChat is backed by the Chinese government--and whatever you think of the CCP, they are an actual government with experience in governing--and Twitter is run by King Elon who randomly changes his mind multiple times a week. Do you want to trust him with your money? I don't. I don't even want to trust him with $8 a month, nor even the miniscule amount of money advertisers make on me, which is why I use an old version of Tweetbot where the timeline is chronological and I don't see any ads or promoted tweets at all. What people want out of a bank is stability and constancy--that when they go to take their money out, their money will be there. If Twitter gets FDIC insured as a bank, then they'll probably end up costing the government a lot of money. If they don't, they'll cost a lot of crypto bros their money.

Basically, what this is revealing is that Musk's real skill, the thing he is legitimately great at, is securing government contracts. This is a valuable skill! But it's not the same as engineering or financial genius.

Edit: Ahahaha maybe Musk fired everyone who remembered that Twitter is under an FTC consent decree and now they might be up for fines. Facebook was fined billions, how about Twitter?

If Musk were deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, what would he have done differently?

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Andrey Vinogradov - Greshny Cheloveche/Niurochka

That's how the joke goes, anyway.

Today I saw an article entitled Why race is still a problem in Dungeons and Dragons and I have some Thoughts since I'm doing my own heartbreaker at the moment.

( My two coppers )

I Feel: amused
I Hear: The Birthday Massacre - Divide

Today I learned that the first native speaker of English who taught in Japan was a half-Scottish, half-Chinook man named Ranald MacDonald who became obsessed with Japan, signed on as a sailor on a whaling ship, convinced the crew to drop him off in a small boat near Hokkaidō, landed on shore and violated the Sakoku policy (the penalty for which was death), was handed over to the shogunate by the Ainu, and while waiting for a foreign ship to come pick him up went on to teach English to a group of people, one of whom became the lead negotiator between the shogunate and Commodore Perry's fleet.

History is stranger than fiction.

[The Japanese in the title is my samurai-speak translation of "I'm lovin' it.]

I Feel: excited
I Hear: Andrea Tonoli - Funeral for the Blackhearted

Well, this is a surprise. Twenty-five years after it was originally supposed to be published, Secrets of the Dead Lands has been released by Athas.org, along with a companion adventure called The Emissary.

This is one of those lost books that got tossed around as an impossible treasure in discussions about Dark Sun for decades. Some people had gotten draft copies, but since it was the 90s they never made it onto the internet and if you weren't one of those people there was no way to read it. Some of those people posted in the Sages of Dark Sun Facebook group and that's where I heard about it, plus the Terrors of the Dead Lands monster book existing for years without a book actually describing the place all these horrible things came from made it obvious there was some source they were drawing from. Well, maybe it was in the service of securing eventual permission to publish the whole thing, since Athas.org has some kind of limited license to use Dark Sun IP, and in the end, it worked. More books for Dark Sun is never a bad thing.

I've briefly poked through it and what most stands out is the use of the term "bugdead"--the Dead Lands are thousands of square miles of lifeless obsidian plains half ruled over by undead wizards-lords and their legions of terror and half by countless insectile monstrosities (including some living ones!), and each half is locked into an endless war against the other. It's very "the whole world has gone to hell," which is quintessential Dark Sun.

It also got me to work on my homebrew Dark Sun conversion to the same system I used for Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom for the first time in over a year, so hey!

I Feel: angry
I Hear: Nothing

So today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I have two things to point out:

here are still fewer of us now than there were in 1938

If you extrapolate demographics from the Roman Empire forward, there *should* be 150 million of us. There's around 16 million

But this post is prompted by news that the McMinn County, Tennessee school board voted unanimously to remove Maus from the curriculum.

If you've never read it, Maus is about the Shoah and about the author's relationship with his father. It's raw, it's brutal, and it's violent. So was the Shoah. The board's complaints come down to "it has nudity" (because the prisoners were stripped before being put in the camps) and "it has swear words," based on the minutes of the meeting. In the board's response, they talk about the "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide." So...they want a bloodless, deathless depiction of the Shoah>

After reading the minutes of the meeting, [the author] Mr. Spiegelman said he got the impression that the board members were asking, "Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?"

The impression I get, reading parts of the minutes and the statement from the board, is that they don't see Jews as people. We're don't really exist to them. We're a part of history, sure, but we're not a living people with wants and desires and, yes, flaws. The victims of the Shoah serve as a great illustration of man's inhumanity to man (as long as they don't have any inconveniences like disliking their father:

"I thought the end was stupid to be honest with you. A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he treated his father like he was the victim."
-Mike Cochran, school board member

How dare the child of someone who went through horrific trauma, who was affected by the trauma because there was no way he could not be, have complicated feelings. We're not real to them. I mean:

"I love the Holocaust I have taught the Holocaust almost every year in the classroom, but this is not a book I would teach my students."
-person identified as Teacher from McMinn High School

It's all just words to them. They don't actually care.

Which is how this sort of things happens again, of course.

I Feel: uncomfortable
I Hear: Contact Chai podcast

So this was a...thing.

I'm looking at this at a remove, but there was a Juneteeth Havdalah event with New York mayoral candidate Maya Wiley as outreach to the Jewish community organized by

TheJewishVote. The major problem with this is that Shabbat ends after sundown--traditionally when three stars are visible in the sky--and a lot of observant Jews wouldn't attend a political event on Shabbat (I wrote about this in 2018 when I attended a protest myself). Another problem is that when video surfaced, it appears to show people making the wrong blessing, using the blessing over wine when lighting the candle:

Video of @mayawiley making havdallah with members of @TheJewishVote earlier this evening. pic.twitter.com/72yMPgwafU
— Jacob Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) June 20, 2021

This is known as a ברכה לבטלה (bracha levatala), a blessing said to no purpose or for incorrect reasons, which violates the Third Commandment as it literally uses G-d's name in vain. This is the actual meaning of the Third Commandment, not avoiding saying "G-d dammit" or anything, because G-d is not G-d's name. Emoji Jewish with Torah

The criticism of this was pretty predictable. Lighting a fire on Shabbat is forbidden, Wiley held a Jewish outreach event when a lot of Jews couldn't attend, "their religion is Leftism not Judaism," that kind of thing. Not unexpected. But the defense of it left me uncomfortable as well. Ones like this one:

What I think people are *actually* taking offense to is that non-Orthodox Jews observe Shabbat and perform havdalah *at all*, instead of fitting the expectation that we don't care about our Judaism.
— Radical Traditional Jewish Person (@JustSayXtian) June 24, 2021

There certainly is a large chunk of Orthodoxy that views their practice as real Judaism and everything else as heresy--they'll often describe their traditions as "Torah Judaism" with the idea that it was handed down from G-d to Moses and then to them--even as completely modern practices like blurring out women's faces in magazines for modesty reasons gain extra traction in their community. But the opposition to this was pretty widespread. I saw a lot of liberal Jews who were annoyed or offended by this as well. The most frequent comment was that if Havdalah can be during the daytime, why can't Shabbat be on Wednesday? If halakha means nothing or is endlessly malleable, why even try following it? There are certainly streams of modern Judaism that hold to that but I disagree--we should engage with halakha wherever we can. If even passages like:

"If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, that will not hearken to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother and though they chasten him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father and his mother lay hold of him and bring him out unto the elders of his city… They shall say unto the elders of his city: This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he doth not hearken to our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones that he die; so shalt thou put away the evil from the midst of thee; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."
-Deuteronomy 21:18–21

can be interpreted such that such a terrible punishment is highly unlikely, we can do the same with other aspects of halakha. Maybe there's some way to rule that Shabbat ends at 5:30 p.m. every Saturday regardless of time of year, and if so, I want to see the reasoning. If the time doesn't matter, and the specific blessings don't matter, what does matter?

I guess my point is that I'm dubious of the "only the ethics matter" approach to Judaism because if the most important (or only) aspects of your practice are social justice, charity, and making the world a better place, what is the specific Jewish approach to that that isn't generalizable?

I Feel: surprised
I Hear: Hotei Tomoyasu - Battle Without Honor or Humanity

A couple days late to this news, obviously, but we have a coronavirus vaccine and it works.

Back in April I was very skeptical that this would happen, I think for good reason. The fastest previous vaccine had taken years. Less than ten percent of vaccines under development ever make it through trials and are approved. Yet here we are, with not just one vaccine but multiple vaccines. That's even better, because there's greater odds that if someone can't take any particular vaccine due to health concerns, one of the other vaccines might work for them.

They put music over footage of the first shipment of vaccine being wheeled into a hospital:

This works quite nicely. pic.twitter.com/KsGzWkm4Cl
— Matthew Podszus (@matthew_podszus) December 15, 2020

The top tweet is here, with the NBA on ESPN theme, though there are quite a few examples in the thread.

Given what we knew in April, I still think I was right to be skeptical then, but I'm glad I was wrong. We still have some months of restrictions in play as the vaccine is rolled out and we try to figure out how likely people who've been vaccinated are to spread the plague even if they aren't affected by it--latest results are very promising--but the end is in sight, and much sooner than a lot of people (and me) expected. Emoji La

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Nothing

I'm not online for Shabbat, but I still knew exactly what was happening yesterday. It's unseasonably warm in Chicago, above 20°C for days, and so we had the windows open and we could hear cars honking and shouting and cheering from outside.

lisekatevans texted me at 11:30 a.m. telling me that it was basically over. Later, I went out for a walk to see the fall colors and see what was going on, and when I walked into Clark Street there were cars going up and down the street, honking their horns and cheering:

Brought to you by gay communists for socialism. There were literally people dancing and singing in the streets. As I've seen multiple places, it was more like the population celebrating the fall of a dictator rather than the election of a new president. Which isn't half-wrong--with Trump's repeated statements about not accepting the results of the election, and maybe seeking additional terms past a second one if he was elected again. He was very clearly angling for additional power and the Republican Party and their voters was perfectly happy to let him.

That's the real issue here--the environment that gave rise to Trump still exists. More Republicans voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016, meaning they looked at incipient fascism and decided that they wanted more of it. Deliberate cruelty as the primary driver of government policy. As the tweet says:

Conservatives haven’t understood yet that when they got everything they wanted, that also meant we all saw what they always wanted, and our disgust is genuine and enduring, and consequently millions of us will never respect or trust you again.

Feel however you want about it.
— A.R. Moxon (@JuliusGoat) November 8, 2020

We have to show that their attitudes are unacceptable while allowing them an opportunity to change their mind. As frustrating as it might be, giving them no path back means they'll just double-down repeatedly. A lot of them will do that anyway, but it's important for the future of the country that we reduce the prevalence of fascist beliefs in the Republican Party without compromising our own. Progressive policy did well in the election--people want change that helps them. A big chunk of them just apparently want a tyrannical blowhard to do it.

Still, we are in an objectively better situation than we were a few days ago!

I Feel: resigned
I Hear: Old Game Plus podcast

There were enough ballots for only one night, but they lasted for eight nights.

At this point it seems likely, though not certain, that Biden will win, and all that remains is the counting. But thanks to efforts by Republican legislatures, the counting is stretched out much longer than it needs to, because the Republican Party wanted to set up the exact results that we got--election night trended red and then the results got more and more Democratic over time. That lets them run with the idea that the election was stolen and all Democratic governance is illegitimate, which is what they believe anyway but now they have an event they can point to as evidence of their claims.

But mostly, I think this election is evidence of something I've thought for a while, which is that one of the most common political position in America is "how dare you tell me what to do!" People repeatedly voted for progressive ballot measures, like Oregon's drug legalization or Mississippi's medical marijuana or Florida's $15 minimum wage, and then voted for Republicans politicians who are against those policies. I described it elsewhere by saying that Americans want liberal policies but want conservatives to enact them, which is glib but at least partially true. There's a lot of talk about racism and fascism in Trump support, and it is a major element, but it's hard to say that Trump lost support among white men but gained it among everyone else due to racism. The left has an image as prissy schoolteachers who repeatedly punish people for exerting any independence, and it mostly has no interest in actually shedding that impression because whyareyoubooingmeimright.jpg. People's votes may be due to racism, but if so (especially if so), pointing it out is just going to make them vote for someone else.

How do we then get past that? There's basically no evidence that implicit bias training actually results in changing attitudes, so that leaves the hard work of talking to people and getting to know them, but polarization is such that when a new congressman tweets:

Cry more, lib.
— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) November 4, 2020

...the response from conservatives is mostly favorable. The right talks about grievance studies, and the politics of grievance, but of course it's projection. "u mad libs" is basically the only policy position conservatives have now.

There is one other element in this election, though, and that's the plague. Attitudes are hugely politicized, and Trump probably got a large number of votes from people who want the economy opened up and are willing to ignore everything else to achieve it. Republicans have far more single-issue voter issues than the Democrats--guns, abortion, etc.--and coronavirus lockdowns are another one.

If the schools were open, maybe Biden would have won with a more comfortable margin.

I Feel: relieved
I Hear: Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood - Drowning in the Horizon

My free company in Final Fantasy XIV bought a house!

I made a joke image with "DUTY COMPLETE" in the FFXIV font on it, but here's the original.

If you're familiar with FFXIV, you know that housing is a problem in the game. Much like the real world, there's a limited supply, most people who want a place to live have to resort to short-term accommodation or small apartments, and the market is primarily controlled by jerks with too much money. Everything that Squeenix does to improve the situation also makes it worse--they prevented single accounts from buying a ton of houses (while letting those who had bought a bunch of houses keep them), they implemented a random timer on sales after a housing plot is relinquished to prevent private sales (meaning people have to stand outside and repeatedly click the housing plot for hours in the hope of getting something), and they allow people who already own a home to bypass that timer (meaning someone can stroll up and take the plot at any time). Housing is terrible, it's always been terrible, they know it's terrible, and yet nothing changes.

Yesterday was the release of patch 5.35, which brought in a bunch of stuff but mostly the addition of extra housing wards, each containing a couple dozen houses. Almost 750 houses in all, and by the time I woke up at 6:30 a.m., an hour and a half after the patch, all of them were gone.

sashagee,

aaron.hosek, and one of our other free company members sat for hours clicking on placards. The other member had the house sniped out from under them after four hours by someone who just strolled up and clicked the sign, but we kept waiting. And waiting. I got up to eat lunch, and go to Japanese tutoring, and when I got back there were seven other people at my sign when most of the day I and been alone or with a single other person, so I left. And as I was riding around looking at listings, a message popped up that

aaron.hosek had bought us a house in Shirogane, the Japan-themed housing district! The other two people there had gone afk and after twelve hours, the invisible timer finally ran out.

The system is dumb. The day was terrible. I would much rather have instanced housing so that everyone could get what they needed rather than people having to sit for an entire day clicking a sign just for the chance to get a house. But now we have a Japanese-style house in Shirogane, right near a market board and steps from the ocean, and since we're on the housing treadmill we never have to click like that ever again!

I Feel: excited
I Hear: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Main Theme

People keep complaining that Nintendo has nothing this year, but Nintendo's determined to prove them wrong Emoji Link smilie

Watch on YouTube

I thought that Hyrule Warriors was fun enough, but I wasn't interested in playing it for the hundreds of hours that I'd need to fill out all the unlockables. But a game that's much more closely based on Breath of the Wild, where Koei reportedly worked directly with Nintendo on the story and lore, with BotW's physics engine? That sounds far more interesting. There's bits of it in that trailer, with Link hurling a bomb at a bunch of bokoblins and sending them flying, or playable Zelda (!!) using the Sheikah Stone's Vitalock function to freeze a charging Lynel. And I'm really into playing the Champions fighting against Ganon's armies!

I am a bit curious about the story, though. Obviously if this is a real Breath of the Wild prequel, then it's a tragedy where Ganon wins in the end. The article I linked said:

In addition to all the action, the game is loaded with a robust story that depicts the events, relationships and dramatic moments of the Great Calamity in captivating detail.

...so the Calamity is still happening. I can see a compelling narrative around the rising tide of darkness as Ganon gets closer and closer to awakening--Memory 8: A Premonition shows that monsters were getting more and more common in the time leading up to Ganon's return, so the Champions will still have plenty to do even though they're destined to enter their Divine Beasts and die at Ganon's hands. And a final mission, with Link fighting off like a hundred Guardians leading up to Memory 17: Awakening, would be a fantastic conclusion.

Video games generally don't end tragically and more of them should. Dark Souls

aaron.hosek suggested that we get this and play together, and even if I weren't going to get it because it's another canon (ish?) Zelda game, I'd be in favor of that. I would have had more fun with Hyrule Warriors if I had played it with a group, and multiplayer with a real physics engine sounds amazing.

I'd better beat Chrono Trigger and Deus Ex so I'm ready.

I Feel: uneasy
I Hear: Andrey Vinogradov - Dusk Is Falling Now

Yesterday at around 2:30 p.m., a tornado alert lit up

sashagee's phone. Not that long after, my mother texted me to ask me about the storm that was coming, and when I checked Dark Sky, there was a solid wall barrelling down from the west toward us. Over the course of fifteen minutes, the sky went from a bit cloudy to twilight, the wind picked up, and rain started to fall.

sashagee left the sun nook and all its windows and went into the office, which has a single east-facing window shielded by an overhang, and waited it out.

Where I am, it wasn't too bad. When we went out shopping after it was over there was barely even any puddles on the ground, but we got lucky. There was a tornado within a mile of us that touched down and went out over the lake, and a nearby street was completely blocked by a downed tree. My boss, who lives within a mile, still doesn't have power this morning. A bunch of my friends also don't have power, and one mentioned $300 of food that's spoiled.

smtemp snapped a picture of a steeple at a building at Wheaton College having collapsed, and

seloy had some parts of her backyard blow away in the high winds. With all those west-facing windows I have, I got away really lucky. Emoji Treasure chest

Also yesterday,

sashagee got a text from her manager saying that her downtown workplace was closed due to damage from looting. This was because the police shot someone the day before and their body cameras were off, so while they claim that they were fired on first, well, police constantly lie about everything. Initial reports were that the police had shot a child (that's how I first heard it), so people nearby were very angry. They fought with police, other people showed up downtown and looted some stores, and the next morning the mayor suspended public transit and raised the bridges again.

I'm getting really tired of the mayor just deciding to disrupt life for everyone on a whim. Raising the bridges and shutting down transit should not be the first response to any situation.

When we went shopping yesterday, everywhere corporate closed early--probably heeding the call of some exec who doesn't live anywhere near Chicago to close all the stores--but the locally-owned Middle Eastern Grocery Store was open through the storm, so we got a bunch of hummus and pita and came back for dinner. We're mostly unaffected by any of this, here on our particular part of the far north side.

2020 really is a year. Emoji Nyoron

I Feel: curious
I Hear: Big Giant Circles, Jeff Ball - Thunderstruck (Ocarina of Time / The Legend of Ze

So over the weekend, a ton of Nintendo's historical prototypes were liberated. Luigi in Mario 64, the original more dinosaur-like Yoshi design from Super Mario World, early maps from Ocarina of Time, a Pokemon MMO, a possible sequel for Zelda 2 (😮), and even more.

I've already read a bunch of people rush to the defense of a billion-dollar corporation like it was their cousin, and while whoever leaked the info should have sanitized it--there's apparently some person diary entries mixed in among the sprite sheets and game dev tools--all I can think about is how quite possibly the most important video game company has an extensive catalog of its own history, preserved through the years even when projects are cancelled while other companies fail like how Blizzard lost the source code of Diablo II or Konami lost the source code to Silent Hill 2 and 3, and I think:

It's all related to how so much of popular culture, the people and stories that we all know and reference every day of our lives, are owned by specific corporations and it's illegal to make new stories with them in a way that's totally unprecedented for most of human history. So I won't weep for Nintendo losing control of the history of some of the most important video games of all time. They belong in a museum.

And I really hope someone takes that Link sprite sheet and makes a new side-scroller Zelda game so I can play it. Emoji Link smilie

I Feel: uneasy
I Hear: Nothing

Not much else surrounding the food because I already posted about it!

sashagee has left more and more of her things here, now bringing over her yoga mat because she figures that after sleeping on my shikibuton she'll need it more than after sleeping on her double-memory-foamed cloud-bed. I'm probably going to end up getting a memory foam pad myself to make her more comfortable, since while I'm used to it to the point that at ACEN last year I slept on the floor of

RogueNire and

zbrund's room with just a blanket and a pillow and I was okay, but for

sashagee, basically the only thing worse than my shikibuton would be a bed of nails. Emoji stabbing

News came out today that Chicago is close to reversing progress and could return to Phase 3, which would honestly be fine with me. I've already ranted here about the beach-scolding when going to the beach is literally orders of magnitude safer than going to a bar or an indoor restaurant, and hoenstly we shouldn't have opened indoor activities at all if you can't wear masks during them. If bars and restaurants and groups greater than ten are banned, it'd change nothing about my life. Even a group of ten is too many, I think (the max I've gathered in was six and that was outside). And

sashagee keeps telling me about people coming into her work in groups of ten or twenty, maybe half of them masked, and gathering around her and her co-workers. Shutting that down sounds great.

( Farmer's Market Dinner )

I really needed this meal today because the internet is a mess. Today "Jews," "Hebrews," and "Semites" were trending--always a bad sign--and on looking into it, apparently Nick Cannon was fired for antisemitism, meaning Twitter was filled to the brim with "See! He said Jews control the media and (((they))) fired him! He was right!" comments, including a depressing amount of them from Black people. Most of those followed the familiar pattern--Jews are rich, Jews control the media and the banks, Jews can't be oppressed because we actually run the world, you've heard it all before. "Punching up" as a model of interaction fails utterly when dealing with antisemitism, because a lot of antisemitism is about how we're secretly on top, so therefore those comments aren't antisemitic, they're bravely speaking truth to power.

As the meme goes, "The Jews are tired." Emoji Picard facepalm

I did really appreciate this article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though: Where Is the Outrage Over Anti-Semitism in Sports and Hollywood? A good question I wish we had a better answer to.

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Entries tagged with article (記事)

The thing about authoritarianism is life just mostly goes on

Sigh (continue for next four years)

It's the economy, stupid

Woke up this morning unsurprised

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a writing month

A traditional Erev Christmas

Exciting Penn developments over Shabbat

Feeling hazy

₩or£₫ o₣ ₩₪r¢r₪ft

MUAD'DIB! MUAD'DIB!

Rationalizationism

Likes are now florps, timeline goes sideways

D&D is the most racist, classist game on the market!

拙者は好きでござる！

Secrets of the Dead Lands

Zero days without goyishe nonsense

Havdalah-gate

Taking down the plague

Victory, at least for the moment!

The miracle of the election

Housing (Savage): Duty Complete

The Age of Calamity is upon you

The Twin Calamities

The Nintendo Gigaleak

A bed like a wooden slab, she says

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April 2025

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