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."

The last barrier has been breached--this morning Laila opened the door to her room, came into our room, and jumped on our bed to wake us up. I was already awake but sashagee was not, so she was rudely woken by the impact of a forty-pound toddler shouting "Good morning!" At least she came into our room instead of trying to wreck the living room. This is after yesterday, when I was eating breakfast and I heard her trying the handle on her door, and eventually she got it open, came out of her room with a big smile on her face, and said, "Good morning abba!" while giving me a big hug.

You learn about so many things working on your hobbies. There's a person who's contributed to Cataclysm who's a Brazilian monarchist. I had no idea those even existed, but apparently they're 11% of the population. Anyway, this person keeps wanting to add Brazilian monarchy-themed items to the game, which, whatever, except the game is set in New England. I checked Amazon and while they have Austro-Hungarian monarchist gear and Tzarist Russia monarchist gear, there's nothing about the Empire of Brazil. They ended up catching a warning for repeatedly trying to insert their political beliefs into an inappropriate location. And the thing is, there is a mod for the game (Tropicataclysm) that takes place in Brazil where this sort of thing would be reasonable...at least, I think so, I have no idea how common Brazilian monarchist trucker hats are in Brazil.

We're in the last gasp of summer in Chicago. The high today is 31°C, but from today it's a walk down the country lane into fall. By the end of the weekend the high will be 26°C, and by this time next week the high will be 21°C. I'm looking forward to getting my coats out again.

Alright, back to work.

Got an email for a training that we have to take at work about bystander intervention. Okay, fair enough, the Bystander Effect is fake but it's still worth reinforcing the urge to intervene, but I'm writing this post due to the note listed on the email:

Note: Given the 1-hour time requirement by law, you cannot skip ahead in this eLearning module; you are asked to spend 60 minutes consuming the information. We appreciate your understanding.

The law requires that everyone receive one hour of instruction, therefore you will be instructed for one hour. Do not resist, citizen.

I wonder if this is the actual law or just corporate idiocy.

I saw this post on reddit yesterday, Morrowind is the only TES game that understands empire, and it really gets to the heart of my Morrowind is, and will always be, the best Elder Scrolls game.

( Cut due to spoilers for a decade-old game )

Blah blah hard to find time to write blah blah.

We've been taking advantage of Laila's youth and easy distractibility as long as there's food around to try to go to friends' for meals, since she's not old enough to get bored when adults are talking about grown-up things. On Saturday, bunnydelfuego invited us over to a combination Havdalah/birthday celebration, so we took Laila and grabbed a bottle of wine on the way. When we got there, Laila was fascinated by the layout of their apartment--unlike most Chicago apartments (and our own condo) which are a long corridor with rooms along their length, bunnydelfuego and benjieweiss's apartment is laid out in a square. Laila was fascinated by this, and she spent quite a while just crawling or walking through doors in a circle trying to find out where the "end" was. sashagee and I traded off watching Laila while the other sat at the table and engaged in grown-up conversation. Laila spent a lot of time in the bathroom touching the tile or the fuzzy bathmat, briefly met Nugget--the rabbit in residence--and gave everyone hugs. We ate gyōza and bruschetta and drank gin punch and got Laila home in time for bed!

Sunday we went out to brunch with aaron.hosek at Pauline's, a diner that's one of his favorite local restaurants. He expected it wouldn't be crowded but the lovely weather (20° and sunny) meant that it didn't matter we were late because the table wasn't ready until we got there. It was another lovely meal, though Laila got a little grumpy towards the end. The stand-out part was when she turned to the table of people next to us and shrieked, just a deafening scream (at baby scale), and when they turned to look at her she was just like Oh! Hello! How are you? Very cute but we're certainly going to have to civilize her a bit.

Perhaps uniquely, I didn't spend last night doomscrolling on the election. I have achieved zen detachment--無心 mushin, one might say--and thought that I had done what I could do and would have to let the world do what it could do. And B"H it turned out that the news is very good. In Illinois we put the right to collective bargaining into the constitution, the governor candidate who made repeated abortion/Shoah comparisons lost, and even the collar counties went Democratic which almost never happens. It turns out that the average voter is able to connect creeping fascism with the problems the country faces.

Does this mean I'm going to stop urging sashagee to renew her passport, and stop plans to get Laila a passport? No. There's a saying that "Jews don't have roots, we have legs" and it's always good to have a plan. I remember reading a tweet from a Ukrainian back in February saying that a couple days prior she had been laughing and chatting out at a sushi restaurant with friends and now she was eating cold sandwiches and happy she had that much. Things can change very quickly.

We took Laila to the dentist yesterday and she did great! She obviously didn't like having her mouth messed with, but she didn't cry and she still gave the dentist a hug afterward! What a good baby.

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.

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?

It's pretty hard to get work done when there's a fascist coup happening.

Frankly, if it were up to me I'd round up all the Republican elected officials and put them in those FEMA camps. Their politics have been leading to this point for as long as I've been alive, and they have received no major pushback or punishment for it. That needs to change or we will not have any democracy to defend. If this coup is not ruthlessly punished there will be a successful one within the decade.

Anyway, off to Target to go shopping with sashagee. Like you do during a fascist coup.

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.

Definite apocalypse vibes as the sky is blue but slightly hazy thanks to the smoke from the entire west coast burning traveling thousands of miles to us. 2020 continues to deliver.

The trailer for The Mandalorian season 2 dropped and it looked incredibly good, but I'm also very annoyed at Disney for not just filming the Mulan remake in Xinjiang but also thanking the local security bureau or, as I put it elsewhere, they didn't just film it in Xinjiang, they thanked the concentration camp guards. That's unbelievably egregious, well beyond the usual ethical considerations in dealing with the CCP. I'm not really sure I want to give them any money after that.

( Farmer's Market dinner )

I had originally pre-ordered Super Mario 3D All-Stars but I cancelled it yesterday when I learned that the games are all just emulated, which I can do right now with what I have on my computer. aaron.hosek even said that the Mario 64 port isn't widescreen-compatible, which means that I get 4K resolution and native widescreen support with my PC rebuild of Mario 64 and poor Switch fans get a thrown-together port, once again validating my decision to be a PC gamer. All games come to PC eventually.

Piracy--for the superior gaming experience.