I learned today that my county has spent a million dollars on a “mine resistant vehicle”

Little ol’ Stevens County, Minnesota, population 10,000 (dropping to between 8 and 9 thousand when the students go home) has been busy militarizing their police force.

Right. We needed one of these things:

I vaguely recall reading a while back that there was a small coalition of a couple of rural counties to put together a mighty task force of super-soldiers to handle Big Crime; they may have made the news for an assault on a motel in Sauk Center. So maybe it “serves” a slightly larger population, where “serves” is a rather dubious verb.

I’m having a tough time imagining the circumstances in which local law would need a monster troop transport. A meth house catches fire, and the gangly, toothless desperate addicts start puking on the lawn? Another cat lady refuses to allow animal services to break up her 50 cat swarm? The corn revolts? Maybe they’re getting ready for a hypothetical “Red Dawn” scenario.

There is a petition to defund the Minneapolis police. Maybe we should all be looking closer to home, too, and asking what kind of ridiculous expenditures our local police are making. This is basically Mayberry — we’ve got some modern challenges, but nothing that requires a tank.

The police are a mob of bullying cowards

The Asheville police bravely assaulted a first-aid station. It was clearly marked, it was staffed by doctors, nurses, EMTs and such people, and no one in the group was participating in the protests. They were just there to help people. Yet the police charged in, knifed all the water bottles, looted bandages and sutures, trashed everything in sight, and harassed the medical staff.

The excuses given: they were only supposed to confiscate medical supplies (why?). They had to search for explosives (in a med station?). They had to get rid of the water bottles, because protesters had thrown them at the police.

Take a closer look at those police.

Holy crap. They’re armored up like storm troopers from Star Wars. And they’re afraid of thrown water bottles? Did they watch Return of the Jedi, think it was a documentary, and worry that there were Ewoks among the protesters?

I also have to point out that they chose to fight medical assistants who have been struggling to get proper PPE for months, and who in this bold assault were wearing t-shirts and handkerchiefs tied over their faces, and were volunteers who weren’t getting paid. How much overtime did Asheville sink into depriving its citizens of medical assistance?

FTP.

Pinker parodies himself

We’re in a time of crisis, when a sense of injustice is acute, when communities are in flames and people march in protest, when white supremacists run the country and the police have willingly become a tool of fascism. What we really need right now is some clueless dweeb from Harvard to come along and reassure us that it’s all an illusion, the country is really becoming less racist, therefore all you white bigots out there can relax and not feel guilty because the statistics say you are all becoming better angels, even if you’ve institutionalized social norms that allow black concerns to be minimized even as you’re throwing huge numbers of them into an inhumane prison complex. That dweeb is the self-appointed guru of white denial, Steven Pinker. You can always count on him to show up at a cataclysmic failure of the system to let us know that this terrible event doesn’t really expose an ugly reality. Everything is getting better, don’t you know. So he takes to twitter to make his usual Pollyannaish pronouncement.

Good god. He’s a psychologist. He has to know that people are really good at rationalization, making self-reported attitudes difficult to trust. Look at this one graph he shows (as if a graph is more powerful than one photo of a cop with his knee on a black man’s neck):

What, exactly, is that supposed to demonstrate? That white people have become less racist since the 1970s, or that racists have been shifting their rationalizations since the 1970s? Are “Inequality is due to lower motivation among blacks” and “Inequality is due to lower ability among blacks” the only two excuses white people give for discrimination, so those two responses encompass the totality of the rationalizations? Has he even considered that both responses are pretty damned racist and are centered on explaining the othering of black people? Has he considered that a shift in what is socially acceptable to say in public doesn’t necessarily imply a shift in underlying attitudes?

Also, wow, over half the white respondents are making those two equally racist arguments. I don’t find this at all reassuring.

Pinker is referencing a black social psychologist (also a big shot at Harvard, which ought to be a caution to anyone reading their work — he’s black, but also in a highly privileged position) who is also cautiously optimistic about the future, but isn’t trying to bury the lede in happy-clappy noise.

We had all thought, of course, that we made phenomenal strides. We inhabit an era in which there are certainly more rank-and-file minority police officers than ever before, more African American and minority and female police chiefs and leaders. But inhabiting a world where the poor and our deeply poor communities are still heavily disproportionately people of color, where we had a war on drugs that was racially biased in both its origins and its profoundly troubling execution over many years, that has bred a level of distrust and antagonism between police and black communities that should worry us all. There’s clearly an enormous amount of work to be done to undo those circumstances and to heal those wounds.

Pinker really is the Norman Vincent Peale of our generation. We don’t need some racist-leaning, evo-psych-loving, IDW-associated professor telling us that everything will just get better gradually over time if we’re patient and wait for white people to become more tolerant. Action is the agent of change. Every incremental shift is the result of people standing up, speaking out, shoving reality in the face of the complacent and demanding change. There is no magic internal trend towards less racism, especially not among the people who hold all the power.

I have good news, and I have bad news

The Iowa primaries were held yesterday. Great news: rabid racist and white supremacist Steve King is out on his ass. Finally!

The bad news: he was defeated for the Republican nomination by Randy Feenstra, who promises to be more of the same, except he just won’t say the quiet parts out loud anymore.

But there have been notable changes of heart in Iowa, too. Among those who backed Feenstra was activist Bob Vander Plaats, a GOP political kingmaker in western Iowa who once was one of King’s staunchest allies. In an ad funded by the Priorities for Iowa super PAC, Vander Plaats said King was “no longer effective” in Washington — echoing Feenstra’s central campaign message.

“He can’t deliver for President Trump, and he can’t advance our conservative values,” he said. “Thankfully, Iowa has a better choice.”

Craig Robinson, who runs the website TheIowaRepublican.com, said Feenstra offered the district everything King did as a conservative, but with no baggage.

New boss same as the old boss, I guess, just with slightly more discretion.

Progress on Linux

Thank you to everyone for your suggestions! I’m still plugging away at Linux, and mostly adapting just fine. My major complaints right now are with my reflexes: cut/copy/paste are handled with the control key in Linux, while in Mac OS X you have to hold down the command key, which means that every time I intend to copy some text, I instead delete it and replace it with the letter “c”, followed by a panicky attempt to undo it by adding a “z”. Also, Pop!_OS uses the command key by itself to switch to a system menu and a display of running apps, so it’s like the screen explodes in confusion every time I make an elementary mistake. Lesson learned: stop making mistakes. Or get my pinky trained to press the correct modifier button.

I’m also experiencing the joy of non-Mac klunkiness. I tinkered with KDENLive as a replacement for iMovie. It’s got some things iMovie lacks, like as many track layers as you want. On the other hand, iMovie is easy — you click on an object in a layer, tell the program to apply the green screen effect, and everything green turns transparent. In KDENLive, you do the same thing, and in addition to requiring that you set a bunch of parameters to define what “green” is, it turns everything else transparent. I’m going to have to go through a bunch of tutorials to figure it all out, while with iMovie I just ran it and everything was intuitive and obvious.

I’m committed at this point, and will master it all eventually, since this is the only laptop I’m using now. Sink or swim! Bye, Apple!

Good Morning, America! The sun is shining upon us!

I took a break from everything yesterday. It felt good. Today, I woke up, stretched, and noticed all the wild and crazy things that are going on with fresh eyes, and thought everyone would appreciate a little reminder.

  • The Republicans still want to dismantle the one reliable government institution, the US Postal Service!
  • The Republicans are engaging in ongoing acts of voter suppression!
  • Trans people are still getting murdered for being who they are!
  • Did you remember…we’re still in the middle of a pandemic? That one slipped my mind!
  • Republicans have shut down women’s medical services all across the country because they don’t want them to control their own reproductive health!
  • Misogyny! It’s still a thing!
  • The Republicans hate education, especially higher ed, and would like to shut it all down!
  • Uh-oh. Climate change hasn’t stopped to give us a break — the planet is still warming!
  • The Supreme Court is still in the hands of Republican ideologues!
  • Mitch McConnell is still controlling the senate, blocking responsible legislation right and left!
  • Our president is still a tyrannical narcissist!
  • The Democrats are in the process of nominating an incoherent geezer in the pocket of the banks and insurance companies to run against him.
  • Black people have been oppressed for at least 4 centuries, and white people like it that way!

I probably forgot a few crises and institutionalized horrors, but I just started on my first cup of coffee. AMERICA!

Looking for Linux advice

Today’s the day. After a miserable experience trying to handle an interview last night with an old Mac that is apparently drowning in molasses (huge lag issues, computer fans howling while I was running nothing but Zoom), I decided that today was the day I had to do something about it. My first thought was a clean wipe, erasing the drive and reinstalling the system and restoring from my backup, but that was going to take many hours and wasn’t a guarantee that the problems would be repaired. Then I took a hard look at my laptop: keys falling off, blotchy dead spots on the screen that only display green, dinged-up case, and a power cable that’s a frayed fire hazard. If I have to, I could make do with it for some undeterminable time longer before it died outright, but it’s frustratingly ugly and unreliable.

I could just buy a new Mac laptop, but I browsed the Apple store, and yikes, a Macbook Pro would set me back $2500-$3000. Nope. By the way, it’s the first of the month, so on top of paying my mortgage I have to send a good chunk of money to pay off lawyer fees. It’s good to have won that case, but the money I’ve sent off to our lawyer in the last 4 months could have bought me a new computer with all the bells and whistles I could dream of.*

So…making do. My wife has an old Asus laptop we got several years ago for cheap, when her old Mac was fritzing out on her. Again, we tried to save money to get functional. It was a bad idea, because it was a Windows machine, she hated Windows (as should we all), and was so repulsed by the OS that she decided she could make do by using her phone for all of her online interactions. She’s like a teenager that way. The Asus was left to gather dust.

A short while back, as I saw the handwriting on the screen of my Mac, I dusted it off, puked on Windows, and then erased it and installed Linux. I’ve been puttering around with it since, installing software, taking it for a test drive, and have been impressed. It’s an older Windows machine, but it outperforms my antique Mac with a clean install of Pop_OS. I could get used to it. While the hardware is nothing special, I could upgrade it to something shiny and chrome for half the price of a Mac, if ever I manage to crawl out of my financial hole.

But now I’m ready to commit. Farewell, Mac, you’ve served me well for 36 years, but the time has come to jump ship. Now I just need to find replacements for a few tools. Tell me, O Linux Experts, what you recommend as replacements.

Keynote. This is the one that hurts the most. Keynote is kind of the pinnacle of Apple software design philosophy — clean, elegant, powerful. Comparing it to the Windows alternative, Power Point, is one of the key factors that quickly steered me away from considering anything Windows. The Windows design philosophy is to tack a hideous, giant toolbar on everything and fill it with little cryptic icons — see also Microsoft Word. I’m still trying to find Linux presentation software comparable to Keynote. This is important to me, since one of the things I often do is put together presentations.

iMovie. iMovie has limitations, but it is also clean and elegant — I don’t need super-powered video editing software. I might be willing to work with something high-powered, aware that there’d be a bit of a learning curve. I’ve been looking at…KDENlive, I think? But I haven’t buckled down to figure it out.

I gave up on Photoshop long ago when it went to a subscription model, so I’m used to klunky old GIMP. Linux has no shortage of good text editors. I’ve been using Pages, but I guess any cleaner alternative to Word would be good. I may just switch to Google docs — ditto for a spreadsheet, which I don’t use for anything fancier than a gradebook. There is an office suite that comes with Pop_OS, which I might just settle for, since there’s nothing exciting about any of those applications.

I’m guessing now that all the nerds on the internet are going to flood me with suggestions.

*Richard Carrier is such an asshole.

I am antifa

As much as one can be, given that antifa is not an organization. I don’t have a membership card. I’ve never paid dues. I’ve never attended a meeting. I’m not part of a cell. There is no hierarchy. I have failed to punch any Nazis.

I am thoroughly anti-fascist though, so I guess the president is going to have to send some cops to my door.

I will, as a certified academic pedant, have to explain to them during the whole ride to the prison that being anti-anti-fascist means you’re a fascist. I’m not too worried, though, since the threat is just blustering bullshit from a bully.