Category: rants

A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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The latest scandal to hit the science fiction community is the revelation that the people putting on WorldCon in Seattle are using ChatGPT to vet proposed panelists. Given that a large number of people who want to be on panels are published authors who are part of the class actions against the companies making these over-hyped LLM products, the amount of outrage was completely predictable.

A number of us also pointed out that the information produced by these programs is very often wrong, since they make things up because they are basically word prediction devices. As a person who is not famous and who has a common Anglo name, I shudder to think what so-called “AI” would produce about me.

But the biggest problem I see with “AI” – outside of the environmental costs, the error rate, and the use of materials without permission to create it – is that they keep trying to sell it to do things it doesn’t do well, instead of keeping it for the few things it actually can do. Of course, there’s not a lot of money to be made from those few things, especially when you factor in the costs.

We’re at the point in tech where new things are not going to change the product that much, no matter what the hype says. Exponential growth cannot last forever. If you don’t believe me, look up the grains of rice on a chessboard story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways people are trying to use “AI” or even older forms of tech to get rid of workers and the more I think about it, the more disastrous it looks.

We don’t need more tech doing stuff; we need more people doing stuff.

It’s not just “AI”. Just try to call your bank or your doctor, or, god help us all, Social Security or the IRS (now made worse by the Dodgy Minions). When we have issues, we need people – real people, who understand what we’re calling about and can solve our problems.

The “chat” feature on a website doesn’t cut it and an “AI” enabled chat feature is probably worse in that it might well make up an answer instead of just not knowing what to do.

I’ve been thinking of health care in particular. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how LLMs can read radiology films better than radiologists, in that they don’t get bored or distracted, so they can point to any things that look out of the ordinary in reference to the kind of films they were trained on.

But of course, what they’re really doing is flagging the problems for a radiologist to look at. They don’t replace the expert; they help them do their job. It’s probably useful, but it isn’t going to make radiology any cheaper, because you still need the person to look carefully at the films.

I don’t believe for a moment that LLMs will be better at diagnosing patients. Continue reading “A Meander from “AI” to People and Back Again”…

Reprint: Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize

personby Deborah J. Ross
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This article first appeared in The Conversation. I offer it here with permission because now, more than ever, we need hope. Hope and belief in our power to resist and ultimately defeat a tyrant.

Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize

Kevin A. Young, UMass AmherstDonald Trump’s first term as president saw some of the largest mass protests seen in the U.S. in over 50 years, from the 2017 Women’s March to the 2020 protests after George Floyd’s murder.

Things feel different this time around. Critics seem quieter. Some point to fear of retribution. But there’s also a sense that the protests of Trump’s first term were ultimately futile. This has contributed to a widespread mood of despair.

As The New York Times noted not long ago, Trump “had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent.” That’s a common perspective these days.

But what if it’s wrong?

As a historian, I study how our narratives about the past shape our actions in the present. In this case, it’s particularly important to get the history right.

In fact, popular resistance in Trump’s first term accomplished more than many observers realize; it’s just that most wins happened outside the spotlight. In my view, the most visible tactics – petitions, hashtags, occasional marches in Washington – had less impact than the quieter work of organizing in communities and workplaces.

Understanding when movements succeeded during Trump’s first term is important for identifying how activists can effectively oppose Trump policy in his second administration.

Quiet victories of the sanctuary movement

Mass deportation has been a cornerstone of Trump’s agenda for more than a decade. Yet despite his early pledge to create a “deportation force” that would expel millions, Trump deported only half as many people in his first term as Barack Obama did in his first term.

Progressive activists were a key reason. By combining decentralized organizing and nationwide resource-sharing, they successfully pushed scores of state and local governments to adopt sanctuary laws that limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

When the sociologist Adam Safer examined thousands of cities and dozens of states, he found that a specific type of sanctuary law that activists supported – barring local jails and prisons from active cooperation with ICE – successfully reduced ICE arrests. A study by legal scholar David K. Hausman confirmed this finding. Notably, Hausman also found that sanctuary policies had “no detectable effect on crime rates,” contrary to what many politicians allege.

Another important influence on state and local officials was employers’ resistance to mass deportation. The E-Verify system requiring employers to verify workers’ legal status went virtually unenforced, since businesses quietly objected to it. As this example suggests, popular resistance to Trump’s agenda was most effective when it exploited tensions between the administration and capitalists.

The ‘rising tide’ against fossil fuels

In his effort to prop up the fossil fuel industry, Trump in his first term withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, weakened or eliminated over 100 environmental protections and pushed other measures to obstruct the transition to green energy.

Researchers projected that these policies would kill tens of thousands of people in just the United States by 2028, primarily from exposure to air pollutants. Other studies estimated that the increased carbon pollution would contribute to tens of millions of deaths, and untold other suffering, by century’s end.

That’s not the whole story, though. Trump’s first-term energy agenda was partly thwarted by a combination of environmental activism and market forces.

His failure to resuscitate the U.S. coal industry was especially stark. Coal-fired plant capacity declined faster during Trump’s first term than during any four-year period in any country, ever. Some of the same coal barons who celebrated Trump’s victory in 2016 soon went bankrupt.

CBS News covered the bankruptcy of coal firm Murray Energy, founded by Trump supporter Robert E. Murray.

The most obvious reasons for coal’s decline were the U.S. natural gas boom and the falling cost of renewable energy. But its decline was hastened by the hundreds of local organizations that protested coal projects, filed lawsuits against regulators and pushed financial institutions to disinvest from the sector. The presence of strong local movements may help explain the regional variation in coal’s fortunes.

Environmentalists also won some important battles against oil and gas pipelines, power plants and drilling projects. In a surprising number of cases, organizers defeated polluters through a combination of litigation, civil disobedience and other protests, and by pressuring banks, insurers and big investors.

In 2018, one pipeline CEO lamented the “rising tide of protests, litigation and vandalism” facing his industry, saying “the level of intensity has ramped up,” with “more opponents” who are “better organized.”

Green energy also expanded much faster than Trump and his allies would have liked, albeit not fast enough to avert ecological collapse. The U.S. wind energy sector grew more in Trump’s first term than under any other president, while solar capacity more than doubled. Research shows that this progress was due in part to the environmental movement’s organizing, particularly at the state and local levels.

As with immigration, Trump’s energy agenda divided both political and business elites. Some investors became reluctant to keep their money in the sector, and some even subsidized environmental activism. Judges and regulators didn’t always share Trump’s commitment to propping up fossil fuels. These tensions between the White House and business leaders created openings that climate activists could exploit.

Worker victories in unlikely places

Despite Trump self-promoting as a man of the people, his policies hurt workers in numerous ways – from his attack on workers’ rights to his regressive tax policies, which accelerated the upward redistribution of wealth.

Nonetheless, workers’ direct action on the job won meaningful victories. For example, educators across the country organized dozens of major strikes for better pay, more school funding and even against ICE. Workers in hotels, supermarkets and other private-sector industries also walked out. Ultimately, more U.S. workers went on strike in 2018 than in any year since 1986.

This happened not just in progressive strongholds but also in conservative states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. At least 35 of the educators’ strikes defied state laws denying workers the right to strike.

In addition to winning gains for workers, the strike wave apparently also worked against Republicans at election time by increasing political awareness and voter mobilization. The indirect impact on elections is a common side effect of labor militancy and mass protest.

Quiet acts of worker defiance also constrained Trump. The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic featured widespread resistance to policies that raised the risk of infection, particularly the lack of mask mandates.

Safety-conscious workers frequently disobeyed their employers, in ways seldom reflected in official strike data. Many customers steered clear of businesses where people were unmasked. These disruptions, and fears they might escalate, led businesses to lobby government for mask mandates.

This resistance surely saved many lives. With more coordination, it might have forced a decisive reorientation in how government and business responded to the virus.

Labor momentum could continue into Trump’s second term. Low unemployment, strong union finances and widespread support for unions offer opportunities for the labor movement.

Beyond marches

Progressive movements have no direct influence over Republicans in Washington. However, they have more potential influence over businesses, lower courts, regulators and state and local politicians.

Of these targets, business ultimately has the most power. Business will usually be able to constrain the administration if its profits are threatened. Trump and Elon Musk may be able to dismantle much of the federal government and ignore court orders, but it’s much harder for them to ignore major economic disruption.

While big marches can raise public consciousness and help activists connect, by themselves they will not block Trump and Musk. For that, the movement will need more disruptive forms of pressure. Building the capacity for that disruption will require sustained organizing in workplaces and communities.The Conversation

Kevin A. Young, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Social movements constrained Trump in his first term – more than people realize”…

Australian elections are never what we expect

personby Gillian Polack
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Three years ago on April 10, I wrote:

Australia’s much-awaited (by us, anyhow) election was called yesterday. This is not just any election. It’s our last opportunity to move away from rabid and corrupt politics.

Our next election is on Saturday and we live in a different country. Three years ago, we were ruled by a queen, and now we’re ruled by a king. For some reason, we are far more prone to jokes under Charles than we were under Elizabeth. Technically, most of the parties are still similar, but this is another pivotal election, and not because of Charles. This was our position three years ago https://treehousewriters.com/wp53/2022/04/10/why-the-aussie-elections-are-so-important-this-year-an-introduction-for-the-unwary

We still have Mr Dutton, currently Leader of the Opposition, who has an apparent and possibly heartfelt desire to be Trump-lite. He replaced Scott Morrison when we decided we didn’t want more Trump-lite three years ago, which makes it a mystery to me why he’s choosing this path right now. Maybe he knows something about Australia that I do not know? I suspect his party would have won the election if he had not made that decision. Why do I think this? Dutton was doing very nicely in the polls until his aim to copy Trump was clear.

Independent of his policies, are his nicknames. I suspect he’s in the running for the most nicknames in history of any senior Australian politician. The one that trumps all (sorry, I could not resist the pun) is “Mr Potato Head.” Australians seldom give nice nicknames. Our current prime minister is nicknamed “Albo” which looks innocuous until you allow for the Australian accent. Our accent means that we call our PM “Elbow.” Intentionally.

Back to the parties. Now, there are other parties (minor ones) who also desire to copy Trump. One has even renamed themselves “Trumpet of Patriots.” No-one speaks kindly of them, but speaking kindly of people is not common in this election. The longest debate I’ve heard about them was which nickname is the best. The one that sticks in my mind (not the most common, just the silliest) is “Strumpet.” In and of itself, this will not affect their votes. Their policies, however, are not compatible with the left, or anyone who votes sort of centralish. Most of us vote sort of centralish, which, in comparison to the US, is slightly left wing. Sometimes quite left wing. This means that the Strumpets are the closest Australia comes to a Trump-like party. They’re not that, though. They’re right wing modified by some current causes. Current causes are a big thing right now.

Back to logic and commonsense. Three years ago I explained that the LNP (which we call the “Coalition,” mostly) were in power and that they were right wing. They are still right wing. They’ve lost a lot of their reputation and are in the middle of a generational change. The vote three years ago caused that, in a way, as did their wipeout in the biggest state in the country. Many of the new candidates for this elections (especially in electorates like my own where not a single LNP person won a seat in either house) are shiny new people about whom we know… not much. (If I were writing this for Aussies, I would use ‘bugger all’ instead of ‘…not much’, but I am aware of US sensibilities about what is everyday English in Australia. Not so aware that I refuse to tease you about it, but aware.)

Labor is now in power, and have the Elbow as leader. Albo is not much loved right now (and neither is Penny Wong, who, three years ago, we all adored), but I suspect Labor still represents more than 50% of Australians. It is a party strongly linked to unions and ought to be quite far left (and once was further left) but now it’s the centrist party. Since I’m in the mood to point things out, the party has US spelling and not Aussie spelling because it was named by a teetotaller US founder. Australia being Australia, we named a pub after him, just as we named a swimming pool after a prime minister who drowned. (I wrote about some of this three years ago. Good historical jokes are worth repeating.) I firmly believe that Australia is everyone’s ratbag cousin who is very charming but gets up to much mischief.

Three years ago I talked about the Greens. This year, I want them at the bottom of everyone’s vote. This won’t happen. They have set up a whole branch of the left (including many people who used to be my friends) and those people exclude Jews and hate Jews and blame Jews and do not listen to Jews and… you can imagine the rest. Me, I live it. They’ve put forward candidates that put the bad stuff happening in the Middle East ahead of what’s happening in Australia. If they get as much power as the latest polls suggest (14% of the vote) then quite a few Australian Jews will either have to hide (many are doing this already) or leave (and some have already left).

The party has always been left wing, but now they’re closer to Communist than to the environmental activists they once were. I am often scolded for saying these things. I answer the scolds with the labels placed in Jewish Australians by their supporters.

Some of the new Left don’t even believe there are Jewish Australians. I had that discussion with someone just yesterday. They now believe I exist, but it took two hours to convince them. We’ve been here since the first long term European settlement in 1788 (one of the First Fleet babies was the first Jewish free settler), so many of us are descendants of colonists. Most of us are descendants of refugees. And every day someone scolds me for personally having colonised Israel and murdered Palestinian children.

The hate is carefully targeted. Most of the rest of Australia has no idea. It’s a bit like domestic violence. “That very good person can’t have caused that black eye. You must’ve walked into a door.” This is being Jewish in Australia right now. It’s why the bottom of both my ballots is already populated by the Green candidates.

There is a new environmental party (Sustainable Australia) which won’t be down the bottom of my ballot. They’re not going to gain power, but if they can increase their influence a bit maybe we can talk about what needs to be done to deal with climate change rather than about the problem of antisemitism. The antisemitism isn’t just the Greens, you see. ASIO (our CIA equivalent) gave its annual assessment publicly this year. They said that antisemitism is Australia’s #1 security threat. Media ignored it. The Greens ignored it. All the other major parties factored it into their policies, but are talking about housing and jobs and the like because we have a housing crisis. I am still dealing with the notion that the new Australia can’t keep more than two ideas in its head at once.

Everyone else belongs to small parties or independents. Lots of those already in Parliament or the Senate are being challenged. Some will get second terms, others will not.

David Pocock is one of the bellwethers. He was voted to replace Zed, who was right wing (LNP) and wildly unpopular as a person. Pocock won partly because he used to be a very famous sportsperson and partly because so many preference votes flowed to him. He was the third in primary votes, and won on preferences. (This is a very Australian thing, and I can explain the voting system again to anyone who has forgotten or would like to be able to follow our vote on Saturday night.) The thing is… he voted leftish for most of his time in the Senate. Frequently, he voted alongside the Greens. He replaced a right wing party in that Senate place. What will that do to his preferences next Saturday?

How many independents and small parties will get through in a strange election where the main left wing party expresses bigotry? It depends on how far we veer left as a country. It depends on how loyal we are to individuals in both Houses. It depends on how personal everything is, in a year when I’m hearing so many people talk about their vote as personal.

I see two big options. One is that a lot of these independents lose their seats. This would return control (in the Senate in particular) to the party with the most seats in the Senate. The other option is that Australians vote a lot of these people into Parliament and the Senate and make everything very, very complex. I’m hoping that this is unlikely, given that many of the independents or small party representatives care only about one issue or are cults of personality, or are “We are not Greens – we just vote with them” people.

We don’t know how many independents or representatives of small parties will get through. The nature of advance polls is to focus on the major parties, so we really do not know how much support these legions of political individuals have in any given region.

Part of this rests on the nature of preferential voting. In the electorate of Blaxland, for instance, which has possibly the highest number of Muslim voters in the country, will the Labor candidate be returned to power, or will Omar Sakr (the Greens candidate) be voted in, or will an independent specifically representing Muslims (the one suggested by the Muslim Vote) get in? The Muslim Vote focuses on Muslim voters and assumes that their main political desire is not about housing or education, but about creating a Palestinian state. I chatted with a friend today, who is also Muslim, but from Indonesia, and she had no idea that this group even existed. The public talk about Muslim votes assume that most Muslims who vote are either Palestinian or support Gazans. And yet… we have many Muslim Australians from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Malaysia and various African countries. I do not know if there is a voting pattern for all these people from all these backgrounds. Some are fully integrated into Australian society, some maintain boundaries and stay largely within their own communities.

My guide to the elections three years ago was a lot simpler. Right now, it feels as if life was a lot simpler three years ago.

PS Just in case you want to know what advice Jewish voters have been given, it’s “Make up your own minds, you’re adults.” We have, however, been given a guide to making up our own minds. 2025 federal election – ECAJ

Time to Change the Stories

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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Cory Doctorow, writing about the idiocy of homo economicus, points out (not for the first time) that corporations are the real AI.

It’s a reasonable metaphor. Corporations, after all, are “persons” – at least legally – and they do have a mindset and way of doing things that is unique to them. People who work for corporations do things in a certain way because it is the corporation’s way, not because they think it’s a good thing to do.

And those who are trying to convince us that so-called AI is the next big thing are continually hinting that if it’s not quite a person yet, it’s going to be.

The problem, I think, is not with corporations per se – there are reasons to form an organization when you need a large group of people to produce something – but rather with our idea that corporations must sacrifice ethical principles in favor of almighty profit.

We could do corporations differently, just as we could develop and use technology differently. The problem is the myths that surround them, stories someone made up that we’re now stuck with.

Those myths and bad models aren’t just limited to corporations or to tech. Here are a few that come to mind:

  • Homo economicus, the myth that individuals always make the rational decision for their own self interest.
  • Survival of the fittest, especially as applied in a cultural context.
  • The myths around gender and sex that assume – in ways small and large – that men are superior and that there’s a distinct binary difference between men and women.
  • The particularly egregious myth of the “tragedy of the commons,” which was invented by a right-wing extremist and which, though it has been thoroughly disproven, is still cited constantly.
  • The belief that AI can think and that it is life-changing tech that can change our lives instead of an improvement in certain digital capabilities useful for a few things.
  • The multiple myths around corporations, including such things as fiduciary duty.
  • American exceptionalism, a myth that is so strong that even those of us who have strong criticisms of our country tend to buy into it.

Which is to say, bad stories. The bad stories that underlie all our cultures are a big part of the problem. Continue reading “Time to Change the Stories”…

No Going Back to Normal

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’m reading a collection of essays called The New Possible in which the authors discuss their visions of what the future should look like and how we can get there. It was published at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, and the first piece, by Jeremy Lent, talks about the kind of balanced civilization we need to develop.

Early in the piece, he asks:

Does it seem like, as soon as one crisis passes, another one rears its head before you can even settle back to some semblance of normal?

And then, discussing not just Covid but the Black Lives Matter protests from 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, he points out:

Ultimately, there is no going back to normal because normal no longer exists.

It’s an argument based on the deep flaws in neoliberalism. I don’t disagree with either his thesis or his goals, but I think I’d put the bit about normal differently:

We shouldn’t go back to normal because normal sucked.

Now these days, what with the Stupid Coup (a term Rebecca Solnit came up with that fits my perception of things), many of us, including me, would take the old normal. After all, they’re destroying parts of the government that worked well – like the Weather Service and NOAA – and making those that needed some changes, such as the understaffed Social Security offices and Veteran’s care, worse.

That’s not the mention the blatant racism of the “anti DEI” campaign, one that wants to eliminate Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from our history. (It was disgusting that the baseball team that brought Robinson into the majors went to the White House despite the grifter’s efforts to erase him.)

All the flaws that exist in what passed for normal are still there and being made worse – bombing and union busting and mistreatment of immigrants – while people who shouldn’t be in charge are destroying the good stuff.

A couple of months of this and most of us – me included – would really love a return to normal. Except, like I said, normal sucked. Continue reading “No Going Back to Normal”…

In Praise of Inefficiency

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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At the beginning of Jennifer Raff’s book Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas she discusses a 1996 paleontology project in a cave on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska where the scientists, while looking at animal bones, found human remains.

They immediately stopped work and consulted with people from the Tlingit and Haida tribes who live in the region. After some discussions, it was agreed that the scientists could continue, but that if they found it was a sacred burial site, they would stop. And they were also required to share their findings with the tribes before they were published.

In this case, it was not a burial site and the eventual outcome of the work showed that the bones of the person they found were related to the people living there and that they went back more than 10,000 years.

But what got me were not just the results, but the fact that the paleontologists stopped and consulted with the people native to the region. That does not fit into the modern focus on being “efficient.”

Meeting with people takes time, especially when the way the paleontologists look at the world and the way indigenous cultures look at the world are often at cross purposes. It’s easy to take the position that scientific inquiry should always come first.

But they didn’t, and the end result was useful to everyone. It just took extra time. And it treated people who were affected by the work with respect.

That brings me to how democracy should work. The people who are affected by decisions need an opportunity to discuss the matter and actually be heard. This is slow. It’s not efficient. But it’s vital to making a government that people can believe in.

I’m generally an advocate for inefficiency. It’s how I get my exercise these days. I walk a lot, and I’m more likely to get out and walk if I have an errand to run. So I try to run my errands in opposite directions, even if I could combine them in one, and I stretch them out over a couple of days when I could do them all at once.

It’s a purposeful inefficiency. It’s not careless or sloppy. And that’s the kind we need in running democratic institutions.

Now we have a lot of council meetings with public comment periods – though they are often structured with a lot of annoying rules that you only understand if you spend a lot of time going to council meetings. And much of that has become pro forma: you have comment period and then the council does what they were going to do anyway.

You often don’t get the impression that anyone is listening.

So what if, say, you were going to fund housing for homeless people and you actually spent a great deal of time talking with the homeless people in the area about what they needed and what they wanted. I’m pretty sure the project would end up looking quite a bit different.

It also probably wouldn’t add as much to the coffers of the local developers who make their living getting city contracts to building housing for low income people who are never consulted about what kind of housing they need and want.

It’s not efficient. But over time, done right, it might actually put a real dent in the problem of too many people who can’t afford a place to live. Continue reading “In Praise of Inefficiency”…

Showing Up

personby Madeleine Robins
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A hand-lettered protest sign upside down, propped against a green plaid couch.Like five million of my fellow Americans, I spent Saturday, April 5, outdoors in the company of a few thousand neighbors, protesting the policies and behavior of the Executive branch, and the lackluster resistance by the Legislative branch. Here in San Francisco we were lucky: the sun was bright, the skies were blue, it was comfortably warm, and the minimal police presence appeared to be there to manage traffic. There were speakers at the rally I was at (albeit with a very underpowered sound system that made the speeches hard to hear) covering the gamut of areas of concern, from illegal deportation to attacks on civil rights, to tariffs, to the defunding of damned near everything I care about (National Parks, education, medical research, museums, etc.).  We waved our signs, chanted some chants, generally let the world know that we are angry–enraged–about the actions the current president and his minions have been taking since January 20. Then, as the rally wound down I wandered over to public transit and rode home in company with some of the folk who had been at the rally too (as evidenced by the signs and sunburn I saw around me). However angry we in the aggregate might be, the folks at the SF rally were polite and entirely non-violent; there were kids in strollers, elders in walkers, folks in wheelchairs, just… everyone.

My own personal bubble is filled with people who are concerned about the way things are going and how much worse it could get, so I was startled to encounter people in San Francisco who didn’t know that the rallies were happening. Not that they disapproved, they weren’t aware (when I stopped to get a coffee, the barista saw the sign I carried, asked what was going on. When I told her, she moved my coffee order up to the front “so you won’t be late”). I know there are  people in my neighborhood–yes, even in San Francisco–who think the actions of the current administration are just dandy (although I do wonder how they’re feeling given the state of the stock market right now). I think it’s important for me to remember that there are a lot of different ways to feel about right now. I don’t know how the small conservative cohort of my neighborhood feels about the rallies–one guy I ran into rolled his eyes at my sign, but said “at least you got a nice day for it.”

So what was the point?

Showing up. Being there among others who are as frightened and angry as I am. Part of the tactics being used to dismantle the government and disrupt social norms is to persuade us that we’re each in it alone, that we have no power, that we have no voice. But I felt good about showing up. I felt good that there were others–thousands of others in my city, and millions across the country–who also showed up.

Showing up doesn’t fix things, any more than Senator Cory Booker’s magnificent 25 hour filibuster on the Senate floor fixed things. Not everything one does creates a fix. But showing up creates solidarity, underscores the problems being protested, energizes the people there with an energy that can spill outward and onward. It can show the people with power who are wavering about taking action that there is pressure to act rightly. And it can get people off the bench: a lot of the speakers at the rally I was at encouraged people to do the things that create solutions: volunteer, run for office, make phone calls, rattle cages; there were places to sign up to do all of those things, and those tables were busy.

I know people in other states whose weather was not as fine as ours in San Francisco. They stood out in the cold and the rain, bundled up and with umbrellas and rainbows, and they showed up. I stand in solidarity with all of them.

A Week in the Life…

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m in the final throes of the thesis-writing. In five weeks, my thesis will be submitted for examination. This means the complete thing needs to be done by this Friday. Sounds fine? Except… this Saturday is Passover. Some friends helped me with some of the shopping and I’ve ordered everything else for delivery plus the fresh stuff at the market), but I need to have the flat clean (since I will be hosting) and the kitchen made as proper as I can. I come from a family that had special dishes for the festival, but my health makes a whole bunch of things not possible and complete kashruth is one of them. I do a best-I-can version, which is not at all suitable for anyone religious.

I do some thesis, do some Passover prep, meet another deadline, deal with the latest panic (my mouse died over the weekend, for instance and my printer is currently sulking), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, do some of my exercises, wonder if I’ll get any sleep, worry about my mother (who has COVID, as do two of my close friends), do some thesis, do a little work on my tax, and so on until I can sleep. It will all be sorted by Sunday, and then I will quite possibly not wake up for 36 hours.

Tomorrow I have coffee with a neighbour. Normally I would ask to not do anything extra this week, because I’m already doing 18 hour days, but he’s very seriously ill and can be quite difficult even when he’s well and I cannot leave it long. So… tomorrow.

I will have to send someone a note about a Wednesday meeting. It’s with a local candidate. We have elections on 3 May, you see. I really need to talk to him and I’ve tried and tried and failed and failed and finally he comes to the Jewish Community Centre and it’s the Wednesday before my thesis has to be sent and before Passover. His timing is so bad.

He should have asked to see us last week, or left it until the week before the election. The timing suggests that he really doesn’t see antisemitism (or us, as the local Jewish community) as a high priority. Also, his office gave me the run around when I offered to talk to someone about why things are the way they are at the moment – and this is part of my academic expertise and I can be really useful… The staff of two politicians have given me the run around. I so miss my previous self, who was asked about things! Anyhow, I’ve decided not to offer my knowledge and understanding to politicians any more. I’d rather meet my deadlines and enjoy cooking for Passover.

Other people are asking me about things, which is a bit of a relief. My big insight for today is that it’s actually very easy to identify who is marching for hate and who is marching with hope that they can improve the wrongs of the world. It’s not what side people take (the good side of history that so many people claim right now… not actually how most of the world operates).

The way people march tells us so much. Look at the body language and listen to the slogans. Do the slogans provide methods to effect change, or are they declamations that lead nowhere. Does the group prevent others from passing, or block access to anywhere? How angry are the people, and what reasons do the slogans give for any anger? Do marchers stop and talk and listen, or do they simply shout, or do they accuse strangers of… almost anything. Telling strangers who the strangers are and shouting in their face is the issue here: actual change agents talk and listen, because change happens when people can see they’re a potential part of solutions. Those marches that breathe fire and brimstone and don’t take a moment to stop being angry, those marches where (as happened this week) a group surround a single stranger and bullies them – they’re the marching equivalent of Nazis in the 1930s. This doesn’t mean their cause is terrible: it means that these particular people are bullies.

Look at how people march and what specific goals they aim to achieve with the march, and whether not even a small part of those marching bully anyone watching or anyone trying to get past and you get a good notion of whether they really care about others… or whether they are informed by hate. If you don’t want to carry that hate with you, you need a way of winding down.

My way is often thinking about food. I have learned a whole new bread-making method in the last few weeks, entirely to handle the antisemitic hate I encounter. This week is not about that bread, however: now that I’ve sorted out how I will obtain all the things for cooking, I have most of a menu for Saturday night.

We begin, of course, with the ritual things. I have horseradish (it cost an arm and a leg, but I have some – it’s simply not in season in autumn) and matzah. I will serve the matzah with charoseth. My father’s charoseth recipe is wonderful: apples and almonds and sweet wine made from Concord grapes and enormous amounts of cinnamon.

After the charoseth, there will be the traditional eggs and potatoes, to be dipped in salt water. I have organic free range hen’s eggs from my local egg farmer ($25 for 60 large eggs, for those tracking the prices of eggs), and also a little packet of quail eggs. There will be no chopped liver – I have the ingredients (the liver is in the freezer) but intend to eat it on Friday week.

After that, of course, chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah dumplings) both of which I make according to old family recipes. The main course is roast chicken (with lemon and garlic) and vegetables. The roasted vegetables will be potato and lotus root. I haven’t decided all the side dishes yet, but there are two types of pickled cucumber, and the same kind of ancient olives that grew near Jerusalem around the time the Temple fell. There is a story behind why these olives grow in Australia, and that story has family connections.

I was going to make cakes (an orange-almond one and a choc-nut one) for dessert, but I think we’re skipping dessert and going straight to afters. The Passover meal I grew up with is far, far too large for modern Australia. A friend found me chocolate macaroons and I have dark chocolate, and the best organic dried muscatels from a local farm. I will have fresh figs with this, and maybe some other autumn fruit. I may make one of the cakes during the week… or I may not.

Tomorrow, to give me time away from my computer on such a busy day, I shall make bagels. That’s the last of the flour and yeast. Tomorrow lunch is the last of the rice and the last of the nori. Step by step I sort my world, and then I cook the big dinner on Saturday.

II live such a simple, slow life.

Real Problems and the Stupid Coup

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I finished reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World this week. It is a brilliant explanation of the myriad of senses of the animals on this planet. He has talked to so many great scientists doing deep work, and made what they’re doing clear to the rest of us.

But it left me with — once again — the understanding that we have real problems to address on this planet and instead we’re forced to deal with what Rebecca Solnit has taken to calling the “Stupid Coup,” a name that becomes more apt with each day.

In the last pages of the book, Yong talks about the problems posed by light pollution — which affects the senses of many insects, birds, and bats, not to mention human beings. But he also mentions such things as ships crossing the ocean affecting whales, the damage to the Great Coral Reef, and how such things create a cascade of damage.

About ten years ago, my partner and I backpacked in the Ventana Wilderness, in the northern part of the Los Padres National Forest here in California. I tell many stories about that trip — how we waded the Carmel River 25 times (not an exaggeration), how bad the trail was in spots — but one of the real glories of it was that, with the exception of a airplane or two overhead, we didn’t hear any human noises for three days except the ones we made.

And we could see the stars (through the trees and clouds, at least) because we were surrounded by enough mountains and trees to block light from the nearby cities. One of those nights — the one where we collapsed into our sleeping bags, completely exhausted — we heard frogs and crickets for hours. Nothing else.

Do you know how rare that is?

I doubt that humans, who have only been living in this overlit and noisy state for about a hundred years – somewhat longer for noise – have adapted, even though we know what’s going on. You can be damn sure that the other creatures on the planet have not.

Fortunately, a whole lot of scientists have ideas on what to do about that for the benefit of both people and all the other creatures.

Unfortunately, what they recommend will not even get discussed these days because of the Stupid Coup. People who aren’t willing to consider the effects of air pollution on human beings (“drill, baby, drill”) are certainly not going to worry about light pollution reducing the insect population. Continue reading “Real Problems and the Stupid Coup”…

In Troubled Times: Still Here, Still Holding on to Hope

personby Deborah J. Ross
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I first posted this in August, 2019. I’m still here, still holding on to hope. We aren’t all crazy or hopeless or overwhelmed on the same day. When events are too much, we can borrow a bit of courage from one another.

Following the 2016 election, I posted a series of essays called “In Troubled Times.” I wrote about despair, fear, anger, powerlessness, and determination. Then the initial fervor faded. Exhaustion set in for me as well as for so many others. Emotional exhaustion. Spiritual exhaustion. But the constant, increasingly vitriolic litany of hate and fear, as well as the assaults on democratic norms and civil liberties not only continued, it escalated.

What is to be done in the face of such viciousness, such disregard for human rights and dignity? Such an assault upon clean and air water, endangered species, and the climate of planet we depend on for our lives? How do we preserve what we value, so that in resisting we do not become the enemy?

I don’t know what the most effective strategy of resistance is. Social media abounds in calls to action. I do know that there are many possible paths forward and that not every one way is right for every person. Not everyone can organize a protest march (think of five million protesters in front of the White House; think of a national strike that brings the nation’s businesses to a halt). I find myself remembering activist times in my own past.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam war resistance (and, later, the women’s rights movement of the 1970s). I wore my hair long, donned love beads, and marched in a gazillion rallies. Those memories frequently rise to my mind now. In particular, I remember how frustrated I got about ending the Viet Nam war. In 1967, I joined the crowd of 100,000 protesters in San Francisco. I wrote letters, painted posters, and so forth. And for a time, it seemed nothing we did made any difference. My friends still got drafted and not all of them made it home, and those that did were wounded in ways I couldn’t understand. Others ended up as Canadians. I gave up hope that the senseless carnage would ever end.

But it did. And in retrospect, all that marching and chanting and singing and letter-writing turned out to be important. The enduring lesson for me is that I must do what I feel called to do at the moment, over and over again, different things at different times, never attempt to second-guess history, and especially never give in to despair. Enough tiny pebbles rolling down a slope create a landslide.

My first political memories date back to the 1950s, when I saw my union-organizer father marching in a picket line. The 1950s were a terrifying time for a lot of folks. For my family, it was because my parents were active in their respective unions, and both had been members of “the Party” in the 1930s. My father was fired from his job on a pretext and soon became the target of a formal Federal investigation. (He’d been under FBI surveillance since 1947.) The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to take away his naturalized citizenship. It was a time of incredible fear: people committed suicide or “went underground” (now we call it “off the grid”) by living in safe houses and using only cash. Some of our relatives did that, and our home became one of those havens. The DoJ suit was dismissed in 1961, although the FBI continued secretly watching my father until his death in 1974. I should add that it is so odd to me to regard that bureau as protecting democracy in current times, after their 1984-like behavior in the 1950s and beyond.

The point of all this is not that my family had a hard time. Lots of families had a hard time. Lots more are having an unbelievably hard, terrifying, horrific time today. The point is that we got through it. Not unscarred — it’s still excruciatingly difficult for me to call attention to myself by political activism. My parents never stopped working for a better, more just and loving world. They never lost hope.

In college I used to have a hand-written quote from the mid-60s by Carl Oglesby (I think) on my door. I searched for it on the internet and couldn’t find it, but it said something along the lines of this not being a time to give in to fear but to drink lots of orange juice, to love one another, and to bring all our joy and gusto to creating a world of peace, justice, and equality. The same holds true today. Since we live in a time when fear, selfishness, racism, and violence are proclaimed from the very highest levels of government, then we need our own turbo-charged, heavy-duty, loud and joyous commitment to the values we hold. And drinking your orange juice isn’t a bad thing either: we of the people’s resistance need to take good care of ourselves.

This is what I tell young people today. I remember what my parents told me when I was wigging out about some minor incident or another during the Cold War:

Keep your eye on what you would like to bring about, not just what new outrage is filling the news. Persevere with unstoppable steadfastness. Nourish yourself as an antidote to exhaustion. Pace your efforts. Keep balance in your life. Make music. Dance. Drink orange juice. Love fiercely.