Miniver Cheevy

An analogy

2026-09-03T14:22:59.977-07:00

Imagine this:

Ted

A few years ago, Ted became a vocal “anti-feminist”.

He is intense about it. He talks about it a lot. He put “anti-feminist” in his social media bio.

He is not a passionately misogynistic MRA. He is culturally & politically on the left, less misogynistic than most men, genuinely concerned with social justice. He was radicalized by seeing feminists who advocate persecution of trans women in the UK.

He shares a lot of misogynistic “anti-feminist” talking points, some of them originating from transparently hateful bigots.

Most “anti-feminist” critiques he shares address real persecution of trans women in the UK. Often the things he shares point to TERFs at their worst … but even when they do not connect to feminism or feminists at all, he shares them as “anti-feminist”.

Many criticisms of feminism he shares offer real facts in a wildly misleading frame. He loves talking about how W.I.T.C.H. claimed to speak for all women, evoked a lineage from a false history of witchcraft, and embraced “terrorism” in the name of their organization. He has a long catalogue of real wrongs feminists have committed, which he insists demonstrate what feminism Really Is.

Most of the criticisms he shares are almost comically wrongheaded about how feminism works. He claims feminism is a religious cult, pointing to suffragettes’ entanglement with the temperance movement, pointing to alliances with the Christian right over porn, sex work, and transphobia. He claims feminism is inherently violent, drawing a continuity from “terrorism” by First Wave suffragettes through attacks on trans women today. He claims that feminists admit to their bigotry and thirst for violent genocide by pointing to figures like Lierre Keith, Valarie Solanis, and Janice Raymond … and sharing misleading out-of-context quotes from figures like Margaret Sanger and Andrea Dworkin. He claims that feminism is not an authentic social justice movement because it stands for “cis female supremacy”, because it depends on a strange & novel conception of “women”, because it only began in the late 19^th century.

He is only interested in transphobia by feminists. He recognizes transphobia by other groups, but dismisses those as distractions from confronting the central problem of feminism.

Ted is smugly confident that he understands feminism deeply. He insists feminism is transphobic by definition, repeating slogans like “feminism is bigotry” and “feminism is genocide”.

He takes accounts of feminism that differ from his as just deceitful apologetics for feminist transphobia either created by lying propagandists or repeated by dangerously, irresponsibly self-deluding feminists.

Jane

Jane is a cis woman who cares deeply about trans liberation. She knows Ted shares her basic values, but his confusion about feminism troubles her.

She counts herself neither as a feminist nor as an expert on feminism, but she knows more than most. Since she respects many feminists she knows, she tries to clarify Ted’s confusions.

Neither her alliance with his commitment to trans liberation nor her lack of an alliance with feminism gives her credibility in his eyes.

When she tries to explain to him how he misunderstands feminism, he insists that “repeating deceitful feminist propaganda” makes her a defender of transphobic genocide.

When she assures him that she respects criticisms which understand feminism — women of color objecting to racism in the movement, the “abolish gender” school of queer theory, et cetera — he insists that this is chaff obscuring her defense of feminist transphobia.

When she tells him that the history of feminism, trans liberation, and the relation between them is far more complicated than the version he tells, he objects that referring to “complexity” is a rationalization of transphobia, since transphobes constantly fault slogans like “trans women are women” as simplistic lies.

When she tries to explain to him how his commentaries land with women, feminist and otherwise — especially when he calls feminists “morally equivalent to rapists” — he insists that protecting trans people is far more important than their feelings.

When she points to trans women who are feminists, and points to feminists who have fought hard for trans liberation, he dismisses them as cherry-picked weirdos in denial about the truth of feminism.

When she points to the things feminism has accomplished, and to the women who are feminists for those reasons, he objects that women should have found another way, that they easily could have … but he cannot name what that alternative would have been. He insists that all feminists ultimately support cruelty to trans people. He rejects the significance of the wrongs feminism addresses because feminism recruits those to “demand a pass” for cruelty.

When she tells him that she understands that he is not a misogynistic bigot but she is worried about him making moves which enable misogyny, he objects that he does not have a misogynistic bone in his body, that many women are anti-feminists, that feminism deliberately encourages more misogyny to justify itself. When she walks through particular things he says, he says that she is making a dishonest feminist move, weaponizing accusations of misogyny to deflect criticism.

When she tells him that he could stand for trans liberation directly, without framing it as “anti-feminism”, he says he is following the lead of trans women who name feminists as the primary agents of their oppression.

When she tells him that he needs to tread carefully because misogynistic bigots, theocratic reactionaries, and fascists often style themselves as “anti-feminists”, he insists that he has never seen that.

Ted is just one among many “anti-feminists” like him Jane encounters. Every time she engages with trans liberation or feminism at all — and often when she just talks about women in any way — guys like Ted come out of the woodwork to insist that she supports the genocide of trans people.

She remains committed to trans liberation, but these constant slaps in the face make it hard for her engage with the movement as vigorously as she wants.

The point

# israel-palestine

This post is about ‘anti-Zionism’.

The analogy is imperfect in many ways. Zionism is the core ideology of a nation-state; feminism has nothing like that institutional power. There are forms of anti-Zionism which make a much stronger case than any form of anti-feminism. Trans liberation presents no threat to anyone; Palestinian liberation advocacy ranges from profoundly egalitarian to dangerously violent. I have a lot more sympathy for confused anti-Zionists than I would have for Ted, since Israel-Palestine is genuinely confusing. Et cetera.

And:

Most “anti-Zionists” I encounter do not understand what Zionism is and offer commentaries on it paralleling Ted’s absurd misunderstandings. They are dismissive of critique, even from people who share their commitment to Palestinian liberation. Most of these people are obviously not motivated by antisemitic bigotry but their “anti-Zionism” does antisemitism.

Bad on the merits. Bad for the cause.

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so:
I keep an index of resources
the moral question is simple:
Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
the history is complicated:
I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
the praxis is complicated:
antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

A “Jewish state”?

2026-08-19T17:48:49.572-07:00

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so first:
I keep an index of resources
the moral question is simple:
Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
the history is complicated:
I have a survey which addresses many common misunderstandings
the praxis is complicated:
antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable

In this long moment of crisis, as Israel commits genocide in Gaza, I am not invested in defending Zionism. But I do see a need to counter how many people misunderstand every wrong committed in the name of Zionism as an inevitable consequence of aims baked into Zionism at its core. That misunderstanding often rests on over-reading what Zionists mean by a “Jewish state” to cast Zionism as an inherently racist, unjust, and therefore illegitimate form of nationalism.

To pursue Palestinian liberation effectively, without slipping into implicit antisemitism, we must understand what Zionism is and is not.

A state?
Theocracy?
Genocide?
Apartheid?
Minimum viable Zionism
Ordinary Westphalian nationalism
The point

Defining Zionism

There are many strains of Zionism. Individual Zionists vary in their thinking about what Zionism should entail. To define Zionism, we must name what all Zionists agree that Zionism means.

After the founding of Israel in 1947, Zionism means support for the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state in some form.

Thus much rests on what Zionists intend as a “Jewish state”; I like to refer to the vision shared among all Zionists as “minimum viable Zionism”.

Before describing that, let us first dispell important misconceptions.

A state?

Many assume that Zionism has always pursued a Westphalian nation-state: a soveriegn, geographically-bounded polity among the 200+ nation-states which we have divided the world into.

An understandable confusion. We have come to take the Westphalian order as normal. Zionists did found the state of Israel. Zionists now support Israel’s continued existence.

But it is an astonishing turn of historical contingency that Zionism eventually produced the state of Israel. At the founding of modern Zionism in response to the emerging Westphalian order the 1897 First Zionist Congress released the Basel Program manifesto, which offers a different definition:

Zionism seeks to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law

At that time, Palestine was not a state, nor was it a country in the pre-Westphalian sense; “Palestine” named a region within the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was a very different entity from a Westphalian nation-state.

The “home” pursued by the Basel Program was not a euphemism for a nation-state. An oppressed ethnic minority carving out a soveriegn nation-state independent the Empire was wildly implausible. Many early Zionists saw a nation-state as not just unachievable but undesirable.

Early Zionists thus imagined an creating an ethnic enclave within the Empire, roughly analagous to the Pennsylvania Dutch, as we can see with the rest of the Basel Program (emphasis mine):

To achieve this goal, the Congress envisages the following means:
The expedient promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.
The organization and bringing together of all Jews through local and general events, according to the laws of the various countries.
The strengthening of Jewish feeling and national consciousness.
Preparatory steps for obtaining the governmental approval which is necessary to the achievement of the Zionist purpose.

This early history does not matter much in understanding contemporary Zionism; the existence of the state of Israel reframed Zionism to mean supporting the state’s existence. But it matters a great deal in countering the misunderstanding that Zionism has contemporary Israel as its foundational vision.

Theocracy?

Many assume that Zionism means theocracy. An understandable confusion: Judaism is a religion.

But Jews can also be understood as an ethnic people, like Turks or Arabs or Aleuts or Kurds or countless other peoples. Many Jews do not practice the religion but do understand themselves as members of the Jewish ethnic community; I am one among them.

While Zionists often embrace Jewish religious poetics, Zionism has always very explicitly framed itself as a secular movement which addresses all Jews as a single ethnic people. Israel neither obeys nor exerts religious authority. Israeli society includes many with vigorous religious practice, including a few who do want a turn toward a theocratic Israel, but there are far more Israeli Jews who are not very observant, even not observant at all.

Zionism opposes theocracy.

Genocide?

Many assume that Zionism aspires to a society of only Jews, requiring a genocidal purge of gentiles.

Another understandable confusion. As I write this, Israel is deep into a genocidal effort to annex Gaza which has already killed over 80,000 people. Before the founding of Israel, Zionist militias killed and displaced many Arab Palestinians, which escalated in the 1948 Nakba to killing over 10,000 Palestinians and driving 80% of the Arab population of the newly-formed state of Israel from their homes. The West Bank is still subject to de facto occupation, seizing increasing amounts of territory for Jewish settlers. There have always been hardliner Zionists who do want a nation composed only of Jews through what is euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing”.

It does not excuse these horrors to say they do not define Zionism.

When Israel was founded, the Arab Palestinians who remained became citizens of the new state. Today, one in four citizens of Israel is a gentile, most of them Arab Palestinians. There have always been many Zionists who have vigorously opposed the murder and disenfranchisement of Palestinians. Israel has not only expanded the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank; at times they have rolled back settlements and other claims.

We must recognize how Zionists have done genocide. But Zionism does not mean genocide.

Apartheid?

Many assume that Zionism requires an apartheid state in which gentiles are denied equal legal rights & protections.

This is the most defensible confusion. Israel is now and always has been an apartheid state. Israel hardliners deny this by pointing to the big population of gentiles holding Israeli citizenship, but that is disingenous; gentiles have always been second-class citizens in countless ways, both in explicit legal inequities and in many more rights which are only equal on paper. Palestinians in Gaza & the West Bank are not Israeli citizens and have been even more disenfranchised under the shadow of Israeli guns.

It does not excuse these and other real horrors to say that apartheid does not define Zionism. In the time of Zionist enclaves within the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, apartheid was not even conceivable. Since the founding of Israel, liberal Zionists have always fought hard for equality for gentiles; hardliners have always held the upper hand, but they do not deny that the liberals are Zionists.

We must recognize that Zionists have done apartheid. But Zionism does not mean apartheid.

Minimum viable Zionism (MVZ)

If a “Jewish state” of Israel does not require theocracy, genocide, or apartheid, what does define it?

The core vision which all Zionists agree on includes:

The continued existence of the Westphalian nation-state of Israel …
governed as a secular liberal democracy
where Jewish culture is ordinary (rather than exceptional as it is everywhere else)
inviting Jews from all backgrounds to become new citizens

Point 1 merits skepticism. Actual Israel — and all too many Actual Zionists — betray it. One cannot claim to have a “liberal democracy” while maintaining a de facto apartheid society. Too many Zionists square that circle by denying the injustices of Israel’s history & present, and by pursuing ugly measures to ensure a perpetual Jewish demographic majority in Israel.

But those disingenous Zionists would not work so hard at the lie that Israel is a true liberal democracy if Zionism were not defined by the ideal that Israel should be a liberal democracy. (They parallel bigots in the US denying how we fall short of our own creed of equality.) Hardliners consider liberal Zionists wrong and dangerously naïve, but do not deny that they are Zionists because Zionism does not refuse equality for gentiles.

Point 2 articulates what Zionism means by a “Jewish state”. All states have some shared culture without any authoritarian imposition by the government. Shinto shrines abound in Japan. Spain all but shuts down during seista time. Sugared avocado smoothies are readily available in Brazil. Such cultural norms are not authoritarian impositions on people who do not share those inclinations.

Readily available kosher food and workplaces closed for Yom Kippur do not constitute unjust inequalities.

Point 3 reflects the purpose inscribed in the Zionist project, a Jewish state as a haven for Jews around the world fleeing oppression and worse. All states choose whom they allow to easily claim citizenship. Many states make it much easier to become a citizen if one has ancestors from that country. Such rules can be a bit weird: Liechtenstein has a path to citizenship through winning a public municipal vote, and many countries open the door to people with particular skills.

That invitation is compatible with the obligation many people (including me) see to also offer citizenship to the descendents of Arab Palestinians displaced in the Nakba.

Israel’s invitation is no more peculiar or unjust than any nation’s immigration policy.

Yes, Israel as it exists now exercises what we might call “Jewish supremacism”, and there are strains of Zionism which want even worse. But that is not inherent in Zionism, as many Zionists stand against it.

The modest ethnic preferences of MVZ are compatible with respecting a truly sovereign Gaza & West Bank, with a gentile majority in Israel, with return & reparations for Palestinians displaced by the Nakba, with true equality for everyone in Israel. MVZ is compatible with a more egalitarian society than any realworld nation today.

An ordinary Westphalian nationalism

Anti-Zionists often fault Zionism as distinct from most other founding national principles in seeking an “ethnostate”, evoking an image of something comparable to a Klansman’s dreams of white nationalism. But MVZ is nothing like that.

Ideas like “the Spanish people” were invented to justify the Westphalian order, claiming that countries have sovereignty over their citizens and territory because the citizenry constitue A People with that territory as their homeland. Casting “Spain” as the nation-state of the “Spanish people” — asserting a primacy of that over Catalans and a distinction from “the Portuguese people” — asserts a relationship between ethnicity and nation. There is no bright line between those kinds of national foundations and minimum viable Zionism.

Early Zionists were fearful of the implications of the Westphalian world animated by these logics which was emerging in the late 19^th century. As a diaspora ethnic minority with a long history of suffering genocidal pogroms, they predicted that if Jews did not find a chair before the music stopped — a homeland — we would end up disenfranchised forever … at best. The events of the early 20^th century proved that Westphalian myths of unified national peoples were a terrible threat to diaspora ethnic minorities. Not only did that Westphalian sensibility animate the Nazi genocide of Jews (and another diaspora ethnic group, the Roma, as well as many others) that sensibility led other countries to close their doors to refugees from that genocide. Zionists rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from being murdered together with half the world’s Jewish population while other movements failed to save Jewish lives.

In that context, I cannot fault Zionism as a hopelessly poisoned nationalist project. The vision of a Jewish state I call “minimum viable Zionism” is no less legitimate than that of any other state … or of any other ethnic nationalist project like, say, Catalan independence.

The point

I do not count myself a Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a more just alternative to Israel. But the history which produced Zionism and then the state of Israel helps animate the respect I have for many Zionists. I respect Israelis whose Zionism consists simply of loving the only home they have ever known. I respect Zionists who defend the Zionist project as having rescued hundreds of thousands of Jews from genocide in Eastern Europe by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and other countries while all other movements failed. I deeply respect liberal Zionists who have fought hard for a truly egalitarian Israel.

Nor do I count myself an anti-Zionist. The past does not preclude the potential for a truly just Israel. But the history of Israel — the horrors of the Nakba, the occupation of Gaza & the West Bank, the oppression of Arab citizens of Israel, the current genocide in Gaza — helps animate the respect I have for many anti-Zionists. I respect those whose anti-Zionism is just an extension of their opposition to the entire Westphalian order. (If they have a compelling alternative to offer, I am interested.) I respect Palestinians who use “anti-Zionism” to mean nothing more than resistence to the injustices they have suffered under the flag of the state of Israel; I wish they would frame their position as “Palestinian liberation” instead, but it is best to honor how they describe themselves.

I wrote this post because I do not respect anti-Zionism which misrepresents the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” as a distinctly illegitimate form of nationalism. There are many reasonable objections one may make to Zionism as an ideology and a movement, but misrepresenting what a “Jewish state” means to cast Zionism as an inherently unjust foundation for a nation is ultimately antisemitic.

Opting out

2026-08-10T17:48:24.989-07:00

Henry Fudge’s essay Degeneracy Is A Symptom is bleak and clarifying.

Consider what it means to be a young adult in a developed economy, and consider it across the same three stages.
In the hedge stage of being alive (call it 1955 to roughly 1975 in the Anglosphere), a median wage covers the median life. You leave school, you get a job, you find a partner, you buy a house at three or four times your annual income, you have children, you save into a pension that your employer co-funds, and at the end you retire on something approaching your final salary. Cash flows cover principal. The future is, in the literal financial sense, affordable. The system is hedge-financed at the household level.
In the speculative stage (call it 1980 to roughly 2008), wages cover the running costs of a life but not the accumulation of the assets a life requires. You can pay your rent but you cannot accumulate a deposit at the rate house prices are rising. You can service your student loans but you cannot retire them. You take on more debt to bridge the gap. You roll your overdraft. You buy your house with a 95% mortgage at six times income because there is no other way to buy it. The system is functional so long as credit remains available and asset prices keep rising. You are speculatively financed. You are, in Minsky’s terms, depending on the music continuing.
In the Ponzi stage (call it now), wages do not cover even the running costs of the life that previous generations defined as normal. The deposit is unreachable; the family is unaffordable; the retirement is fictional; the career path that was supposed to deliver these things has been replaced by a sequence of contracts. The only way to access the reference standard of living is to acquire assets that rise faster than wages, which means either inheriting them, marrying them, or speculating into them. Productive labour, in the Ponzi stage, is a losing strategy by construction. You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.
What does a rational agent do in the Ponzi stage?
She does not work harder at the losing strategy. That would be irrational. She pivots to strategies with the property that their upside actually reaches the reference threshold, even if their expected value is poor. She buys lottery tickets, metaphorical and literal. She speculates on crypto. She gambles on football. She starts an OnlyFans. She day-trades. She marries for money. She sells her eggs. She joins a multi-level marketing scheme. She bets her redundancy on a single hand at the roulette wheel of life because the steady strategy has a known terminal value below the threshold she needs to clear.

Found by way of Silverman On Security, who says:

This is a great analysis of an interesting article. What goes unsaid, and I expect it is only because Paul doesn’t work in the discipline, is that what is being described has been known as Differential Social Organization, which is the beginnings of Social Learning Theory.
It grew out of the response of Sutherland, the father of modern criminology, to his colleagues at Chicago doing the neighborhood studies for the Cook County Courts. Those studies were an attempt to apply sociology & demography to questions of juvenile delinquency and other criminal activity.
As the lore goes, when Sutherland looked at his colleagues’ results he told them what they were really looking at was not normatively versus deviantly organized communities in different neighborhoods & areas (zones) of the city.
Rather, the neighborhoods & areas with the highest levels of delinquency, deviancy, and crime weren’t maladapted, they were differentially socially organized.
What he meant was that in order to be able to survive, function, and live under the socio-economic & socio-political conditions those Chicagoans were living in, it made perfect sense for men, teens, and boys to engage in criminal activity as there were few decent paying jobs. Since their was almost no reward to engaging in the licit economy, the risks of engaging in the illicit one were lower because it was pretty much that or nothing. Similar for women who chose to engage in sex work.
When I read the excerpts that Paul include, clicked through to the piece he’s responding to, and then his take on it my impression was this is a description of Differential Social Organization with two other, and related to each other, empirical sociological / criminological explanations.
Institutional Anomie, which is the macro- to meso-level modern variant of Weber’s classic anomie theory and General Strain Theory, which is the more micro- to meso- version of Weber’s classic. Specifically the alienation from each of the societies socio-economic, socio-political, and social realities.

Differential Social Organization is very apt and useful to look at what happens to states & societies and the groups & people within them under different socio-political, socio-economic, socio-religious, and societal conditions. I’ve used it in my work on Iraq & Afghanistan for the Army.

The information environment

2026-08-04T12:24:03.780-07:00

I shoulda assembled a linkpile of resources long ago. For now, just one key one:

Nothing moves the needle

A reflection on how mainstream news media have been compromised … and why even when they do report what is happening it does not shape our poltics as it once did. Its reflection on Russian disinformation is particularly good, neither under- nor over-stating its relevance:

⋯ Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm in St. Petersburg— didn’t invent a new method. It merely industrialized Surkov’s domestic playbook and aimed it at a country with no immune system for it—the United States. The clearest illustration isn’t abstract: the IRA organized both a pro-Trump rally and a counter-protest, at the same place and time, in Houston in May 2016 — manufacturing both sides of a street confrontation among real Americans who had no idea the same operation was staging them against each other. That is Surkov’s method, exported and automated.
None of this is speculative. The Mueller Report and Volume 5 of Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2020 findings — written under Marco Rubio as the committee’s acting chairman — documented real coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. That’s not a theory. That’s the official record. What’s happened since is the payoff: a Republican Party that has largely stopped treating Kremlin-aligned talking points as disqualifying, and a pipeline — tracked in detail by researchers like Renee DiResta at Stanford — that launders Russian-state narratives into American conservative media until nobody can quite trace where a given talking point originated. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it started in Moscow. It’s ours now. There’s an old Soviet intelligence term for what Surkov practiced: reflexive control — shaping what an adversary believes to be true so thoroughly that the adversary defeats itself, freely, without ever feeling coerced.
The ascent of social media made Surkov’s method exponentially more effective. It led to the creation of thousands of siloed news platforms governed by algorithms which grew increasingly impenetrable. Before long, Russia and its American assets—knowingly or otherwise— began promoting so many conflicting and contradictory narratives that it was impossible for a single shared narrative to dominate the whole culture.
So that’s what I mean when I say freedom of the press doesn’t work anymore—at least, not the way we always assumed it did. It isn’t that the First Amendment stopped protecting reporters, or that fewer scoops are landing. It’s that Surkov’s method, and its automated heirs, did the one thing capable of neutralizing the whole system: they got to the audience before factual reality did.

Democratic socialism (n.)

2026-07-10T18:09:13.228-07:00

I keep needing a short explainer.

What democratic socialism means

As Hobbes teaches, government emerges from the need for an explicit agent maintaining the social order. Public institutions ensure people’s security through military defense and criminal justice, resolve conflicts through law and courts, and adjudicate standards like weights & measures, among other things.

Democracy asserts that public institutions must serve everyone in society, for both moral and instrumental reasons. Elections, transparency to journalism, juries chosen by sortition, and other instruments create public accountability. Democracy contrasts with authoritarianism, in which the exercise of institutional power lacks accountability to the people it affects.

Socialism and capitalism contrast in how they approach capital: the factories, organizations, and other means by which we produce the goods & services which provide the material supports for people’s survival, dignity, and joy. Socialism includes capital in the sphere of public institutional responsibility & authority which government addresses; that can mean a range of things from state control of capital or institutions outside the state like worker-owned firms. Under capitalism, public institutions enforce private individuals’ ownership of capital, empowering them to direct society’s resources, inviting them to extract as much wealth for themselves as possible, making the overwhelming majority of people dependent on capital owners to pay them wages.

Thus democratic socialism — “demsoc” — means capital controlled by public institutions accountable to the people.

The absence of democratic socialist examples

We can point to societies combining democracy & capitalism, authoritarianism & capitalism, and authoritarianism & socialism, but we lack clear lasting examples of democracy & socialism. At the risk of evoking the BS of the “political compass”:

This unpopulated quadrant should give us pause, but we must not conclude that democratic socialism must be impossible.

Historical contingency does much to account for the gap. Modern democracy, industrialization, and capitalism all developed together in the 19^th century. That does not make the three tightly linked: there are cases of industrialization producing democratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism or authoritarian socialism.

Democracy emerges slowly. Once established, it has never fallen to authoritarian socialism, but has been overthrown many times by authoritarian capitalism. Authoritarian socialism has only defeated a democratic socialist movement in the initial scramble after revolution against an authoritarian predecessor.

Leftists commonly argue that democratic capitalism has never developed into democratic socialism because democracies defuse socialist movements with social insurance concessions — pensions, education, healthcare, unemployment benefits, et cetera. This makes democratic socialist challenges to democratic capitalism a good bet even when they fail.

The dynamics of socialist failures

What do the failings of 20^th century authoritarian socialism teach us about the nature of socialism? Dare we hope that 21^st century democratic socialism will not produce the same horrors as 20^th century authoritarian socialism?

Much of the worst has unmistakable parallels in 20^th century authoritarian capitalism, demonstrating that the authoritarianism was the culprit. The rest of the worst appeared in the transition from pre-industrial conditions to industrialization, and has unmistakable parallels in cases where that transition led to capitalism, demonstrating that industrialization was the culprit.

Lesser — but still significant — problems emerge from the distributed sensing & computation challenges of a national-scale industrial economy.

Partly this too reflects authoritarianism rather than socialism, in creating strong incentives to deliver comforting lies to higher-ups. Inability to see what the economy actually does bedevils authoritarian capitalist societies no less than their authoritarian socialist counterparts.

And 20^th century socialists made a huge mistake in overestimating what central planning could accomplish. The early Soviet Union actually performed better than capitalist economies by many measures, coördinating efforts and eliminating redundancies in a way capitalist economies could not. But after picking the low-hanging fruit, it turned out that you can never have enough guys with pencils and green eyeshades in Moscow to optimize the zillion little coördination and quality control problems of a complex industrial economy as well as the highly motivated local experts at firms under capitalism could. While the Soviets clung to central planning, the capitalist West had far better and far more abundant consumer goods. Score one point for Hayek.

But socialist public authority does not necessarily mean central control. (Plus central planning seems to have a bright future: Walmart, Amazon, and other massive privately-held markets demonstrate that computing tech gives central planning an edge over constellations of small actors in the 21^st century.)

Democratic capitalism’s burden of proof

Democratically-accountable institutions enforcing private control of capital inherently compromises the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Capital owners’ wealth is …

inequality in and of itself
an instrument of authoritarian control over employees who depend on them for wages
authoritarian control over people’s material conditions across society
insulation from experiencing those material conditions
disproportionate influence over the democratic process setting policy in other domains

Ascendent democratic capitalism animates our national & global condition during this moment, the greatest social / political crisis since the Second World War. In this crisis …

fascism has returned from the grave
the postwar geopolitical order is broken beyond repair
day-to-day material conditions for most people in the US and the industrialized world at large have long followed a worsening trajectory, with no end in sight
the material sustainability of human civilization is in jeopardy

We should not accept the democratic capitalist status quo by default because we have uncertainty about the potential for democratic socialism. Democratic captialism must make a positive case for itself, addressing both its real strengths and its demonstrated problems.

Democratic socialism does not require revolution

A democratic capitalist order can evolve toward democratic socialism through a series of policy experiments, like …

Adding democratically-accountable members to corporate boards
National sovereign wealth funds taking shares in private firms
Democratically-accountable public banks as an alternative to private investors
Public provision of goods & services entering markets without displacing private solutions: public housing, postal banking, familiar & novel utilities, key consumer goods, …

Constitutional daydreams

2026-06-15T12:34:07.774-07:00

As one among many seeing a need (and opportunity) for big ideas to enable American reconstruction after this long, terrible moment, I have been daydreaming about what a new Constitutional order could look like. I don’t have any real expertise in comparative government, so I offer this as a playful-but-not-frivolous provocation.

If you do not like these ideas, I keep an index of thinking about Reconstruction which includes other comparable proposals.

A unicameral Congress

This proposal rests on an idea I have for replacing our first-past-the-post system with a novel system in which voters cast ranked ballots, producing a set of elected representatives each of whom holds different voting power in Congress, proportional to their voter support.

There are three distinct types of Congressional representatives.

County councilors

Each county elects five councilors. Though different counties have different populations, representation is equal because the counselors hold voting strength in Congress proportionate to the population who voted for them.

With 3000+ counties in the US, that would mean over 15,000 councilors. Best to have them cast votes electronically from their home county rather than send them to DC, making them available to their constituents.

Choose senators nationally

It is weird that the US has two geographically-determined sets of national representatives, so I propose choosing senators in a national election: everyone in the country votes, and the top ten candidates become senators.

These ten senators become the biggest movers in politics, as a group small enough to have an unstructured discussion in a room together. Each would present a policy package tentpole, creating a greater range of loci of power than just two (or a few) parties.

Having these Congressmembers elected nationally with proporational representation empowers significant but thinly-distributed minorities; if just 10% of the population shares interests but lack a majority in any particular area, they can still elect a senator.

Assemblors chosen by sortition

Have 50 Congressmembers chosen randomly from the citizenry, like a jury. Each would vote in Congress with the strength of ⅟50^th of the eligable voting population. Fifty is a big enough group to smooth out the bumps of weird individuals, but a enough that they could convene in a room together and build real relationships.

All three types of reps vote together

Rather than having the weird two-stage process of current American bicameralism, in this system all three types of reps would vote in Congress at the same time and have their proportionally-weighted votes tallied together. The numerous councilors would not overwhelm the few senators & assemblors because assemblors & senators vote with a strength of millions while each councilor has only the strength thousands of voters.

A measure supported by a strong majority of senators could pass if it was a bit short of a majorities of councilors & assemblors, et cetera.

A new type of supermajority

Parliamentary systems require various kinds of supermajority for particularly strong measures. F’rinstance, it currently takes a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify a treaty.

In this system, strong measures could require a majority among each of the three types of congressional representatives, harder to achieve than the normal single combined vote, but democratically powerful as it demonstrates majorities achieved through three structurally distinct representations of the polity.

Distinct powers for different classes of Congresspeople?

This system creates an implicit gauge of public support for assemblors. If assemblors do their job well, fewer people might bother to vote for senators & councilors, granting the assemblors more power in Congress. If assemblors do badly, citizens could respond with higher election turnout, outweighing assemblors’ power.

Some key particular functions may be assigned to one type of Congressional reps or another. I think it is probably wise if only senators can introduce new legislation. Judicial appointments might be approved by assemblors alone, since they most directly represent the citizenry.

Separating the classes Congresspeople for certain functions helps provide some intra-Congressional checks-and-balances. Perhaps senators do not vote on impeachment proceedings against other senators, with that determined by a supermajority of the body of councilors & assemblors, and so forth.

A parliamentary executive

Presidential systems have a host of problems. The US got lucky for a long time, but it seems our luck has run out.

Congress chooses a PM who serves as chief executive, much as the president serves now. Omit veto power over legislation and the pardon power. Give the PM a bit greater authority over foreign policy by doing stuff like lowering the threshold for Congress to approve treaties. Reduce (or maybe even eliminate) the process of Congressional approval of executive appointments, since the PM answers directly to Congress.

This makes the legislature stronger and the executive weaker; there are good reasons to want that.

I hope that the Congress as designed here would not be vulnerable to the deadlocks which prevent some parliamentary systems from forming a government. There is a lot of prior art in parliamentary systems to draw upon in preëmpting those problems in specific selection process Congress uses.

A ceremonial president

Constitutional monarchies have some advantages from having a ceremonial head-of-state distinct from the democratically-empowered chief executive. In the US the presidency awkwardly combines both functions, and we should not compromise the PM role that way. Given the poetry of the American presidency, it would be nice to also have a president to address this problem.

The president would deliver an annual State Of The Union address, award medals, et cetera. They would have full discretion over a constitutionally-fixed discretionary budget, pegged to maybe 0.1% of the national budget. I imagine a bouquet of ombudsman-like powers. The president would be able to compel Congress to vote on any question. I think the pardon power would present less conflict-of-interest trouble connected to this weaker role. I imagine that the president would continue to use the White House, but get cut off from all the extra business in the basement, which instead would be at the disposal of the PM with an office in the Old Executive Office Building.

I hate Ronald Reagan but he would have been great as this kind of ceremonial head-of-state. Even Donald Trump would have been relatively harmless in the role.

Choose the president with a national popular vote using ranked ballots where voters can list anyone they like, just as they do for senators and councilors. My electoral mechanism is not structured to produce a single victor, but there are a number of ways to determine one from ranked ballots … and with much lower stakes for the office, any method will do.

Unitary government with stronger counties

A council comprised of the councilors a county sends to Congress plus a set of local panelists chosen by sortition governs each county. The councilors vote both in the national Congress and in the local council, while the panelists would only vote on county governance. (This embraces Americans’ common false intuition that members of the House Of Representatives have responsibility for governance within their home districts.)

Rather than have our complex overlapping jurisdictional relationships between municipalties, counties, states, and the federal government, this is a unitary system which only structurally recognizes the national government and the counties. Power resides in the national government, which assigns power & responsibilities to the counties.

Counties may not raise funds; each county receives funding out of the national budget directly proportional to their population, at a rate set by Congress. This corrects stark inequities in the resources available to local government today.

Because councilors vote in Congress, the national government would not starve the counties of funding or authority … but senators & assemblors considering policy at the national scale would balance assemblors’ appetite.

States are grandfathered in as agreements between counties, and municipalities become instruments controlled by the counties, which county governments may alter or abolish. (This is why I refer to national rather than federal government, and the flag at the top of this post retains the basic form of the US flag but omits the stars representing states. We might call the reconstituted nation the “Republic Of America”.)

Judiciary

I have given judicial reform much less thought. This system is compatible with many proposals I have seen.

F’rinstance, the Supreme Court may work much the way it does now, but instead of being populated through our weird system of death and gerentocracy we appoint a new Justice each year and retire the longest-serving justice if that gives the Court more than nine Justices.

The PM might propose judicial appointments subject to approval by Congress, much as the president does in our current system … or perhaps assemblors alone ratify — even select — judges.

Anti-corruption measures

Any such surgery on the Constitution is a good time to get the money out of politics. There are many good, familiar proposals, like public funding of electoral campaigns. I have a radical proposal to add to the mix.

All elected officials — plus appointed officials controlling a budget greater than 10,000x the national median income — become a Public Citizen for life, with tight constraints on their personal finances. They get a pension of twice the national median income … but are forbidden to take any other money from anyone. The national government takes custody of their assets, though they get right of first refusal to rent their house at the market rate.

This would be expensive, and tricky to enforce, but would keep powerful government officials from governing to the benefit of monied interests and then cashing in after they serve. Plus it would encourage ordinary people to take on government service while deterring rich people!

Miscellany

I have a grab bag of other proposals —

Pre-commitment to legislation

Candidates for legislative office may make a binding promise to vote for specific legislation. If that law comes to a vote they don’t get a choice; they must cast the vote they promised. To avoid poison pill shenanigans, this would have to be bound to very specific legislative language.

Re-drawing county lines

With counties so important, it would be valuable to have a process for splitting, merging, and otherwise re-drawing county boundaries, rather than stay stuck with boundaries created under very different conditions. Elected councilors would hesitate to alter their jurisdiction and thereby risk losing their position, so changes need to come from somewhere else. Most unitary states give the national government the power to alter administrative units like counties.

It might also be sensible to let local panelists propose changes which then get put to a plebicite, which would require majority approval by the citizens in each region affected. So if County A wanted to take custody of Region B within County C, it would require a successful vote among voters in County A and Region B and the rump County C.

Pace layers

Assemblors have a lot of responsibility, so give them an eight-year term. In their first two years, an assemblor gets tutored in the operations of the government. In their third year, they participate in the assembly but do not have a vote. Then they serve as full members of the assembly for five years. Each year ten new assemblors join the pipeline and ten retire, giving the body of assemblors continuity.

The ranked-ballot system gives incumbents a significant credibility advantage, but having their voting power proportional to votes they receive means that each rep’s strength will wax and wane with each election. I think it would be wise to have the senate face an election every year, while counties might come up for election at a slower cadence, maybe every five years.

Since the presidency is much less fraught in this system, I don’t think the cadence matters; it might make sense to have Congress call Presidential elections at will, with a requirement to call them at least every eight years. I would not subject the president (or any elected position) to term limits, but I do want the presidency to be a role that honored political leaders would retire to, so past presidents are barred from holding any other government position.

No other elected positions

Voters choose only senators, councilors, and the president. I am skeptical that having a lot of elected positions creates more democratic accountability; fewer elected roles make accountability more clear, easier for inattentive citizens to keep track of.

Insulated accountability bodies

There are a few forms of accountability which should be protected from election pressures, as the judiciary is now in the US. I imagine a set of bodies with specific domains of interest and subpoena power. These would be appointed by the national assemblors, whose limited terms and varied backgrounds present the least temptation to corrode these bodies’ willingness to check irresponsbile exercise of power.

Rather than have the constitutionality of legislation governed by a reactive Supreme Court, I would have a body committed to this function with a mandate to proactively check laws’ constitutionality. Congress would be able to demand a test of the constitutionality of proposed legislation.
A body must audit Public Citizens to ensure that they obey the financial restrictions upon them.
Government secrecy is necessary for certain purposes but invites abuse, so have a body able to inspect government programs and information, checking that secrecy is actually justified.
Citizens need reporting of factual information about government operations beyond what journalists can do, as current bodies like the Congressional Budget Office do.

Explicitly name core principles

The Declaration of Independence names bedrock principles which should have the force of constitutional law. The preamble should include something like: “The institutions named here — and whatever actions those institutions undertake — derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed and from serving all of the people they govern: protecting their equal rights and dignity, meeting their human needs, enabling them to work toward common purpose.”

Today we must draw a line

2026-04-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

This morning, President Trump threatened to commit massive genocide in Iran.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

Today we are all tested.

Congress and others in power

You bear greater responsibility than ordinary citizens. Getting this right was your job.

Anything short of active opposition to Trump and all his works from the beginning places you among the disgraced for the rest of your life: no voice, no power, no responsibility.

Anything short of vigorous effort to impeach President Trump before the sun sets means you belong in the dock at The Hague for crimes against humanity.

Citizens

Today I saw someone on social media say:

The only groups you can effectively blame for this are MAGA voters. The independents stupidly moved for economic reasons they thought this creep would fix. They basically did a Transformers unite and shit this horror on the rest of us.
It simply wouldn’t have happened without them.
A lot of minority voters voted for him, too. And I have seen people wishing harm on groups of people because some people in a group did that.
That is also fucked up. They also didn’t singlehandedly vote this man in.
It took groups of people to create this mess we are in. A lot of factors go into presidential election victories and movements(propaganda, voting restrictions, and deliberate ignorance baked into our citizenry).
So, if someone is like THE LEFT IS THE FAULT they can go to hell.

I concur that moral responsibility rests on Trump voters and people in positions of real power. Even the most prominent American leftists have just not had the power to bear meaningful responsibility. And I have repeatedly and publicly allowed for people who refused to vote:

I can respect saying “I just could not bring myself to vote for the lesser evil on this”. I vigorously disagree, but it is legitimate.

I meant it. But my grudging respect ends today.

And I have repeatedly and publicly extended this grace:

The bargain we offer to Trump voters is that we grant that it was an honest mistake if they admit that it was a mistake.

I meant it. But that ends today, too.

The new covenant

If you have not opposed Trump to even the minimal measure of voting at every opportunity for the only electoral candidates who viably contested him, today is your last chance to avoid permanent disgrace.

“Gosh, I made an honest mistake” no longer cuts it.

You must admit today that you got a vital and easy call catastrophically wrong. You must admit that you have no wisdom to offer on any subject until you have rigorously examined & altered your principles to make this error impossible for you in the future, and then demonstrated to the satisfaction of people who opposed Trump that you have gotten your head straight.

If you positively supported Trump with even just a ballot, you bear a moral debt which you have to work off with active effort to prevent another Trump ever threatening the world again.

Anything less is so morally reprehensible and dangerously stupid that anyone who ever credits anything you ever say or entrusts you with even the smallest measure of power or responsibility joins you in the ranks of the disgraced.

If you want anything more than teeth-gritting support for your fundamental rights as a human being, you must devote the rest of your life to vigorously supporting those of us who got it right in our labors to build a better world.

Murc’s Law

2026-03-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

the widespread assumption that only Democrats have any agency or causal influence over American politics

You’ve Probably Never Heard of “Murc’s Law”, But You’ve Seen It in Action Lots of Times assembles several useful commentaries. (It has a good reference to Romney bitterness.)

See also Campos’ Exception from The paradoxical limits of Murc’s law:

If the government is shut down, that is because the party that is against the government [the Republicans] has succeeded in achieving its reason for existence, which is to not have a government, or at least one that actually works.

Facts have a YIMBY bias

2026-03-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

For now this is just a disorganized stub index. I keep needing resources about housing policy, so I’m going to start racking them up here.

Ned Resnikoff

A policy wonk I like.

Dissent | Supply and the Housing Crisis: A Debate

Debunking a lot of silly left-NIMBY arguments.

The Nation | A YIMBY Theory of Power

A response to criticism of the Abundance YIMBYs.

Roosevelt Institute | There Is No Housing Affordability Without Building More Housing

The vacant housing canard

Debunking NIMBYism: A Closer Look at Vacant Housing Units

A few key statistics showing that there is not a big resevoir of unoccupied housing which people could move into tomorrow.

Millions of U.S. Homes Are Sitting Vacant, So Why Are Homes Still So Expensive?

Another look at the numbers on vacant housing.

Why vacant homes won’t solve our housing shortage

Another overview of the fundamentals.

Building “luxury” housing

Many NIMBYs say that allowing more housing development will not bring down housing costs because developers will just build “luxury” housing. But even building fancy housing brings down housing costs, because it soaks up housing demand by affluent people who would otherwise bid up the cost of existing housing stock.

The Downmarket Impact of New Multifamily Housing: Evidence from a Honolulu Condo Tower

A case study showing that fancy new housing brings down the cost of all the housing nearby.

Curbing Rising Housing Costs: A Model-Based Policy Comparison

An academic paper with evidence that building new “luxury” housing might actually be the best way to bring down housing prices.

Policy

Beyond Skepticism: Data Confirms Auckland's Zoning Reforms Delivered on Housing Promises

A case study showing that zoning reform brought down housing costs.

California YIMBY | Restoring the California Dream

A comprehensive proposal.

Tax Incentives and the Supply of Low-Income Housing

A study showing that tax credits targeted at the creation of “affordable” housing is ineffective.

Pew | Austin’s Surge of New Housing Construction Drove Down Rents

Increased supply lowers costs.

Politico | The left’s housing civil war is ending

YIMBYism is not neoliberalism.

Housing the unhoused

It turns out that high housing costs cause people to become unhoused, and the most effective policies to address houselessness are to lower housing costs and to just give people on the street stable housing.

Finland’s Zero Homeless Strategy: Lessons from a Success Story

An overview of a policy success.

Two encounters with the grift

2026-03-05T13:16:00.000-08:00

I have an unwholesome interest in scams. Not because I romanticize them; because I cannot imagine devoting that level of effort when one could do something useful instead.

A call from a boiler room

One day back in the 20^th century I got a cold call from a young lady working in a boiler room somewhere. She had an Exciting Offer for me. She talked through her script with earnest, clumsy enthusiasm. I let her run for a minute, then gave her a couple of softball questions, which she fielded by awkwardly reading scripted answers. Then I took a guess.

“Is today your first day at this job?”

“Yeah, sorry, I’m still learning.”

“No harm done. You’re doing great. But can you tell me how your employer makes money from this?”

She started to paraphrase the rap from her script, but I interrupted her. “No, that is not how they make money.” Then I explained the scam to her.

She paused a long moment. “Wait. Really?”

“Yeah. Now, I don’t want to tell you what to do. Working this kind of job is a bummer. You wouldn’t have taken it if you didn’t really need the money.”

“I sure do.” She said it with conviction I was glad she could not muster when reading the script.

“So think about this. Your employer is lying to me in order to rip me off. Are you sure that they will keep the promises they made to you?”

“Oh.”

“Hang in there. And have a good day.”

“Thank you.”

I felt like a hero.

Short con on the street

One day I was walking up Powell Street in San Francisco, near Union Square, among the tourists. A man in a nice suit and no necktie approached me. He sheepishly confessed to being in a jam; things had gone sideways for him, his wife & kid were holed up in a hotel room, and he needed a little money to get his car and them back on the road.

He was good, but I made him work for it with some pointed questions. He had great answers, and he really sold the mix of anxiety and embarrassment. I gave him forty bucks, and he handled the blow beautifully — grateful and eager to go sort out his troubles. Worth every penny.

Maybe six or eight years later, I was walking up Powell again, and I saw him scouting the crowd; he was even wearing the same suit. I hoped I might get to see him work someone else. But instead he approached me. I understood him not recognizing me; the last time I had been clean-shaven, with my hair tied back, dressed casually, while this time I was beardy with my hair down and wore a good suit.

It was uncanny having him give me the exact same pitch again. I drew out my wallet, pulled out a couple of twenties, grinned, and said, “You told me the same story right here on Powell Street years ago; I gave you forty because I admired your craft. I’ll give you another forty now if you tell me why you marked me.”

He tried to bluff past it. He didn’t know what I was talking about, he had to get back to his wife and kid, blah blah blah.

“No, I already heard that one. But I really will pay to hear what about me got you to choose me as your mark,” I said cheerfully.

His demeanor changed. He was sorry he had bullshitted me. The reality was that he was in a different jam, but he figured the wife and kid thing would be more convincing. He started to lay out this whole different story.

“That’s not what I asked.” I waved the money. “Satisfy my curiosity, or don’t.”

His demeanor changed even more sharply. He was suddenly in tears. He was desperate because he was in trouble. He trembled. The guy was good. I feigned a sympathetic expression and enjoyed him working it for half a minute. But I pulled my hand with the money closer to me.

“Heartbreaking,” I said. “But not what I asked. It’s easy money. Do you want it? Tell me how you marked me.” I expected a lie, but was ready to enjoy one.

He stopped the shtick, suddenly and completely. He was expressionless, and for a moment he met my gaze with a psychopath’s dead eyes.

Then he just walked away.

Republic Dogs

2026-02-23T19:47:00.000-08:00

Rescuing a classic from linkrot:

Republic Dogs
By Nathaniel Daw
Copyright 1994 and all that.

[Thrasymachus is tied up in a chair. Socrates is brandishing a gun in his face.]

Thrasymachus:
Don’t kill me, man!

Socrates:
Are you finished, fucker?

Thrasymachus:
Look, look, man, you can have my ten yoke of oxen. My virgin daughters? My pomegranite orchard?

Socrates:
You like pomegranites? Shit, motherfucker, I hear they’ve got a fuckin’ all-you-can-eat special going on on pomegranites where you’re headed.

Thrasymachus:
Don’t do it, Socrates. Be fair.

Socrates: [Suddenly contemplative]
Fair?

Thrasymachus:
[Sees an opportunity for survival]
Yeah, fair … think about my wife and children --

Socrates:
Would you say that to be fair is the same thing as to be just?

Thrasymachus:
What?

Socrates:
Well, I’m just a dull, wandering street philosopher, so I don’t understand quite where you’re headed with this particular line of reasoning. Perhaps [motions with gun] you could further elucidate your theory of justice.

Thrasymachus:
My theory? Of justice?

Socrates:
Yes. You do … have a theory of justice, don’t you?

Thrasymachus:
Uh …

Socrates:
Or perhaps you’d like to hear my theory.

Thrasymachus:
Oh, yes, yes, yes, of course, your theory. You have a theory?

Socrates:
Well, yes, I have been thinking a little about justice -- not of course, so deeply as could a wise sage like yourself. But I’ve had a little idea, an insignificant but troubling little idea, and it’s been bothering me a little, and I thought that maybe someone as smart as yourself could help convince me that it was wrong.

Thrasymachus:
Of course, I’ll do anything I can to help.

Socrates:
So you’d like to hear my theory?

Thrasymachus:
I’d be honored.

Socrates:
My humble little idea goes something like this. [He is suddenly extremely loud and violent. Roars:] Justice is only the will of the stronger. What do you think about that, asshole? [Slaps Thrasymachus across the face with his gun]

Thrasymachus:
Uh, uh, uh …

Socrates:
Come on … come on, you wanna try and disprove my theory, you weak little shit? Yeah? Yeah? Shit, I think I feel a proof coming on. [Shoots him.] Why, thank you Thrasymachus, you’ve certainly opened my eyes.

Narrator:
Thrasymachus. Alcibiades. Aristotle. Socrates -- are Quentin Tarantino’s Republic Dogs.

[Enter Alcibiades and Aristotle]

Aristotle:
So you’re saying you’d give Helen of Troy a foot massage?

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah, in a minute.

Aristotle:
You’d touch her feet? She might be the most beautiful bitch since fucking Aphrodite, but trust me, her feet stink. And her armpits stink too. Just cuz she’s beautiful don’t mean she don’t smell like the rest of us. And don’t you go telling no deodorant story, either, cuz you know and I know it wasn’t invented during the Trojan war.

Alcibiades:
What, you wouldn’t do her?

Aristotle:
I didn’t say I wouldn’t do her. I said I wouldn’t give her a foot massage. I don’t dig on feet.

Alcibiades:
Well, what if before you did her you’d have to give her a foot massage to get her in the mood?

Aristotle:
Allow me to inquire, Alcibiades. What if you had to massage her armpits to get her in the mood?

Alcibiades:
Fuck you, Aristotle.

Socrates:
You guys have got it all wrong.

Alcibiades:
What, you don’t like foot massages either?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, the Iliad, you’ve got the Iliad all wrong. Do you wanna know what the Iliad is about? Well, I’ll tell you what the Iliad is about. It ain’t about no bitches, that’s for fucking sure.

Alcibiades:
Sure it is. You’re saying Helen of Troy ain’t one hot bitch?

Socrates:
I’m not saying Helen of Troy ain’t a hot bitch, I’m saying the Iliad ain’t about her. She ain’t even in it. The Odyssey is about bitches, I’ll grant you that. But I’ll tell you what The Iliad is about. It’s about big boats. Didn’t you ever read the second Canto? Boats boats boats boats boats boats boats. Hence, the Trojan War.

Aristotle:
You’re full of shit.

Alcibiades:
Fuck yeah you are; the Iliad is about Achilles’ struggle with his own homosexuality.

Socrates:
Maybe I should frame my theory a bit more emphatically. [Drawing his gun.] Didn’t you ever hear of the face that launched a thousand … boats?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
WELL?

Alcibiades:
Yeah.

Socrates:
Well, how’d you like me to launch your face?

Alcibiades:
Uh …

Socrates:
Ahh, I guess that example cleared up all your objections then. [Points weapon at Aristotle] You don’t have any problems with that, do you?

Aristotle:
Hey, man, it’s cool. Cool. Boats are cool by me. I was just on a boat recently.

Socrates: [Putting away his gun.]
Well good for fucking you. This makes you special?

Aristotle:
From Mycinea.

Alcibiades:
What’s it like? I hear they do some crazy-ass shit there.

Aristotle:
Man, that place is like Mount-fucking-Olympus. Every night, they gather round the fire in certain legally designated areas, where government-licensed civil servants throw the roots of a domestically cultivated plant in the fire.

Socrates:
So fucking what?

Aristotle:
So the smoke makes them giddy and lighthearted as if they had drunk on wine, only they don’t have a headache in the morning, that’s fucking what.

Socrates:
That’s it, I’m fucking going. It’s the perfect fucking city.

Aristotle:
It ain’t the perfect fucking city.

Socrates:
You know a better city?

Aristotle:
No, I don’t know a better city, motherfucker, but that don’t mean fucking Mycinea is fucking perfect. “Perfect” doesn’t mean that there ain’t nothing better, it means perfect.

Socrates:
Can you explain that lofty idea in terms a base, wandering street philosopher like myself might be able to understand?

Aristotle:
Well, allow me to demonstrate. Let’s say there was an imaginary city, and all the people were divided into three groups. Let’s say I represent the Gold group, I’d be Mr. Gold, you, Socrates would be Mr. Silver, and, you, Alcibiades, Mr. Bronze.

Alcibiades:
Why do I have to be Mr. Bronze?

Aristotle:
Because it’s only a demonstration. So me, Gold, I’d be the philosopher king --

Alcibiades:
But why can’t I be the philosopher king? Look, Socrates, I’ll trade with you.

Aristotle:
[Draws a gun, fires a shot into the air,
and points it at Alcibiades]
Interrupt me again, motherfucker. Interrupt me again. Nobody’s trading with anybody. This is my allegory.

[Alcibiades gestures submission.]

Aristotle: [Putting away gun.]
So as the philosopher king, it would be my duty to keep seditious literature out of the city.

Socrates:
I got it. I understand.

Aristotle:
Shut up, motherfucker, how can you understand my perfect city when I haven’t explained it yet?

Socrates:
No, dickhead, not that, I understand what you were saying before, about perfection. It’s all about forms.

Aristotle:
Forms?

Socrates:
Yeah, motherfucker, forms. Like, something don’t have to physically exist for it to be perfect; it exists as the perfect ideal, the perfect form, beyond mortal comprehension.

Alcibiades:
Socrates, you’re supposed to pour your libations on the ground, not drink them till you’re talking like a crazy Bacchae bitch.

Socrates:
Normally, I’d be pouring libations with your spinal fluid right now, but since I’m feeling at peace with the universe I’ll try to enlighten your sorry ass instead. Imagine there’s this dark, underground cave.

Alcibiades:
Yeah?

Socrates:
And there’s this rapist-motherfucker, and he’s got this gimp, right, tied up in the cave. See that?

Aristotle:
Okay.

Socrates:
And this rapist, he’s a sick motherfucker, so let’s say one day he sends down a coupla pipe-hittin’ negroes to cut the gimp’s ear right off.

Alcibiades:
Cut his ear off?

Socrates:
Yeah, and gouge out his fucking eyes. Now wouldn’t you say that the ear and eye are the proper receptacles of the senses of sight and hearing, respecitively?

Alcibiades:
Clearly so.

Socrates:
So, moreover, would you not agree that this gimp’s senses are imperfect?

Aristotle:
Why, yes, Socrates, I suppose they would be a trifle damaged.

Socrates:
And what do things look like to someone with imperfect senses?

Alcibiades:
Dark?

Socrates:
No, motherfucker, nine letters, begins with “I.”

Aristotle:
Imperfect.

Socrates:
Bingo. So you’d say this gimp, you’d say this gimp motherfucker would be unable to perceive true perfection -- but that don’t mean it don’t exist. Now if you brought him out of the cave, into the light, things would be less dark, and his eyes might heal a little, he might begin to see a glimmer of light, thereby gaining the idea of true perfection --

Aristotle:
What kind of argument is that? Your theory of the forms rests on an arbitrary and vicious act of violence.

Socrates: [Draws his gun.]
Aristotle, you’re Plato’s student, I respect you, but I will put fucking bullets through your heart if you don’t take back what you said about me being violent now!

Aristotle: [Also drawing gun]
You shoot, you’ll be dining with Lord Hades tonight. I repeat. You kill me, your ass is eating pomegranite fucking casserole for the rest of eternity.

Alcibiades:
Shit, man, you’re acting like a bunch of fuckin’ Spartans. Am I the only philosopher around here?

Socrates and Aristotle: [To Alcibiades]
Shut up!

Alcibiades:
Guys, guys, calm down. Look, I’ve got it. Let’s have a symposium -- we can all drink wine and make speeches in praise of love.

Aristotle:
What are you, some kind of pansy?

Socrates:
Shoot that dipshit.

[Socrates and Aristotle turn in unison and shoot Alcibiades, then turn back and again aim at each other.]

Socrates: [To Aristotle]
Don’t think you’re getting off that easy. You ever read Plato?

Aristotle:
Of course.

Socrates:
There’s this little passage I got memorized that I like to recite in situations like this. It is a tale of a brave man, Er, who once died in war. On the twelfth day, as he was already laid out on the funeral pyre, he revived, and told what he had seen yonder. He said that after his soul had left him it travelled with many others until they came to a marvellous place, where there were two openings upward into heaven, and between them sat judges. These, when they had given judgment, ordered the just to go upward through the heavens by the opening on the right. The unjust they ordered to travel downward by the opening on the left. For all the wrongs they had done to any person they paid a tenfold penalty. Savage men, all fiery to look at bound their feet, hands and heads, and threw them down and beat them, tortured them on thorny bushes.

Aristotle:
What the fuck was that all about?

Socrates:
So, motherfucker, prepare to test the hypothesis! See, I’ve got it figured out, I’m the just man, and you’re the unjust man, my gun is the thorny bushes, and Mr. dead pansy here is the judge. Now DIE MOTHERFUC --

Aristotle:
But what if I’m the just man and you’re the unjust man and this dead dipshit is the thorny bushes?

Socrates:
Oh, uh …

Aristotle:
Or what if Alcibiades is the just man, and we’re both unjust men. And the thorny bushes are the judge?

Socrates:
Shit, well I guess that all depends on your definition of justice.

Aristotle:
Exactly my point. That was what I was working up to with my description of the perfect city, before I was so rudely interrupted.

Socrates:
Shit, I’m sorry. I don’t suppose you could explain it to me now?

Aristotle:
Only if you stop pointing that thing at me.

Socrates:
Well … all right.

[Both of them holster their guns.]

Aristotle:
Whew. That was exciting. [Patting him on the back,] Could I interest you in a drink?

Socrates:
One minute. I’ll meet you there.

[Aristotle starts to walk off]

Socrates:
[drawing his gun and pointing it
at Aristotle’s back]
But first, how’d you like to hear my theory of justice?

[they both freeze. the end.]

One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

2026-01-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

I am generally skeptical of breathless “AI” boosterism. LLMs have given us some astonishing surprises in the last few years, and we can expect more surprises over the next few years at least, but it is preposterous to see artificial superintelligence is on the horizon. LLMs have differently-shaped strengths and limitations from familiar proceedural computing systems, but the contrasts with what we see from human cognition make it obvious that there are a lot of things humans do which they simply cannot.

I am generally disgusted by the disdain both for the arts and for artists in how “AI” boosters imagine replacing artists with robots. Surprising and weirdly impressive as developments in “‘AI’ art” art have been in the last few years, I cannot imagine thinking that “AI” is on a trajectory toward replacing novelists, painters, filmmakers, et cetera. I join those who refer to “‘AI’ art” as “slop” because of its deeply schlocky quality.

But I don’t want to be a one-dimensional “AI” hater, and have been challenging myself to think about ways these tools can be useful. So here are some ideas I am not sure are good, offered as a provocation to my thinking and others’.

Slightly better clip art?

Maybe “AI” illustrations are not a big problem because their distinctive janky quality signals what they are, meta-communicating I am using this as an ephemeral little instrument to communicate a simple intent, rather than as a subtle work.

When generative “AI” image tools were new, I experimented a bit. I made this little meme image quoting a Lou Reed song by asking “AI” to give me a “sneering Statue Of Liberty”. I am satisfied with it delivering a little something I could neither draw nor afford to pay an artist to do.

I think that plays because it is not a subtle work. A picture is worth a thousand words and I wouldn’t ask “‘AI’ art” to do that … but sometimes you just need an illustration worth less than a dozen words. There are plenty of bland corporate filler illustrations which express no profound human intent. I know using “AI” deprives illustrators of jobs making this stuff, but isn’t that the kind of elimination of toil we should embrace as enabling Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism?

Maybe the right regulatory solution to “AI” images is to lean into their janky soullessness. Might we force them into a few house styles so we always recognize that they were not created by an artist?

For the TTRPG table?

There is currently a fight among tabletop roleplaying game creators about the use of “‘AI’ art”. I join with those who advocate against the use of “AI” slop in rulebooks and other materials. But I have been thinking about a possible LLM-driven artbot for creating images on the fly for use during play in games like D&D which has the necessary scale to pay for artists to create big corpus of art used as training data.

They would have a bunch of reference illustrations of what halberds, swords, beholders, dwarves, fireballs, et cetera are supposed to look like plus tagged examples of a handful of “house styles” like Cozy Fantasy, Heavy Metal Album Cover, Heroic Pseudo-Realism, Medieval Woodcut-Ish so that it can render any of the Things in any of the Styles.

Published settings & adventures could include an artbot module of data about creatures, locations, items, NPCs, etc to support relevant illustrations.

Then a gamemaster could instruct the artbot tool to spit out images of what is happening in play: “Liddel The Rogue and Vadania The Druid face the kobolds in the Cave Of Dread” or whatever.

The artbot tool to do this would require real programming, not just prompt “engineering”. It would be important to create images which are consistent, which align with the plans for an adventure, et cetera.

My hope is that this kind of artbot would end up benefitting artists, producing an ecosystem with new jobs to create reference images to train it for an endless succession of adventures and sourcebooks. Software-mediated marketplaces like Etsy have enabled artists a bit, making it easier to sell stuff like commissioned character portraits; I imagine this hypothetical TTRPG artbot enabling new kinds of commissions between players and artists.

Maybe none of that would work! But this is the kind of thought experiment which keeps me from being an absolutist in opposing “AI” illustrations.

As an ingredient in mixed-media art?

Over on the Bluesky thread where I first articulated this idea, someone countered …

“Fully automated luxury gay space communism” should have a higher aspiration than to feed money to the VIC collective to torch miles of rainforest and fresh water to generate an image of partying seniors with 9 fingers per hand for a failing rural elder care program.
Put a tick more precisely I think a use case for LLMs of artists doing drafts and preliminary scaffolding for their sincere work is orders of magnitude more socially beneficial than for making corporate PowerPoint sloptent even more repellent & sloppier.

Indeed. Even my dumb little meme images seem useful to me as an instrument for a small purposeful comment.

The more substantive uses of “AI” I find interesting are artists using these tools as one among many instruments in composing something with intention and meaning, whether it is James Curico weaving “AI” elements into complex mixed-media artworks or Damien Walter using “AI” illustrations just to liven up a videoessay so it’s not just him being a talking head. Curico says:

I’ve had very good results in this direction, personally. Though it’s kind of a lose-lose talking about the process since on the one hand it’s “doesn’t matter if you spent 90 hours on it you still deserve the electric chair” and “what's the point if can’t do it with one prompt?”

Reconstructed movies

2026-01-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

I have lately been seized by a mania to track down interesting re-edits of films, either done by the original creators or by fans.

Ones I have seen

Raiders

Steven Soderbergh — the prolific director best known for Sex, Lies, and Videotape and Ocean’s 11/12/13 — has transformed Raiders Of The Lost Ark into a seductive film school exercise. He changed the color to crisp black-and-white and stripped out all of the sound, even the dialogue, using instead a loop of Trent Reznor’s score for The Social Network.

Why?

I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.

Fun for me too.

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Soderbergh’s experiment is weird film-nerd joy but it isn’t anywhere near as fun or as gutsy as this variation on the theme.

Back when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was new, a circle of tween-aged kids had a crazy idea: how about taking a parent’s home video camera and making their own version of the movie? They resolved to reproduce every shot from the original film as well as they could, which is bonkers considering that home video releases of films were not yet a thing, giving them no way to examine every scene closely. They went to a movie theater and furiously took notes, recorded the audio on a tape recorder, pored over stills they found in places like magazines and trading cards.

They spent their whole summer vacation working on it, but they didn’t get as far as they imagined. Filmmaking is hard. So during the school year they kept at it on weekends when they could. Then they devoted the following summer to it again. Then the next summer. They were in too deep to stop. They had almost the whole movie done when high school graduation forced an end to the project.

Decades later the kids, now grown, dusted off their VHS tapes and did a few showings at theaters willing to spare a screen for a couple of hours for this oddity … despite being unable to charge money lest a plague of studio lawyers descend upon them.

I was lucky enough to go to one of those early screenings, with a raucously enthusiastic crowd. Watching the film is uncanny and delicious. Actors transform back and forth between kids and teenagers from scene to scene, or even within a scene. Because it’s a film you know, you cannot resist thinking ahead. “I know what comes next. How the heck will a bunch of kids reproduce that in a backyard?” Every time, their solution turns out to be more clever and impressive than one would dare hope.

Word eventually found its way to Steven Spielberg, who decided he had to meet these creators. He must have twisted some lawyers’ arms, because now you can just buy a home video copy.

The Blackened Mantle

Akira Kurosawa’s lost original cut of his story of Annakin Skywalker’s fall from grace played out against the backdrop of the rise of the Galactic Empire.

Well, obviously not. But that is what it is meant to feel like.

Star Wars has enough enthusiastic fans that there are countless fan-made re-shufflings of the films. They follow in the footsteps of The Phantom Edit, a pioneering fan effort from before just anyone with a laptop and a lot of patience could re-cut a film; it re-arranged scenes from the first prequel The Phantom Menace and cleverly transformed Jar-Jar Binks into a wise sage by snipping out his slapstick moments and replacing his dialogue with an invented alien language and wholly new lines delivered in subtitles.

Mantle takes that trick much further.

Star Wars is a pastiche informed by a host of sources. George Lucas had originally wanted do a Flash Gordon film but could not get the rights, so Star Wars stirred that together with Westerns, Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, flying ace movies about both World Wars, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and … the films of Akira Kurosawa set in Japan’s feudal era, most directly The Hidden Fortress.

So informed by Kurosawa’s influence, The Blackened Mantle refines Revenge Of The Sith by presenting it in the style of Kurosawa’s works. It’s in black-and-white, with bits of the other prequels woven in as sepia-toned flashbacks. All of the actors’ performances have been dubbed in Japanese so that subtitles can tweak the dialogue to reshape the storytelling. It preserves most of the story elements and action sequences, but trims out elements which weaken the plausibility of Annakin’s turn.

A friend recommending this got me going down this whole alternate-edit rabbithole in the first place, and the creator has an index of numerous edits under the witty title Bad Movies Made Less Bad.

Gus Van Sant’s Psycho

So. What if it’s not a gang of kids attempting a zero-budget shot-for-shot remake of a Hollywood film? What if, instead, a talented real-deal director had the resources to do it right?

Would it produce the same movie? Would it turn out as a different movie? This should just be a film school hypothetical, impossible to test, but Gus Van Sant cashed in on the moment of his greatest industry pull to actually do it.

What did the experiement reveal?

I find it impossible to describe. Yeah, it’s the same film as Hitchcock’s … sort of. But also sort of not. The only way to get it is to see the film. Van Sant says:

The results were that it wasn’t as frightening as Hitchcock’s film, and I attribute it to the director, me, my DNA, and the different totally immersive style of Hitchcock. Without that, it seemed it couldn’t be reproduced.

I cannot recommend it unless you are a film nerd. But if you are, there’s nothing else like it.

Touch Of Evil — 1998 Walter Murch restoration

I’m glad that I somehow never saw the original theatrical version of Orson Welles’ noir classic despite having meant to catch up with it. It had a reputation for being great despite confused storytelling which resulted from the studio trimming the film down from Welles’ original cut.

Almost 20 years after the film was released, a print close to Welles’ last version was found, but that had been an unfinished film, with postproduction work still to be done when the studio took it away from him. Then another 20 years later, after Welles had long since died, sound designer Walter Murch discovered an angry memo Welles wrote to the studio criticizing what they had done to his film. There were 58 single-spaced typewritten pages detailing everything he would have done differently. Murch restored the film, using the memo as the blueprint, revealing the real movie at last.

Metropolis — The Complete Metropolis

One might guess that Touch Of Evil is the only director’s cut delivered from beyond the grave, but Metropolis may be an even greater miracle.

Metropolis was made in 1927 and it still looks wildly ambitious to eyes accustomed to mega-blockbusters. The cost of the elaborate sets and effects nearly bankrupted the entire German film industry. But epic result was packed with imagery so powerful and influential that I refer to it as a film everyone has seen even if they have never seen it, because its moves (and even snippets of the film itself) show up in so many later films that when one sees it for the first time, it feels familiar.

Few people ever saw the full film. It was trimmed down from its original 2½ hour runtime for distribution in Germany, then trimmed down further for international distribution. Then decades passed, with prints circulating through film schools and rep houses, getting scratched and burned and broken and spliced back together, so each extant print was at least a little different. In the ’80s a producer struck newly restored prints … with a different (rock ’n’ roll!) soundtrack, goofy colorization, and trimmed down more than an hour shorter than its original runtime.

Then at the end of the century, a German film foundation asked to borrow every print in the world. They scanned them all and combined the data — one print could correct the loss from a scratch on another print, a lost frame on one print could be covered by it surviving on three others. They pored over archived notes from the original production. This produced the fullest version any living person had ever seen, a little over two hours long. The computer synthesis of information from multiple prints made almost all of it look as fresh as if it had been shot yesterday; the film was even more beautiful than we knew. Title cards describing what surviving records revealed about the missing scenes got them as close to rescuing the entire film as anyone believed possible.

Then one more print turned up in a museum archive, a negative struck from the original full version. It was in bad shape, but it had 25 minutes of footage which no one had seen since 1927. There were a few bits damaged beyond repair, but it meant that we got all but five minutes of the original cut back.

Have I mentioned that the film is amazing? The film is amazing.

Brazil — The Director’s Cut

Terry Gilliam had such a hard time getting the film released at all that The Battle Of Brazil is a book entirely about Gilliam fighting against the studio’s attempt to bury it, which then spawned a documentary film. Gilliam showed the movie at film schools and art houses on the sly in his campaign to bring attention to it.

Finally the studio relented, but in a final tragedy they held Gilliam to his contractual obligation to deliver a film within a certain runtime. To keep the studio from hacking the film entirely to bits, Gilliam cut out ten minutes of footage from the finished film he had been showing around.

That theatrical edit was still hailed as a great film and became a staple of rep houses, where I fell in love with it as a young film nerd. But a decade later Criterion, the prestiguous home video publisher of classic and arthouse films, made Gilliam’s original edit available.

Gilliam was right to be frustrated by the theatrical version. The full version includes a scene unnecessary to the plot but underlining the film’s theme, the terrifying secret police revealed as working joes griping about their day, oblivious to the horrors they commit. It’s good to have the real thing back.

Blade Runner — The Final Cut

Possibly the most famous director’s cut to find its way to a broad audience, and one of the few to eventually displace the original theatrical version almost entirely.

Warner Bros had wanted a sci-fi action blockbuster, but director Ridley Scott delivered a textured, alienating science fiction art film. To make the movie more accessible, the studio insisted on adding a introductory title card, a happy ending, and voiceover narration throughout. Harrison Ford recorded a deliberately stilted voiceover track in an attempt to help Scott talk the studio out of using it, but the trick didn’t work.

The resulting film was not the hit they hoped for, but despite the voiceover and other flaws, Blade Runner became a favorite of film buffs, including me. I saw it in its original release and was a little too young for it. I rediscovered it as a budding film nerd in college, re-watching it obsessively. I no longer rank it among my top-tier favorites but it remains the film I have watched more times than any other.

Because cinephile love made it a rep house perennial, prints of an early assembly cut from before the studio’s changes found its way to screens, misrepresented as a “director’s cut”. Scott felt frustrated by that version’s lack of polish, but the interest people showed in it led to the studio coöperating with Scott to create a proper Director’s Cut. The resulting film was subtly different and better. Then Ridley Scott’s ongoing success in his career made it possible for him to get one more bite at the apple, making a host of fine adjustments and even shooting a bit of new footage more than two decades after principal photography had originally wrapped.

Despite having seen the original theatrical cut dozens of times, the Final Cut is so right that it has almost completely displaced that version from my memory.

Dark City — Director’s Cut

I had long thought that this edition just removed the opening narration forced into the theatrical release which undercut its surreal-mysterious tone, but seeing it recently revealed that it adds 11 minutes of footage to expand several scenes a bit, and to significantly alter the closing psychic-battle setpiece.

Fixing the opening is definitely an improvement, as I aleady knew from skipping it when watching with friends who were new to the film. I’m not so sure the other changes are worthwhile. That psychic battle landed as a little goofy even when it was new; having more of the effects which have not aged well belabors the inherent problems with the ending. Though is sure does land as anticipating The Matrix, which arrived the following year.

Maybe I need to make my own fan edit which never shows us the city from the outside?

Star Trek: The Motion Picture — Director’s Edition

Nerdy, obscure, and amazing.

I grew up a Star Trek kid. I was the right age to be entranced by the goofy Filmation animated series when it was originally broadcast, grew into nerdlove for the original series in syndication, and was still young enough when the first feature film was released that I was uncritically delighted to see new Trek on the big screen at all.

But by the time ST: The Motion Picture was released for home video, my tastes had matured enough that revisiting it revealed that how the film was a clumsy slog. I had heard rumours about how The Motion Picture had suffered from Studio Meddling. Since the special effects shots were expensive some suit had insisted on including every bit of them, whether they served the story or not, filling the second act with a stultifying series of shots of the crew of the Enterprise looking at clouds through the viewscreen. To spare time for that nonsense, a bunch of character stuff and ideas landed on the cutting room floor.

It did not stand up in contrast with The Wrath Of Khan and the run of pretty good original cast Trek films which were still coming out. Then there was Next Generation. Then other Treks. I thought I would never look back at Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.

This wasn’t a beloved classic the studio could cash in on investing in like Blade Runner; even the famously enthusiastic Trek fandom admitted that it was a dud. There wasn’t a better cut just sitting on the shelf like there was with Brazil.

But the studio still had the footage that didn’t make it in to the theatrical release, director Robert Wise just couldn’t let go of the thought of the better film he had wanted to make, and a lot of film professionals have a soft spot for Trek. Wise doesn’t call what he and a host of enthusiasts did a restoration of his cut, he says they got to finish an unfinished film. They didn’t just trim out the clouds and weave the story beats back in, they worked on everything. They improved the sound design. They cleaned up the effects shots they wanted to keep. They made new effects shots to replace things they originally hadn’t had time, or money, or capacity to do back in the 1970s, careful to match the distinctive look of the original effects.

The resulting labor of love is not just a marvel of craft or just a good Trek film. It’s a great Trek film. It may not have quite the appeal to non-fans of The Wrath Of Khan or The Voyage Home (the one with the whales!) but anyone who likes Trek at all will enjoy it, and for anyone who ever loved the original series it is a true gift.

Alien³ — The Legacy Cut

The theatrical version of this film was so bad that it nearly killed the franchise. I saw it on its original release, which was an unnerving experience. The first few scenes were so gripping that I thought the universally negative reviews were lunacy. The next few scenes didn’t quite work. Then the next few scenes were weaker still, and it continued to decline through an incoherent second act, and then further still to an excruciatingly hokey ending. Strong turns by Sigorney Weaver and Charles Dance couldn’t save it. It’s a pile of crap.

It was well known to have come out of a horrendous production process. There had been a succession of scripts and directors — including a script by William Neuromancer Gibson which one can now find adapted to comics and as an audio drama — and was already wildly over-budget when young David Fincher took the reins to direct his first feature. The filmmaking and wrestling with the studio was such a mess that Fincher is said to have come close to refusing to have his name on it. He hasn’t just refused to attempt a new cut of the film, he is so bitter that he has refused to ever talk about the movie at all.

The studio tried to lure fans into paying for a home video release of this unloved mess by creating a box set of Alien films with a bunch of special features, including what they called the Alien³ Assembly Cut, a Frankenstein’s Monster made without Fincher’s involvement incorporating a bunch of unused footage and reference images for special effects that were never made. I gather that the result is a hash that makes one wonder what might have been. That non-film inspired a crew of nerds to create this fan edit, tinkering with the arrangement of scenes and fleshing out missing effects.

The result is better than anyone who has seen the theatrical version would believe possible. It’s not as good as the original Alien or James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, but that is praising it with faint damnation; I think it’s better than the sequels Ridley Scott has given us. If you have a taste for the series it’s worth a couple of hours.

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition

While I’m nerding out, I have to point to these James Cameron re-edits of two of his films.

The theatrical release of The Abyss was good but sloppy, and the ending was completely broken. We are lucky to have the Extended Edition even though it remains more than a little shaggy.

I understand why some people prefer the theatrical version of Aliens — it’s so tight that you could bounce a quarter off of it — but I concur with Cameron’s judgement in creating the Special Edition, if only to have the sentry guns pile on even more suspense.

Ones I want to see

The Dark Side Of Oz

Probably the most-seen fan edit ever made, in part because anyone can re-make it DIY: it’s just The Wizard Of Oz with the sound off, playing Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side Of The Moon as a soundtrack. There was a craze for it back in the 1990s, when video rental through Blockbuster was at its peak; reputedly there’s a lucky alchemy in the way the tracks of the album align with events in the film.

Despite listening to the album a billion times when I was young somehow I never got around to trying this. One of these days.

Silent Hill — Restless Dreams

I have not played the vidya game, but an enthusiast for it introduced me to the film adaptation. It doesn’t quite work, but it is so atmospheric that I found it seductive anyway.

Fan edit enthusiasts rank this one of the best examples of the form; rumor has it that even the movie’s director likes it.

Raising Cain — Director’s Cut

There are a lot of director’s cuts broadly recognized as better than the original theatrical version. There are a lot of fan edits which many fans call better than the original theatrical version. There are even a few fan edits which directors have praised. But I think this film is unique in being such a good a fan edit the original film’s director annointed it “The Director’s Cut”.

Admirable humility by Brian De Palma.

Bateman Begins: An American Psycho

This is a weird one. Christian Bale played both Patrick Bateman, the titular main character in American Psycho, and also Batman in the three Christopher Nolan films, so an enterprising fan has stitched the two films together to suggest that they are the same guy.

It’s so crazy, it just might work. I have to find out.

Blood Simple — Director’s Cut

An oddity both in that it tightens the the movie to be a few minutes shorter and that many fans fault it as inferior to the theatrical version.

End Of Skywalker

Nosing around the internet, I find a lot of people calling this the best of the sequel trilogy re-edits, mining footage from all three films and using the subtitles trick to assemble a single feature telling a significantly different story. That’s not as seductive as the Kurosawa conceit, but I’m curious.

As with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, the sequel trilogy is frustrating. The Force Awakens demonstrates impressive craft but not quite the resonance someone who grew up with Star Wars hopes for, The Last Jedi is divisive (I adore the way it brings Luke Skywalker full circle), and The Rise Of Skywalker wraps it up with … a total trainwreck. That last is particularly bitter given the gorgeous production design, actors’ strong performances, and nifty action setpieces it wasted. Good ingredients for stone soup.

The Empire Strikes Back — Revisited

It’s easy to pitch me on the fan edits above attempting to improve on Star Wars at its worst, but why mess with The Empire Strikes Back, generally recognized as the best Star Wars feature film?

Well, I found fans insisting that this edit is actually better than the original film. I didn’t think I needed to see Empire again at all, but my curiousity is piqued.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

The Superman II we got was a remake of an unfinished film the world never saw. The original plan for the 1970s Superman movie was to leverage the cost of the ambitious production by doing two films worth of principal photography, in the hope that profits from the first film could fund post-production on the second film. It almost worked. After a long, difficult production, director Richard Donner delivered Superman: The Movie and it was a hit. But budget and production challenges meant that the shooting Donner had done for the sequel was not quite enough to bring the sequel home, and in a complicated behind-the-scenes soap opera, Donner was replaced by Richard Lester.

In order to resolve the legal ambiguity that created in assigning a director’s credit, Lester wound up re-shooting a lot of what Donner had already done. While Lester deserves credit for how rightly beloved Superman II was and remains — “kneel before Zod”! — some of its odder elements are Lester’s additions.

As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a sentimental director and enthusiastic nerds decided to finish the film that might have been. I gather that the result doesn’t have anything like the astonishing polish that the Trek team got to deliver, but I also hear that it qualifies as an interesting real movie.

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

The title is a misnomer. Director Sergio Leone’s true original cut was about 700 minutes long (almost six hours!). This recently released edit was created without him, since he has been dead for 25 years, and it runs “just” just 250 minutes.

The cut Leone preferred is lost to time. There are no records of what it contained, precious few people ever saw it, and he is not alive to tell anyone about it. Legend describes it as a glorious, fascinating misfire. Since the elaborate production had Leone starting from a ten-hour rough cut, there is no figuring out what Leone wanted to do from first principles.

It was cut down for a showing at Cannes, then cut again for limited release, then at the point when it finally got a full a full US theatrical release it had been whittled down to a broken 139 minutes. But then in the years since Leone’s death there has been a trickle of different releases adding more and more things back in. It seems that the latest edit is the most complete version we will ever get.

I have not seen any version. Someday I want to tackle it, and binging the longest available version seems like the way to go.

Dark

Dark was filmed in 2013 and released in 2014 under the title Dying of the Light. The film was taken from me after the first director’s cut, re-edited, scored and mixed without my input.
I offered to revisit the film, cut and mix a new version at my own expense but was denied permission by the producers.
This cut was created using work print DVDs. I had no access to the original hi-res footage and unmixed sound. I used those limitations to my advantage when creating this new film.
I was working toward a more aggressive editing style when Dying of the Light was taken away from me. Dark represents the direction I was hoping to go.
Dark was not created for exhibition or personal gain.
It is for historical record.
— Paul Schrader

Found by a friend who says it “largely takes place within Nicolas Cage’s CIA agent’s brain as it is being eaten by a tumor, as he pursues vengeance against a terrorist. I haven’t yet seen the official release, but the re-cut is just wild.

More fan edits

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

The Escape from the Shining Alien Thing from Beyond the Stars

Reputedly a weird, inventive mashup of several films, starting from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Cosmogony

A weird mashup of several films, said to be more “contemplative” than a narrative.

Dune: The Alternative Edition Redux

A fan attempt to recover the novel’s spirit and Lynch’s intent. I have soft spot for some of the weird stuff in the very long “Alan Smithee” cut, so I can imagine how that might be possible. And it gets surprisingly positive commentary.

Wes Craven’s Dark Nightmare

A fan edit of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare which reputedly makes it more psychological than fantastical to good effect. I revisited New Nightmare recently and I found it short of the fresh surprise which impressed me when it was new, so I imagine that there is room to improve the film by re-framing it.

Phantom Of The Paradise — Uncensored Cut Restoration

An elaborate fan project to rescue the lost version of a cult classic.

Paradise

A fan edit weaving together the Ridley Scott Alien sequels into a single film, in an attempt to produce something that makes sense. an attempt to make them make sense.

Hellblazer

A fan edit of Constantine drawing on deleted scenes. It seems there is a lot of opportunity there, given what a mixed bag the theatrical cut was, and the choice of title suggests that the creator shares my love for the ’90s comics. But hard to get.

The Matrix Revolutions Decoded

All the sequels woven into a single feature, much loved for clarifying the source’s themes. One can get a little taste.

More official releases

I want to come back to write these up in greater detail, ideally after seeing them.

Doctor Sleep — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release does amazingly well at sweating down the doorstop of a novel and reconciling King’s novel The Shining with Kubrick’s film The Shining along the way. But there is a lot more to say, so I wonder how it does that.

Little Shop Of Horrors — Director’s Cut

Lots of little changes, plus a big change to the ending, reputedly making it even more Faustian.

Das Boot — Director’s Cut

The theatrical release was already a great film … and it turns out there is a much longer version available.

Highlander 2: The Renegade Version

The director’s attempt to recover as much of the movie they had actually wanted to make as he could. Sort of. But do I care?

That Thing You Do! — Extended Cut

Reputedly better all-around, including that it corrects queer erasure in the theatrical release.

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

The only major change is in the last few minutes … but that is reputedly a profound change.

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

A fair bit longer than the original theatrical version, which evidently makes it land as completely different on a thematic level. During the Iraq war era I had no appetite for a film about the Crusades, but I’m curious.

Blackhat — Director’s Cut

A weak film that came out of a very messy production, and this cut is supposedly very different. But in this case is different actually better?

Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

2026-01-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Capturing a Bluesky thread from Matthew Sheffield.

‪Kai Ryssdal‬ asks:
Fight and help win a world war.
Establish a global order that cements your national power for 80 years.
Blow it all up.
What am I missing?
This is literally what I've been writing and podcasting about for years. I was planning to do an essay on this, but here's a [Bluesky thread].
The main reason is psychology. Due to personal, family, and cultural histories, some people are inherently scared of the world. The fear of the world usually manifests as fear and hatred of new things. They rarely admit to this fear (especially the men), but they show it in their actions of carrying a gun everywhere or thinking that if they don't cheat others first, they will be cheated.
This fear actually proceeds from an even deeper impulse, the belief that quick judgment thinking (what I call memetic epistemology) is superior to extrinsic thinking. They trust their instincts more than anyone else, regardless of their expertise. Conservatives and their reactionary cousins believe that their views are true because they believe them. They don’t need hard proof or to be able to argue for them. They’re “common sense.” This viewpoint is the fundamental unifier of everyone on the right, from atheist ancaps to Christofascists.
Memetic epistemology isn’t inherently bad. It is in fact how we experience love, art, music, faith, and maintain coherence in adversity. But the self-focused, somatic nature of memetic thinking means that it can be dangerous when applied to the world at large.
Society has become so large and so complex that one person can no longer have total mastery of even two fields of knowledge. The paradox of modernity is that each advance in knowledge also creates ignorance, in two major ways. The first is that knowing more things also increases the number of known unknowns. Our models of reality are not reality itself. Scientific laws are descriptions of physical obligation, rather than the obligations themselves. When we describe one thing one way, it unlocks other ways to describe it. This extrinsic epistemic approach has made modern humans able to advance through science in ways that would appear godlike to any ancient human.
But this new way of thinking is knowing through negation. And it’s not how humans did things for the entire history of our species. It’s “unnatural.” For more on the fear of the “unnatural,” please see this recent podcast episode I did with Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: Robert Kennedy’s bizarre obsession with ‘natural’ isn’t going to make Americans healthier: historian of fitness Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on why an obese president has a health secretary who moralizes about wellness (audio).
Cumulative advances in knowledge are threatening to people who only want to use somatic reasoning and who respond to all new things memetically. They want to imitate authorities rather than have humility and accept extrinsic realities through abstraction. This is the conservative epistemology.
Besides piling up all kinds of newfangled things, expansions in knowledge also can liberate minds from social prejudices. For centuries, women and other ethnic groups were not fully human, same-sex attraction wasn’t real, and trans people didn’t exist. As Virginia Heffernan and I recently discussed, this is the problem of other minds. Because cognition is done through hidden states and language is an only a very partial extrusion of thought, we can’t know for sure that other minds are as real as ours: Renee Good and the problem of other minds (audio).
But the problem of other minds also extends to institutions made by other minds. During the Great Depression and after World War II, the United States and many other countries built governmental and international institutions to alleviate poverty and resolve disputes. These institutions and the global order they created were very far from perfect, but they were much better than what existed before. Unfortunately, their creators didn’t realize that they needed to continue to advocate for institutions and to continue to reform them.
People are sometimes surprised that Trump and other reactionary politicians don't have consistent policies. They shouldn’t be. Reactionaries hate abstract systems and coherence. They don’t understand NATO, USAID, public broadcasting, literature, or science. So these things must be destroyed. Government as the ultimate mutual aid, cooperation, consent, and sexual autonomy are concepts that don’t make sense in a worldview where only the strong survive.
There's so much to do to educate the bystanders and the malcontents about what the right wing is doing. Please share if you could!
I forgot to add that it’s no coincidence at all that the emergence of science and liberal democracy happened at the same time. Science and democracy need each other, and it's also no coincidence that reactionaries hate both, as Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discussed with me: Science is under attack because it left the public behind: NIH scientists Mark Histed and Jenna Norton discuss the deep connection between democratic principles and scientific progress (audio).
Science, democracy, and art all go together. And so does sexual freedom. They’re all ways of knowing ourselves, as Savannah Sly and I discussed here: The right-wing wars on science and sex are linked: New Moon Network founder Savannah Sly on the radical right’s attack on self-knowledge and autonomy (audio).

Not exactly my analysis, but related enough to add to my Understanding American Politics index.

Campism

2026-01-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

A long excerpt of the perennial points from a longer post Against Campism by a wise leftist I recommend following, Alley Valkyrie.

What’s campism, you ask?
In short, campism is taking a binary position regarding the current geopolitical alignment of the world, the belief that those who stand in opposition to the same “camp” that you are opposed to need to be supported no matter what.
It’s the ideological/geopolitical version of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which manifests itself as the idea that any leader and/or regime positioned in opposition to the United States needs to be supported in the name of anti-imperialism.
For those who adopt this mindset, the fact that some world leaders who are seen as “enemies” of the United States are also brutal, murderous dictators who oppress, disappear and slaughter their own people is an afterthought, if even that.
More often than not, campists will insist that such beliefs are actually nothing more than Western imperialist propaganda. That in fact, folks such as Assad, Putin, Maduro, and now Khameini are really not so bad after all, and need to be supported because to not support them is to continue to prop up American empire.
[⋯]
Campism is to leftism what a fear of insects is to our personal well-being: an instinct that had a legitimate function in previous stages of our evolution but which nowadays does much more harm than good.
Let me elaborate on the former.
The origins of campism are rooted in the geopolitical shifts that resulted from the emergence of the “Great Powers” in the early 20^th century, which solidified in the years after the Russian Revolution and then cemented itself in the divisions that unfolded due to the Cold War.
The Cold War created three general geopolitical groupings: countries aligned with Western capitalism, countries aligned with Soviet socialism, and the “non-aligned” countries. These three groups are where the concepts of the First, Second, and Third World come from. Three camps, if you will.
But even during the Cold War, when geopolitical lines were much more clearly drawn, adherence to campism could function as a trap. Consider the origin of the idea of tankies, a term which was birthed as a way to distinguish and call out leftists who defended the use of tanks by the Soviets in order to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Those who did so were so blinded by their allegiance to Communism that they either failed to or refused to consider that the reasons why Hungarians were revolting was legitimate and that such a show of force on the part of the Soviets was brutal and unjustified. Those who defended the Soviets in that instance, as well as during the ’68 uprisings in Prague, were engaging in campism and absolutely deserved the pejorative label that they received.
After the fall of the USSR, in the absence of the previously-stated categories, campism reinvented itself into what we see today. In place of a (theoretically) tidy capitalist / communist split, campism ended up taking on the trappings of what’s best referred to as Third Worldism. The divisions redefined themselves as follows: the Global South versus the Global North and / or the underdeveloped world versus the developed world and/or the colonized world versus the colonizer world.
Which is a set of alignments that from a leftist perspective should absolutely act as a guide, a compass, a framework that anchors where we take off from. But after the take off, nuance and critical thinking are paramount, and campism has no use for either. It’s black and white. Good guys, bad guys. And from that, the idea that any leader that the bad guys don’t like must be a good guy.
Which is how you end up with folks like Caitlin Johnstone, who has stanned pretty much every modern-day dictator that’s come up against American empire without fail. For her and other campists, the ends justify the means. The suffering and fate of millions of people is ignored in the service of taking an ideologically pure position against empire.
And such a position is abhorrent.

Internationalism, Anti-Imperialism, And the Origins of Campism has much more.

This paper examines the ideas of people coming out of the left who call themselves “anti-imperialists,” but who have become defenders of dictatorial governments — some of which call themselves Communist or Socialist — that oppress national minorities, beat down movements for democracy, and crush workers’ struggles for a better life. Those who support these authoritarian governments have been called “tankies,” an allusion to those Communists who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or “campists,” referring to the notion that the world is fundamentally divided into two camps, one imperialist and the other anti-imperialist. They have also, and more recently, been called “authoritarian leftists” because, though they claim to be on the left, they have become supporters of authoritarian regimes. These people often refer to themselves as “anti-imperialists,” though I would prefer the term “pseudo-anti-imperialist” because these thinkers and organizations do not in reality consistently oppose all imperialism. I have, however, used the term “campist” here simply because it is shorter and more convenient.

Virus-cautious socializing

2026-01-12T17:42:00.000-08:00

Looking at covid, flu, et cetera, my sweetheart & I are trying to live a virus-cautious life, so that compels us to have a protocol for socializing.

Indoors

Just as one doesn’t like to share air with folks wrestling with obvious symptoms like coughing, we are wary of folks who have been in big risky crowds et cetera in the last few days.

Since rapid covid tests are not so accurate these days, we pack a Metrix test kit for use before sharing indoor air … though the awkward bit is that it takes 30 minutes to run the test. Ideally we would build a small circle of folks testing.

We are also looking at more aggressive HEPA filters and far-UV lights improving the odds.

Outdoors

We have both gas & electric heaters set up for our covered patio. They aren’t strong enough to overcome the coldest times of winter, but they take the edge off enough to be cozy on a chilly day if one also dresses warmly.

We are also trying to cultivate a list of venues with covered & heated outdoor seating.

Victoria Bar
our favorite, with good nosh — NE Albina
The Rambler Bar
N Mississippi
¿Por Qué No?
taqueria — SE Hawthorne
Bar Maven, Bar Carlo, Shami Cafe, 5 & Dime Bar
surprisingly good food (except 5&D) but none of these have heat outside — SE Foster

We are also up for an adventure to try places like …

Mirisata Restaurant
Sri Lankan food — SE Belmont
Laurelhurst Market
a world of beef — E Burnside
Tiny Bubble Room
taproom & grill — N Lombard
Interurban Saloon
N Mississippi
The Knock Back Bar
NE Alberta

Divination and “AI”

2026-01-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

I am an esotericist who takes divination seriously as a thinking process, neither more nor less different from electrical engineering than film theory differs from medical diagnosis.

Contrary to what some esotericists and most civilians imagine, when doing divination using tarot cards (or I Ching hexagrams, or runes, or astrological charts, or whatever) one need not believe that the Cosmos delivers wisdom through a spooky process which controls which of these tokens come up.

Each token in a divinatory system (a card or rune or whatever) has a complex, multivalent meaning. Famously, the Death card in tarot does not necessarily mean actual death — readers take it more often as signifying sharp changes and transitions, carving away the unimportant to attend to the important, and so forth. I personally like tarot because of how this manifests in the complexity of the imagery on the cards, but even a spare, simple rune has this quality; isa (ᛁ) signifies ice, stillness, reflection, observation, facing fear, endurance, the antithesis to primordial fire, and more. Learning a divinatory system involves developing a rich, complex sense of what each token can signify.

During divination, drawing several random tokens offers the reader a big bouquet of symbolism rich in meaning. The reader’s mind surveys that, picks out elements, and synthesizes those into a description of what they see the tokens “saying”. This is not a reasoned process, it is an “intuitive” process. Reading tarot, I find that different elements of a card stand out for me in different readings; I may focus on the fallen king under Death’s horse in one reading, then in the next reading find myself thinking about the odd sunrise (or is it a sunset?) between two towers in the background.

What are the mechanics of that “intuition”? One can conceive of it as receiving information from spiritual forces & entities, or one can conceive of it as an entirely psychological-materialist process. Practitioners commonly describe how everything feeds a divinatory reading — not just the tokens but the querant’s question, what the reader notices about the querent, what the reader knows about life, et cetera. This is the kind of subtle mental process Freud was trying to address by talking about conscious thought being the tip of an iceberg which included “das Unbewusste”, the unconscious. Does das Unbewusste draw on information from spirits or other cosmic forces? Jung thought so, and many readers find it useful to think so. Jung would also say that the Cosmos arranges synchronicities — meaningful coïncidences — so that the hand of the Cosmos chooses the right tokens to appear. But one may also presume that contemplating a novel mix of arbitrary symbols just brings forward analysis das Unbewusste does on information it has received through mundane channels, that perceiving meaning in the spread of tokens is just a useful illusion.

Esotericists generally counsel resisting the temptation to overthink those mechanics. I embrace a radical agnosticism on where the insight “really” comes from … though in doing divination I find it very helpful to pretend as hard as I can that the particular tokens which come up contain a carefully-composed message from the Cosmos.

The relationship between a querent and a reader parallels the relationship between a reader and a spread of tokens. What a querent absorbs from a reading is the querent’s own process of “intuitive” interpretation drawing on the set of ideas the reader presents to them. I submit that this double cascade of interpretation further demonstrates how divination is a structured thinking process; doing divination solo, a querent drawing their own tokens without a reader, is notoriously difficult.

Software systems attempting to deliver divination have been around for decades, but they are unsatisfying. Having a computer program spit out a fixed meaning for a tarot card or astrological correspondence — “beep trine between the Sun and Saturn signifies a need for caution in financial & business concerns beep” — does none of the subtle analysis I describe above. This is the same difficulty as doing divination solo.

But I wonder about LLMs, the technology animating recent discussion of “AI”. I have a hunch that they might enable better divination robots than the proceedural software systems of the past. The way I describe the mental process in divination above seems to rhyme with the way people (sometimes dangerously) project meaning into the output of LLM babblebots. Maybe a querent can exercise the Eliza Effect with an LLM as a substitute for a human reader? Or cultivate that as a skill easier to develop than ordinary solo reading?

Over on Bluesky, a wise esotericist I know challenges this suggestion:

This idea is disgusting to me on principle. This only makes sense to do if you don’t think spiritual matters are real, because if they are, then the unethical and exploitative nature of the tech is surely a form of spiritual pollution you wouldn’t want touching your divination.

As both an esotericist and as a nerd skeptical of “AI” boosters’ breathless enthusiasm for supposed applications of LLMs, I share that impulse, but I am also trying to resist becoming a reflexive LLM hater.

I think they were partly responding my original thread’s implication that an LLM might do a human spiritual process, which I do not want to suggest.

Rather, considering the potential usefulness of a divination robot depends on a couple of big ifs. Are there querents who do not need the full support of a human reader’s insight, but do need a more digestible instrument than raw tokens to provoke their own spiritual insight? Can an LLM do the necessary work of symbolic refinement to provide something useful to that purpose? Does divination require an input of spiritual insight beyond what lies within the querent — if not a human reader, Something Else like a conscious nonhuman spirtual entity?

I don’t know. Surely someone is trying the experiment?

The tale of RMS Carpathia

2025-12-15T20:07:00.000-08:00

I’m overdue to keep a link to this great telling of one of my favorite stories: the RMS Carpathia rescuing surivors of the wreck of the Titanic.

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

Have a hanky handy. I’ve read this dozens of times and it makes me weepy every time.

Also: in case you didn’t already know, this story will show you that the Starship Enterprise is a steamship.

Clarifying common social justice praxis

2025-11-21T13:50:00.000-08:00

Social justice is not my primary political project, so I don’t want to claim profound expertise. But having rolled with people who are serious social justice advocates for a long time, I have a developed a distinctive way of articulating some key things which some people find useful. This post is no place to start thinking about social justice, but I hope that it will help clarify other commentaries.

The left
Liberal vs identity politics
Hard vs soft identity politics
Identity politics concepts

Fundamentals

Social justice

The term should be familiar. I like to name a few things explicitly.

Praxis is a word much-used by leftists to name to the manifestation of ideas through practices.

Social justice means addressing injustices pervasively experienced by social groups: the sexism women encounter, the racism people of color encounter, et cetera.

Social justice advocacy more specifically refers to the practice of attempting to correct social injustices. There are a range of different approaches, grounded in different analyses of how social injustices work. This post is mostly an attempt at clarifying how some major approaches work.

Social justice advocacy culture is an expression I use to distinguish advocates’ driving ideologies from the social norms & practices people exercise in the course of doing advocacy. This can be useful, for instance, in naming that one embraces the feminist project & analysis while faulting some moves feminists tend to make … or vice versa.

Opponents of social justice include people acting from a few different principles. Some assert that American society is fundamentally just, with social justice advocates misrepresenting how the world works. Some accept that the conditions social justice advocates point to are at least partly real, but reject addressing them as impractical, or entirely impossible. Some recognize those conditions but assert either implicitly or explicitly that those conditions are right & good. I find it useful to talk about these types together while recognizing that they are not simply all the same.

The left

We should not just conflate social justice advocacy with “the left”.

We need to start with clarity about the term “left”, which can mean a few different things. (I have a long post on the subject.) To name to the range from Democratic Party moderates to Maoist revolutionaries and countless points in between, I like to refer to “the broad left”.

Leftism — or The Left — is the portion of the broad left which calls for profound institutional change replacing capitalism with some form of socialism (not just social insurance like single-payer health care, but public control of factories et cetera). Within both groups one can find many different relationships with social justice — frameworks for understanding, policy approaches, and degrees of attention.

Leftists often contrast themselves with “liberals” or “libs”, people who share the broad policy objectives of the Democratic Party. I like to use “lib” to make clear that I mean liberal-not-leftist rather than “liberal” in another sense.

Social justice advocacy is not just the same thing as the broad left, leftism, or lib. Social justice advocacy on the broad right is rare, but does exist. Some people on the broad left have a weak enough concern with social justice that they do not qualify as advocates. Many social justice advocates conceive themselves as leftists; many others do not. Some leftists consider social justice advocacy a distraction from economic class as the important locus of political action; others take the full range of social justice advocacy as as so entangled with economic class that they must be addressed together.

Two big social justice ideologies

Among social justice advocates in the US one finds two broad ideological schools with profound differences. The failure of social justice advocacy culture to articulate these schools clearly produces a lot of confusion. Alas, as when talking about the left, the most precise terms of art invite confusion, but we have no better alternative.

The liberal school is more familiar to most who do not have a deep engagement with social justice advocacy culture. “Liberal” in this context is different from what leftists call “lib”, it means liberal in a deeper sense: the approach to governance & society which grounds political claims in democratic institutions and universal egalitarian rights. (To specify that sense, I often abbreviate liberal democracy as “libdem”.) One may summarize the liberal school of social justice as:

calling for equal rights for all
vigorously rejecting institutional discrimination
exercising institutional power to counter private discrimination

The identity politics school has come to dominate US social justice advocacy culture in recent decades. Unhappily, this name for it is most often used as a bogeyman by opponents of any efforts toward social justice, but we need to be able to distinguish this framework from the liberal school, and no other term will do. (The nearest alternative term in use, “woke-ism”, is even worse.) “Identity politics” first appeared in print in the 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement, and one can learn a lot about this approach to social justice by reading that early document. I summarize the identity politics school as:

examining the particular group categories society imposes on individuals’ identities (race, gender, et cetera)
actively countering the unequal relationships between those groups in every context (cultural, social, institutional, et cetera)
therefore considering the universalism of the liberal school inadequate for achieving social justice; as Anatole France famously snarked, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”

Hard vs soft identity politics

I find it not just illuminating but important to distinguish “soft” from “hard” identity politics. This distinction is my own coinage, but I find that it helps make sense of where people stand.

Soft identity politics embraces both the liberal and identity politics approaches. It sees them as complimentary, acting as counterweights to each other’s limitations.

Hard identity politics rejects any other approach to social justice as illegitimate. It sees the liberal school as nothing other than an instrument for maintaining & justifying inequities.

One cannot draw an entirely bright line between these tendencies. Among the soft school, people may lean more or less on liberal or identity politics frameworks, often changing their priorities in different contexts. Among the hard school people still sometimes invoke liberal language about rights et cetera despite their rejection of the liberal framework.

Identity politics concepts

To understand what the identity politics school is — and to make a lot of social justice praxis legible — I find it clarifying to reïntroduce some key vocabulary & concepts from its analytical toolkit, since advocates do not always introduce them crisply.

The term equity directs attention to bottom-line outcomes, in contrast with liberal ideas of rights & process equality. This famous cartoon offers a metaphor:

Identity politics registers that different axes of identity (race, gender, et cetera) operate in similar ways. In particular, it refers to relative advantage as privileged positions (white people, men, etc) and refers to relative disadvantage as oppressed or marginalized positions (people of color, women, etc). “Privilege” in this context neither contrasts with rights nor denotes the particular advantages of high economic class; the term stuck despite those misleading resonances because a famous 1991 commentary used it well in speaking to college-educated white feminist women.

Identity politics articulates several ways that different privileged positions operate similarly, just as different marginalizatized positions do. For example, culture tends to frame privileged positions as “normal”, while taking marginalized positions as deviation from that norm, so a privileged identity often goes unmarked while a marginalize identity is marked even when it was irrelevant — one will hear references to a “Black doctor” or a “female doctor” much more often than to a “white doctor” or “male doctor”.

Identity politics also examines the unique characteristics of each axis, and intersectionality names its body of ideas for addressing how people’s positions on mutliple axes interact in complex ways. No one is simply privileged or marginalized. A gay Black man experiences privilege along the axis of gender while experiencing marginalization on the axes of sexuality and race. Each identity complicates the others; a gay Black man experiences racism differently than a Black straight man or a Black lesbian woman does.

The identity politics school has a vocabulary for talking about different mechanisms which produce inequities — personal, interpersonal, institutional, structural, and more. This expands the scope of social justice advocacy beyond impacts of overt bigotry & discrimination, trying to overcome systemic inertia from ignorance, misunderstandings, inequities in financial & social capital, et cetera. Thus it uses “racism” to refer to everything which creates & sustains racial inequities, rather than to refer just to racial bigotry; likewise for sexism, homophobia, etc. This makes it easy to get confused about which processes we are talking about in a particular instance; I try to never deploy terms like “racism” alone, instead specifying “racist bigtory”, “systemic racism”, et cetera.

Because of this attention to systems beyond bigotry, identity politics underlines that one can participate in injustices without exercising bigotry at all — that indeed one inevitably will unless one makes deliberate efforts toward antiracist / antisexist / etc action, especially along the axes where one occupies a privileged position. The aphorism “impact, not intent” reminds us how focusing on the particulars of bigotry (intent) can become a distraction from understanding & correcting how one implicitly enables unjust processes (impact).

One practical application of impact-not-intent is that nouning is considered harmful: one should avoid asking whether a person is a racist or a sexist et cetera. Instead, we should name the things they should do to better support justice, without disqualifying their whole moral character. I sometimes express that by saying things like, “I don’t think you are a racist, but when you X you are doing racism, so you should change that”.

Grappling with criticisms

Reasonable people of good conscience can come to significantly different conclusions about how best to understand & correct social injustices. Vigorous contention among social justice advocates is healthy, inherently difficult, and necessary.

Personally, I find the identity politics toolkit for overcoming the limits of libdem unmistakably necessary … and I am committed to taking libdem remedies as far as possible before venturing beyond them, so I stand with soft identity politics. I find wisdom and allies from folks in both both the hard liberal and the hard identity politics camps. One must respect people committed to the project whom one considers mistaken.

I also think that successful social justice advocacy requires admitting significant problems in social justice advocacy culture.

There are a few social justice advocates who I think we must keep far from the levers of power. So it goes: there will always be smug, noisy assholes whose voices carry when they rationalize themselves with so-called political principle. But in any movement one can easily misread loud voices as more significant than they are. The worst ideas and actors in social justice advocacy hold no significant power, and will not any time soon.

Similarly, while I see obstacles to a healthy culture of social justice advocacy within the movement I recognize that more dysfunctions emerge from necessary adaptations to constant attacks from outside: sincere misunderstandings or deliberate bad faith. Even the movement’s greatest failings are not nearly so bad as opponents of social justice suggest.

Those defenses made, I see a need to talk about criticisms at length, for several reasons.

Addressing criticisms is important on the merits. I have posted before about concerns because we can and should do better.

Addressing criticisms serves the primary misson of this post, delivering clarity to people sympathetic to the project of social justice who find encounters with social justice advocacy disorienting and frustrating. Facing a blizzard of nonsense objections to social justice makes it hard for advocates to register legitimate anxieties about our practices under all the noise. Failure to address legitimate-but-mistaken concerns tends to drive good people away. Clarifying things people react to and putting them in perspective helps people find ways to engage productively even when they remain skeptical. This is why, for instance, this post names a distinction between social justice versus social justice advocacy culture; I want to defuse any tendency to reject the project of social justice because of stinging encounters with movement culture.

Addressing criticisms refuses to cede the ground of critiquing social justice advocacy culture to opponents of social justice. I don’t want opponents to look more credible than they are by saying “we are the only ones talking about XYZ”.

Addressing criticisms supports improvements in developing better praxis. When we cannot sustain an internal dialogue about a problem, new critiques cannot build on past efforts or address those efforts’ limitations, re-starting from Square One, reïnventing the wheel. (I find it particularly galling that social justice advocacy culture has let our opposition repeatedly coöpt our terms of art for self-reflection, including not just “identity politics” but also “political correctness”, “social justice warrior”, “woke”, and others.)

So below I try to name some common troubles in social justice praxis, focusing on things which I find that people unfamiliar with advocacy tend to mis- or over-read.

Faux liberalism

A lot of criticism of social justice advocacy which exercises libdem language is either deceit or wank rationalizing inaction which leaves inequities in place. One can see this fundamental problem in one of critics’ classic moves: demanding that we demonstrate to their satisfaction that an inequity emerges directly from bigotry severe enough that acting to correct it is possible and morally necessary.

Social justice advocates often reject that move from bitter experience with such critics refusing to ever accept that we have proved that case. I find it useful to challenge an assumption lurking within critics’ demand of “proof”: the burden of proof should fall on suggestions that an inequity may be fair, starting from the presumption that inequities are unjust.

Consider people framing their objections to antiracist policies as standing for “equality of opportunity, not opportunity of outcome”. How do they account for every metric one can find revealing white people better off than Black people? It is trivial to see how in 1950 this reflected discrimination. Today’s inequities pointing in the same direction as past differences in opportunity is a very suspicious coïncidence. If American society changed to provide equal opportunity, when exactly did that happen? 1975? 2008? What evidence supports that claim? If Black people get lesser outcomes from equal opportunity, is that not a claim that Black people are somehow inferior? If one is not a bigot, isn’t it more parimonious to attribute inequity to lingering unfairness in the system? If that unfairness does not emerge from direct discrimination, why would that make the unfairness OK? Even if bigotry were entirely erased from American society — which we know it has not been — we would expect it to leave a lingering systemic legacy, like a traffic jam persisting after cars wrecked in an accident have been cleared. Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can to correct those echoes from past wrongs?

Reflexive anti-liberalism

I respect how faux liberalism inspires impatience with liberal arguments skeptical of identity politics analyses and remedies. The culture of identity politics advocacy sometimes presumes that all support for the liberal school of social justice reflects nothing other than disingenuous opposition to social justice. In my personal experience people offering skepticism framed in shallow liberal terms sometimes turn out to be more goodhearted than they appear, having embraced a misreading of liberal principle because they have given these questions very little thought. I would never demand that any social justice advocate spend the time and energy it takes to walk people out of that thinking, but we should consider it noble to attempt.

Some hard identity politics folks extend that reading yet further. One rarely sees social justice advocates draw the distinction I do between the liberal and identity politics schools because a lot of people committed to identity politics resist recognizing it as a social justice ideology, because they think of it as the only real form of social justice advocacy. This denial of the legitimacy of the the liberal framework often extends to implying that no real liberal tradition in social justice advocacy has ever existed, which would come as a surprise to the people who put the word “rights” in the middle of the name of the Civil Rights Movement.

Language policing

Most social justice advocates consider cultural change as important as institutional change. I have sympathy for this feeling like nitpicking sometimes … though the shock of encountering casual racism, sexism, homophobia, and other bad cultural politics in media just a few decades old makes a strong case that the nitpicking efforts which changed our norms were well worth it. Taking care with language is a big way social justice advocates do this cultural work. But the practice can have messy unintended consequences.

Sometimes preferred language is just an arbitrary signal that one pays attention to social justice. One cannot deduce from antiracist principle that one should say “person of color” rather than “colored person”; one has to absorb the norm from involvement in advocacy culture. This does not make the language hollow — signaling that one pays attention to social justice is good! We should say so, forthrightly. In that particular example, objecting to someone saying “colored person” is fair because the rule is well-known. But in other cases, social justice advocates take offense based on language norms which they presume are better-known than they are. Esoteric language can drive away people with their hearts in the right place who don’t know where to start in getting more engaged with social justice advocacy culture, and can reïnforce social class gatekeeping by presenting a greater challenge to people who have not been exposed to that langauge through a college education or other professional-class spaces.

Social justice advocacy culture responding to people who don’t use the word “racism” the way advocacy culture does presents a particularly fraught example. Advocates often tell people that they are “wrong” to think that “racism” means racial bigotry because the “real” definition of “racism” understands it as a system. Trying to assert the “correct” meaning of “racism” is like trying to identify the “correct” meaning of “God” — the ideas the word represents are too contested. Most dictionaries offer racial bigotry as their first definition of “racism”, and many do not reference racism as a system at all. Countering people talking about racism in terms of bigotry with an assertion about the definition of the word turns the discussion away from the substance of language to the semantics.

At its worst, this becomes a lazy attempt to force people to accept a whole way of thinking about social justice without bothering with the argument for it. I find it both more honest and more effective to say, “Because looking only at bigotry does not reveal enough about how things work, a lot of social justice advocates include everything which produces racial inequities when they use the word ‘racism’ — stuff like honest ignorance, social & financial capital, et cetera. This dignifies all of those processes as important for us to address.” People often object that the way advocates use the word is weird, but they can accept a description of the usage as clarifying, making it possible to talk about the substance of what I am trying to say without spiralling into unanswerable questions about what the word “really” means.

It further undermines attempts to assert an “accurate” definition of “racism” when social justice advocates are not actually precise with their usage of the word. Advocates commonly slip between using “racism” to mean The Big System Of Injustice and using it to mean bigotry. That sloppy language makes advocacy look like sloppy thinking … because in those cases, it is slopping thinking, implying that systemic inequities prove the presence of bigotry without presenting an argument, which walks right into the trap I described of faux-liberal skepticism insisting on “proof” of bigtory.

Social justice advocacy culture needs to do better at delivering the care with language in practice which it calls for in principle.

Absolutism

Sometimes social justice advocates over-read tendencies as absolutes.

Understanding from lived experience

Standpoint theory registers that one’s identity positions have an inescapably profound impact on one’s encounter with the world, which makes it good praxis to value lived experience: people in a marginalized position have a generally more sophisticated read of the inequities along that axis, and the mechanics of how those inequities work, than people in a privileged position do. Women see sexism more clearly than men, et cetera. We can recognize that while also understanding that sometimes a man may happen to have an insight into sexism which a woman does not.

But this sometimes does stiffen into an abolute form. I have been told that a particular fact I have offered about the history of feminism which a woman did not happen to know could not possibly be correct, because men must always defer to women’s lived experience of sexism. I have seen social justice advocates insist that the lived experience of queer people are the only ground for understanding homophobia, which may make us dismiss a useful insight from a straight historian because it differs from queer cultural memory. This can produce maddening paradoxes, calling on people in privileged positions to speak out against injustices but then scolding them when they do.

This is tricky to navigate! Correcting over-reliance on lived experience is not always worth the effort. People in privileged positions need to learn to correct for their tendency to misdiagnose these problems as far more prevalent than they are. My fact about feminist history was not all that important. On balance, relying too much on queer cultural memory will still deliver a better understanding of how homophobia works than being too credulous with straight historians.

It is particularly important to draw a distinction between theory and action. Since no position sees everything, dialogue between the privileged and the marginalized is necessary as we try to make sense of things together. In making sense of things, the marginalized should exercise a little patience while the privileged must step carefully to avoid trying that patience. In deciding what to do, the privileged must defer to the choices of the marginalized, since marginalized people face higher stakes.

Campism

The privilege–marginalization framework inherits a lot from the anticolonial work of Franz Fanon, who underlined the importance of always checking one’s politics against whether or not it supports the oppressed in overcoming their oppression at the bottom line, summarized in the famous aphorism that the oppressed have a right to overthrow their oppression by any means necessary.

If one actually reads Fanon, he cautions about the dangers in reducing that analysis to a campism which justifies any and every brutality the oppressed might commit. He supported liberation by any means necessary, not by any means possible. I have encountered people falling into the trap he warns about, claiming a moral impunity for frightening ruthlessness, in a creepy parallel with Carl Schmitt’s fascist “friend-enemy distinction”. That kind of vulgar Fanon-ism should give us the cold spooky.

Oppression Olympics

If the only ground for understanding is the experience of the marginalized … how do we discern who resolve whose marginalization is legitimate and relevant in context? Some “feminists” claim that men accepting trans women’s account of transphobia illegitimately favors trans women (who are privileged because they are “really” men) over cis women (who are the marginalized group). Trans women call this a demand that we favor privileged cis people over marginalized trans people. Deferring to the marginalized in itself cannot resolve the question, we must compare claims on some other basis. (Relatively easy in this case, since transphobic feminists are liars.)

This interlocks with campism; if any ruthlessness is justified in the name of the marginalized, then correctly identifying who is most marginalized is hugely consequential, creating an oppression Olympics. “Intersectionality” names the importance of not doing that, because the dynamics are always complex and entangled.

Cancel culture

I have another post directly addressing this one. There is no better example of a genuine challenge which opponents of social justice grossly exaggerate. Two key points:

the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Manifestos for a new America

2025-11-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

We have no choice but to think big.

The ongoing reälignment of American politics which produced the Trump regime is already at least as profound as the emergence of the New Deal administrative state. Given the course I imagine for the Trump regime, we will need a reconstruction as profound as the unfinished reconstruction after the Civil War. Not just policy. Not even just governance or an economic system. A full new social vision with its own ethos.

I’m starting to see manifestos, so I’m going to index them here.

Visions

Liberal Currents
Reforging America

A word from Samantha Hancox-Li of Liberal Currents, where people are thinking about the muscular, radical liberalism I yearn for.

The mainspring of governance

Congress must be revitalized internally
Congress must reassert itself vis-a-vis the other branches
Most importantly, the link between the Congress and the people must be reforged
A world of abundance
We must clear out regulations that serve only to create artificial scarcity
We must run a hotter economy than the neoliberals allowed
We should invest in basic public goods
We should re-found the world trade system

America for all
We must invest in public and higher education
We must finally arrive at a new settlement on immigration
We must prosecute all the criminals of Trump II.
We must rebuild our public sphere

Liberal Currents
Dennis Lytton

A cluster of commentaries on fixing some Constitution-level problems.

The UnPopulist
The Reconstruction Agenda

The Reconstruction Agenda, a new project of The UnPopulist, will take this problem seriously, building on its Fireproofing the Presidency series. Its Executive Watch project is diligently documenting the copious abuses of the office emanating from this White House. The Reconstruction Agenda will propose fixes and mechanisms to avoid such a scenario from transpiring ever again. Through written analysis from myself and outside experts, along with regular in-depth interviews on The Reconstruction podcast, it will examine how American democracy became so brittle and how it might be rebuilt. The goal is to value genuine expertise and make it accessible to any thoughtful reader. You’re smart people and you deserve smart answers, not clickbait and ill-informed punditry, nor nihilistic doomerism. The task before us is restoring the capacity for freedom and self-government, not simply lamenting its decline.

The Reconstructionist
re: Constitution

A proposed novel structure for governance.

The two largest alterations are the creation of a unitary legislative leadership structure and functional bicameralism. A unitary legislative leader is effective a non-executive prime minister, a Speaker of Congress, while functional bicameralism is dividing the chambers by role not just method of election and apportionment. That would see a superior ‘overslature’ primarily manage legislation and appropriations while an inferior ‘underslature’ would primarily manage oversight and revision.

Constitutional daydreams

My own musings on a different constitional order enabled by a novel voting system.

Manifestos for a manifesto

These are not quite manifestos themselves, but rather smart comments framing what we need from a manifesto.

Jamelle Bouie
America Broke Something When It Gave Trump a Second Chance

⋯ A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not for restoration of what was.
⋯
During Reconstruction, after the Civil War, Republicans worked to refound the nation as a democratic and egalitarian republic that embodied the values of the Declaration of Independence. “By the Constitution it is stipulated that ‘the United States shall guaranty to every state a republican form of government,’” said Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in his eulogy for Abraham Lincoln, “but the meaning of this guaranty must be found in the birthday Declaration of the Republic, which is the controlling preamble of the Constitution. Beyond all question, the United States, when called to enforce the guaranty, must insist on the equality of all before the law, and the consent of the governed.” Such, he continued, “is the true idea of republican government according to American institutions.”

Timothy Burke
Working On Our Ism

We are against Trump and Farage and LePen and Orban and Weidel, but what are we for? What do we call it, if “socialism” is either hopelessly abstract or tied to references that don’t translate into the present? Could we give a positive, e.g., not defined by negation, description of what electoral majorities want other than fascism or ethnonationalism, and from that granular description, coin a new ism?
[⋯]
What I think we need is something like a list of propositions that many of us agree with deep in the bone, that we feel, without any attempt to specify implementations, laws or policies. If we do this right, I think we can find some basic ideas that a very substantial majority agree on, even including some people who might right now be voting for authoritarian or ethnonationalist parties.
[⋯]
But somewhere in all of that is not so much an anti-capitalism, defined by negation, but a vision of shared social life that is other than capitalism. Something other than liberal modernity or mass society. To give whatever that it is a name of its own and a pathway to concretization I think involves more conversations about these ideas before we try to make parties or movements or policies.

Brad DeLong
“The Permanent Problem of the Human Race”

A liberal economist observes that this is a integral to the history of economic thinking and its limitations.

Brink’s major diagnosis of the ills of modernity is that the society we have built while an absurdly rich society is also a terrifying mass society: we confront it as producer-cogs in labor markets, as consumer-cogs in product markets, and as parasocial information- and entertainment-consumers who then find themselves without agency to affect anything at all worthwhile. All human associative groups and markers of cohesion and particularity have been steamed away.
We have market economies with their price signals and their equilibria. We have states—democratic states, for now at least—setting-up rules of interaction and issuing commands via what really is a tremendously efficient bureaucratic order. We have ideologies creating and enforcing common values and orientations and operating procedures to a degree that the Prussian General Staff college dreamed of but never managed to attain. And we always have the possibility of a charismatic personalist dictatorship, law-abiding or not, giving mass society direction. on the other — whether by a market equilibrium, a bureaucratic command, an ideological conformity — enforcement, or an overmighty authoritarian personalist dictator.
All of that is necessary for us to be extraordinarily productive as we are.
Yet these societal-scale institutions squash the individual: liberate us from material scarcity and personal hierarchical domination and empower us to control nature and organize ourselves on the one hand, but subject us to the dominion of extraordinary strong powers — market systems, bureaucratic systems, ideological systems, and now algorithmic systems — that seem arbitrary and alien. They seem so because they are. They make us their playthings, controlling us by making us offers we dare not refuse, for refusing them hobbles our very valuable extraordinary material prosperity.
And so none of that is at the human scale we need for autonomy and agency, and thus for human flourishing.

Robert Ferry
A Democratic Integrity Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

A broadly-conceived, crisply-articulated proposal for correcting Citizens United and much more.

The purpose of this Amendment is to restore self-government by the people by stripping corporations and other artificial entities of constitutional personhood, removing money’s corrupting influence from elections and office, and securing the equal democratic participation of every citizen.

This bit strikes me as clever and useful beyond this context:

Indexed Unit means a sum of money equal at ratification to one-sixteenth of the national median household income for the year preceding ratification, and adjusted annually thereafter, but only thereafter, by the cumulative change in the most widely used national index of consumer prices. The base sum once established shall not vary with later changes in median household income. The Indexed Unit shall be published annually by the Public Integrity Commission.

Jacob T. Levy | Liberty Fund
When a Doctrine Becomes Destructive of These Ends

I emphatically disagree with this reflection on American conceptions of liberal democracy, but think it is a valuable whetstone for thinking about how we should conceive of our most fundamental politics.

Populist politics, ethnonational exclusivism, a rhetoric of liberty that has belied the phenomena from slavery to mass incarceration, a reluctance to embrace partisan competition, a tendency toward executive centralization, a willingness to persecute dissent: these are all expressions of an organicist holism. The other is that they aren’t atavistic holdovers of a previous age, or alien interruptions into the American tradition. They have roots in the very doctrine to which Americans appealed in their fight for freedom.

Wank

2025-11-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Iris Meredeth offers “wank” as a useful term of art:

Our society clearly has an issue with a whole family of bad-faith speech acts: outright lying is an obvious problem and bullshit, as defined in Harry Frankfurt’s text on the matter is a pressing concern in our political climate. However, none of them quite capture what’s going on here, which can perhaps be described as speech that aims to bolster someone's self-image or let them feel good about themselves, but that is disguised as something else: a political statement, an objective statement of fact or a form of artistic expression. This essay aims to define this form of speech, and given its observed properties, we could do worse than to call it wank.
[⋯]
⋯ Our working definition might therefore be as follows:
Wank is a speech act directed first and foremost at helping the speaker feel better about themselves, stated as an objective claim about the state of the world, that we are expected in discussion to treat with the epistemic authority of a claim about identity, but the content of the actual claim.

The end of the Social Justice Détente

2025-10-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

After the wrenching fights over social justice from the ’60s through the early ’70s, American society made an implicit bargain I like to call The Social Justice Détente:

no big new government policy moves to correct injustices
no public expressions of overt bigotry

Advocates for social justice today tend to think of the emergence of The Détente as simply the bigots winning, but it did not seem that way at the time. Before The Détente, American public culture had allowed a measure of bigotry hard to imagine even if one is old enough to remember it. Changing that was not trivial.

Part of the logic of The Détente was that in the ’70s & ’80s, social justice advocates in our pop media engaged in a pervasive propaganda campaign to overcome bigotry. In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Young Robin Williams faced down the local chapter of the Klan! In an episode of The Partridge Family, Danny became an honorary Black Panther! Norman All In The Family Lear was the king of this sort of thing, but it was everywhere. When young social justice advocates grumble about white liberals’ earnest, maddening misunderstandings, half the time they are confronting ideas inherited from this propaganda campaign, which feels dangerously tepid & naïve to contemporary viewers but reflected a powerful challenge in its time, supported by sophisticated social justice advocates.

The broad left hoped that these egalitarian parables and a public sphere purged of overt bigotry would produce a new American generation free of the bigoted attitudes of the past. Arresting policy progress was a pause, not a surrender; the next generation would would pick up the baton and take the next steps toward a more just society.

Obviously that did not happen. American culture still has plenty of bigotry. The wave of political support for new policy comparable to the anti-racist (and anti-sexist) reforms of the Civil Rights Era did not come. To understand our current condition, we need to understand both those failings and the successes we did get.

Baseline common bigotry on the broad left today mortifies people attentive to social justice, but it is far less than the bigotry common even on the broad left prior to The Détente. Even the fact that we have a hard time remembering how bad bigtory used to be constitutes a major victory.

The broad right today is twistier.

The right started worse, and changed a lot less. But they are sincerely offended by a lot of things their great-grandparents would have said casually … which they think means they are not bigots at all.

Bigots never think they are bigots; they think their attitudes are just obvious common sense. So people on the right assume that most people on the left privately understand and agree with their attitudes. They imagine that we just differ from them in working harder to maintain the hypocritical performance of public norms which conflict with common sense. Surely in our most private circles we let ourselves admit the truth.

People on the right have learned not to express themselves “honestly” without subtly checking first whether everyone in earshot is “cool”. It is easy for folks on the left to underestimate the gulf between the attitudes people on the right have and routinely express in private versus what they say when measuring their words in our presence. When people on the right grumble about the “far left” exercising “totalitarian” control and “dominating” culture with “lies”, it is absurd, but they are sincerely describing what they experience.

Compounding that, the broad right feel that the broad left have violated the terms of The Détente. We didn’t accept The Détente as a satisfactory endpoint. We don’t admit that “real” racism & sexism have been obviously defeated. Indeed, we greedily demand more. The scope of what we permit in public keeps narrowing. And we have extended the power of the state to support the disgusting queers.

All this is of course a big part of why they find Trump refreshing and forthright. And they remain frustrated because even Trump does not get to say everything they say in private. I think it’s dangerously simpleminded to understand MAGA as just about bigotry, but it is a lot about bigotry.

I was prompted to finally write this post because of a recent story about leaked chats among Young Republicans which I think even most people on the broad right would find repulsively bigoted and fascist. The bigots-among-the-bigots use the skills they learned in stepping carefully in mixed company to watch what they say even among ordinary folks on the broad right. Even more than regular people on the broad right, they find it cathartic to speak “plainly” among themselves, and yearn for a world in which they can be “honest”.

Vice President Vance dismissing concern over the leak by saying “I refuse to join the pearl clutching” demonstrates how MAGA as a manifestation of our ongoing massive social reälignment rejects both aspects of The Détente: they will roll back the social justice policies implemented in the ’60s & early ’70s and change our public culture to permit bigotry.

Liberal Currents
The Present Crisis and the End of the Long ’90s

A racial and sexual hypocrisy
The Long ’90s was also a cultural settlement. The cultural settlement was not embodied in any single law or policy, but rather shaped the basic assumptions of Americans about our country — and, most especially, who was a full citizen. Surprisingly, the consensus can be expressed quite simply. On the one hand, explicit racial or sexual discrimination would end. On the other, America would remain de facto a white man’s republic.
From the perspective of 1982, this seems like a good bargain for all concerned. The bruising unrest of the 60’s and 70’s — including the violent terrorism the New Left had degenerated into, including the violent terrorism of Jim Crow or COINTELPRO — all that would end. The insurgents — the feminists, the civil rights activists — would get a major improvement on the status quo. And the status quo — the white patriarchy — would in practice get to keep most of its privileges and power.
The compromise broke down with the election of Barack Obama. After forty years, the “insurgents” were no longer the children of Jim Crow and white-picket-fence patriarchy. They were the children of the Long ’90s, who had been promised the world. We told all America’s children — men, women, and otherwise, black and white and otherwise — that they could be anything they wanted to be. Unsurprisingly, they believed us.
Meanwhile, the old guard of the white man’s republic — men and women both, it turns out — were shocked and appalled at the possibility of a black man being president—of black people demanding an end to routine police brutality — of women demanding an end to routine sexual assault. Both MeToo and Black Lives Matter were shocks to the conservative psyche it has not yet recovered from.
The Trump II theory of the case is bizarre and conspiratorial. Trump II appears to believe that this sea change in American culture — the belief that America is not a white man’s republic, but a republic in which all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights — was a result of a cabal of Marxist professors and other elites, the “Cathedral,” which brainwashed the youth of America, and if they can simply find the Cathedral’s funding and cut it off, Americans will go back to loving the boot. They just need to kill the woke mind virus. The demand that Harvard accept a group of political commissars to ensure “viewpoint diversity” (aka affirmative action for rightwing incompetents) embodies this.

Romney bitterness

2025-10-15T16:45:00.000-07:00

Over on Bluesky, a bunch of lefties piled on to a post expressing a common sentiment from the right.

The media smeared Mitt Romney as Hitler. Then Republicans thought, well we might as well run Hitler.

We have been hearing this for years, and lefties mostly respond by calling shenanigans on this as disingenuous. This classic cartoon from lefty satirist Matt Bors sums up the point:

That critique of the right claiming that the left drives them right has a lot of truth to it, but I think there is some extra dimension to folks on the right feeling raw about Romney in particular.

To many folks on the broad right who may not even be MAGAs, supporting Romney’s presidential bid reflected something paralleling what Clintonian triangulation represents to the broad left. “He is obviously sharp. He is fundamentally competent. He doesn’t say inflammatory stuff that freaks out the other side which some other potential candidates from our side might. We are tacking toward the center rather than toward what we want most, to be less vulnerable to criticism.” There was even the inversion of Dems’ grumble, “How can the Republicans object to the Affordable Care Act when it is essentially the same plan Romney implemented in Massachusetts?” He was not a candidate who excited them, he was a candidate they hoped would repel their opponents less, win over a few votes, and enable reaching across the aisle in Congress.

I’m not saying Romney was that person; he was more a creature of longstanding Republican movement conservatism than they remember. But a lot of Republicans sincerely understood him that way. Folks on the broad left should be familiar with how it feels to see that fail.

There’s also a thing that fascinates me about Mitt Romney’s screen presence. He looks like the actor one might cast in a movie which has just one scene in the Oval Office, and thus needs a guy who is obviously meant to be the president without anyone having to be told. It’s a characteristic which feels very comforting to Republicans in a way they would assume extends to Dems. They don’t understand that it opens the question of why they don’t feel the same comfort with Obama in the Oval, with its obvious ugly answer.

Dems of course did not attack Romney as Practically Hitler. But we did sharply criticize him (for very good reasons), which felt so unfair because they were Trying To Be So Nice in picking him.

Fine, then. They’ll pick a candidate who does excite them. Not because Trump is a fascist — obviously that is a “leftist” fantasy! But they get to enjoy the schadenfreude from the left frantic over that “fantasy”. Why not? Being nice by picking Romney got them nowhere.

“Cancel culture” and criticism

2025-10-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

I keep bouncing off of my attempts to say something sophisticated about the challenges in constructively criticizing social justice advocacy culture. It’s a huge subject and I get lost in nuance.

One must start from the recognition that 95% of criticism of social justice advocacy culture is disingenuous reactionary bullshit from opponents of social justice … and that 95% is not 100%. There are legitimate criticisms which are not simply attacks on the project of social justice itself. There are roadblocks deterring worthy criticisms which emerge organically from social justice advocacy culture itself, but I try to keep from focusing on my grumbles because most of the frictions preventing the culture from facing its own failings have their roots in necessary adaptations to dealing with opponents of social justice.

Today I fell into a rant about “cancel culture” on Bluesky, so it seemed worth capturing (and slightly refining) that here.

What are we even talking about?

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About Cancel Culture reflects this knotty challenge. Because opponents of social justice often make absurd claims about “cancel culture” or “call-out culture”, advocates for social justice often claim there is no such thing. But there is a thing, it is a feature of social justice advocacy culture, and as the Bluesky thread which inspired this post observes …

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people

I have captured that thread below. This post started from me expanding on the point: the scary thing is capriciousness and lack of proportion. Memorable real examples include:

A woman followed by a handful of friends on Twitter ironically takes the voice of a bigot to make a bad joke about AIDS in Africa, gets on a plane, and when she gets off she is infamous and unemployed. She deserved criticism, sure, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
A couple of guys at a tech conference joke to each other about the funny technical term “dongle” and by the end of the day they are infamous and one of them is unemployed. They deserved criticism, maybe, but that was capricious and disproportionate.
A trans woman writes a raw, personal story attempting to subvert a transphobic trope, the publisher faces so much criticism of it being “obviously” transphobic that they withdraw it, and the writer ends up so shaken by the pushback from her own community that she never attempts to get anything published again. A tragedy.

We all have said bad things that landed with people as even worse than they were, then found ourselves unable to set things right despite our sincere efforts. Dreading the possibility — however distant — that such an episode could seriously damage our careers or standing in community is natural and justified.

Moves people in social justice advocacy culture make to dismiss these concerns — like saying “‘cancel culture’ just means ‘consequences’” or “people should be more careful what they say” — implicitly endorse the capriciousness and disproportionate stakes.

The Thing We Are Talking About When We Talk About “Cancel Culture” is turbo-charged by online social media shitstorm dynamics but it is such a distinct phenomenon in social justice advocacy culture that Jo Freeman referred to it as “trashing” in a famous essay about feminist organizing in 1976.

The acid test, however, comes when one tries to defend a person under attack, especially when she’s not there, If such a defense is taken seriously, and some concern expressed for hearing all sides and gathering all evidence, trashing is probably not occurring. But if your defense is dismissed with an oft-hand “How can you defend her?”; if you become tainted with suspicion by attempting such a defense; if she is in fact indefensible, you should take a closer look at those making the accusations. There is more going on than simple disagreement.

Perversely, the more one actually cares about social justice, the more vulnerable one becomes to the thing we are talking about when we are talking about “cancel culture”. That bad actors often benefit from being “cancelled” is no comfort if one is neither cynical nor evil.

Again, most criticisms of “cancel culture” are disingenuous BS from bad actors trying to rationalize their desire to say bad things in public without consequence. But they are leveraging a real thing which presents substantive problems. Dismissing that real thing and those problems helps the bad actors and weakens the effectiveness of our advocacy.

That social justice advocates all too often snap — either retreating from public advocacy or even joining the opposition — is bad for everyone. I submit that many people we push out from social justice advocacy culture were just flawed in an ordinary, human way, just trying to figure things out, just making honest mistakes. On principle, social justice advocacy culture should help people where they stumble, not attack them. Yet the Driving People Out thing in social justice advocacy is another pattern which pre-dates the era of the identity politics framework and social media. Yes, some of those folks were charlatans all along, but is rooting out charlatans as vigorously as possible worth the cost? The right don’t think so; they support their charlatans and it sure pays off for their cause.

Many of us are too eager to read dissenters as having been Charlatans All Along; the psychological pressures of people facing a shitstorm of criticism will screw up even the most level-headed person. F’rinstance, I am fascinated by the tragedy of Warren Farrell. In the 1960s & ’70s he was a deeply committed feminist advocate. He turned the feminist analytical toolkit on what we now call toxic masculinity; I read his 1993 book The Myth Of Male Power, which has a fascinating mix of insight and bad ideas. Had feminist culture engaged with what he wanted to address rather than rejected him, our understanding of toxic masculinity would have gotten decades of head start. Instead, the pushback he got from feminist women drove him mad, and eventually he became a thoroughly evil MRA.

As I say in a longer word on grappling with criticisms of advocacy culture …

Preventing social justice loyalists from making good faith critiques of advocacy culture is not just bad on the liberal-values merits, it has been bad for achieving social justice. We can and should do better.

Commentaries

Aelkus on Bluesky

Not exactly my read, but illuminating, and it inspired the thread which became this post.

in hindsight it makes sense to see cancel culture as a harbinger of the end of shame rather than an excess of it. “shame” presupposes stable social norms and a sense of what one did wrong and how it could have been avoided. not suddenly a thunderbolt from zeus thrown at random people
because that was what CC was for the vast majority of people actually impacted by it.
at its peak, it really was essentially a free for all driven by platform dynamics and a ritualized system of aggression
Venkatesh Rao described a good part of here: The Internet of Beefs
there's a saying “not even wrong” to describe bad theories — they’re so bad that they’re impossible to be shown wrong. you might coin an analogue: “not even a mob with pitchforks.” all of the insanity of a crowd stoning someone to death, but none of the lasting social effects
i don’t think it makes sense to make an analytical separation, anyway, between “online harassment” and “cancel culture” as phenomena. they were both symptoms of the same underlying generating mechanisms in the 2010s
we do so largely because they are still ideologically loaded terms rather than neutral ways of describing “large masses of people concentrating negative energy on the internet towards a single target”
similarly, little of the discussions of “surveillance capitalism” in the 2010s acknowledged that social media was always built around peer to peer surveillance
the end result was fairly predictable. lots of random furries in discords got their social identities obliterated by other random furries in discords. however those with significant offline social status not only weathered the storm but became proficient at controlling platforms to use as tools of aggression. the quasi-feudal system Rao described in the post I linked died, and was replaced by what X represents today. A fully operational battle station controlled by a single nutty person
the fact that the system that produced this progression is now filled with nostalgia speaks to the enduring delusions its participants have about its true nature

Frances Lee | Excommunicate Me From The Church Of Social Justice

This memoir of familiar frustrations with social justice advocacy culture has a telling comment about the topic of this post:

Scrolling through my news feed sometimes feels Iike sliding into a pew to be blasted by a fragmented, frenzied sermon. I know that much of the media posted there means to discipline me to be a better activist and community member. But when dictates aren’t followed, a common procedure of punishment ensues. Punishments for saying / doing /b elieving the wrong thing include shaming, scolding, calling out, isolating, or eviscerating someone’s social standing. Discipline and punishment has been used for all of history to control and destroy people. Why is it being used in movements meant to liberate all of us?

Offbeat Empire | Liberal bullying: Privilege-checking and semantics-scolding as internet sport

Common call-out culture trends:
Focus on very public complaints. I can think of exactly one time when someone emailed their concern about problematic language. These complaints seem to be always intended for an audience.
Lack of interest in a dialogue. These complaints aren’t questions or invitations to discuss the issue. They’re harshly-worded accusations and scoldings (which I’ve written about before).
Lack of consideration for the context or intent. The focus is on this isolated incident (this one post, this one word, this one time), with de-emphasis on the author’s background, experience, or the context of the website on which the post appears.
And on a more stylistic note, these complaints are often prefaced with phrases like “Um,” and other condescending affectations.
It’s challenging for me because the values motivating these complaints are completely in-line with both my personal politics as well as my professional passion for catering to niche markets and semi-marginalized cultures …

Lydia Laurenson | Cancelled Left and Right

A memoir with Laurenson’s characteristically thoughtful ambivalences. A taste:

What bothered me most was that there seemed to be no grace, no possibility for a canceled person to recover or make amends — not even anything resembling a “fair hearing” that a person could request once targeted by the cancel mob. Additionally, the cancellation process seemed unfairly harsh for any but very serious crimes. In other words, cancellation struck me as a punishment that didn’t fit most crimes it was used for. Moreover, even when applied to bad cases, the process seemed counterproductive for the community using it; most people who’d been canceled shifted away from social justice norms or left the movement entirely, and sometimes took their friends with them. All these effects seemed destructive and wrong, but saying anything publicly was clearly dangerous for one’s reputation and sanity.
[⋯]
Worse, the club benefited from cancellation. It helped them stay at the top. That was the thing that disgusted me so much that ultimately I could not bring myself to publicly rejoin the movement. “The club” let newcomers run into the cancellation buzzsaw while watching to see if they survived, and if the newbies didn’t? Well, then there was less competition for the women in that room! Supporting a canceled feminist was a calculation made afterwards, based on whether she made it through the experience.

Everyday Feminism | Maisha Z. Johnson | 6 Signs Your Call-Out Isn’t Actually About Accountability

An insider’s review of types of misfires.

In many ways, holding each other accountable has come to mean punishing each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re all competing on a hardcore game show, trying to knock each other down to be crowned the movement’s Best Activist.
[⋯]
You’re Not Focused on the Outcome
You’re Not Choosing Your Battles Based on What’s Best for the Community Involved
You’re Using the Same Strategy for Every Situation
You’re Centering Yourself on Behalf of Another Group
You’re Engaging in Respectability Politics to Police Other People’s Behavior
You’re Trying to Force Someone to Be Accountable

Adrienne Maree Brown | Unthinkable Thoughts: Call-out Culture in the Age of Covid-19

Too subtle and poetically rich to usefully quote; this taste is meant as an enticement to read it.

the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements’ needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’, to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. we need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberation paths. not already free, but practicing freedom every day. not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, and ending those cycles in ourselves and our communities.

Contrapoints | Canceling

A long video-essay. I should note that, as usual, Natalie Wynn inspires a lot of criticisms, and I have my own … and as usual I admire her brave, deeply-considered, astringent efforts to face hard questions. There’s a transcript if one needs it.

Morally Motivated Networked Harassment as Normative Reinforcement

While online harassment is recognized as a significant problem, most scholarship focuses on descriptions of harassment and its effects. We lack explanations of why people engage in online harassment beyond simple bias or dislike. This article puts forth an explanatory model where networked harassment on social media functions as a mechanism to enforce social order. Drawing from examples of networked harassment taken from qualitative interviews with people who have experienced harassment (n = 28) and Trust & Safety workers at social platforms (n = 9), the article builds on Brady, Crockett, and Bavel’s model of moral contagion to explore how moral outrage is used to justify networked harassment on social media. In morally motivated networked harassment, a member of a social network or online community accuses a target of violating their network’s norms, triggering moral outrage. Network members send harassing messages to the target, reinforcing their adherence to the norm and signaling network membership. Frequently, harassment results in the accused self-censoring and thus regulates speech on social media. Neither platforms nor legal regulations protect against this form of harassment. This model explains why people participate in networked harassment and suggests possible interventions to decrease its prevalence.

The Ballads of Malcolm Reynolds

2025-10-08T10:33:00.000-07:00

Over on Bluesky, Sean Kelly says:

Malcolm Reynolds starting off as an abusive prick who all the women love anyway because deep down, he’s a good person is such a case of Joss Whedon telling on himself.

Kelly is smart about this sort of thing. I see why he says this. As someone who watched — twice — all of Whedon’s perverse masterwork Dollhouse, I recognize him frequently revealing his misogyny, narcissism, and abusiveness in his storytelling. I see plenty of those problems in Firefly.

But on this point I see something else going on, because we know quite a bit about what Whedon wanted to do with Firefly and with Malcolm Reynolds. A few years back, I posted a quote from Whedon on this very subject:

Mal is somebody that I knew, as I created him, I would not get along with. I don’t think we have the same politics. But that’s sort of the point.

The series offers Mal to us as a noble scoundrel loved by all of the women aboard the Serenity, but not because Whedon wanted to tell that story, quite. Whedon created that under protest, as an adaptation to Fox’s insistence that the central character of the ensemble could not be the utter bastard he wanted to examine. Whedon filed down Mal’s rough edges — still an abusive prick, but less so — and made the whole ensemble less fractious, more loving. That paradoxically meant that the story did less work to justify the sympathy for Mal it asked for, creating a dissonance which made Kelly itch.

We can glimpse the different Malcolm Reynolds Whedon wanted to give us in the pilot which the studio rejected. The first sequence introduces Mal as a callously violent soldier smugly fighting for the Space Confederacy. In the second sequence, we see that losing the war broke something in him, turning him into an utter shit. He is insulting and disrespectful toward a sincere priest and a self-possessed prostitute! Had Whedon been able to figure out a way to justify including a dog in the scene, Mal would have kicked it.

In that pilot, yes, Kaylee does love Mal. Whedon has said that in writing the show “when Kaylee says it, we believe it” because she is a pure soul, wise enough to fall in love with the real hero of the Serenity crew before his heroism became apparent. But her love for Mal is the only thing in the pilot telling us that this asshole is worth caring about. Even Mal himself tells us otherwise.

In that pilot, River does not love Mal. Well, she doesn’t get to say much. In the second first episode, River says in one of her fugues of holy madness, “Mal. Bad … in the Latin.” The show uses River’s inhuman insight to tell us things, much as Whedon says it uses Kaylee, so that is stark. River comes to love Mal as the whole crew do, but along the way River — who is a scary murder-monster — often fears Mal.

In that pilot, Zoe does not love Mal. She is utterly loyal to him, and she trusts him. The show hints that she feels indebted to him for something he did in the war. But that is not love. In the Serenity film, Whedon tells us very clearly that Zoe only loves only one person in the ’verse, and it ain’t Mal. In the pilot it seems that Zoe does not even like him, though maybe she hopes to someday get back a better Mal she knew before the war broke him.

In that pilot, Inara does not love Mal, despite genre savvy telling us that Inara & Mal have romantic tension. What keeps them apart? Mal being terrible. Inara finds Mal attractive but dislikes him, for good reasons. (In this do see a different accidental confession from Whedon, resentment that women like Inara often feel attracted to men like Mal, an ugly note which shows up many times in his work.)

The changes in charactization after the pilot are significant but not jarring because Whedon and his team are crafty, largely just fast-forwarding to a state Whedon had meant to work hard to earn over a few seasons of storytelling.

He did a similar trick in wrapping as much as he could of several TV seasons’ worth of storylines in the feature film Serenity, including an abbreviation of Malcolm Reynolds’ arc. The series gave us Mal living by a code of honor which emphasized total dedication to his crew. In the film, he realizes that caring for a small circle of people is not good enough. He has to care about everyone. His moral obligation to the ’verse outweighs his own life and even the lives of the people dear to him. Had Firefly ended after seven seasons that could take him there, I believe that in the last episode Mal would have taken off the coat, because no, the browncoats were not just the losing side, they were the wrong side.

Had Whedon gotten to make that Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds, I doubt that many people would love it the way they love the cozier Ballad Of Malcolm Reynolds we got. There are a bunch of reasons why I think it would not have worked, but I wish I could reach into a parallel timeline to watch it because it would have been a hell of a thing.

Miniver Cheevy

An analogy

Ted

Jane

The point

A “Jewish state”?

Defining Zionism

Opting out

The information environment

Democratic socialism (n.)

What democratic socialism means

The absence of democratic socialist examples

The dynamics of socialist failures

Democratic capitalism’s burden of proof

Democratic socialism does not require revolution

Constitutional daydreams

A unicameral Congress

County councilors

Choose senators nationally

Assemblors chosen by sortition

All three types of reps vote together

A new type of supermajority

Distinct powers for different classes of Congresspeople?

A parliamentary executive

A ceremonial president

Unitary government with stronger counties

Judiciary

Anti-corruption measures

Miscellany

Pre-commitment to legislation

Re-drawing county lines

Pace layers

No other elected positions

Insulated accountability bodies

Explicitly name core principles

Today we must draw a line

Congress and others in power

Citizens

The new covenant

Murc’s Law

Facts have a YIMBY bias

Ned Resnikoff

The vacant housing canard

Building “luxury” housing

Policy

Housing the unhoused

Two encounters with the grift

A call from a boiler room

Short con on the street

Republic Dogs

Republic Dogs

One cheer for “‘AI’ art”?

Slightly better clip art?

For the TTRPG table?

As an ingredient in mixed-media art?

Reconstructed movies

Ones I have seen

The Abyss — Extended Edition Aliens — Special Edition

Ones I want to see

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut

Once Upon A Time In America — Extended Director’s Cut

More fan edits

More official releases

I Am Legend — Alternate Version

Kingdom of Heaven — Director’s Cut

Conservatism as fear and “instinct”

Campism

Virus-cautious socializing

Indoors

Outdoors

Divination and “AI”

The tale of RMS Carpathia

Clarifying common social justice praxis

Fundamentals

Social justice

Understanding from lived experience

Campism

Oppression Olympics

Manifestos for a new America

The mainspring of governance

The Abyss — Extended Edition
Aliens — Special Edition