Did it happen?

 

Does it feel real yet?  I was watching his victory speech way after the fact last night and feeling both the kind of horror you sometimes feel in nightmares when you know something dreamy and unusual and good is an illusion that’s going to be snatched away from you by a demon (granted I was pretty close to stage 1 sleep while I was listening), but I was also involuntarily beaming at everything he said.  It got me to thinking.  I think Zohran Mamdani’s victory could well be the very best thing that’s ever happened on the political stage in my lifetime.  I shouldn’t hedge or hesitate at all.  I can’t think of anything comparable.  Aside from some Bernie primaries, it's the only victory for any office in any election anywhere in my lifetime for which my gratitude at the outcome is not qualified.  He’s incredibly talented, but he also had phenomenal help from his volunteers.  Thank you for your service.  

I am also thinking that as personable and genuine and likeable as he is, he is something very special.  Not to idolize—it’s admiration that I feel for the qualities that brought him to victory but also I feel like I am witnessing a rare piece of seminal history in the making.  This is what I wish history was more like and what I hope for history for the future.

Judging from the clobbered over the head look that dem leadership and some of our most prominent dem leaning media personalities exhibited in the post mortem to the victory, it doesn't seem that everybody in our soulless clueless age is ready for a new one, but I hope the fascists are quaking.  I hope their days are numbered.

Waltz About Death

 Angela Autumn and Lockeland Strings prove that we are still making beauty.

I don't care what you think about Graham Platner

But these two would like to thank you.

I already liked Graham Platner, oyster farmer, harbormaster, democratic candidate for Senate from Maine who is aiming to defeat the evergreen Susan Collins-- seeking her record breaking sixth term next year as the reasonable republican who only votes against her party's oppressive public policy impositions when they are assured to win-- when details suddenly surfaced of a raucous internet past peppered with what Elie Mystal has characterized as "bigoted" language, and of a skull and bones tattoo that he and his drunk buddies on leave in Croatia thought looked cool that turns out to have a Nazi origin (he has replaced it).  With a voice that immediately reminds you against your will of John Fetterman's sonorousness and a deep, long Military past that involved stints in every American operation from Iraq to Afghanistan, followed by time as a diplomat's bodyguard as an employee of a company formerly known by its deservedly infamous name of Blackwater, there were hurdles that he had to get past to win my enthusiastic support, but he cleared them with his fresh, unapologetic expounding of policy positions revealing a favoring of government that serves the people that resonates with my own aspirations for government, and that earned him an endorsement from Bernie Sanders* (who stands by him) and a joint appearance with the Vermont Senator at an anti-oligarchy and endorsement rally in Portland attended by a crowd filling the Civic Center on a summer afternoon, massive for political events any time of the year even by Maine standards.

Much of the online left however has lost its mind.  The generally helpful Humanist Report has demonstrated a need for a vacation in professing a done-ness with Platner on account of the scandals. Elie Mystal usually excellent on the law at the Nation has a very bad take on the controversy.  The point of that Platner-defending Pod save America tweet that Mystal critiques is not that Woke is bad.   The point is that very few people, and certainly people ambitious enough to seek public office have lived perfectly woke lives.  Mystal links to a digest of the controversial Platner posts which is how I first set eyes on them.  I am not at all offended by Platners’s obviously over the top use of "gay" in his ancient reddit posts that he now as a mature therapized adult disavows (but I’m not gay, which is why I don’t argue with gay people about how much offense they take from people’s past overuse of the ubiquitous 90’s kid slang addiction to the word "gay" which shocked me when I first heard younger colleagues bandying it about like a beachball in the audience of a festival stage.  Platner's usage strikes me as being in this spirit.)   I truly don’t care about anything Platner wrote in the throes of PTSD as he was sorting out how he felt about how he had spent his adult life to that point.  What he says now about gay people and how he came around to regretting his language is what matters to me.

 

My take is people can decide for themselves (and they will—and the only ones who matter are the voters of Maine) how they feel about the past of a candidate who is strongly in favor of everything I’m in favor of as a candidate to replace the Republican who votes against every Republican bill as long as it’s guaranteed to win.  I happen to think they are wrong not to listen to Graham Platner now.  They are wrong to base their support on no longer in-context internet posts from the wildest west of sites.  (For that matter, though I may be blind, I don’t see anything really objectionable or Nazi or right wing about what he has said at heart. We’re tone policing here.  We’re up in arms about the over the top language of a passionate PTSD sufferer in the rough and tumble of internet shit-posting.    If you read the Wikipedia article for a good summary of what is "troublesome" in his reddit posts, you may be able to see through the fog that his posts pretty consistently show a staunch radical who is not opposed to radicals being as well armed as the other side.  I don’t see anything to apologize for that.

Oppo research is not presented as a service to everyone.   The targets of oppo research are not those who already agree with the funders of it.  They are precisely the terminally online leftists who might dutifully, reflexively, obligingly take up the oppo case for them in order to sow dissent among the ranks and weaken the opponent's base.  This is exactly what has happened in Graham Platner's case.  The left parodies itself when it demands that those who get to work to make life better for people must pass a purity test.  It's a parody of the left, and the dream of the right.  The operatives drooled over what is transpiring: the usual pile on of leftists falling over each other to be the first to cancel an easy target.  What Graham Platner should be is a challenge to the left to grow up, grow some shells and get some game for once for fuck's sake.

The whole mess has once again highlighted for me that the election of ambitious people with flaws that may color the dysfunction of their service, by voters with their own flaws that likewise are apt to contribute to the dysfunction of their choice is no way to pick those who represent us in government.  The answer for the 10,000th time is sortition: the scientifically random selection of our leaders from among ourselves -- all citizens, residents, subjects of the places we live-- for short, non-consecutive terms.  It is the only way to remove the types of partisan politics that in this day and age has come to mean battling opposition research, horrifying reveals of our candidate's mistakes and their humanity, and millions of dubiously come by dollars spent on hours of negative ads of performatively fake outrage rehashing those hard-won nibblets of scandal.   I will take sortition anyday.  But as long as we are stuck with our duopolistic system, can you imagine if one day sortition actually won and in an effort to undermine it and get back to oligarchy, billionaires (perhaps using AI) studiously dug up oppo research on every one selected randomly by sortition?   How would you do, comrade, under the censorious scrutiny of the oligarchic oppo machine?

If you want me to take your own false outrage seriously, try to come up with a better candidate than Graham Platner first-- good luck with that-- and if you succeed, let's see how long that candidate evades the oppo trap and your own acquiescence to it.

~~~~~

* There's a contingent of the left who in spite of everything Bernie has done in the Senate to try to end the funding of Israel's assault on Gaza (to say nothing of what he's done for left causes throughout his still very vital career) think he took too long to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  Good for you you fucking purists.  What has your purity actually accomplished for Gaza?

What it is

No comment

 

Losing Time

I recently got into my head a notion I couldn't shake to read 107 Days, Kamala Harris's new book about the 2024 election.  Nearing completion of a book with nothing else in particular lined up I found myself scanning the list of current titles in the Apple Book store, and Harris's book appealed to me as a quick settlement of the what's next question.  I made the purchase and was dismayed to discover I had accidentally selected the audiobook instead of the ebook.  Being frustrated in my efforts to figure out how to make an exchange (it seems to be impossible), I resigned myself to the audiobook delivery method.  It paid off: at double speed, I was able to finish the unabridged book, read by Harris herself in about 4 and half hours.   That was really about all the investment I had hoped to give it anyway.*

I can't say I didn't have an agenda in even considering Harris's book.  I have been maintaining for months that the impulse felt by so many single-issue leftists to punish Kamala Harris as a proxy for Joe Biden, particularly over Biden's Gaza policy by voting third party (or abstaining altogether) without regard to what a Trump victory would mean instead was a tragically misguided mistake.   The "cease fire" just negotiated comes when Gaza has been flattened after months of  intensified bombing by Israel after unilaterally breaking a January cease-fire in March.  Israel continues to starve those who remain.  Trump did not get the Nobel Peace prize this year-- another few years of degradation and it should be his-- but it's all he wants out of it -- he couldn't give a shit was happens to Palestinians.  And if he doesn't wind up profiting from Israel's development of Gaza's beachfront real estate (as he has certainly indicated are his designs) it will only be because we have been transported to another dimension.  Would a Kamala Harris administration have been any different?

I don't make a habit of reading political memoirs, but it strikes me as a given that politicians who want to continue their careers do not serve themselves by speaking unvarnished truth in their public utterances.  If I were a politician, I would certainly have to hide my atheism and reflexive eye rolling at displays of patriotism and expressions of American exceptionalism.  Not only do I think we should expect politicians to be somewhat hypocritical and duplicitous in their public lives, but I almost think we should want them to be at least in certain relatively benign respects.  If Kamala Harris had said in her book that Joe Biden was the albatross around her neck that prevented her from soaring to the presidency it would have been truthful but might have had a ring of unseemliness coming from her.  For this reason, I was not expecting Kamala Harris to come out and say, "As President, I would have forced Israel to stop bombing Gaza and done what I could to see Netanyahu and Israel punished for war crimes." and she does not, but I did expect to see some coded signals of differences between herself and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I was not disappointed.  She speaks about generational differences between herself and the reflexively pro-Israel Biden, as well as the importance of International consensus and her preference that Israel and the US not be opposed to the rest of the world in wanting to proceed with the destruction of Hamas regardless of the cost to Gaza and its innocent 2 million inhabitants.

In undertaking Harris's book, I was partially interested in seeing if I could get to the bottom of the question “Would Kamala Harris have been a continuation of Joe Biden?  Did Kamala Harris deserve to be punished for Joe Biden’s administration?”  While she doesn’t come out and say, “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?  Of course I would have wiped the floor with Joe Biden’s first term, ” she does codedly indicate that Joe Biden’s Israel steadfastness prevented him from seeing Palestinians as people whom Israel was unjustly immiserating.  We learned last spring that Biden's sense of timing with the demands for loyalty that he placed on his hand-picked replacement was impeccable as on the eve of her debate with Trump three months after Biden's own pratfall of a performance hastened his exit from the campaign when he urged her to allow "No daylight, Kid" between herself and him in public assessments of his administration and promises of how hers might depart from it.  It's also clear that in 4 years of being the racist and sexist Biden's ethnic and feminist beard as his DEI Vice President, she did not get a lot of support and loyalty from the Bidens before or after she took over the ticket, and attributes the deficit in public recognition she was handicapped with at the start of her curtailed campaign to her purposeful invisibility as Biden's second in command.  Notably, she regrets not having had the courage to talk the poorly aging Biden out of seeking a second term (she thought it would be perceived as being self-serving at the time but in retrospect she thinks it would have been the right thing to do for the country.)  Nevertheless, with the microphone hers, she openly mocks some of Joe’s senile foolishness around the election such as his ideological discomfort in pushing the wedge issue of reproductive choice in contrast with Trump's role in gutting it, as well as incidents of tomfoolery on the campaign trail such as actually putting on a MAGA hat that someone handed to him at an event they both appeared at following his dropping out of the race providing helpful fodder for mockery from alt-right media.

My big takeaway is that she called the book 107 Days --not to echo 10/7 as some dummies have suggested-- but rather to emphasize that the curtailed campaign was the obstacle she could not overcome, that it forced her to make decisions and edits and snubs that she would not have taken if she’d had the whole 2 years and left her at the mercy of "the conversation" that was already underway, such as her failure to negotiate an opportunity to speak to Joe Rogan's audience of disaffected young men-- Rogan had congealed as a Trump endorser before she was able to persuade him to have her as a guest.  (Of course she probably would not have been the candidate if there had been an actually open Democratic primary as there should have been.)  

One of the highlights of the book is when campaign adviser David Plouffe tells her too late in the game for her to re-adjust her strategy the thing she needed to hear from a strategist on her side much sooner: “People don't like Joe Biden”.  But the campaign was already lost by then and it was too late to pivot from its focus on peeling wishy washy Republicans from Trump’s side to add to what she assumed was Biden’s solid support.  More malpractice.   Low point of the book: she talks about her appearance on the View, which she says was marred by an answer to a Whoopi question to the effect of She would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden if she had been president.  She was not prepared for the question she said and she gave a perfunctory answer.  But that’s not the low point.  The low point is that she was prepared to say that she would have had a Republican in her cabinet.  (In keeping with what she thought her strategy was supposed to be.)   Because she blew Whoopi’s question, she actually made a point of slipping her prepared Republican in the cabinet remark into a reply to someone else’s question.  She apparently did not ever see that if “People hate Joe Biden” it’s not because he didn’t coddle enough Republican genitals.  

I’ve probably left important stuff out but the thumbnail is, as an adult who has seen a lot of elections and politicians and as an American in October 2025 who can tell the difference between a fascist creep and a smart enough if rather typical post-Obama democrat, I feel satisfied that I was not deluded that regardless of what Joe Biden was forcing her to say at the time, she would have been a break from the stench of the America of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  Not a savior of anything but America from more of the same old old man stink.  

~~~~~

* The downside is that when I appear to be quoting the book I am actually paraphrasing it and paraphrasing it from memory at that, and from memory pieced together from whatever snippets of attention my ADHD brain was devoting to it at the time.

What Times Are These?

US 2025: A faceless force the people did not call fires on the people

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.  -  G. Michael Hopf, from his 2011 novel, The End

I am grieving for my stupid-ass country.  It has fallen into the hands of thick, soulless clods.  Greedy, tasteless twits.  Nasty-spirited fucks.  It happened by accident, because its asinine political system-- designed by a self-appointed committee of slave-owning aristocrats a quarter of a millenium ago-- permitted it.  The people perhaps mean well, if you can mean well by putting your trust in a cadre of over privileged ungrateful louts who believe their thievery of the commons is their birthright-- or worse yet their reward for an imagined exceptionalism-- who promised to restore a nation diseased by the most craven capitalism and in genuine pain to a supposed former greatness by removing a completely conjured cancer called Immigrant.

The epigraph of this post has a pleasing ring of truth to it.  Could it explain how we got here?  But try to follow it back.  Are we in hard times?  Did weak people make them?  Who are those weak people-- is it Biden and Kamala Harris or Trump or all of them?  If Trump is not weak, is he strong?  Is he making good times?  When were the good times that made the people weak?  Who were the strong people who made those times good?  Good for whom?

Truthfully, the course of history in my lifetime brings the lie to that pleasing theory of history.  On the contrary, even the greatest times of my life-- the far distant past-- were tainted by their stinginess to the least of us.  What made them great was not their greater ignorance as MAGA would have you believe and is urging us all to get back to, but rather the greater economic equality in this country between those at the top and those at the bottom.  Social engineering was in the process of enshrining the social equality that science-- the product of flawed humans that was nevertheless still recognized as a process useful for getting at truth (and sometimes used that way)-- was reluctantly coming around to seeing as every human's birthright.  Strong people were indeed required to overcome the inertia of history.  But equally strong people, mostly men whose strength derived from their place at the top of the economic ladder soon came to defeat the heroes of Civil Rights and Liberation Movements in order to impose wonderful times for themselves and increasing misery for the rest of us.  My life has been a trajectory from hope to disappointment to despair as I have witnessed the arc of history wrested from the justice bringers by the thieves of the commons for 50 of my 60 plus years.  Those thieves have won.

"The Conversation" that we overhear on our TV screens and read about in what's left of our news outlets tends to normalize the horrific loss that happens every day.  Political loss, economic loss, loss of freedom, loss of culture, loss of autonomy, loss of the biosphere.  The Conversation would have you believe that on the whole things are getting better; that our vision is clouded by the myopia of our present circumstances.  Just hold on, the Conversation says, until 2028.

"The Conversation" is stupid.  Don't engage in it.  It is designed to distract.  Start your own conversation.  Start the ones "The Conversation" is avoiding.

US 2025: Who ordered this?  What was the order?

Hard Knocks

Real and TV Amanda Knox - Amanda Knox (l) and Grace Van Patten (r)

I am very happy that Jimmy Kimmel's suspension has been suspended by ABC because it means that there is no longer any need to boycott Hulu at the moment.  Hulu, apparently owned by Disney is one of my streaming indulgences, and apparently enough people made good on their impulse to cancel all Disney related subscriptions, including Hulu, in protest that they succeeded in reversing Disney owned ABC network's caving to the FCC's extortion campaign to use the excuse of a Charlie Kirk adjacent joke that Kimmel told (which was actually at Trump's expense) to force the show off the air.   ("Charlie Who?" I can hear future readers ask.   Trust me, you don't want to know.)  I barely had time to betray the cause before the boycott was over.  I can go months without even thinking of watching Hulu, but lately I'm invested in the mini-series The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox which has two more episodes to go.  

Anyone who has been around since 2007 should be able to remember the real Amanda Knox-- Foxy Knoxy as she was known by the European press at the time-- a 20-year old American college student taking a year abroad in Perugia Italy who was accused, tried and convicted of killing her British roommate Meredith Kercher in some weird sex game with her brand new Italian boyfriend of just over a week, Raffaele Sollecito, on the evening of All Souls Day of that year.  Under police interrogation before her arrest, Knox had voluntarily wrongfully implicated a third party, her boss Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese immigrant who owned the bar at which Knox served drinks for extra money.  Lumumba was ultimately acquitted for lack of evidence-- he was after all at his bar when the murder happened.   Knox and Sollecito after a lengthy highly publicized trial were convicted on December 20, 2009 after spending 2 years in prison and sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively.  In the meantime, police work had uncovered the participation of yet another party to the murder,  Rudy Guede, a troubled Côte D'Ivorian by birth brought to Perugia at the age of 5 by his polygamous ne'er-do-well father who ultimately left him there, and ever since in and out of trouble, raised by a succession of unofficial foster parents.  The wealthy couple that finally adopted him at age 17 were so immediately overwhelmed by his behavior that they had the adoption nullified.  According to the story presented by the prosecution, Knox and Sollecito had procured Meredith for sex with Guede-- a sometime guest of the group of male jocks who lived in the apartment below Amanda and Meredith's-- and then  killed her with Knox delivering the fatal blow which the three attempted to cover up by staging false evidence of a robbery.

As the dramatization demonstrates, Amanda Knox had been tried in the court of public opinion before her verdict was reached, painted in the press in Italy and in Kercher's Britain as an ice cold American beauty, a serial sexual adventurer who betrayed callous feelings toward her roommate's death, preoccupied as she was with brazenly engaging in nookie with her new boyfriend and partner in crime while the investigation was underway.  The narrative of the murder was provided to the public from the interrogation of Knox herself without a lawyer present (Italian law requires a lawyer only for the already accused.  Knox's accusal came out of her testimony.  Once accused, Knox was advised by her interrogators that requesting a lawyer would only be seen as admission of her guilt.). In fact, the police conducting the interrogation had already formed a theory about Knox cultivated by the prosecutor of the case Giuliano Mignini from suspicions of the lead investigators Monica Napoleoni and Marco Chiacchiera in spite of a stubborn lack of corroborating evidence.  

From the beginning, Knox had maintained that the night of Kercher's murder, she and Sollecito spent the evening at his place smoking pot and watching Amelie since her boss Lumumba had given her the night off.  However during lengthy interrogation, Knox was worn down by insistence that she give her testimony in the Italian that she was barely fluent in.  The police had decided that the text Knox had written to her boss on learning of her suddenly free night-- "See you later"-- was not some benign American pleasantry, but rather proof that Knox, Sollecito and Lumumba had planned to meet up after the bar closed, no doubt to terrorize and murder Kercher.  In a harrowing recreation of the interrogation it's evident that the police used a number of tactics familiar from miscarriages of justice on the American side of the Atlantic-- withholding permission to speak to her mother as she repeatedly requested, domination to the point of disallowing bathroom breaks, teaming up against her with several interrogators screaming at her in Italian all at once, coaching desired answers out of her, wearing her down with accusation after accusation without the opportunity to respond to each in turn, lying about the testimony that Sollecito was giving separately in a way that suggested her new boyfriend was implicating her, threatening her with serious consequences for lack of cooperation and even committing physical violence against her with slaps to her head.  Having learned from witnesses of an African man who may have been involved, the police had suggested that Lumumba was the man and planted the false accusation in her head which came out of her mouth only after hours of relentless interrogation.  In the end, both Knox and Sollecito had under duress signed confessions composed by their interrogators.

Even during the trial, irregularities and improprieties in the investigation were brought to light.  The interrogation was determined to be inadmissible, but as the details were already well discussed in the press, the damage had been done.  After two years, Knox and Sollecito were convicted.  By this time it was widely known that the African seen by witnesses was the actual murderer, Rudy Guede who had fled Perugia but was returned to stand trial separately and given 30 years for the murder and sexual assault of Kercher in 2008.  Knox and Sollecito's convictions were automatically appealed.   By the time of the second trial, momentum against the false confessions of Knox and Sollecito coerced by the police and for the story that both originally told, placing them at Sollecito's apartment when the murder was committed gained enough traction that the convictions of both were thrown out.  Knox's conviction for false accusation of Patrick Lumumba held, but she was sentenced to time already served.  After 4 years, Amanda Knox left Perugia Prison on October 3, 2011.*  On returning to America, she has made a career out of advocating for those falsely convicted, and has published books, cooperated in the production of documentaries and news programs about her case and now co-produced with fellow redeemed unjustly fallen woman Monica Lewinsky this powerful and (be forewarned!) truly harrowing fictionalized account of her story.

As is often the case, Kercher's family has apparently had a hard time letting go of the original conviction and have been critical of Amanda Knox's involvement in media that they feel capitalize on their daughter's murder.   This is commonly seen in American cases as well and happens because families searching for answers for their loved ones' deaths often work closely with the Prosecutors of those accused of responsibility for their murders. For my part it seems obvious that Italian prosecutors and police (like their American counterparts all too often) in an effort to bring swift "justice" to the victim and the victim's family -- indeed to the public which had become so invested in the verdict-- composed a pleasing narrative out of the scraps that were strewn about them.  But you only need to apply Occam's razor to conclude that the pleasing narrative was false.  The notion that a 20 year old American foreign exchange student just spreading her wings in an excitingly new language and country was actually a calculating murderess of her roommate on a lark who, when cornered by police, falsely implicated her boss-- to protect the identity of her actual accomplice?-- was the stuff of utter fantasy.  It seems inconceivable to me that, knowing the true story of her own murder, Meredith Kercher would describe her friend Amanda Knox's ordeal as justice.

The problem I am certain lies in the western system of justice that Italian and American law have in common-- particularly the notion of prosecution and defense.  In both systems, organs of the state are tasked with identifying parties to accuse of guilt, and while the burden of proof is on the state, in practical terms, the accused must raise their own defense with the assistance of lawyers procured by themselves or by the state.  In short, what is supposed to pass for justice is really a contest between the considerable forces of the state and whatever defense the accused can muster.  Only one side will win.  It is not clear to anybody that the state's victory actually amounts to justice.  Imprisonment or even capital punishment of the convicted rarely restores justice to the bereaved, and it frequently spreads injustice to the family of the convicted.  Never more spectacularly than in cases like Amanda Knox's in which trumped up charges of innocents are fabricated out of whole cloth in sacrifice to the bloodthirsty God of Punishment.  As practiced in most of the developed world verdicts are ground out compulsively as if in service to a tic of society that demands that vengeance on a designated perpetrator be the sufficient reflexive response to every incidence of a wrong.

In order for real justice to occur, the pursuit of it must be, not a competition, not a gotcha for the accused, but a shared effort between all parties.  The focus of justice should be restoration, not revenge or retribution or pwning of the accused.  The process should be more akin to science or history and not at all akin to biblical vengeance or to game shows.  Restorative justice is how injuries heal.  This is how the false pleasing narratives of police keep from ruining innocent people's lives as a settled for substitute for true justice.

~~~~~

* Three more legal steps had to be cleared in Italy in her absence following her release from prison before she was finally legally absolved for the murder: The Italian Supreme Court of Cassation (the highest court in Italy) reversed her acquittal and sent the case back to the lower court for a re-trial demanding further DNA tests to correct the errors of the original investigation.  The lower court again found Knox and Sollecito guilty, a verdict which was immediately sent for appeal back to the Supreme Court of Cassation.  In the second Supreme Court trial, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted for the murder for lack of evidence of their physical presence at the crime scene.  Nevertheless, based on the inadmissible coerced confessions of the two defendants from their first trial, the court determined (perfunctorily and incorrectly in this blog's estimation) that Knox and Sollecito had been present at the Villa when the murder occurred as witnesses.  Nevertheless, they were permanently free from the possibility of facing trial again for the murder.