Reading

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podcasts

podcast friday

Here's a series from a week or two ago that you really should check out: It Could Happen Here's "Darién Gap: One Year Later." It's four parts and I recommend listening to the whole thing, as it's some truly brilliant reporting, but if you are like me, the one that will stand out the most is the second episode, "To Be Called By No Name." It begins with a song written in 1948, Woody Guthrie's "Deportees (Plane Crash At Los Gatos)" that has horrifying resonance now, nearly 80 years later. From that jumping off point, James discusses the media coverage of the manufactured migrant crisis.

The four part series focuses on two migrants in particular, Primrose and her daughter Kim, from Zimbabwe. Primrose's family opposed the regime there and her father was disappeared; she and her daughter fled a deadly situation to try to claim refugee status in the US. The plight of migrants from African countries is even less discussed than those from Latin America or the Middle East; in detailing Primrose's story, James makes her visible, a heroic protagonist facing impossible odds, someone who lodges in your heart and stays there. It's great storytelling as well as great journalism. He refuses the objectivity of the mainstream reporters, who just don't bother to talk to migrants, let alone give voice to their names and stories.

Even posting about this tears me up. I know a lot of you reading this are doing your best to fight ICE but I want to beat every one of those bastards to death with my bare hands and by the end of this series, you will too.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson. I never had the privilege of seeing Gibson perform, other than on YouTube, so this is as close as I'm ever going to get. They really were a brilliant poet. Some of the poems lose a bit in print—they tend towards the storytelling and autobiographical, and that reads much less powerfully on the page than in speech—but this is a fairly minor critique. Gibson writes powerfully about queerness, gender, disability, and the climate crisis, and their furious energy is made all the more poignant by their premature death earlier this year.

Currently reading: Censorship & Information Control: From Printing Press to Internet by Ada Palmer. This is an exhibit based on a course that Palmer taught and it just makes me wish I could take the course. I'm screenshotting bits to text to people. Her central argument is that the total state censorship we see depicted in 1984 is the exception rather than the norm; more often censorship is incomplete, self-enforced, or carried out by non-state entities like the church or marketplace. This is obviously important when we talk about issues like free speech, which tends to be very narrowly defined when most of the threats to it have traditionally not come directly from the government (I mean, present-day US excepted, but it took a lot of informal censorship to get to that point).

The bit about fig leafs, complete with illustrations, is particularly good, as is the bit on Pierre Bayle, who hid his radical ideas in the footnotes to his Historical and Critical Dictionary in lengthy footnotes that he knew no one would read.

You can get this for free if you want to read it btw.

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music

Bandcamp Friday

There are a few hours left in Bandcamp Friday. Instead of using Spotify, why not buy some music there? Coincidentally Grace Petrie has a new EP out.

Entry tags:

podcasts

podcast friday

There has been another round of great podcasts this week, but this is not an unbiased blog, and thus check out The Fiction Lab's "The Intersection Between Activism & Fiction with Rachel A. Rosen" and hear all about how fiction and real life activism inform each other, the challenges of telling political stories, and how to make your political stories (and activism) a little less on-the-nose.

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Couldn't put this one down, which is why I'm tired this morning. It's dark academia meets gothic with three rather compelling heroines who've been cursed by witches. Like most gothics, it's more about the atmosphere than the mystery, though I did really enjoy ( spoilers ). And I loved all three characters, which, in true SMG style, are very driven, to the point of alienating most of the people in their lives, and very lifelike.

I am glad I was warned for ( another spoiler )

Oh it's also super adorable to see the "ancient department heads" at Stoneridge College. This is best not spoiled.

Currently reading: Nothing, but I have a hold that should be coming in soon at the library so it's time to read all my short books.

Understanding AI more deeply means I can trash it harder

Vibe coding at scale so far is often trash. It's potentially full of security holes and unnecessary changes and features, saving time on code generation but costing time in code review. It seems no one wants to be rude enough to point out that maintaining code is the bulk of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) historically. It's wild that vibe coding platforms can sometimes delete entire databases or hard drives because they've gone off the rails.

I've recently arrived at a strategy of dual-wielding critical realism (if not transcendental realism) and post-structuralism in order to be able to take down naive notions of AI and what it's capable of. Like, we fit AI to training corpora, not to truth per se. It would be irrational to claim that AI trained in that way could arrive at absolute truth, as the training process is grounded in data at a significant remove from reality itself. And the decision of dataset curation and tagging reflects power as per post-structuralism, so there can be no appeal to some mythical pan-cultural objectivity across all domains. I suppose if I had to typify this approach to critique, it would amount to: AI isn't what you think it is.

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fuckin white people

The City of Toronto decided to, at the request of Black Lives Matter six years ago, rename a bunch of places that were named after Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811). Many important landmarks here, including a major street and two subway stations, are named after this guy (as well as a small town and many other streets around Ontario).

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811), was a wealthy British white man who was in favour of the "gradual abolition" of slavery, which is to say that over half a million Africans who might have otherwise been freed were instead trafficked during the delay.

Many, many people are suddenly amateur historians defending the life and beliefs of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811), the beauteous sound of the syllables upon the tongue, the importance of remembering history (textbooks no longer exist, you see, and Wikipedia was never invented) and the cost to the city of the renaming. These same people have never, to my knowledge, issued a single complaint about Gichi Kiiwenging being renamed to York and later to Toronto, constituting a massive act of disrespecting and forgetting history and culture and a financial cost still borne by today's Anishinaabowen. They probably even call the Skydome the Rogers Centre now!

Is this act symbolic and pointless? Kinda. Black Lives Matter also asked, famously, for the police to be defunded, but this year the police budget got a 3.9% raise, ballooning to a princely $1.22 billion, at a time when violent crime continues to fall. I think that's a more important demand! I also think that the new name of the subway station is stupid. However, as a Jewish person, I wouldn't like to be walking down a street named after Hitler, so I do think it's a nice symbolic gesture to call it something else.

All I can say is imagine being so white and having so few problems that you have suddenly started caring about Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (1742-1811)!