Links: Now what, and what happened

The key is to avoid perpetuating the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.. 1) Trust yourself. 2) Find others whom you trust. 3) Grieve [...] 10) Envision a positive future. Via cosmolinguist and ewt

Who Goes Nazi? by Dorothy Thompson."It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi."

I've been following Mekka Okereke @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io over on mastodon, and he's been saying for months (probably years) that the key is the Black vote. White people (he's particularly down on white women) can't be depended on to vote against fascism. He says "Right here is where it all went wrong." Oct 11, 2024, Kamala Harris announced that as president she would create a bipartisan council of advisers. This is aimed at swing voters rather than at Black or other progressive voters.

The whole thread is worth reading, with lots of good points. And someone does call Mekka out on his focus on white women. (I wish people would specify white Christian women too. While I'm sure there are a few Jewish fascist sympathizers, I bet there aren't many.)

If, like me, you want to have some kind of understanding of what happened, the explanations are 1) Voter turnout about 8 million less than in 2020. Trump got about the same number of votes, so the deficit is in the Democrat tally. Partly the betrayal of Black voters (see below), and also, of course, voter suppression. 2) Abortion-rights referendums made some white women feel safer voting for Trump because they think their own right are safe. (?!!)

A thread about why moving to the center, collaborating with Nazis "a little bit", loses a crucial 10% of the Black male vote.( Clearly laid out )

Link: Refugias

Jules @AFewBugs@ramblingreaders.org posted from Great Tide Rising by Kathleen Dean Moore.

"Over the years, college students have often come to my office distraught, unable to think of what they might be able to do to stop the terrible losses caused by an industrial growth economy run amok. So much dying, so much destruction. I tell them about Mount Saint Helens, the volcano that blasted a hole in the Earth in 1980, only a decade before they were born.

Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980, I tell my students. When they first climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone. Every tree was stripped gray, every ridgeline buried in cinders, every stream clogged with toppled trees and ash. If anything would grow here again, they thought, its spore and seed would have to drift in from the edges of the devastation, long dry miles across a plain of cinders and ash. The scientists could imagine that– spiders on silk parachutes drifting over rubble and plain, a single samara spinning into the shade of a pumice stone. It was harder to imagine the time required for flourishing to return to the mountains – all the dusty centuries.

But here they are today: On the mountain, only thirty-five years later, these same scientists are on their knees, running their hands over beds of moss below lupine in lavish purple bloom. Tracks of mice and fox wander along a stream, and here, beside a ten-foot silver fir, a coyote’s twisted scat grows mushrooms. What the scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation passed over some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer fern under a rotting log. There under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly larvae. Refugia, they call them: places of safety where life endures. From the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, forests and meadows returned to the mountain.

( Look for the refugias. Protect them. )

— Kathleen Dean Moore: Great Tide Rising

ToDo: Passport renewal

I spent a chunk of time this evening putting together my passport renewal application (renewal how-to), and I'll go get a photo and mail it out tomorrow. Oddly enough, my current passport was issued Dec 4, 2016. The fee has gone up to $130.

I haven't used the passport since I renewed it 8 years ago. The photo looks charmingly young, and isn't half-bad. I debated about what to put for hair color on the renewal form. I have a decent frosting of gray on top, and the braid is still mostly brown with threads of silver. I put gray, since it's the way to bet in the long run.

Such a weird sense of deja vu. I keep thinking about survivorship bias, and Tamnonlinear (recent post from julian), who died by suicide in 2016. I was so viscerally panicked in 2016. This time I'm more resigned. At the moment, anyway.

When I think back to the beginning of the pandemic, I remember how terrified I was. Now I'm realizing, it was the terror of the unknown, PLUS the accumulated anxiety of the previous four years. At least I'm starting out this time with a nervous system that's more settled?