Open Thread

At this point, five years later, it’s going to be firehoses wielded by fascists in masks providing the water.

The Helen Kellers of the nothing-to-see-here crowd were and are always so consistent.

Unless it’s Hillary’s emails, Biden the Commie, non-existent NATO troops invading Texas, ghosts trying to steal their property, vaccines attacking our vital bodily fluids, a Somali under every hospital bed, Haitians eating their pet Rottweilers, or Christ a la Trump on a pogo stick.

Then it’s gun and ammo time.

Aliens/demons from outer space walking among us, by which they mean we are the aliens and they are “us”, THAT they believe.

You can see where that’s going.

I would for Jon Ossoff.
Should the election be held and my vote counted.

Glad to hear, I’m trying to get a sense of him….

It won’t be.

The opposite of FYLTGE

It’s easy to forget, for those in the east, just how progressive the western states were a century ago.

Women first got the right vote statewide in Wyoming, IIRC.* (The Utah legislature passed women’s suffrage, by unanimous vote!, shortly thereafter. Due to vageries in election dates, women in Utah actually voted first; probably best not to argue that matters, if speaking to someone in Wyoming.) The next 6 were Colorado, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, and Arizona. Are you seeing a trend here? Colorado was the first state to elect a woman to the legislature; Nevada was the first to have a majority female legislature.

Things like initiatives and referendums** are routine here — the results of the Progressive Era. They appear to still be unknown in much of the rest of the country. Some parts of the west are extremely conservative now. But even there, things like that are part of the traditional culture that they want to preserve, no matter how they are viewed elsewhere..

* Technically, women, at least rich women, could vote in New Jersey from Independence. But that was ended after ~30 years.

** Latin purists: be informed that English absorbs foreign nouns from many languages, and rately worries about how, or if, they do plurals.

Colorado was the first state to elect a woman to the legislature; Nevada was the first to have a majority female legislature.

There are currently nine state legislative chambers where woman members hold 50% or more of the seats. All nine are in western states. Four of the last five Speakers of the Colorado House have been women.

GftNC – nous: speaking (as we were) about Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I wonder whether you have read or know about Blood Over Bright Haven? I’ve just this minute finished it. It’s a worthy development, I think.

I have not, and neither has my wife (who is the one most likely to be reading new SFF – especially dark academia). I’ve put it on her radar. She’s got more reading time opening up now that the Nebula reading and voting is done.

My current reading is divided between Utopianism for a Dying Planet (608 pgs.) and – relatedly – a 780 pg. William Morris bio, so it’s going to be a bit before I can get to anything else. (I’ve also got The Left Hand of Darkness on my bedstand, but that’s not going to bog me down.) Feels like I have the start of a research project building here, but no idea yet where it is heading. It’s all in the heavy lifting and brainstorming phase still.

In the process of finishing my final grading for two courses, then the unpaid labor for the summer will be putting together my materials for a performance review and fleshing out a new syllabus for next school year. It’ll be a research writing class centered on bicycle activism, which sounds quite niche at the outset, but blossoms into a dozen or so potential research paths with diverse disciplinary homes and methodologies – something for all majors and interests. Most importantly for my purposes, it’s framed as public outreach, which will force the students to synthesize what they are reading, apply it to real world contexts, and address it to diverse, real-world communities. Gotta make the writing feel real or else they will never treat writing like it IS real.

hsh – I’m slow-burn furious over what’s been done to my students’ futures without their knowledge or consent. I would love to put together a class that combines reading of some utopian SF with some critiques of our current, unsustainable path, and then set them all loose to write some solarpunk utopias and imagine a better future for themselves.

The problem with this is that most of them come in with far too little reading and writing in their education patched together and propped up with an overreliance on AI, struggling to collaborate because social media and the pandemic have sapped their social skills, and stressed to the max by how much debt they have taken on trying to future proof themselves from a world where all their jobs have been automated away.

It would take a couple years of careful buildup to get them ready to handle the reading list, and to engage in undirected critical thinking.

Not their fault. They are as capable as past students. We have not given them the conditions or the institutions that would allow them to prosper as we did. We have hobbled them.

It’s kinda heartbreaking.

https://digbysblog.net/2026/06/12/by-any-and-every-means/

In Germany after WW1 a trillion would not have bought you a loaf of bread. People went to the shops with wheelbarrows full of money and then had to trade in the wheelbarrow because it was not enough. In 1924 there were 100-trillion Reichsmark single banknotes.
Even His Orangeness with his economical incompetence will not get the muskrat that high.