latest updates: a quick update with some neat stuff i'm reading ‖ musings on immigration ‖ getting back into reading ‖ busy at work on a few projects ‖ an ethics of complementarity ‖ building a website when you barely know what you're doing is exhausting ‖ what i would do for a third party i actually like ‖ getting into the rhythm of blogging ‖ eulogy

a quick update with some neat stuff i'm reading

Alyaza Birze (September 24)

i don't have time for a more structured update today (as you might be able to tell by the timestamp, i'm sending this pretty late in the day which is not my preference), but i do have a few cool links in the pipe that i've wanted to toss on my blog. here they are, in no particular order:

Disabled Union Members Are Strengthening the Labor Movement (The Nation)

no doubt there is heterogeneity in how the labor movement has dealt with crises like the COVID-19 pandemic—and many unions have not done much if anything to protect their membership as they should—but i think it's heartening to listen to the success cases and what efforts at genuine disability inclusion look like:

[Leslie Bryan of the California Faculty Association’s Disability Caucus] noted that the union framework provides an ideal avenue for ensuring that disabled people’s needs are heard. By design, unions uplift all workers by way of facilitating coordinated, collaborative actions. A collective union action pushing for better ventilation at work, for example, has a much higher impact than a single disabled worker asking for this accommodation. Solidarity between disabled and nondisabled members also makes it clear to bosses that workers are invested in inclusion for everyone—and as a marginalized community, disabled people are more vulnerable to discrimination at work that unions can help them fight. For the [California Faculty Association], that inclusion started with advertising accommodations and supports at meetings to make it clear that disabled workers would be both welcome and heard, increasing meeting turnout and interest in engaging with the union. She said, “If you put the accommodations out there and let people know they’re there, they will come.”

[Bryan] told me that she’s seen policy shifts at the CFA, including captioning and ASL at union meetings and improved on-site accessibility. Disability advocacy drove these changes, not only within the CFA but also in discussions with sibling unions, such as Murphy’s CSUEU, which collaborated on conversations about safe emergency evacuation for disabled students and staff.

Traffic safety for all road users: A paired comparison study of small & mid-sized U.S. cities with high/low bicycling rates

would you be surprised to learn that there is evidence of a relationship between places that have a culture of bicycling and general pedestrian safety? of course it seems quite obvious when you put it that way—we would expect bicycling to occur most where there is no risk to doing it—but a shockingly large amount of traffic safety is kind of bullshit, as many of you learned together when you read Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System along with me. in any case:

[...]higher-bicycling cities are significantly associated with better overall road safety outcomes. In terms of mode choice differences, pedestrian ‘safety in numbers’ as well as reduced driving activity had a positive impact on pedestrian safety.

[...]the results suggest that to improve the safety of their streets, and especially for vulnerable road users, small and mid-size cities might focus on promoting alternatives to driving. There was strong evidence of pedestrian ‘safety in numbers’ identified, with cities and block groups with higher levels of pedestrian commuting experiencing lower pedestrian fatality rates.

Secondly considering the built environment, one of the principal findings of this work is the importance of a high-density built environment in terms of both land use and street networks when pursuing traffic safety improvements. Such high-density built environments are likely associated with shorter trips, lower vehicle speeds, and less vehicle miles travelled, thereby resulting in the traffic safety improvements identified in this paper, although future work will be needed to verify these underlying mechanisms.

How Arizona works to give Navajo voters a ballot they can listen to in their language (Votebeat)

i observed on Bluesky a few days ago that we should probably have some sort of government agency—call it the United States Language Corps or something—for general language translation, preservation, and support. beyond its pro-social and pro-cultural functions, an agency like this could be something that states and counties can ask for support from when they need to give official guidance or write ballots in like, Haitian Creole or Navajo or another minority language. we already oblige them with the latter thing in many cases, as this article notes, but often they're left to do this on their own (or to subcontract it out, which sucks):

Section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act requires places around the country to translate election information into specific languages if they have significant numbers of residents who share a common language and don’t understand English well, or if they meet other criteria. It’s a challenge to do these translations, and do them correctly, especially for counties such as those in Arizona that must translate historically oral languages.

now, is a Language Corps a fraught question with a lot of ethical and social considerations such as imperialism to work through? oh yeah, i'm sure this would be a very complicated undertaking, especially with historically unwritten languages (there are many in the American Southwest). but i believe it can work—i believe it can be done respectfully, especially when supported with the resources of a state. and i think linguistic preservation ought to be a human imperative: everyone should have a right to speak their cultural language, and not have to watch it atrophy and become extinct because of social forces beyond any one speaker's control.

musings on immigration

Alyaza Birze (September 22)

i read this post from liberal pundit Noah Smith the other day—How will you save small midwestern towns without mass immigration?; i find it interesting now that i've finished Future of Denial. here are some miscellaneous thoughts on the two.

for the most part, a combination of social and economic liberalism seems to actually get people reasonably close to what i'd consider a correct take on immigration. but, as with many political differences that distinguish liberalism from leftism it's the remainder that presents a gigantic issue. this article is useful for illustrating some of that.

it's not all good

you might say the political distinction is best illustrated by the framing of the article in the first place: that revitalizing and maintaining the economic prospects of a desiccating region through immigrant labor is more-or-less always a good thing (for both the immigrant and to a lesser degree the place they're immigrating to). take for instance the glowing verbiage here:

If you’re a poor immigrant from a low-income country like Honduras, or Somalia, or Haiti, or Laos, or even the poorer parts of Mexico, the chance to live in a first-world country like America and work in a relatively clean, relatively safe factory for $14 an hour is the chance of a lifetime. You’ve really made it, if you can do that. So when a small-town factory owner who needs labor starts hiring workers from an immigrant group, they quickly tell all their friends and family, and the factory fills up with immigrant workers.

is this sentiment true in many cases? i'm sure, especially if your frame of reference is Somalia or Haiti or any other number of deeply fucked up countries in the world. it isn't for nothing that over a million people per year immigrate to the United States—in terms of political stability, wealth, opportunity, and cultural and economic hegemony this country has quite a lot to offer virtually any immigrant. but living a better, safer life obviously does not make you immune to exploitation (even in a liberal framework; certainly in a leftist one). the treatment of immigrant labor is often quite appalling in the United States (especially undocumented labor, which de facto allows for slave-like conditions) and deeply exploitative or unsafe relative to non-immigrant labor. and—while this can't inherently be solved by wage increases, benefits, and unionization—is it not an obviously troubling dynamic that vital industries like meatpacking and fruit production are heavily reliant on a flow of immigration to function?

mass immigration, freedom of movement, carceral policy

there's a section in Noah Smith's article which is as follows:

Opinion about immigration in America depends very strongly on the type of immigrants being considered. For example, people really love high-skilled immigration. But at the same time, people really don’t like illegal immigration. But in between, there’s a whole category of immigration that doesn’t quite fit into either of those buckets: mass low-skilled legal immigration. This is when a large number of people come to an American town who aren’t entrepreneurs or engineers or doctors, but who came through perfectly legal channels.

and in the conclusion, he notes:

[...]if you’re upset about “floods” of low-skilled immigrants getting “dumped” on small towns in the American heartland, you should ask yourself: How else do you propose to revive those declining regions? Would you starve them of the only resource that they could possibly use to revitalize themselves?

i think these make for good jumping off points to exploring far more interesting aspects of mass immigration that deserve consideration and aren't just dumb right-wing canards or fearmongering. for example: immigration is for most intents and purposes a finite resource under the immigration law of most countries. there are a finite number of people, and the subset with the ability and desire to move elsewhere are even more finite. most immigration processes are also exceedingly laborious; and some are virtually impossible, especially for the "low-skill immigrant" category Smith identifies.

needless to say: i think that's bad! if we're serious about facilitating mass immigration and freedom of movement then i think it obviously follows in the short term that we must demilitarize existing borders; reform immigration systems to be much more permissive of who is allowed in and how quickly; and create analogues to the Schengen Area around the world. i'm sure Smith agrees with most of that, and that it'd make everything much easier for those considered "low-skill immigrants". we could revitalize a lot of economically deprived areas that way.

but i suspect where i'd lose him is full abolition of borders—i am opposed to them in principle and practice. in this specific context, that's because if we want to make the finite nature of immigration as unimpactful as possible, that will require minimal restrictions on global freedom of movement. borders are obviously and by far the largest impediment to this. but there are other reasons borders suck and shouldn't exist, and some of these are perhaps even ones that you've considered in passing before.

borders are necessarily carceral, even when in "kind" forms like the Schengen Area; they must define an in-group and an out-group, a "legal" and an "illegal", a "right" and a "wrong" way to move about. the construct of "illegal immigration" is in large part a product of borders (and the states which make them tangible). borders serve to define the in-group and the out-group, and they make it possible to describe someone as "illegal" through the application of a state's law. as Catherine Dauvergne puts it: “Illegal migration is a product of migration law. Without legal prohibition, there is no illegality.”

a byproduct of this is that a state's power to police its borders can extend far beyond its actual borders. Tad Delay and Harsha Walia combine to note, for instance, that:

Borders do not keep people out. What borders do is confer and revoke status. We tax goods at the border. Humans turn “illegal” at a border. [...] Concentration camps and border patrol raids draw attention, but power acts on migrants or refugees long before they reach a host nation. In her marvelously documented book Border and Rule, the immigrant rights activist Harsha Walia defined border externalization as webs of “interdiction, offshore detention, safe third country agreements, and outsourcing of border control to third countries.”

many of the people impacted worst by this—the ones who resort to being trafficked, or who brave journeys of thousands of miles over land just to attempt to declare asylum—are, of course, in the "low-skill immigrant" category. reforming the immigration system will only change so much for these people, especially as they become more frequent due to climate change, political instability, and worsening economic prospects in their home countries.

neocolonialism

of course there's an additional, interesting matter of complication: at least currently, the dynamics of immigration in the world seem quite neocolonial. the financial power—or prospective financial power—of developing nations is, in a sense, extracted through emigration. facilitated by the lack of opportunity in such countries, developing nations lose their highly-educated talent to other countries like the United States (and often these emigrants do not return). a brain drain follows, from which such countries often struggle to recover. economic prospects are worsened; political instability is made more likely; the country is perhaps obliged to take on foreign specialists (who may have their own agendas) to replace lost domestic talent, or perhaps forced to be subservient to outside financial interests to make up for this.

the root of this issue is the state these developing countries were left in by the colonial process. this is almost universal, actually. even comparatively well off developing countries like Nigeria—poised to be a major economy in the future due to its population growth and oil wealth—struggle with the historical plunder of colonialism¹ and the lack of colonial statebuilding. the Congos of the world have even less to look forward to in this respect. emigration is a very understandable impulse from countries like this; but simultaneously, and especially if it becomes easy even to the non-skilled worker, virtually guarantees Nkrumah's words become reality for these countries: "the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside." even the benefits of such emigration (remittances, for example) are easy to see as liabilities in the long term.

overall, this is an unfortunate dynamic that there don't seem to be easy answers for—in the short term, even good and humane immigration policy on the part of developed nations seems likely to make the dynamic worse.

¹ and ongoing economic neocolonialism too! that oil wealth has many strings attached by foreign corporations—check out how many joint-companies there are in the Nigerian petroleum industry.

getting back into reading

Alyaza Birze (September 21)

it's really hard to read when you're busy, and unfortunately the way i read best is through having minimal distractions and locking in. i don't recommend the manic burst approach to reading things, but it's the primary way i operate. the past week has made this nearly impossible to do on any meaningful level; thankfully with things calming down i've been able to actually dedicate some time to it. the "what i'm reading" section will likely become a more fleshed out fixture of these updates, since a lot of what i like to talk about in my posts is related to the stuff i get around to reading. lotta interesting stuff in the world, if only you can set your mind to the tomes people write about it.

incidentally:

what i'm reading

i hate carbon offsets

carbon offsets are completely fake bullshit that are just a way to launder PR for corporations and take the pressure off them to actually end their carbon emissions, but i feel like these two examples from Future of Denial really underscore how fake and nonsense they are. what the hell are we doing here?

A new company called YepYou stretched offsets to the absurd. Billing itself as the “World’s First Human Breath Carbon Offset,” YepYou offers fees starting at seventeen dollars annually to plant trees to offset exhaled breath. Offsetting your whole lifestyle costs sixty dollars. Customers may even pay for their pet’s breath.

Early in 2020 Delta Air Lines announced it would go carbon neutral by March. The company didn’t claim to end emissions but only to “mitigate all emissions,” leaving details to customers’ imagination: “Because we’ve committed to carbon neutrality from March 2020 forward, you can feel confident that when you choose to fly Delta, your flight will be carbon neutral.” Delta claims its flights are already carbon neutral long before alternatives to jet fuel exist.

and even if they weren't mostly fake (most of them are basically acts of fraud), carbon offsets are literally useless for most intents and purposes. the market prices them way too low; as physical entities to be meaningful they pretty much have to exist for the lifetime of the person they're intended to "offset"; and in a lot of cases the intended offsets just die or burn down. this happens routinely in California, for example, because the state is semi-permanently racked by massive fires (and—even ignoring the huge burn deficit that exists because of current firefighting doctrine and the desire to insulate/protect private properties—likely needs to be in perpetuity for the health of its forests). sometimes they also cause knock-on ecological problems because they're monoculture, or they lead to externalities of their own like "privatizing/enclosing indigenous land." all things equal, you might as well invest in carbon capture technology for all the good it does—at least we actually probably "need" carbon capture to eventually begin reversing climate change.

what does it mean to be self-aware?

self-awareness is an interesting concept. to the degree that we can meaningfully quantify it, it's probably true that humans have the most advanced form of it—while we can't really know this, it's just hard to imagine that other animals have the same ability to, say, "introspect and place ourselves in the context of everything" as we do given the gulf in our capabilities versus theirs. (i'm not sure how we'd test for this in any case. there's also the human tendency to analogize or pathologize animal behavior to behaviors of our own.) but a level of significant self-awareness is probably quite common among even the simplest non-human animals:

When one teases apart [self-awareness's] cognitive layers, they’re not so uncommon. Mental time travel is one of them. Another is metacognition, or the ability to reflect upon one’s knowledge: I know. I don’t know. Rats are also metacognitive, as demonstrated in setups that let them choose between getting a small, guaranteed snack now or taking a memory test in which correct answers earn big snacks and wrong answers nothing at all. When the passage of time has blurred their memories, they opt for the guaranteed reward.

Some might argue, though, that rats are uncommonly intelligent, and therefore not representative. Yet consider another component of self-awareness, episodic memory: the what, where, and when qualities that give shape to undifferentiated recollection. Episodic-like memory has been found in zebrafish, a tiny species used as a model organism for investigating the foundations of cognition. Minnows shoaling in the stormwater pond’s shallows almost certainly share this type of memory, with the topographies of their daily lives replacing the experimental setups—familiar and unfamiliar objects, familiar and unfamiliar settings—used to illuminate the memories of their aquarium-bound cousins. Researchers have also demonstrated this type of memory in hummingbirds, mice, and cuttlefish, the latter of whom last shared a common ancestor with vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. That such evolutionarily disparate creatures possess these memories suggests how common they are.

busy at work on a few projects

Alyaza Birze (September 19)

yesterday was quite busy in no small part because i am currently involved in the machinations of the Website League; this post-Cohost will hopefully get up and running at the end of the month, but it means a lot of my time is spent acting as a de facto secretary keeping minutes and refining ideas into a useful state for everyone.

unrefined thoughts on religion and society

adapted from a Discord chat earlier this week—

i think i would consider religion an influence we need to overcome in society, and probably transcend eventually. but one of the reasons i'm unsure of this position (and why i've spent a lot of time thinking about it in the first place) is the practical logistics of that eventually taking place.

in practice the only way people seem to actually "deconvert from religion" en masse is through authoritarianism. you can make people de facto irreligious (see East Germany for example), but at scale this seems to almost exclusively be accomplished best by forcibly making people give up their faith and totally impeding its practice, which i think is probably not the way to go. for the most part i think you have the right to practice whatever religious or spiritual system you want.

absent authoritarian measures, however, when most people "deconvert" they seem to just go from being religious to being spiritual—and they don't really give up the corrosive underlying thought-processes many religions impress on their followers. there are tons of American cultural Christians, agnostics, or atheists who still replicate and live by the exact structures of discrimination, authoritarianism, and inequality religions create and encourage. and even if you are an american agnostic or atheist, you probably still had a pretty religious upbringing of some kind statistically and that influences how you live your life (and why)

i guess the place of transmission i'd identify here is how people get raised specifically. it seems like if you want to reduce the influence or religion you would have to fight the norms people raise their children with (which even if they're not christian in America for example are probably strongly informed by what christianity thinks is right).

what i'm reading

For more than two thousand years, belief in animal unintelligence had spread through Western civilization. Aristotle, zoologist as well as philosopher, thought animals capable of feeling only pain or hunger; his hierarchical taxonomy of life, with humans perched on top, was adapted by Christian theologians bent on replacing pagan beliefs in human–animal kinship. They emphasized rationality as a supposedly defining human trait and laid the foundations for Enlightenment thinkers such as Nicholas Malebranche, a seventeenth-century philosopher who neatly distilled the attitude of his peers when he said animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”

an ethics of complementarity

Alyaza Birze (September 17)

i made an offhand post to this end yesterday on Bluesky but it's hard to imagine in 50 years that most people will play or engage with American football. all sports have some level of injury risk, especially at the high-intensity, professional level. but fundamentally with football the sport is tethered to actions that irreparably damage your brain and cannot be designed around. the problem is one-part constant subconcussive forces, and one-part obvious traumatic brain injuries. we have people today who—before they even make it to college or the NFL—accumulate ten years worth of noticeable brain damage by playing normally. played at scale and for a lengthy amount of time, it's essentially a factory for breaking people permanently.

i'd say maybe rugby will come back in vogue since it fills a similar niche, but—despite the lack of padding incentivizing safer hitting practices—it actually has the same problem (and maybe worse; studies may just be lagging behind American football here), at least in the traumatic brain injury/chronic traumatic encephalopathy department. so maybe the whole niche is just fucked from first principles here

what i'm reading

i've opted to table Kochland for one book just because i need to get back into the swing of reading after a hectic week. instead, i'm reading Meet the Neighbors by Brandon Keim and it's already pretty fun even though i'm only in the introduction. i like this particular paragraph from the introduction because i think it slots nicely into an already existing synthesis between Social Ecology and Communalism and Braiding Sweetgrass i've previously observed:

Humanity has become a planetary force, regulating global nutrient cycles and changing the climate and rearranging ecosystems. This power is something to understand not only in terms of what we do, but in terms of who we are. Our values are inscribed on the planet. What and who we care about, how we see ourselves and others, our morals and our ethics: these now shape the course of life itself. And even if we prove unable to halt the ecological collapse, if our grandchildren’s Earth is a radically different and less verdant place than our own, there will still be nature, and animals, and the imperative to live well with them.

even though Social Ecology and Communalism was written before Meet the Neighbors, Bookchin pretty unambiguously concurs, in "What is Social Ecology?" with Brandon Keim's notion that we have become a "planetary force". to Bookchin, that reality means must accept our place—that we have created for ourselves in establishing a dominion over nature—as stewards for both our own well-being and the well-being of nonhuman life on this planet. he says of this:

[...]humans have an ethical responsibility to function creatively in the unfolding of that evolution. Social ecology thus stresses the need to embody its ethics of complementarity in palpable social institutions that will make human beings conscious ethical agents in promoting the well-being of themselves and the nonhuman world. [...] Social ecology, in effect, recognizes that – like it or not – the future of life on this planet pivots on the future of society.

he posits further that we should take an explicit "supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the biosphere" and 'go beyond both the natural and the social toward a new synthesis that contains the best of both [...] in which human beings intervene in natural evolution with their best capacities – their ethical sense, their unequaled capacity for conceptual thought, and their remarkable powers and range of communication."

Bookchin also notes that the framework of domination over nature is a byproduct of class structure and hierarchy—it is not intrinsic to human life and did not always exist:

We must emphasize here that the idea of dominating nature has its primary source in the domination of human by human and in the structuring of the natural world into a hierarchical chain of being (a static conception, incidentally, that has no relationship to the dynamic evolution of life into increasingly advanced forms of subjectivity and flexibility). [...] Its idea of dominating nature – so essential to the view of the nonhuman world as an object of domination – can be overcome only through the creation of a society without those class and hierarchical structures that make for rule and obedience in private as well as public life, and the objectifications of reality as mere materials for exploitation.

it is in large part because we maintain existing social stratifications; consider ourselves "superior" and the nonhuman world "inferior"; and structurally divide ourselves away from nature (or see ourselves as above it) that the objectification of the natural world into "mere materials for exploitation" can follow, and ecological destruction can occur without thought.

Keim's assertion that "What and who we care about, how we see ourselves and others, our morals and our ethics: these now shape the course of life itself." is likewise something that Bookchin has an answer for; from even his earliest anarchist writings until his transition to communalism, Bookchin advocated for what he called an "ethics of complementarity.” by complementing nonhuman beings with our own abilities—and through acting as a supportive species rather than a “dominant” one—we can avoid the problems described above. simultaneously, values like mutualism (with nature and each other), self-organization (among ourselves), and freedom can also be prioritized.

an "ethics of complementarity" is also, in a way, advocated by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who states in Braiding Sweetgrass:

Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind.

Wall Kimmerer expands on this notion in pretty similar terms as Bookchin, saying:

As I grew to understand the gifts of the earth, I couldn’t understand how “love of country” could omit recognition of the actual country itself. The only promise it requires is to a flag. What of the promises to each other and to the land?

What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence? [...] In the Thanksgiving Address,¹ I hear respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not one political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?

notes

¹ a traditional address to the natural world given by the Haudenosaunee. a common translation/version of it by John Stokes and Kanawahientun can be found here.

building a website when you barely know what you're doing is exhausting

Alyaza Birze (September 16)

brief preface: the Cohost Union News section of the site is up, if you haven't seen that; updates are now being made to it (and i'm slowly working on converting the archive). check it out—it also has a separate RSS feed from the rest of the site.

anyways

it is very tiring to run a website of any kind. i know this with Beehaw because i am a co-founder and administrator of; now i know this is the case with building a website. i would probably call this the most hectic two weeks of my year so far—which has included a lot of hectic moments. needless to say this has been quite draining.

luckily, i think we're now beyond the worst of this. between Chrome and Firefox, my open number of tabs has hovered at probably fifty or more this week, versus my usual 20-ish. but i've been able to consolidate the tabs i have significantly now that things are stabilizing a bit; i'll now be posting between about five or six websites at a time, but that seems... reasonably manageable, since most of them share formatting. i'm hoping to get some reading in today, and i finally have time to start posting back to Beehaw again.

i am collecting links for the next Cohost Union News post. i might settle into a rhythm of every other day as feasible, we'll see.

what i would do for a third party i actually like

Alyaza Birze (September 13)

[...]if we want to have more parties, we have to understand that it’s the institutions that give us our party system. We need electoral reforms that make it possible for third parties to compete without being spoilers.
Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, Lee Drutman

what i just quoted to you probably seems really fucking obvious. it does to me: the American political system is fundamentally broken and minoritarian, and electoral reform will be necessary in order for there to ever be meaningful choices in most of our elections. i am currently a partisan Democrat by vote and will probably vote for Kamala Harris in November¹—but i would quite like if this was not the case given that i am a socialist. this party is a tent i am in because of our bad institutions, not because i want to actually be here.

luckily, this year Colorado gets to vote on Proposition 131 (or Initiative 310) - a top-four ranked-choice voting initiative. i have many disagreements with this sort of electoral reform (and i think it's, in electoral reform terms, a fairly meager reform), and the guy pushing it is some annoying center-right "moderate" who Doesn't Agree With Either of the Parties—but i will be voting for it. a step forward is a step forward, and this is obviously an improvement on the existing system. more importantly: top-four has strong potential for left-wing third parties, especially if coupled with liberal ballot access laws. i have argued previously that Alaska is now the most compelling state to attempt to build a socialist third party in because of its electoral system, and Colorado (which already has/had a number of Democratic-caucusing socialists in its legislature) could become a very compelling state for third parties too with this system. that would be pretty cool to me, personally.

unfortunately, the Green Party of Colorado does not seem to agree with this assessment or even the basic possibility of third parties being advantaged by such a system.

in their judgement, it is primarily bad to do electoral reform like this because it is not their preferred electoral reform. they argue that we should instead be "using RCV to elect our state and federal representatives by proportional representation from multi-seat legislative districts." and yes, that is agreeable—i support a single-transferrable vote system (which, if anyone's wondering, is what "multi-winner RCV" is.). but i have no idea how that actually conflicts with passing Proposition 131, or why the Green Party thinks "we should use an even better system" is a compelling argument for voting against something that would improve the system marginally.

the assertions that changing to this system would "make primary elections more expensive — increasing the role of big money in our elections and further corrupting our democracy" are plainly goofy. "big money" is already entrenched in our elections—there is basically no way to make this "worse". and how does this not already happen in FPTP? if anything it's worse in an FPTP system because "big money" can win a plurality instead of needing a majority—often the biggest spender in a clown-car FPTP race is the one who wins. AIPAC (the "American Israel Public Affairs Committee" - a big pro-Israel lobbying and spending group) in particular has made mincemeat of federal-level open primaries this year, and that's because they can throw millions of dollars into races of that sort and skate to victory with 30% or 40% of the vote. at least in ranked-choice, groups like this would be obliged to win over supporters of other candidates and not merely buy their way to victory. (candidates could also meaningfully strategize against this by engaging in ranking agreements.)

and i just frankly don't know what to say about the notion that a top-four primary is comparably "anti-democratic" to FPTP, as the Greens insinuate. i would agree if the number of slots for advancing to the general election was two, as in California and Washington (in the latter, Democrats combined for ~56% of the vote in the Land Commissioner race this year, but nearly got locked out because it was split between 5 candidates). but if, say, three or four Republicans advance in a top-four primary, that's probably because people actually want three or four Republicans. a lot of races in Alaska this year (and likewise in 2022) don't even have four candidates running, so there is no real risk of one party being "unfairly" locked out of the general election if they put up even a token candidate. many of those four-candidate races are only four candidate races in the first place because a third party candidate filed. and lastly: Alaska has demonstrated that voter preferences are largely identical between the primary and the general election in a system like this. in blunt terms, a candidate that fails to make the top-four is neither likely to win nor influence the outcome—it's probably fine if they're not on a general election ballot.²

in short: i don't agree at all with the Greens, and i think this is an almost-textbook example of them shooting themselves in the foot. but maybe i shouldn't be surprised: this is a party which has barely run any candidates since 2018 and seems moribund outside of reviving itself every four years to get the Green presidential nominee on the ballot. and unfortunately goofy goober decisionmaking like this is seemingly emblematic of third parties generally in this country. until they aren't (or unless their judgement is correctly overriden by voters and they get over themselves), i suspect i will begrudgingly remain a partisan Democrat by vote. (medium term party surrogate model my beloved)

what i'm reading (42/40)

i have unfortunately made zero progress on Kochland, but i hope to begin that again tomorrow. i have been reading a few news articles in preparation for what will likely be the first Cohost Union News post tomorrow, though. no spoilers!

converted essay of the day

today's essay is Just How Bad The Antifa Wildfire Panic Got In Rural Oregon in 2020, a post i wrote in May of 2023. this is one where i've preserved the imagery by Devin Eskew and other photojournalists because it's something that i think needs visual accompanyment. the story is in part that people in rural Oregon were so fearful of the enemy within—this faceless, amorphous idea of "antifa" far divorced from anything the left uses the term to mean—that they took to roadblocks and menacing journalists and passersby. the fear was pervasive and all-encompassing; it did not discriminate on class or occupational grounds. randoms who just wanted to save their houses were as in on it as the deputies of the police department. the hysteria was so severe that it necessitated pushback from law enforcement agencies, journalists, and the government itself. it was the worst a crisis situation has to offer and—not to alarm anyone—maybe it's one sign of a future to come in the Western US.

notes

¹ it's really only Cornel West who i am otherwise considering and--regrettably--even Cornel has been up to some real corny shit this year, so i'm not actually very enthralled with his candidacy. the PSL candidates are write-in this year, so that seems pointless (in addition to propping up a party i have some real issues with personally and strategically). and the less said about Jill Stein the better—she really makes me wish that Murray Bookchin had gotten his wish to make the Greens an "anti-party" party.

² as an extreme example: the original fourth-place Republican for Alaska's at-large House of Representatives district this year got 652 votes. the Democrat replacing him (because said Republican dropped out) is literally in a federal prison outside of Alaska and got 467 votes.

getting into the rhythm of blogging

Alyaza Birze (September 13)

They wonder why I'm not enthused to drop /
The more visible you get, the more your spiritual is tried
— _, Kendrick Lamar

manually blogging things is, admittedly, not a thing that i necessarily want to do. technology, in the sense that i'm using to make this post, is not really my thing. i don't find it very interesting to build websites; i don't find it very interesting to do much of the formatting minutiae that services would otherwise provide me myself; and there's a lot more friction to all of this that i generally dislike. but i'm also not very interested in continually bouncing around services—and i sure as fuck do not want to microblog. i preach to a choir, but: we made an unbelievable mistake when Twitter became load-bearing infrastructure for the blogging space and no, Bluesky is not going to be better about this. 300 characters is barely sufficient to tell you my favorite enchilada ingredients, much less tell you about the complexities of the world you live in.

so, here we are. let's see how many times i can find the strength and time to do this per month.

what i'm reading (42/40)

before Cohost kicked it, my plan was to give you a lengthy treatise on the history of climate change; luckily, that's something well-suited to a medium like this and the plan has not changed (although i could not begin to give you an estimate on when the post will be out). a lot of my reading this month—provided i can get to it through the instability of everyone moving everywhere—will be to that end. actually, a lot of the notes for the essay already exist and i could probably write it with what i have now—but i like to be thorough. accordingly: i'm early into Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America by Christopher Leonard. this book makes me wish i could personally throw Charles Koch (and actually the Koch family generally, but definitely Charles if i had to pick one) in a hydraulic press.

i'm not even to the parts that would have information for the post. i'm like one chapter in. but why is this guy not in front of an international tribunal? the children of the people reading this are probably going to wonder why we collectively—to use a Situationist turn of phrase—didn't hang him with the guts of his own bureaucrats. just a deeply, sincerely evil person on every level—can't wait to see what other horrible things he's been up to since... 1973, the year i am chronologically on in this book.

converted essay of the day

if you're hankering for some truly unrefined content, i have converted my essay "unfinished political musings on the state of West Virginia" to the site. this was a Cohost draft that i eventually published at some point, and it seems i did it so late in the post's existence that Google has outright failed to index it. or maybe the service is just that fucking bad now, even when you use the prefix "site:" and exact quotes, i dunno.

i think eventually i'll rewrite this guy more formally; the political history of West Virginia is genuinely fascinating and i will maintain it (among other things) is a good reason to consider it culturally distinct from the capital-S South. i also have a book in my long list of to-reads about the history of the Socialist Party in the state, which might make for a good post eventually.

other stuff of interest

i think Cohost Union News will launch on Sunday or Monday, as of now; i'm collecting links already for the first write-up and finishing up the blog-roll for the sidebar. i'm also advising a few things behind the scenes elsewhere in the greater Cohostsphere, and we'll see what comes of those.

a eulogy for Cohost

Alyaza Birze (September 12)

The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

every person has their own eulogy to write about Cohost; this is my own brief one.

Cohost was my primary social media website from the beginning—and in most senses of the word i was a true believer in the mission. (the site will lapse with my $50/yr contribution still in the barrel.) with its demise i'm not sure what the path forward is, in a few ways.

interpersonally, and with respect to my online presence: everything feels like it fills only one small part of a void, not even close to the whole. the most natural one-for-one alternative is Dreamwidth; but, without widespread adoption, it'll mostly be me talking to myself. i despise microblogging, but most people seem obliged to stop over on Bluesky. Tumblr is, well, Tumblr. and i'm not technically savvy enough to set up comments on here (absent it being built in to the software itself already). already, it feels like we're trading down substantially here.

more than anything: i will miss the one-stop-shop nature of Cohost, where it seemed like you could read about anything someone wanted to put their time toward on any given day. it was a centralized hub for all things nerdy and worthy of a longpost. the nuances of the world found a refuge here and thrived; now it seems we'll all have to make do with a blogosphere of our own. i generally echo the sentiments of Fourth Website Down, Three to Go :( from Nicky Flowers in this regard.

technologically: there are a lot of people in this world who deserved—and who, simply put, needed—something like Cohost, but won't have that anymore because the market has decided it is not profitable to be "a moderately-large social website that tries to actually design everything to benefit its userbase instead of predating on them". this sucks. the diversity of the web will be smaller now in its absence—and every worse, predatory model benefits from this. that sucks even more. i can only hope that one day there is a Hague for the people who designed the modern web.

ideologically: i am strongly of the opinion that something like Cohost cannot really survive in a capitalist economic system; or, alternatively, that to survive it would require exploitation that would counteract any good the website itself does. i dislike the cliche trope that in order to do something, capitalism must be overthrown—but this is a case where i think it is applicable (in part for reasons we'll get into further below). there will be facsimilies of Cohost but likely nothing approaching the complexity or community of the real thing. the legacy of the site itself will almost assuredly have to live through its internet diaspora.

a handful of things we might learn from Cohost?

Cohost was not all roses. there seem to already be lessons to learn here, and i don't think it's gravedancing to acknowledge them.

the elephant in the room is finances. despite its goal of eventually being in the black Cohost was never even approaching profitability and was always tethered to a short financial runway through having a single, not-particularly-rich investor. the plans to change this, juxtaposed against actual numbers, paint a picture of not knowing just how deep in the red the site was each month.¹ even generous estimates imply losing six figures per year, and frequently tens of thousands per month. despite the open finances, the most basic stakes of the finances—whether the site was two days, two weeks, two months, or two years from shutting down—were severely opaque at basically all times. it's fitting, given that opaqueness, the announcement of shutdown came suddenly. you would be forgiven this month for thinking the site would still exist a year from now.

i personally think it's quite goofy, but salary discourse is undoubtedly going to take up some of the Cohost retrospective space given the "large numbers" at play there. more interesting to me is the refusal to use volunteer labor, a position i personally believe they should have compromised on and which may have afforded them more time to get the house in order (and less being tied to the whims of employee availability). in the future, i hope websites with the buy-in of Cohost recognize and utilize this resource.

obviously, there's also the racism/moderation issue i wrote about extensively. moderation will never be perfect; but on Cohost the recurring pattern was inaction until it was far too late. this seems like it only changed because of my extensive post on the subject and, if not for that, may not have at all. simply put: i hope that future websites looking to Cohost as a model learn from that post, and i hope future users of said websites do not have to write an 8,500 word document like i did. my advice? invest in a diverse mod team and a diverse founding culture, and cultivate it with your life.

there are likely other takeaways and issues that will become apparent as more people publish their own retrospectives—maybe i will link to more of these as i come across them.

notes

¹ the Eggbux snafu is the obvious example here. user @quyksilver also notes, however: "Artist alley brought in about $800/month, which is enough to cover like...10% of one staff member's monthly pay. How many man-hours were put into this?" simply put most of the monetization looks in hindsight like trying to cover an arterial wound with a kleenex tissue.