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I now have a never ending, ever morphing, randomly generated mishmash of Wellerman, the COVID rewrite, and the Star Trek filk version on loop in my head. Thanks, Internet.

President Boring

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John Scalzi, in President Boring:

I suspect I will be exasperated with Biden a lot, and remember that I am a well-off cishet white dude who is not, in fact, a radical liberal. However exasperated I will be is a mere fraction of what others, more affected by the nonsense of the last four years, will be feeling. What I’m going to try to remember in those moments is that every step away from the abyss our nation almost toppled into is a good step. Biden will be my president (thank God), but he’s not the president for me. He’s the president for White People Who Still Haven’t Realized How Bad It Just Got, and hopefully through him, things get better for a whole lot of other people. Every day of that will be a victory of sorts.

I’m not as well-off as Scalzi is, and my impression is that I skew a bit left of him. Even with those caveats, he’s spot on here.

Biden wasn’t my first choice. There will be lots of times when I’ll wish he was doing more, or pushing harder. But he’s going to be so much better than what we’ve had and what we would have had if that continued.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day

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From his daughter Bernice King on Twitter:

Martin Luther King, Jr., from Letter from Birmingham Jail:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”

From Teen Vogue, in “Martin Luther King Jr. Was More Radical Than We Remember“:

Figures like President Barack Obama have reminded us that King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But over time, the great orator’s writings became less magnanimous and ever more convinced that white supremacy was the most significant obstacle in attaining liberation for all black people.

In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, originally published in 1967, King wrote that “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. The reality of substantial investment to assist Negroes into the twentieth century, adjusting to Negro neighbors and genuine school integration, is still a nightmare for all too many white Americans.”

He continued: “These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.”

From Timeline, in “By the end of his life, Martin Luther King realized the validity of violence“:

One of the foundational notions of nonviolence is that in order to be respected, one must behave well and abide by the social contract: work hard, follow the rules, and prosper. The problem is that since the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade, black people had worked harder and followed more rules, more strictly than anyone in America. And still they found themselves in an impossible and impoverished situation. King might not have been as militant as the militants would have liked, and he may have become an even greater citizen of the world while cities were on fire, but by the time he spoke in the fall of 1967, he recognized that it would no longer be effective to tell black folks to only protest peacefully, kindly, and respectfully. They could not prosper in a game where they were the only ones expected to play by the rules. King closed that speech with a stark truth:

“Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”

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📚 3/2021: Ringworld by Larry Niven ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1971 Hugo Best Novel

This was one of my formative SF books of childhood, and for the most part, still holds up well, especially in the sheer mind-boggling nature of the Ringworld itself and the true alien-ness of the puppeteers.

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📚 2/2021: The Dark Veil by James Swallow ⭐️⭐️⭐️ #startrek

A year after the attack on Mars and Picard’s retirement, Riker and the Titan (including Troi and Thad, their first child) face off with Romulans while assisting a mysterious alien ship. More good backstory building.

Do ‘elder Goths’ hold the secret to aging successfully?

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From The Washington Post: Do ‘elder Goths’ hold the secret to aging successfully?:

(Well…yes. I mean, have you seen me and the people I run around with?)

Since 2014, Bush has chronicled the rituals of her forebears in Maryland’s Goth community. Her contention is that “participation in the Goth subculture presents an alternative to being aged by culture.”

In other words, there is a better, more Goth way to grow old and to prevail over life’s many challenges.

[…]

As Bush and her Goth studies colleagues explain it, so-called elder Goths — who came of age with the music decades ago — possess a kind of road map through life that doesn’t exist for fans of more youth-obsessed musical genres.

That, and we bathe in the blood of virgins (consensually donated, of course…this is the 21st century, after all).

“Happy Goth” may seem like an oxymoron — but that’s the point. Bush argues that Goths’ success in aging has a lot to do with their ability to juggle opposing, seemingly paradoxical energies. Take Goths’ emotional intensity: While off-putting to some, Goths’ willingness to harnessdark feelings such as despair, gloom and hopelessness, rather than repress them, can prove healthier in the long run, Bush says. Equally vital is Goths’ ability to find humor, irony and beauty in supposedly “ugly” sources, such as flowers that grow by a cemetery or the absurd frailties of the aging body. In a culture, for instance, that already treats older women as frightful, why not own that, and become the most fabulous grand dame of darkness the world has ever seen?

According to Bush, the subculture’s most important element is a fierce sense of community. Goths feel united by their embrace of difference: As one older Goth puts it, she’s grateful to have a scene “with people who are my age and maybe a little older, who are still living life on their own terms, where they said, ‘I’m older but I still want to go out, I still want to listen to wild and crazy music, I still want to look freaky.’”

I’m 47, well on my way to 48, and very much looking forward to the day when the local club’s doors open up and I can start going out again. While I may not ever go out with the same regularity as I did in my 20s, when I was single and living on Capitol Hill within walking distance of several clubs, I really can’t see myself letting that go until I’m literally physically unable to get out.

On the Singular They

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From Discover Magazine’s article People Have Used They/Them as Singular Pronouns for Hundreds of Years:

Battles of grammar, for the most part, play out in English classrooms and in the pages of style guides. Rarely do arguments over split infinitives and Oxford commas venture beyond the walls of academia.

My first thought at this point was that whoever wrote this article definitely doesn’t have my circle of online friends. Oxford commas in particular are a regular source of entertainment, especially the amusing images produced when the Oxford comma isn’t used. And while there certainly are academics among my friends, such posts definitely aren’t limited to that group.

But one linguistic phenomenon lands in the limelight every so often, and it’s a word you know well: the pronoun “they” — along with its derivatives “them” and “their.”

I don’t really expect that I have many–if any–regular contacts who are still prescriptivist about singular “they”; in my circles, it seems to be at or near universal acceptance. But this was still an interesting look into its history and usage.

Kirby Conrod, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington whose own personal pronouns are they/them, polls students each semester to assess their feelings about this specific usage of the word. Most have no objection; some, especially those who grew up using singular “they” with nonbinary friends, are simply confused — why would the professor ask about such a mundane word? “It’s really already hit the threshold of this critical mass,” Conrod says. “It’s part of the language enough that I don’t think you could squash it if you tried.”