I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent tweet by Marjorie Two-Names:

Stop.
It’s a fake religion created by a psychopath.
You aren’t bringing in new voters, you are turning them away.
People are tired of pandering and BS. https://t.co/NrhE6O6BG5

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) December 26, 2021

I’ve long held the belief that Racist Barbie is playing a role, but this specific tweet brought me new appreciation for the people who are writing her lines. Every part of this tweet is crafted to offend someone, and stoke the hatred of someone else. I’m frankly in awe.

You can almost imagine her writing staff, having crafted this nugget of hatred, just waiting for the right opportunity to respond to someone with it. And the College Republicans obliged. Young, idealistic, eager to change the world. And ideal, with their 72k followers, for the Queen of Qanon to poison their idealism.

First, she calls Kwanzaa a “fake” – dismissing all of the celebration of African American culture as nothing more than a fabrication, designed to pretend that our African American brothers and sisters have their own identity separate from America as a whole.

And, really, isn’t it “fake” in some sense? I mean, in the sense that all holidays are made up. On a scale of July Fourth (ie, actual historical event that didn’t happen on July Fourth) to Talk Like A Pirate day, Kwanzaa is kind of a Mothers’ Day of realness, right? A celebration created to celebrate a concept. Is that “fake?” Sure, if you hate the concept, it is!

Next, she calls it a religion – which, obviously, it isn’t – so why does she do this? Because she wants us to believe that the African American identity is a cult – an anti-Christian, anti-American system of belief that we must fight. She wants to frighten good, god-fearing, decent white Christians with the doubt as to the motives of these subversives. How dare they subvert Christmas with this kind of anti-white propaganda?

Next we have “created by a psychopath”, which is just a whole rabbit hole of racism. There’s the narrative that Kwanzaa was created by the FBI, which is a truly fascinating pit of conspiracy. There’s the notion that Maulana Karenga’s pan-African movement in the 1960s was anti-American, and that it has anything to do with how Kwanzaa is celebrated today, or, more specifically, that anybody that celebrates Kwanzaa today is intent on overthrowing the government.

But, by calling it a religion, she subtly implies another one of her common themes – that this is really an arm of radical Islam, which is dedicated to destroying decent (ie, Christian) world views. The Faux News audience will likely assume that the psychopath to whom she refers is Mohammed, right?

It’s a lot to pack into 8 words, and that doesn’t even go into the notion that the College Republicans’ only legitimate purpose is to bring in new voters.

She has offended people who enjoy Kwanzaa, and also people who think that it’s a distraction from actual African American identity. She has offended white Liberals who know nothing whatsoever about Kwanzaa but feel like they should, and that they should defend it.

She has got people writing articles about this rather than about actual real things that are happening in the news.

She has drawn attention to Kamala Harris and her … somewhat questionable? tweet about celebrating Kwanzaa as a kid, before it had been invented.

She has emboldened folks who hate all this diversity crap, and who want an excuse to dismiss African American identity.

She has annoyed African Americans who don’t observe Kwanzaa themselves, due to its hyper-politicized roots and Karenga’s questionable life choices.

And all of this from a person who has again and again demonstrated that she is an ignorant, racist moron who loves controversy. So … yeah, she’s totally doing her job.

But who’s writing this stuff? Someone put that sentence together, and one has to respect the dedication of packing that much racism, hatred, and misinformation into 8 words. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that her writing team is composed of people who The Onion laid off when writing this kind of absurdist mishmash of tropes wasn’t funny any more because the actual President was saying worse from the Oval Office.

The GOP identified a Senate seat that there was no chance of losing, and put someone in it who is as loud and divisive as possible specifically for this purpose.

And what is that purpose, you ask? Simply stated, there are two purposes.

One, to “trigger the Libs.” To make their political oponents angry about inconsequential things, so that they aren’t spending time on thing that actually matter, and that they could win.

Two: To get the cheers of their so-called “base” – the white-supremacist, culturally-Christian, poorly educated lower/middle class who keeps voting for these morons, consistently against their own actual personal interests, out of hate of other and fear of change and of losing their precarious status quo.

She isn’t in the Senate to govern. She is there to say the insane things that respectable Senators (are there any of those left) cannot say without jeopardizing their seat. And here she is, doing her job again.

I can hardly wait to hear what she says on January 6th.

List, Known, Stats

(Via Weekend Wordsmith: https://twitter.com/WkendWordsmith/status/1455444 574227374082)

I made a list.
Several, in fact,
and a spreadsheet.

I calculated and compared
amortized and weighed all of the
numbers and stats,
looking for the right answer.

Is this the right thing?
Is there a right thing?

Turns out
life doesn’t consist
in what is known,
but rather in what is guessed.
One unknown carefully balanced
against another,
we pretend we can tell
which one would fall.

I’m reading “the queen of air and darkness” by Poul Anderson, and I’m struck, certainly not for the first time, by how often science fiction authors choose not to question sexism in human society.

The job of the science fiction author, after all, is to question everything. From relativity, to the presence of non-human species, to the notion capitalism or government or whatever. But more often than not, science fiction hold on to the notion that men run Society, and women are the followers.

I just read the phrase “she’s one of the three women ever admitted to the Club” – a phrase that I expect in Dickens or Isak Dinesen or Somerset maugham, but not in futuristic science fiction.

I recognize, of course, that it’s a function of its time. Poul Anderson was writing in a time when these things seemed unquestionable. But he questioned light speed travel, and assumed that we would eventually have colonies on other planets.

It’s just fascinating to me what the human mind is capable of questioning and what it assumes as immutable fact.

This is also one of the reasons that I enjoy Tad Williams and NK Jemesin and other contemporary Sci Fi writers who do throw out all of these preconceived notions.

I wonder, though, what a reader Thirty or forty years from now will say about the writers of today, and the things that they seemed unable to challenge.

A few days ago I ordered “The Big Book of Small Python Projects” because of several reviews I’ve seen. I want to become more proficient in Python, and I know that it is pretty much impossible for me to learn any programming language unless I have an actual project to work on.

I’ve written a handful of small scripts with Python – stuff that automates aspects of my day job – but I haven’t had an opportunity to advance much beyond the basics. I need something that uses more complex data structures, since, to me, that’s the interesting part of a language, and what made Perl so useful and fun.

I’m only 3 or 4 chapters in, so I don’t have much to say yet, but here’s a few observations.

1. The biggest detriment to using this book is, unfortunately, my eyes. I stopped buying paper books a few years ago, even though I love books, because the fonts are just too small. This is particularly problematic when I’m sitting at my computer, because that’s when I wear my computer glasses, which are optimized for a screen 18 to 24 inches away from my eyes – which, in turn, makes it that much harder to read tiny font on paper.

One of the selling points of this book is that you type in the code, rather than copy-pasting it, and that this implants it in your brain much more firmly. As someone who grew up typing in programs from Atari Magazine, I can definitely attest to the efficacy of this approach.

But I cannot read the code. In particular, I cannot distinguish ” from ‘ and ; from : and . from , which all make typing in code fraught with errors.

And so I downloaded the code from the website, and I expect that this will greatly reduce the efficacy of having the book in the first place. I should have bought it on Kindle instead. And I probably knew that going in.

2. The projects are fun, interesting, and … kinda useless. I cannot imagine myself adapting any of them to other purposes. And it’s the adapting that helps me learn. But I’m still *very* early in the book, so I am almost certain that this will improve.

But I still, always, need a project that directly benefits me, in order to really learn to be a “native speaker” in a new language.

3. I am still a native Perl speaker. I think of things in Perl idioms. I miss some of the Perl syntax – especially regular expressions, and the multi-dimensional data structures. It’s going to take me a long, long time to be as adept at Python as at Perl, if that ever happens.

So, that’s it. I will say more later, once I’m further into the book.