Great Customer Service Smoothes Out Bad Self-Service

Success at switching to a truly bundled Disney+ and Hulu experience (both with no ads) from the janky status quo where both services were billed separately and Hulu had ads but Disney+ didn't required the great customer service experience I had earlier today. In prior months, I'd made the mistake of following the instructions provided as the self-service approach to accomplishing this, and failed miserably. I switched from annual billing to monthly on Disney+ and tried to switch to the Premium Duo multiple times over multiple months, only to be redirected to Hulu and be blocked from signing up for what I wanted.

Today I tried the chat option (with a live human being) and finally got the bundle I wanted--and a refund for the price differential between the new bundle and what I'd been paying. It ultimately took being manually unsubscribed from both Disney+ and Hulu, which the customer service rep accomplished by reaching out to whatever department and systems she needed to, in the span of about 20 minutes. Definitely a 5-star customer service experience--unfortunately made necessary by terrible self-service options.

Plenty of companies almost certainly believe that they will be able to use ChatGPT (or something like it) to replace the people that do this work. But at least initially (and probably for quite awhile after that) the fully-automated customer service experience is likely to be worse (if not much worse) than the experience of customer service from people. I'm very skeptical of the idea that an AI chatbot would have driven the same outcome from a customer service interaction as a person did in this case. And this is in a low-stakes situation like streaming services (some number of which will very likely end up on my budget chopping block in 2024). High-stakes customer service situations will not have the same tolerance for mistakes, as shown in the FTC's 5-year ban on Rite-Aid using facial recognition for surveillance. These are the sorts of mistakes warned about in the documentary Coded Bias years ago, but I have no doubt that other companies will make the same mistakes Rite-Aid did.

In an episode of Hanselminutes I listened to recently, the host (Scott Hanselman) used a comparison of how AI could be used between the Iron Man suit and Ultron. I hope using AI to augment human capabilities (like the Iron Man suit) is the destination we get back to, after the current pursuit of replacing humans entirely (like Ultron) fails. Customer service experiences that led by people but augmented by technology will be better for people on both sides of the customer service equation and better for brands.

How To Say Babylon: A Memoir

Terry Gross has been an excellent interviewer for decades, so when my dad shared a link to her interview of the poet Safiya Sinclair, listening to it was a must.

Sinclair traces the origins of the Rastafari movement to one of the last speeches of Marcus Garvey, and a street preacher named Leonard Percival Howell. Howell believed Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari Makonnen) was the king foretold of by Garvey. Her description of Jamaica as deeply Christian definitely reminded me of times of visits to Jamaica when my sister and I were kids and spending more than one Sabbath (we were and are Seventh-day Adventists) there in this church back when our grandma was alive and still in Kingston (dressed in usual church attire despite the heat).

It was surprising and saddening to learn how strict Rastafarianism was, particularly in their treatment (perhaps more accurately subjugation) of women. This makes it all the more impressive how much Sinclair's mother accomplished in teaching not just her and her siblings at home, but other children as well. The love of poetry Sinclair's mother passed on to her reminds me of my own mother and her similar fondness for that genre of writing.

Flipboard Renewing Its Relevance With the Fediverse

Flipboard is jumping into the fediverse with both feet, according to a piece from The Verge. While the fediverse isn't where I saw the piece first (that would be on Threads), when Flipboard first announced it was experimenting with Mastodon some months back, it was the first time I'd thought about Flipboard in years (much less used it). Since The Verge piece first ran December 18th, it's been updated with links to both their Flipboard account, and their Mastodon account.

If you're not familiar with Flipboard, their key organizing principle is the magazine. Articles you read from any number of sources can be "flipped" into a magazine you create, along with any commentary you may want to provide. As in other social media networks, you can follow other members and be followed by them. You can comment on shared articles and other Flipboard members can respond. Another interesting feature (which I never took advantage of myself) is Invite contributors. I presume this feature allows multiple Flipboard members to contribute articles to the same magazine. This might be how The Verge handles its own presence on Flipboard.

Unrelated to the whole fediverse pivot, reviewing the features of Flipboard makes me wonder if they ever actively pursued the sorts of people who write newsletters. From what I've seen of Substack, I haven't seen anything it does as a service that Flipboard doesn't do as well or better--and they probably have a much larger number of monthly active users.

The key difference I've found so far between the mobile app experience and the web experience of Flipboard is that you can only flip articles into Mastodon via the mobile app.

Another thing Flipboard has changed since I last looked at what they were doing with Mastodon is allow you to add any Mastodon profile URL to your Flipboard profile and display a verified link on your profile page. I've already set that up and now my profile looks like this:

This is the sort of attention and interest that Tumblr could have generated had they moved more aggressively in exploring integration with the fediverse via ActivityPub. Tumblr is a first-class citizen on IFTTT, an awesome site for creating workflows and automations between a whole host of different services. I have a number of automations (IFTTT calls them applets) that use Tumblr as a destination and a "fedified" Tumblr would have let me automate a lot of posting without having to change a thing. Flipboard simply isn't set up for that--not without workarounds or hacks (though IFTTT appears to have one that uses Pocket as an intermediary that I plan to try).

If this post has piqued your curiosity about Flipboard's foray into the fediverse, I encourage you to check out Flipboard for yourself. Follow me there, comment on pieces I've flipped, create your own magazine(s), get the Flipboard mobile app and flip good pieces into Mastodon.

(Tech) Education Should Be Free (and Rigorous)

Free tech education is the reality being created by Quincy Larson, the founder of FreeCodeCamp. I've been seeing their posts on Twitter for years, but didn't dive deeper until I heard Larson interviewed recently on Hanselminutes. The 30-minute interview was enough to convince me to add Larson's organization to the short list of non-profits I support on a monthly basis. One of the distinctions I appreciated most in the interview was the one made between gate-keeping and rigor. Especially in the context of certifications (in an industry with an ever-growing number of them), making certifications valuable is a challenge that FreeCodeCamp solves by making them challenging to get. Having pursued a number of certifications over the course of my tech career (earning a Certified Scrum Master cert a couple of times, the AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate, and an internal certification at work for secure coding), I've seen some differences in how the organizations behind each certification attempt to strike that balance.

  • Certified Scrum Master. Relative to cloud certifications for AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, CSM certification is much easier. Two days in an instructor-led training course, followed by a certification exam and you have a certification that's good for 2 years. I don't recall what my employers paid for the courses to get me certified each time, but these days you can spend anywhere from $500-$1100 per person for the 2-3 day class and exam. I think the minimum score to pass is 80%, and one of my classmates the last time I certified got 100% (I missed out on that by a single question). In short, less rigorous (and far less gate-keeping).
  • Certified AWS Solution Architect Associate. I spent months preparing for to take this certification exam. Just the associate-level exam itself costs $150. The self-study course and practice exams I took (both from Udemy) normally cost $210 combined, though there are plenty of other options both online and instructor-led (I expect the latter would cost significantly more per student than instructor-led training for other certifications. Achieving the minimum score to pass (usually around 70%) is far from certain, given the sheer amount of material to retain and the high level of rigor of the questions. I ended up scoring around 80% but I really had to sweat for it. Much more rigorous, but rather low on gate-keeping as well because of the relatively low cost of self-study and practice exams (and the ability to do hands-on practice with the AWS Free Tier with a personal AWS account).

The key value of rigor is that the process of preparing to take a certification exam should meaningfully apply to actually doing the work the certification is intended to represent. My experience of pursuing AWS certification is that the learning did (and does) apply to design discussions. It's given me valuable depth of understanding necessary to push my teams to fully explore different services for building features. One of my direct reports used the knowledge gained from certification to build equivalent functionality out of AWS services approved for use inside our organization to approximate the functionality of an AWS service currently not approved for use (in order to integrate with a third-party vendor we were working with).

When I talk to people in different fields where certifications are available, I get the distinct sense that there are varying degrees of gate-keeping involved (a practice that tech companies are certainly no strangers to). My wife has said this often regarding HR certifications offered by SHRM. She's been an HR director for over 20 years (without that certification) but hasn't been able to pass the certification exam (despite having a master's degree in HR management).

When considering whether or not to pursue a certification, it's definitely a good idea to look at them from the additional perspective of whether they are gate-keeping--or providing rigor--not just if they will help you advance your career. If you can, find out from people who've actually earned the certification whether they feel like it helped make them better at their job. Some certifications are must-haves regardless of their rigor or utility, either because your employer requires them or because eligibility to pursue certain contracts requires them (particularly in the federal contracting space).

Last Day of Work Until the New Year

I've signed out of my work laptop for the last time in 2023 (as long as no emergencies come up that require me to log back in). So until next year:

Duke University Libraries Drop Basecamp

I was glad to see Duke University Libraries in-depth explanation of why they're dropping Basecamp for managing projects. It reminded me of previous blog posts of my own from 2017 regarding the ideology and worldview that seemed prevalent at that time in tech, and a post from last year that drew a line from James Damore, through Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, to Elon Musk.

The Libraries took the time to revisit their discussion of 2021 to continue using Basecamp and updated themselves regarding the posts and rhetoric of Hansson regarding DEI, and his public glee in the mass layoffs of tech workers last year (which have by no means abated in 2023). They also did not shy away from talking about their own shortcomings as an organization when it comes their own workplace:

We also know the harms that our own workplace practices and culture have caused over the years. We know about it because we listen to each other, both informally and formally, via climate surveys, workshops, and other practices: 

The point is not that we’re perfect, or a model to emulate. The point is that we are not naive. We have seen (and done) some stuff.

Duke University Libraries Blog, November 30, 2023

The Libraries set a thoughtful, public example of consciously choosing temporary inconvenience over continuing to reward the mendacity and cruelty of the leader of a third-party vendor. I salute them.

Peter Gabriel Is Why I Love Stop-Motion Animation

Back in October, I was reminded exactly when I became a fan of stop-motion animation. A friend in one of my Slack groups shared this Jason Kottke post. The second video on the page (Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer) was my first introduction to him. The song came out in 1986, the video won 9 MTV Video Music Awards the following year. The company who did the animation for the video, Aardman Animations, would later go on to create Wallace and Gromit (an inventor and his pet dog) who've starred in a number of short films (The Wrong Trousers) and feature-length films (The Curse of the Were-Rabbit) that I found hilarious. Chicken Run was an Aardman co-production with Dreamworks that I also enjoyed.

While researching this post, I learned that another one of my stop-motion favorites--The Nightmare Before Christmas--actually came out the same year as The Wrong Trousers (1993). Nightmare was very much in keeping with the dark and scary sensibilities of Tim Burton (the man behind Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, among many other films), but to make it a musical as well was just hilarious and delightful. Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr. Fox are two more stop-motion animated features I've enjoyed. One of my guiltier pleasures when it comes to stop-motion animation was definitely Celebrity Deathmatch. Stop-motion animated wrestling matches between clay versions of celebrities was way more fun than it had any right to be.

While not actually stop-motion animation, The Lego Movie (and its sequel) succeed at hewing very closely to the same style, with the obvious exceptions of the live action scenes. While there are much older examples of stop-motion animation (the original King Kong from 1933, the character Gumby from the 1950s, and anything by Ray Harryhausen), the Sledgehammer video is where that particular fandom of mine began.

Recent Grenadian History Revisited

Going deeper down the Grenada rabbit hole I fell into just a week ago, I recently learned of a limited series podcast titled The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop. I'm only two episodes in (episode 5 released on November 15) and I am completely absorbed. The title of the podcast isn't clickbait--it's literally the truth. Forty years after he and members of his cabinet were lined up against a wall and machine gunned to death the whereabouts of their remains is still unknown.

It has been fascinating to revisit the early 1980s as this podcast does and hear just how often Ronald Reagan talked about this little island in speeches, as well as animosity at least one leader of Grenada's revolution had for Reagan. The episodes I've listened to so far went into some depth regarding Eric Bishop's predecessor as prime minister, Sir Eric Gairy. His iron-fisted rule of Grenada, which stretched back before it achieved independence from Great Britain, was enforced by the Mongoose Gang. The descriptions of this group of thugs with police powers reminded me of the Tonton Macoutes of Haiti under Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Listening to episode 2 in particular, it was sad to see how quickly Bishop adopted the rhetoric of Gairy, even if he didn't go as far as forming a secret police. Bishop's rule in Grenada ultimately ends in gunfire either as a result of unwillingness to share power, not being extreme enough in his embrace of Cuba and the Soviet Union, rivalry and jealous within the New Jewel Movement, or some combination of all of the above. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the series and what else I can learn from it.

The Muscle Memory of Surrender: A Brief History of the Modern GOP

All of these smart Republicans who frankly did not understand how thoroughly corrupted their party had become, or the fact that if you cave in over and over again, you develop a muscle memory of surrender, and it’s hard to get back.

Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 9, 2023

The quote above effectively summarizes the modern history of the GOP. Given his pre-Bulwark history in Wisconsin, perhaps he should have explicitly included himself in that collection of smart Republicans. Syke's interview with McKay Coppins just one week earlier on his new book Romney: A Reckoning served as a speed run of recent GOP history of how far and how quickly the party moved away from those so-called smart Republicans many years before they actually realized it. Syke's interview with Coppins actually jogs his own memory around 17 minutes into the interview that he actually had Donald Trump on his radio show at the time back in 2004.

When I listened to the interview, Romney's book sounded like an extended attack of conscience regarding his own role in paving the way for the GOP to move even further to the right. To me, Mitt's father George looks much better than his son by comparison because at every possible point, Mitt looked at the choices his father made (and the negative political consequences of those choices) and decided not to follow his father's example. George Romney turned around a struggling automaker in Detroit in the 1950s. George Romney supported the civil rights movement, even trying and failing to prevent the GOP from surrendering to the likes of Barry Goldwater and his ultimately successful efforts to push black voters out of the GOP. George Romney served the Nixon administration as HUD secretary, trying to increase the supply of housing available to the poor and to desegregate the suburbs, but was deliberately undermined by Nixon in many cases.

His son Mitt by contrast wrote a New York Time op-ed titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt in 2008. In his 2012 run for president, he famously told a private audience of wealthy campaign donors that "Obama backers will vote for the president 'no matter what.' Romney said that they account for '47 percent' of voters and he does not 'worry about those people.'" Also during that campaign, Romney actively solicited the endorsement of Donald Trump--who was still actively fueling the birther conspiracy about Barack Obama at the time. Coppins cites numerous earlier examples of choices he consciously made in the interest of political expediency. A couple that stand out (though not as baldly and badly as seeking Trump's endorsement):

  • taking a pro-choice position to win the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts despite his personal opposition to abortion
  • talking about "repealing the death tax" as an applause line to an audience filled with people who would never have to pay it

The interview goes on to talk about Romney bowing the knee to Trump in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to be appointed Secretary of State (effectively because he didn't bow the knee far enough and publicly repudiate all the negative things he had said about Trump).

Perhaps the clearest indicators of the lack of understanding of the so-called smart Republicans that Sykes would criticize the following week can actually be found in the part of his interview with Coppins when they talk about who wins the GOP nomination in 2012 and 2008. Coppins expresses the belief (and Sykes seems to agree) that the turn of the GOP was a sudden one when in fact it was not. Here's what Sykes says per the transcript:

You know, it occurs to me that his nomination in 2012 in many ways was a false indicator because, the party had already begun to change dramatically, but we were able to tell ourselves as conservatives that the center would hold that this was still the party that would nominate George Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. So it's not the party of Pat Buchanan. It's not the party of Don[ald] Trump. I mean, they're there, but there's a reason why, you know, people like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich don't ultimately win. Yes.

Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 2, 2023

Sykes is at minimum 4 years too late in identifying the "false indicator" election for the GOP nomination. The John McCain who won the GOP nomination in 2008 was a far cry from the man who ran in 2000. The John McCain of 2000 who specifically (and correctly) named Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance on the political right was replaced in 8 years by a version who made peace with them, and cemented their support by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice president. What I was not aware of at the time, was that Palin was known commodity among the ardently pro-life in the GOP. Mitt Romney placed a distant third in pledged delegates in the 2008 GOP primary, behind Mike Huckabee. In 2012, Romney would follow McCain's playbook in staking out hard right positions (for political expediency) to beat his contenders for the GOP presidential nomination only to be defeated when voters didn't buy his attempts to move back to the center for the general election. As Romney (and others in the GOP) would demonstrate again and again in subsequent years (through the Trump presidency to the present day), having power was more important than having integrity.

Now, even one of those in the GOP who briefly showed sufficient spine to vote in favor of impeaching Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection has begun to develop his muscle memory for surrender. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who did so (and was ultimately defeated for re-election as a result), has pledged to support the Republican nominee for president in his current run for the Senate--going even further to say that Joe Biden had done more to disgrace the office of the presidency than the man he voted to impeach just a couple of years ago.

Meijer is no worse than the current pretenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Nearly all remaining contenders pledged to support Trump even if he is convicted on one (or many) of the 91 different felonies he has been charged with. One angry social media outburst from Trump and the House speaker candidacy of Tom Emmer (notable for his relative lack of surrender to Trumpist priorities) went down in flames. His replacement--Mike Johnson--is unknown and inexperienced as a legislator, but was one of the key advocates of the Big Lie regarding the 2020 election and still to this day refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. Even as Trump-backed candidates and priorities continue to cost them victory after victory in ballot initiatives (like the one in Ohio that put the right to abortion into the state constitution) and in elections (like the ones in Virginia that saw Democrats retake full control of the General Assembly and the Kentucky gubernatorial election that kept the Democrat Andy Beshear in power and rejected the Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron), the GOP's muscle memory for surrender to its most extreme elements is too strong for them to break.

Grenada: Nobody's Backyard

I learned a lot from this episode of Throughline about an invasion that happened when I was just 9 years old. It provides a ton of context and backstory of what was happening on the island in the decades leading up to the invasion. What I didn't realize until I looked it up was how close in time the invasion was to the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut (just 2 days earlier). In the clips of Ronald Reagan speeches played during the episode, it was interesting to hear anti-communist rhetoric as the rationale for invading Grenada just a few years before the scandal we call Iran-Contra would be brought into the light.

Other Caribbean nations (Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and Jamaica actually played a role in the invasion as well. Jamaica sent 150 troops via an Air Jamaica 727 who served in a peacekeeping role well after U.S. troops arrived. All six nations also voted against the U.N. resolution condemning the invasion. A UPI piece I found lists Barbados and Antigua as also providing soldiers for the invasion while St. Lucia, Dominica, and St. Vincent sent police officers. The same UPI piece does a good job of putting the U.S. invasion of Grenada in historical context, noting that Haiti and the Dominican Republic were invaded and occupied for multiple years on 3 separate occasions during the 20th century.

Rhymes with 9/11

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes

Mark Twain

I could not have anticipated that what I wrote on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks regarding how this country really treated its Muslim population (residents and citizens alike) would be relevant again so soon. I won't claim any special insight into the Middle East, or the latest war between Hamas and Israel--but the response of the U.S. government, U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle, U.S.-based mainstream media, and everyday citizens looks more and more familiar with each passing day.

Balbir Singh Sodhi (a Sikh, not even a Muslim) was murdered 4 days after 9/11. His killer proceeded from there on a non-fatal shooting spree against a gas station clerk (a Lebanese-American) and at his former home (previously purchased by an Afghan family local to Mesa, Arizona). Little more than a week after Hamas' attacks on Israel, a Chicago landlord stabbed two of his Muslim tenants repeatedly, killing 6-year-old Wade Al-Fayoume.

As recounted in Spencer Ackerman's Return to Little Pakistan, Muslims in Brooklyn began receiving business cards from agents of the FBI and INS, and NYPD officers asking to be called as soon as possible to answer questions. We would later learn that the NYPD would illegal surveil Muslims both inside and outside New York City for over a decade after 9/11, not generating a single lead that exposed any terrorists or prevented any attacks in all that time. The LAPD tried and failed to follow New York's lead in 2007. Just one day after the Biden administration announced plans for the DOJ and DHS to partner with campus police to track hate-related threats, Ackerman reports that the ADL is urging college and university administrators to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for "potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization."--without providing any evidence of such support from any chapter of this organization. The same organization whose Center on Extremism claims to "strategically monitor, expose and disrupt extremist threats" removed the notorious Libs of TikTok account (and Chaya Raichik, the woman behind it) from their extremism list after she threatened a lawsuit. This isn't even the first retreat of October 2023 for the ADL, having resumed advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk threatened to sue them for defamation the month before.

To oppose the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force that would enable military operations in no less than 22 countries (including the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and war in Iraq, and detention of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) was a lonely endeavor that came with death threats, insults, and hate mail. While there is almost certainly more (and growing) opposition to the IDF bombing campaign in Gaza than there was to the US invading Iraq, any sympathy at all for unarmed Palestinian civilians unaffiliated with Hamas (or any other militant group) has come with consequences like firing from jobs, revocation of job offers, threats of deportation from Donald Trump, and a Senate resolution condemning specific campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (per Ackerman's reporting).

Our country treated the 9/11 attacks as an existential threat--a thing that could cause the U.S. to cease to exist. That mindset regarding the threat of terrorism rationalized not only the bipartisan sacrifice of civil liberties named the Patriot Act within our borders, but "a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation", ultimately resulting in the death of innocents as explored in documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. As of May 2023, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay still holds 30 detainees--some still await trial, some being held indefinitely facing no charges and without recommendation for release.

The threat to Jews both worldwide and within Israel itself is very real. Anti-semitism--whether here in the U.S. or abroad--is never far beneath the surface. Not much time has passed since the former president defended neo-Nazis and others protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue as "very fine people", or since the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh killed 11 and wounded 6 worshippers--including Holocaust survivors. As with the U.S. and the countries we attacked with military force in response to 9/11 however, the difference in military power between Israel and those who threaten it is substantial. Depending on which reports you read, between 5000 and 10,000 Palestinians have died in airstrikes from Israel's military--the vast majority of those women and children. This death toll--the vast majority of them civilians--will only grow. The civilian death toll during the so-called Global War on Terror is orders of magnitude larger. Prior to the latest attacks by Hamas, Israel was holding over 1200 people in detention (virtually all Palestinians) without charges or trial. Per AP's reporting, Israel's military justice system is what Palestinians are subject to, not unlike the military tribunals used at the Guantanamo Bay prison to try terrorism suspects.

Unlike the U.S. military, Israel can't leave where it is. It can change its policies and its leaders, but not its neighbors. I have no idea what the answer is to whether or not Israel and the Palestinians will ever be able to co-exist in a status other than "cold" war or hot war. But the ways Israel's response to October 7 rhymes with the US response to September 11 probably mean we'll be asking that question for a long time.

What I’m Reading and Listening to About Palestine

A friend of mine asked what I’ve been reading about the war between Israel and Gaza to help him understand what was going on. So I’m writing this post to share with him and others to provide a sense of what I’m seeing and hearing as inputs to my perspective.

I found this piece by Kali Robinson very informative: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-hamas-what-to-know-about-its-origins-leaders-and-funding. It’s well worth reading in full, because you’ll learn not just about Hamas’ origins, but about how Egypt and Turkey factor into the conflict (against and for Hamas respectively), the civil war between Hamas and Fatah militias in 2006, and how Palestinians view Hamas, among other context.

Another valuable read is the book Palestine, by Joe Sacco. It’s a non-fiction graphic novel covering the journalist’s 2 months in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from December 1991-January 1992. In it you will find a perspective and complexity too often lacking from what is typically available in journalism covering the region even 3 decades later. As an aside, I bought my copy of Palestine from Big Planet Comics a number of years ago,

Fareed Zakaria’s interview of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is also worth watching. Barghouti is a Palestinian physician and co-founder of a group supporting non-violent resistance to Israel's occupation (of the West Bank and Gaza). The points where the interview would have been helped by Zakaria pushing back (such as Barghouti's assertion that Hamas would release its prisoners if Israel released Palestinian prisoners who are currently jailed) will likely be obvious to viewers.

This morning, I just finished listening to the latest episode of a podcast called The Bulletin. Including a podcast aimed at Christians (like myself) may seem puzzling at first. But it's necessary because trying to understand the region includes being aware of how American Christianity's understanding (some might more bluntly say misunderstanding) of our own faith distorts our perspectives and our policy in that region. American evangelicals have been, and continue to be huge supporters of the state of Israel. This is where one of the distortions comes in: John Hagee's group (Christians United for Israel) lobbies senators and congressmen regarding our country's policies toward Israel. One of the key reasons for that support is a self-interested one however--a belief that a state of Israel is necessary for the second coming of Jesus Christ and that Jews will either convert to Christianity or die. John Hagee is just one of a number of evangelical preachers that have disturbing views about the reasons for the Holocaust as well as what will happen to Jews in the future as he interprets the Bible. A paper by Thomas Ice of Liberty University goes into more specific details regarding this belief.

The Daily podcast from the New York Times is the most consistently high-quality news product the organization produces. These three episodes about Hamas' attack and Israel's response have been very helpful for greater understanding:

The one link from social media regarding the latest iteration of war in Palestine that I will share is from a lawyer named Sheryl Weikal on Bluesky. She is a self-described "white Ashkenazi Jew" but pulls no punches in calling her co-religionists to task for their bloodlust and desire for revenge. In addition to calling out the immorality of bloodlust, she discusses some of the non-violent resistance to occupation Palestinians have engaged in (and the response of US states to it) as well as the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli settlers. If you aren't already on Bluesky, it might be worth it to join if only to read this. Twitter is predictably flooded with disinformation regarding what is happening in Gaza so I don't look there for useful context and details.

Contrary to what we are seeing and hearing in much of the media today, what is happening in Palestine will continue to defy easy explanations and narratives. I hope there will be more journalism and reporting that seeks to add light rather than heat, and believe the links I've shared largely succeed in that mission.

Ahsoka Fell Victim to the Marvelization of Star Wars

via GIPHY

I hate to say this about my oldest fandom, but Ahsoka wasn’t good. I'm not here to set Dave Filoni's entire filmography on fire. Contrary to some, I think The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels were better than the prequel movies. Ahsoka is a key character in both The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, which is why so much of the fandom (myself included) was excited to see her in live action in The Mandalorian. Grand Admiral Thrawn wasn't just a key antagonist in the last couple of seasons of Star Wars: Rebels, he's one of the best villains in Star Wars--and notably one who George Lucas did not create. Timothy Zahn is the author behind Thrawn (and each of the 13 novels that feature him), including a trilogy set after the events of Return of the Jedi that would have made for a much better sequel trilogy than the one which ultimately made it to theaters.

In retrospect, this interview where Dave Filoni essentially agrees with the perspective that Ahsoka could be seen as season 5 of Rebels was a warning. This confirmed that viewers would basically have had to do the homework of watching most everything with Ahsoka in it to grasp everything going on in the show. Enough time has passed since I watched Rebels in full that there were multiple points in the show where I didn't get what was going on. And that's before you get to the now infamous "space cartwheel".

Ahsoka Space Fight GIFfrom Ahsoka GIFs

Even viewers who did the homework must contend with the addition of a master-padawan relationship between Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren that wasn't in any of the shows. This was far from the only opportunity missed to use flashbacks to add missing context and flesh out characters so they actually mattered to the audience (whether they'd "done the homework" or not). I've said on social media that Dave Filoni did better character development with The Bad Batch than he did in Ahsoka. The same is true of Jon Favreau and The Mandalorian. With this show, Filoni leaned far too hard on "unearned, MCU-level 'remember this?' tropes that rely more on good memories than actual character development."

Beyond the "homework" problem and lack of character development in the show itself, Ahsoka was stuffed with too many competing storylines to do any of them justice. For me, there wasn't enough in the show to explain the loyalty of the Night Sisters of Dathomir to Thrawn's cause, or Hera Syndulla's fear of his return. As I write this, I have yet to see any confirmation of Ahsoka being renewed for another season. Assuming it doesn't get cancelled, I'm pessimistic that a second season would improve on the shortcomings of the first.

Postmarks Revisited

Since my initial post on Postmarks, I made two minor changes to my bookmarking site:

  • I edited src/pages/layouts/main.hbs to eliminate the Login link from the header and the footer
  • I also removed the About link from the header
  • I moved the divider in the footer after the About link from outside the {{#if loggedIn}} to inside

This gives the site a slightly cleaner look I prefer.

Digging into the admin functionality a bit, I noticed the input textbox hid most of the JavaScript for the bookmarklet, so I replaced it with a readonly textarea and gave it the same id as the textbox I removed. This preserved the functionality while making all of the javascript visible. The bookmarklet itself works nicely, opening a pop-up that autofills the New Bookmark page with the URL, title, and description fields. When adding a bookmark, I forgot that multi-word tags weren't allowed and got an error message like the one below:

invalid tags: #invalid tag must be in #hashtag #format, tag name supports a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and the following word separators: -_.

When you get that error, the bookmark isn't created. I updated line 11 of src/pages/partials/edit_bookmark.hbs to add the following reminder:

Remember: multi-word tags must be separated by dash (-) or underscore (_).

A nicer way to handle this might be to prevent the save attempt and allow the bookmarker to correct the bad tag. If I figure that out at some point and implement it, the new capability will be available for everyone who opts to remix my version of Postmarks.

Remembering 9/11

It’s hard to believe 22 years have passed since the terrorist attacks of that day. I still remembering being on the way to work when I heard the news on the radio of the first tower being hit by a plane. I still remember a lot of my coworkers with children in school leaving the office early to pick them up and go home. I still remember how soon afterwards letters laced with anthrax started showing up in the mail.

I personally didn’t lose any family or friends in the attacks. But a girl I was seeing at the time lost her older sister, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald—a firm noted often in the news at the time for just how much of their staff they lost. I remember spending a lot of time on the road between DC and New York visiting her, and supporting her and her family at the memorial service.

The intervening years have made certain memories fuzzy—fuzzy enough that some people engage in mythmaking when it comes to the country being unified by the attacks. But Spencer Ackerman remembers the way things really were--particularly in New York City. This piece I read yesterday is a stark reminder of how our nation actually treated Muslim Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. He plans to post follow-up pieces that I am looking forward to with great interest.

I wrote last year about how this country's response to 9/11 would ultimately pave the way for insurrection on January 6th. Were I to update that piece today, I would certainly connect Trump's various (and ultimately successful) attempts at Muslim bans to the surveillance, harassment, intimidation, and discriminatory treatment inflicted on Muslims in Brooklyn by the NYPD, INS, and FBI in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Years after it happened, I recalled that Trump's initial Muslim ban kept the spouse of one of my co-workers at the time from joining him. A second co-worker at the same job was married to a man from Somalia, one of the seven countries subject to that ban. Ending birthright citizenship (in direct opposition to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) is another idea that gained currency on the political right during Trump's term, but has had advocates among so-called conservatives before then.

Other anti-democratic impulses unbound by terrorist attacks of 9/11 threaten every American today, but especially those of us more traditionally and more easily "othered". The Department of Homeland Security was a bipartisan creation, certain of whose component parts were responsible for civil rights abuses of protesters ordered by Trump, others who were responsible for the vile child separation policy at our southern border. The moral outrage that is Guantanamo Bay remains open, despite the end of US troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Biden wins the 2024 presidential election (which is by no means a certainty), small-d democracy remains under threat in this country.

The Presumption of Belonging

In my occasional attempts to learn from people I disagree with, I watched an episode Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast. Her guest last week was Irami Osei-Frimpong, a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Georgia and podcaster who has self-branded as The Funky Academic. She invited him on to talk about SCOTUS decision ruling affirmative action unconstitutional (among other topics), but embedded in the first 40 minutes or so of the conversation (beginning around the 16th minute) was a description and critique of American identity from Osei-Frimpong that I found so challenging that I found myself replaying it to make sure I was actually hearing what I thought I did. What kicked off Osei-Frimpong's response (which I attempt to transcribe below) was a prompt from Gray regarding a recent interview Senator Tommy Tuberville did where he conflated what white supremacy is with what being an American is.

Osei-Frimpong: I think it's fair to conflate American identity with white national identity insofar as we are the other. No one conflates American identity with the descendants of slaves. Our Americanness is as a degradation of our being. So we exist as like a not real people. There is a way in which black failure is American, but black self-determination would be communist. Part of an American identity is to treat black people like garbage.

Gray: So the condition of our American status is to be a second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier member of the society.

Osei-Frimpong: And a condition of their American status is to think of us as second-tier, third-tier, fourth-tier. I think part of the middle class identity is to flee black people. Lineage is the American identity. People have to think about Jim Crow as a forward-facing regime. They were saying that not only are you not anything, but your grandkids won't be anything. The regime as always not just about you, but of your line. Your great-grandparents weren't anything, and your grandkids won't be anything. The regime is realized when you look at the outcomes today. The problem is we think of the Jim Crow regime and race in general as like a static moment ... when it was always a statement about a line in the past and a line in the future. And I think that line has held. Anywhere there's a congregation of black people--80% or above--it's not someplace that you necessarily want to drink the water. And that is not an accident. People think that Jim Crow just affected lineage property holders--which is true. But it's not just in property holding. [Jim Crow] overdetermined all of our institutional relationships, including the church, education, and family. I think the black family was overdetermined by the needs of surviving Jim Crow.

a recent Bad Faith Podcast with guest Irami Osei-Frimpong

Osei-Frimpong's argument regarding the status of black people in America isn't entirely new (as captured in book-length treatments of the subject I've read this year), but neither Wilkerson nor Reed make the case as bluntly that this lower status is a condition of being seen as being American and belonging in America. Through the lens of Osei-Frimpong's argument, the ongoing discourse around Florida's recent changes in what is taught about slavery can be seen as a variation on this idea of belonging. Defenders of these changes (including Florida governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis) insist on the idea that black people benefited from enslavement because of the skills they gained--as if black people had no skills other than those taught by their enslavers. These are not the arguments of those who actually see black people as equals.

Some defenders of these new standards, such as Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review, have gone so far as to call Vice President Kamala Harris a liar in print for characterizing the changes this way. But the list of items he compiles, rather than refuting Vice President Harris' point, actually does more to confirm it. Some examples:

  • Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit
  • Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian, European and African cultures
  • Instruction includes the similarities and differences between serfdom and slavery
  • Instruction includes the comparative treatment of indentured servants of European and African extraction
  • Exams the condition of slavery as it existed in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe prior to 1619
  • Instruction includes how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey)
  • Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries (i.e., Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean slave trade)
  • Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures (e.g., Sumerian law code, Indian caste system)
  • Instruction includes the similarities between serfdom and slavery and emergence of the term "slave" in the experience of Slavs

These and other examples make it clear that the aim of this new curriculum is less to educate children regarding the nature of slavery as practiced in American colonies and what would later become the United States, than to draw false equivalences between it and how slavery was practiced in other cultural contexts. Not once in Cooke's analysis or his numerous bullet points does term "chattel slavery" appear, which would make clear that enslavement was not merely permanent for those originally enslaved, but generational--passed down to any and all descendants.

Others of Cooke's bullet points seem selected to convey the message that other enslavers were worse than colonial (and later American) ones, such as these:

  • Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease).
  • Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.

Still other select bullet points seek to valorize those in power and the prevailing system of governance as actually working to end slavery, such as these:

  • Instruction includes examples of how the members of the Continental Congress made attempts to end or limit slavery (e.g., the first draft of the Declaration of Independence that blamed King George III for sustaining the slave trade in the colonies, the calls of the Continental Congress for the end of involvement in the international slave trade, the Constitutional provision allowing for congressional action in 1808)
  • Instructions includes how different states passed laws that gradually led to the abolition of slavery in northern states (e.g., gradual abolition laws: RI Statutes 1728, 1765 & 1775, PA 1779, ma & NH 1780s, CT & NJ 1784, NY 1799; states abolishing slavery: VT 1777).
  • Analyze the contributions of founding principles of liberty, justice and equality in the quest to end slavery
  • Instruction includes the contributions of key figures in the quest to end slavery as the nation was founded (e.g., Elizabeth "Mum Bett" Freeman, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay).
  • Instruction includes how Abraham Lincoln's views on abolition evolved over time.

The word "ordinance" appears a handful of times, but never in connection with the ordinances of secession, the resolutions drafted and ratified by each of the 13 Confederate states regarding why they were leaving the Union (at least 3 of which mention slave-holding in the context of property rights as their rationale).

One of my personal frustrations with this curriculum controversy being focused on slavery is or isn't taught is the ways in which it has diverted attention from the virtual absence of any instruction at all, proper or otherwise, about Reconstruction and Jim Crow--a period of history spanning nearly an additional century after the end of the Civil War of what Osei-Frimpong described as "a degradation of our being". Cooke's analysis mentions Reconstruction just 3 times. Here is one of those three mentions:

Instruction includes how whites who supported Reconstruction polices for freed blacks after the Civil War (white southerns being called scalawags and white northerners being called carpetbaggers) were targeted.

Florida's State Academic Standards -- Social Studies, 2023, page 16

Cooke's callout on how Reconstruction impacted certain white people (rather than the black people it was intended to protect) reveals as much or more about his priorities than it does about the curriculum in question. References to the word "compromise" in the standards do not appear to include the compromise of 1877 (of which Florida was one of 3 key states), which ended the Reconstruction era and helped usher in Jim Crow. Entirely absent from his analysis is any mention of the Great Migration, which was at least in part motivated by the abandonment of Reconstruction by the federal government (which rates a scant 6 mentions in an academic standards document 216 pages long).

Jim Crow is mentioned just once in Cooke's analysis, and only five times total in my own search of Florida's new academic standards. This takes me to Osei-Frimpong's second point regarding Americanness and blackness, that Jim Crow is incorrectly seen as a static period in time. His characterization of Jim Crow as a statement about the past and future lineage of black people being "nothing" crystallized for me in a way few previous commentaries have that the intent of Jim Crow's architects was to ensure a permanent black underclass in the same way their predecessors intended chattel slavery to be permanent. When Osei-Frimpong says "there is a way in which black failure is American", to me it is a reminder of the ways the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, and Jim Crow, deliberately omit from the record all the ways in which black achievements were consistently hidden, threatened, stolen, and/or destroyed. As a result, well-meaning bureaucrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would write The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which would be used by some to reinforce their previously-held stereotypes of black people with no acknowledgement of how the necessities of surviving Jim Crow might have meaningfully and durably damaged black families. I'm reminded also of the ways in which prominent conservative black public intellectuals (Thomas Sowell in particular) both in the past and in the present have used the economic success of black immigrants like my own parents as a rhetorical cudgel to beat native-born black Americans for their relative lack of success with no acknowledgement of the differences in the circumstances between us or the impact of the multi-generational denial of the benefits of first-class citizenship on black citizens.

Defenders of these new standards include two members of the working group who created them. Dr. William Allen's training is in political science (not history). The initial defense has been thoroughly discredited by Twitter threads like the one below:

[twitter.com/etotheipi...](https://twitter.com/etotheipie/status/1682764410224357377?s=61)&t=-4FCcPPtvB-s8sLXAPRZMA
Start of a thread discrediting the examples provided by members of Florida's African American History Standards Workgroup

The thread above calls out numerous errors in the examples provided, such as:

  • Numerous black men who were actually born free, or born after 1865
  • Multiple incorrect professions
  • Including the free white sister of George Washington
  • Including a man never actually freed from enslavement

At least so far, I have yet to read or hear any responses the working group to these errors.

One of the things the Supreme Court did in striking down affirmative action was essentially state that black people do not belong in elite higher education. Antonin Scalia said exactly this during oral arguments for Fisher v University of Texas in 2015, a case brought by the same activist behind Students for Fair Admissions v President and Fellows of Harvard College. By contrast, the much older practice of legacy admissions--despite its history and origins as an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, and anti-Asian set-aside for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants--went unchallenged by the Asian students of Students for Fair Admissions. Legacy students are presumed to belong at elite institutions, even though in many (if not most) cases their academic marks would disqualify them for admission absent their legacy status. The presumption of --if not entitlement to--belonging in elite higher education is apparently acceptable for everyone except (most) black people. It is very much at odds with the metaphorical pats on the head black people receive for their achievements in Florida's new social studies curriculum.

CRT bans in schools, book bans in schools and public libraries, and threats to corporate diversity initiatives are far from the only things I expect to see when it comes to challenges to the presumption that black people in this country belong anywhere we can currently be found. Within the past day, Matt Gaetz introduced legislation intended to end birthright citizenship--a direct challenge to the text of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to former enslaved people (as well as to me). Gaetz has plenty of company in seeking to restrict citizenship, including presidential candidates who themselves would not be citizens without the 14th Amendment like Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. We've reached a sad state as a nation when those who seek its highest office have closing the constitutional path to citizenship as part of sales pitch to the GOP electorate.