"I’m a millennial who attended Z-Con, a conference for Gen Z creators and activists. Here’s what I learned"
Enter Z-Con, a two-day affair hosted by United Talent Agency last week that billed itself as an event designed by Gen Z, for Gen Z, uniting hundreds of creators, activists, influencers, marketers, and executives. Z-Con's organizers sought to reclaim the mic and pass it among their generation to speak for themselves: It aimed to connect young leaders across a variety of industries with businesses to help marketers meaningfully connect with Gen Z.
The event was driven by NextGen, the entertainment marketing arm at United Talent Agency formerly known as JUV Consulting. The agency was founded by Ziad Ahmed and Shaina Zafar while the two were in high school and was eventually acquired in March 2024 by UTA.
It wasn't too long ago that millennials were the newcomers to the workforce and the focus of constant media attention: We were the generation bringing real change to the corporate world and beyond, acknowledging our mental health and setting boundaries, while maintaining our side-hustle culture mantras and supposedly thriving in a limitless girl-boss era. (Never mind that many millennials came of age in the 2008 recession and had no choice but to pick up second or third gigs to make ends meet.) These were traits that we proudly wore on our sleeves until we eventually became the burnout generation.
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Dan Conover discussing WaPo an NYT on this election
Dan Conover, a "recovering newsman" wrote the following about "the failure of the NY Times and Washington Post to adequately defend democracy" (according to Dave Winer.) Dan posted it to his Facebook page.
After the whole "1. Bezos hell-boxed the WaPo Harris endorsement; 2. No he didn't, it was a decision by the publisher; 3. I'm Jeff Bezos, and I'm writing to tell you why I killed it" fiasco, people I admire and respect posted arguments for why people should cancel their Amazon accounts, rather than "punishing" the journalists at the Post by abandoning one of the last quality news staffs in the United States.
It's really not a bad argument. I just disagree with it. Here's one example of why.
Yesterday, Joe Biden responded to the comedian at Trump's MSG rally calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. It went pretty much as you'd expect until the President said the only garbage was Trump's supporter's.
Or was it "Trump's supporters?"
Little Marco Rubio was so excited that Biden (who, you'll recall, isn't running for President) might have been referring to ALL Trump supporters, rather than the very SPECIFIC supporter who made the "joke" (which, btw, had been vetted by the campaign), that he ran onto the stage during Trump's speech at another rally to read the alleged insult aloud.
Set aside the fact that Trump insults Harris' supporters every fucking day. He's actually upped the ante this time: We've been promoted from "very bad people" to "The Enemy Within," which sounds so much better in the original German.
Forget that the White House issued a statement clarifying that Biden was, in fact, referring to Trump's comedian, not Trump voters in general. And try, if you can, to ignore the fact that Trump put on a high-visibility safety vest and took a ride in an actual garbage truck on which his campaign painted "TRUMP" so as to milk every ounce of insult and phony media umbrage out of the latest Biden gaffe nothingburger.
Instead, pretend you're the Executive Editor of the Washington Post, and ask yourself: Considering all those factors, and the proximity of Election Day, where would you run that "Did Biden Call Trump supporters 'Garbage'?" story on your print newspaper and website?
Here's what I learned from Talking Points Memo's David Kurz this morning: Not only did The Post give the "garbage" story top-billing, so did the fucking New York Times.
There was a time in my life, long ago, when I got paid decent money to stand around a desk in the middle of a newsroom on a deadline and shout at other editors (and sometimes reporters) about headlines and placement. And lemme tell you: When the people who would put that phony garbage story above the fold win those ethical headline-and-placement arguments, you've got a big, big problem.
We're not talking about HuffPo or Salon here. We're talking about the last two "unique nationals" standing in American print journalism. Instiututions with long and storied histories. Both took the same test at the same time, and both failed it.
Do I have beefs with Amazon? Of course. But when it comes to monopolistic practices, the problem isn't Amazon -- it's a legal systems that either can't or won't prosecute those practices. And, while I'm at it, if it weren't for Amazon, my ficition [sic] career would have ended with the last literary agent who deleted one of my query emails without a second thought because "that's too different from what sold last quarter, and he's not related to anyone famous."
Amazon Publishing isn't a perfect publishing platform. But it's a chance for indies like me to find an audience, and that's all I ever asked for. So thank you for that, Jeff Bezos, you Lex-Luther-looking motherfucker.
I didn't quit The Post because I hate Bezos personally or because I demand that the paper endorse Harris. I quit The Post because journalism may be a business, but it's supposed to be MORE than a business. It's protected by the First Amendment because an informed electorate is essential to the health of a democratic society. And if you look back at the history of American journalism, you will probably not be surprised to learn that it's ALWAYS been a mixed bag, at best.
But I can't, and won't, forgive The Post for backsliding at this crucial moment.
The Post has a talented roster, and does some great reporting on matters of significance. But its editorial policies -- not to mention its retrograde executive hiring practices -- are sending a message to news organizations across the country: If The Washington Post and The New York Times -- the two papers most responsible for holding Richard Nixon accountable for his crimes -- are going to blatantly suck-up to the rich, powerful and unethical, why aren't we?
Trust me: No matter what they might say in public, there's nobody at The Post who misunderstands this message. Two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand subscribers didn't quit this week because they hate Dana Milbank or Aaron Blake. They quit because Post management rolled over for Donald Trump, and then fucking lied about it.
I don't want The Post to go away. I want The Post to change. And if that means they should fear their readers more than they fear Donald Trump, so be it.
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Eco's 14 Points of Fascism
Umberto Eco was an Italian philosopher, novelist, an historian (among other things.) It's good to remember his 14 points that define fascism. Eco received the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic before dying in 2016. He named the following 14 points in his essay 'Ur-Fascism.'
To be clear - I do not believe all conservative politics is inherently fascistic. But the problem the Republicans are dealing with is the thing where if they are at a rally and it features fascist points, it is a fascist rally.
And as a definition, 'syncretistic' means referring to syncretism, which, in turn means, "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous."
- The cult of tradition. "One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements."
- The rejection of modernism. "The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."
- The cult of action for action's sake. "Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
- Disagreement is treason. "The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge."
- Fear of difference. "The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
- Appeal to social frustration. "One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups."
- The obsession with a plot. "Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged."
- The enemy is both strong and weak. "By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. "For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle."
- Contempt for the weak. "Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology."
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. "In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death."
- Machismo and weaponry. "Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
- Selective populism. "There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People."
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."
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Friday Glowbug Programming
I've had a lovely week off of work, but I'll head back to it on Monday. As part of this week I've blogged and read a fair bit, and as part of blogging, I've coded a fair bit. Again, primarily behind the scenes code, which is some of my favorite stuff as it's the most "hone the tool" hobbit software work for something like Glowbug.
I don't publish this CMS, it's just for me. So I get to appreciate and use it. No performance, just utility. Am I going to win any coding awards for it? Never. Does my github commit streak matter? Not in the least. It's all just for me.
Today's work:
- Fix an admin search bug.
- Implement pagination on a few pages and write a generic pagination function to reuse.
- Fix my 'images' admin page, which now needs to support the sporadic audio files I upload.
- Add cleanup functions for getting rid of unused data and files which might be leftover.
- Improve efficiency of an admin page which took 12+ seconds to load to be sub 1 second.
- Fixed an issue with the link suffixes on the website.
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"How Concerned Citizens Ran a Neo-Nazi Out of Rural Maine"
This is a good read about how a citizen journalist & podcaster helped expel a burgeoning neo-nazi group in Maine be expelled and brought to heel. The articles focuses on a fuckhead calling himself 'Hammer' and a podcaster dedicated to taking down far right idiots named 'Crash.'
Crash isn't an armchair reporter. He isn't content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. "If I didn't limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done," Crash told me. "There are just so many of them."
Later in describing Hammer:
Hammer is different from Crash's other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime [World Church of the Creator] acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a "last stand, a righteous war" against those who "call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity." He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and "Hammer Shades"—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.
This passage which examines Maine's history has me digging into the topic about other state histories (including Washington, Oregon, etc.), but that will come later:
Maine's whiteness isn't accidental. It was intended, orchestrated. To understand this history I spoke to Samuel James, a journalist and the creator of the podcast 99 Years, which he describes as "a Black exploration of the deliberate creation of the whitest state in the nation." James is tall and tattooed, with large brown eyes and a goatee. He is the descendant of a slave and grew up in Biddeford, Maine, "in cornrows and Rollerblades." His father was a Black session musician, and his mother was a white dancer, the daughter of a church pianist.
To make his point about Maine's racist history, James cited Malaga Island, a fishing community settled by free Blacks around the time of the Civil War. "The Great Migration begins in 1910, and powerful Northern racists freak out," James wrote to me in an email. "Maine's then governor Frederick W. Plaisted was one of those racists, and the following year he began the ethnic cleansing." The state forcibly removed people from Malaga Island, committed many of them to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and even dug up the graves of their dead. "This made national news and gave all the right and wrong signals to all the right and wrong people," James explained . Signals, that is, about the kind of state Maine was and wanted to be. (It wasn't the only state outside the South to embark on such an openly racist path. In 1859, Oregon entered the union with a law excluding Black people from moving there; though rendered moot by the 14th Amendment, the legislation wasn't formally repealed until 1926.)
...
Given the state's white-supremacist history, James isn't surprised that Hammer set his sights on Maine. "In 2020, there were still three islands with the word 'nigger' in their names, and when the state finally redesignated them, the Press Herald said it acted 'swiftly,' " James told me, referring to Portland's daily newspaper.
Later in the article they delve into what Crash did, in addition to discussing Hammer on his podcast:
On March 22, Crash reached out to state authorities to report that he suspected Hammer was running an illegal tattoo operation, and he provided the latitude and longitude coordinates of the property (45.371120°N, 68.155465°W). White supremacists are often brought to heel by the government not because of violent acts but because they violate basic laws and regulations. "They got Al Capone on tax evasion," Crash reminded me.
As the community began rejecting the neonazis, there is this passage that discusses how it happens as the narrative escalates to state news:
In early August, Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli of the Bangor Daily News published a story about Hammer. A seasoned reporter with a Stevie Nicks haircut and a nose ring, Phalen Tomaselli had written for papers in New York and Pennsylvania before buying an old farmhouse in Maine and relocating with her husband. She brought unique experience to the Hammer story: She'd once investigated the East Coast contingent of Aryan Nations.
Phalen Tomaselli is bold and wanted to see Hammer's land for herself, so she drove down from her home near Maine's border with New Brunswick, Canada. The people of Springfield were eager to assist. "Town officials were really helpful in showing me exactly where it was, helping me find the registry of deeds. And people gave me information like, 'If you pass this thing that looks like this particular landmark, you've gone too far,' " she said. She went into the woods with her camera to document what was there, which wasn't much. Hammer's construction plans appeared to be moving at a glacial pace.
The article then diverts into explaining the paradox of tolerance, admittedly through a Christian minister's sermon. Then it turns back to the local Spingfield Maine community and its response:
By late summer 2023, it seemed like everyone in and around Springfield was talking about Hammer. There were community meetings about confronting the rising tide of white supremacy. Papers ran articles that shined a light on Hammer and op-eds that condemned him. "I am not pleased at all with this presence in the community. My grandfather and uncle fought the Nazis…. My other grandfather milled steel for the war effort, and my grandmother on that side worked in a munitions factory. We did not fight that war for nothing!" one local man told the Bangor Daily News. "They are unwelcome here and will not find support from anyone who still believes in what America is really supposed to be about." The paper's editorial board stated its view succinctly: "The welcome mat has limits."
According to Zac Chickering, some Springfield residents were more aggressively intolerant than others and went straight to the source of the problem. "We have a bunch of 80-year-old men that went up to that dickhead's face and threatened to backhoe his body into a grave. And that's nothin'. That's just the flake on the potato plate," Chickering told me. When Hammer started handing out pamphlets promoting his views, residents told him, as Chickering put it, that "nobody gives a thin shit what you think."
This all culminated in April of 2024:
The bill banning paramilitary training was signed into law by Maine's governor, Janet Mills, in April 2024. "This bill is about us saying we are going to draw the line," Joe Baldacci said in a speech on the senate floor. "We are not going to allow people to flout the law and intimidate others." But the new law, it turned out, would have to be used on Hammer's successors, the next neo-Nazis who decide that Maine is their promised land. By the time Mills approved it, Hammer was long gone.
As the article closes, the author brings a heavy handed but apt simile from his time on Crash's own homestead:
With the election around the corner, Crash was thinking a lot about ways the average person can help to curb the antidemocratic forces gaining ground in the United States. He'd recently reminded readers of his newsletter that they weren't powerless in the face of Hammer and his ilk. "We CAN fight fascists without fisticuffs or violence. Voting, and encouraging other non-chuds to vote, is an important first step," he wrote. "So is keeping an eye on your local polling place on election day. Maybe even sticking around after the polls close to watch the vote counting—and democracy—in action. Hopefully, though, you'll want to do more, before votes are cast, to ensure your candidates for the Legislature, school board and other municipal offices aren't chuds, chud-adjacent or chud-sympathetic."
Before leaving Crash's homestead, we helped with the morning chores. We brought feed to the chickens and slop to a trio of pigs named Larry, Curly, and Moe. My kids stood next to Crash in the swine enclosure as he demonstrated how to administer a medicinal tincture—one of the Stooges had contracted a cold while being transported to the homestead from a factory farm. "That's our job, you see," Crash explained. "Our job is to give them the best life possible."
He squeezed the medicine into the pig's mouth with a giant syringe. At first the pig wouldn't swallow, but Crash held its jaw shut, encouraging the animal to follow its instincts. Finally, the pig swallowed and gave a snort, then went back to rooting in the weeds.
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The Chairwoman of the Duwamish is Cecile Hansen since 1975
Cecile, aside from her serving nearly 50 years in leadership for the Duwamish people, is that she is the great-great-grandniece of Chief Si 'ahl. It is very sad to me that the Duwamish are not recognized as an official tribe by the US government and thus not being granted their tribal fishing rights. It seems unlikely to ever happen now, without sizable changing for how the Bureau of Indian Affairs makes these decisions.
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Washington State and the KKK
The article earlier about the neo-nazi and Maine sent me to doing some more reading about Washington and its history for non-white people. One thing I came across was a mention of the City of Bellingham giving the leader of their KKK chapter the key to the city back in the 1920s.
[M]ost of the news coverage of the Klan in Whatcom county during 1924 focused on I-49, the anti-catholic school bill which was soundly defeated. But whereas most Klan chapters declined after that election, the Klan in Bellingham and Mount Vernon areas were strong enough to not only continue but draw large crowds at a series of public events that began with a meeting of over a thousand in Stanwood in 1924. And some believe that Marion A. Keyes, who was elected Mayor of Blaine in 1924, was a member of the Klan.
On September 26th, 1925, the “largest crowd that has ever assembled in the Lynden District,” estimated between 12,000 and 25,000 people, attended a rally of supposedly 750 members of the Ku Klux Klan at the Northwest Washington Fair Grounds.
And elsewhere on the site, there is a mention of the following:
Delegates to the Democratic Party's 1924 Convention from Washington State, Oregon, and Idaho unanimously opposed adding a plank to the Party Platform that would condemn Ku Klux Klan violence.
The democrats have changed so much since then, but Jesus what a thing to read.
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"Character Amnesia in China"
During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word 'sneeze'. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters. I thought to myself: Peking University is usually considered the 'Harvard of China'. Can one imagine three PhD students in the English Literature Department at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word 'sneeze'? Yet, this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. This was my first encounter with an increasingly widespread phenomenon in China known as 'character amnesia'. Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?
There have been very few empirical studies assessing the extent of the phenomenon. Informal surveys carried out by China Daily and other publications report that roughly 80 per cent of respondents experience character amnesia in their daily life (Wikipedia 2024a). Some research projects have been initiated to examine the factors that contribute to the problem (Wang et al. 2020; Langsford et al. 2024), but the data are hard to assess in terms of differences in occupation and level of education.
The answer is complicated, but it has to do with the feeble 'phoneticity' of Chinese characters, as opposed to other scripts that were specially devised to convey the sounds of a language. In writing systems whose symbols represent phonetic information, there is a 'virtuous circle' in which the four functions of language—speaking, listening, writing, and reading—are mutually reinforcing.
The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
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"Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances"
It is not an exaggeration to say that, to me, Jamelle Bouie is one of the most important voices regarding current US politics and racial division. I follow him across social media (BlueSky, TikTok, and his articles.) This is an excellent article which reminds us that Trump is a serious threat to our country because what he proposes isn't new, in fact, it's explicitly how the country was founded:
It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.
"Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states," the historian Terry Bouton writes in "Taming Democracy: 'The People,' the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution."
We were not given a democratic Constitution; we made one. We unraveled the elitist and hierarchical Constitution of the founders to build something that works for us — that conforms to our expectations.
But nothing is permanent. What's made can be unmade. And at the foundation of Donald Trump's campaign is a promise to unmake our democratic Constitution.
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Automated Archives for November, 1st 2024
This post was automatically generated.
Articles To Read
The following are articles that I saved today. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
- Would Either Candidate Fundamentally Change the U.S. Economy?
- The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law
- Hello in There | The Point Magazine
- What is the “Cyclopean Cave” — and why are these guys hauling buckets of Colorado mud to find it?
- Should you feel guilty about using AI?
Blog Posts On This Day
- 1 year ago (1 post)
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