jducoeur

After years of argument about it, there's something weirdly exciting about actually filling in the stupid form, and seeing what it wound up looking like. (This gets sadder as I go along.)

PSA: fill it in. No, really -- this is how congress-critters and electoral-college votes get allocated. If you want your state to be properly represented, it's really important, even if the bastards overseeing it are diabolically evil. Refusing to fill it in because of that evil is basically cutting off your nose to spite your face -- they would be overjoyed to be able to report that Massachusetts turns out to not have so many people, so we're taking away one of your representatives now.

First impression, as I type the URL: Google is prompting me with "my2020census.gove". Uh-oh. That smells like some identity-fraud scammers may be poisoning the system and trying to divert people into a fake form.

I love the fact that you first get (paraphrasing) a "How many people will be in your household on April 1?" page. Then you get "Please list all the people in your household on April 1". Then you get "No, really -- think about it. Are there going to be more people in your household on April 1?". It does show that somebody in the form's design understands humans.

Curious that they care about whether we have a mortgage.

On the one hand, I'm glad that they explicitly acknowledge that same-sex partnership is a thing. OTOH, I'm cranky that they call it out as different from opposite-sex.

Unsurprisingly, they try very hard to draw a rigid "Male or Female", on strict biological lines. No acknowledgement of the occasional intersex "it's complicated" situations.

Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me -- they want me to not only say "White", but specify my national origins as well. I might just say "Mutt". Yeah, did so. (Seriously, even if I was confident where all my ancestors came from, it's certainly multiple countries. Stupid, stupid question.)

And I'm morbidly curious about the public justification for calling Hispanic out as a separate race (indeed, its own separate pathway from all other races), when Italian explicitly isn't. I mean, yes, the reason is raw nativist racism and an attempt at government-led terrorism of the Hispanic community, but I don't actually know what the public window-dressing for it is. It's even more nakedly offensive than I had expected.

Hah! You get to the end, and the final question is essentially, "No, really -- think about it one more time. Do some of those people you previously listed in this household actually live somewhere else?" (Actually, that last one may be a devious trick to prevent prison inmates from getting counted at all, by mucking up the accounting. Sobering possibility, that.)

Thanks to Peter David for this pointer. It's a good solid rant, but it pinpoints a matter that's been subtly bugging me since the beginning of the Katrina debacle: Bush's apparent attitude towards the whole thing. At least at a gut level, I have to agree: throughout, he's projected a remarkably cavalier air about a pretty grave matter...

... and Mark Fiore may be the most skillful political comic I know today. If you haven't seen his work, he's essentially a traditional newspaper cartoonist, but his medium is online Flash animations. This week's piece (thanks to jpicon for the pointer) expresses the Katrina debacle more clearly than anything else I've seen so far. Not his funniest piece, but one of his more effective...

Here's a political question, looking for opinions.

What with the Supreme Court nomination shaping up to be the greatest political debacle of our time, I'm thinking about the most useful way to proceed -- where my voice would most likely be *useful*. I look at mega-petitions like MoveOn and such, and I find myself pretty skeptical that anyone's going to really pay much attention to them. Indeed, I'm not even sure that they're entirely productive, because I expect them to push a line nearly as intransigent as the neocons.

What I *personally* want to see is a relative moderate on the bench. In this case, the best plausible outcome is getting someone who is fairly open, forthright and thoughtful -- conservative but not knee-jerk conservative. Frankly, someone like Justice O'Connor herself. What I do *not* want is to wind up with either a tool of the religious right, or a cipher. (Who would probably be such a tool in reality.)

So the question is: who would be optimal to write to? Say I want to send semi-personalized letters (in my own words, rather than pure machine-driven petitions) to ten Senators. Which ones should they be? The hard-right ones would be entirely useless, I believe, and the hard-left ones nearly as much so -- both of those sides are going to settle into open warfare, and are unlikely to give ground.

Rather, I'm looking for the swing votes, who might be convinced to be reasonable. I want the moderate Republicans to withhold support (or, at least, not actively fight for) the more ideological nominees. And I want the moderate Democrats to keep a stiff spine against those ideologues, while seeking genuine compromise candidates to push for. A filibuster is likely to be necessary, but it's important to present viable alternatives while doing so. There is no chance of getting someone *less* conservative than O'Connor, but a disciplined campaign might be able to get someone similar to her -- a genuine swing vote.

And to both sides, I think I want to ask for patience and stamina. This is going to be brutal and bruising, and the first few rounds are either going to stalemate, or the conservatives are going to have to pull out the anti-filibuster nuke again. Working past that is going to take a lot of patience. This is all about round three, when the public has lost its patience with both sides and compromise is strictly necessary.

Yes, it may be rosy-eyed to even imagine a decent outcome of this mess. But better to hypothesize a possible good outcome and do my own tiny statistical part towards it, rather than throw up my hands and give up...

I like the Fourth of July. I've enjoyed it for many years -- certainly since before the year that goldsquare and I camped out overnight to stake out primo space for the Barony in front of the Shell. And I know that, as the Boston celebration has grown and commercialized, it's lost a certain something. But this year -- this year kind of bugged me.

(Caveat: I was at the rehearsal yesterday, and caught the end of today's telecast. These impressions are composited from those parts.)

It was a bunch of little things that got to me. First, one of the anthems got an arrangement I can only describe as Disneyfied -- sweet, inoffensive and to my mind wholly inappropriate for patriotic music. It was a comfy musical blanket, lulling you to sleep. The tone was entirely wrong, to my mind. Patriotism is dangerous, dammit, and should always demand that you think about it. Anyone who paints it as safe and comfortable is deliberately handing a loaded shotgun to a five year old.

Then there were the guest performers. All perfectly decent but, y'know, three country music acts just doesn't exactly strike me as representative of Boston. This, more than anything I've seen before, drove home that this concert has now been carefully marketed for the national audience. Indeed, there was an odd note of, "Please don't hate us because we're a Blue State" echoing past me throughout the whole thing.

Finally, there was that atrocious medley they did at the end, grabbing "patriotic" phrases seemingly at random and smushing them together -- a stock phrase from the Constitution here, the beginning of the Pledge of Allegiance there, resulting in a sort of lumpy Patriotism Stew. I'm sure that the idea was to make it all super-patriotic, but instead they wound up with Nutrasweet Patriotism -- it sort of tastes right, but there's no substance to it and it leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. (And it's bad for you in large quantities.)

For all my cynicism, I consider myself a patriot, and take that seriously. But the past decade has made me very sensitive to the difference between patriotism and jingoism, and this evening's entertainment came just a step closer to that line than I like. In any other broadcast I would just shrug it off as the times, but this is *Boston*, dammit. This is my city, and a concert that has long been close to my heart. Those sour notes are harder to ignore when they're coming out of my home...