Every time I post a critique like this I feel like I’m looking over my shoulder a little. It’s an election year, everyone’s on edge, and there is just this vibe about it all that is intense.

I’m not going to try to paper over or sugarcoat my political leanings: Pretty “left,” in the basic political parlance. Not a Republican. Not a “centrist.” Not a “moderate.” Not a “right-winger,” “fascist,” or whatever.

Behaviorally, I vote Democratic, but I do not believe that it’s my obligation to “create unity” during primaries, and I don’t think the Democratic party represents my views or even really my interests in any “forward progress” sense of the word.

Ideologically, I don’t like picking any label because I have been thinking about those labels for decades on decades and have seldom seen them actually help anyone be more clear on what anyone else believes. If I had to pick one, I’d stick to “socialist.” But I was once on the national committee of a socialist organization I do not care to name and understood very clearly the vast daylight between me and any number of other “socialist” organizations. We even joked among ourselves that we got a small hoot out of people believing we were probably just sort of into European-style healthcare and better emissions control.

And I don’t like the labels because I believe that you are what you do, not what you say you are. I really appreciate the phrase “my political commitments” as opposed to “my political beliefs,” because the idea of “commitments” naturally invites the question “if they’re commitments, what are you doing about them?” That’s a reminder for me, personally, when I think about opening my mouth on this stuff.

But even “left” and “right” have issues, as do “conservative” and “liberal.” We use those terms and there’s some rough agreement, but I’d much rather understand what someone is trying to do than understand some taxonomy of labels when these words are doing all kinds of work and mean so many things.

But when I snark about the cascading system failures going on around me, it’s not because I think we’d be better off with Republicans in charge. It’s because I think the people who are in charge are failing us, and a. they’re in charge, b. I don’t care if they’re the home team because they still need to be held accountable at the next opportunity (primaries, which is why believing primaries are for beating the base into alignment is a position you’d expect the people who want to keep power to take), and c. no, they’re not left enough for me. We should be building government housing and socializing healthcare.

My disgust with that pull quote up at the top is pretty simple: On what planet is “enlightened” a useful policy platform? Who cares what leaders say? What are they doing? Is there anything more Peak Portland Liberal than “well, we know better so it’s odd that things aren’t working out.”

PikaPods and Calibre-Web again.

I did all the setup on my PikaPod and Calibre-Web to get it talking to my Kobo and … something was very wrong. Sync wasn’t working, none of the books in my collection were showing up as download candidates, etc. I remounted my Kobo and rolled back the config change that pointed it at the Calibre-Web API in favor of the Kobo store API and went to bed mildly disappointed but deciding there are worse things in the world than sideloading my entire library of ebooks onto a device I update once every five or eight years.

This morning it turned out it was bothering me more than I had let on to myself. One discrepancy I noticed was that most docs expect the service to be listening on :8083, but the URL it was generating in the UI was going to hit :80. When I did a straight curl I got … nothing. So I curl -v’d the PikaPod with :8083 and got … nothing again. So back to :80 with -v and … oh … Calibre-Web’s handy little “paste this line into your Kobo config” field was providing an unsecured URL and curl was stopping on a 308 redirect to the secured URL. I guess 308 is implemented inconsistently, because it should have simply redirected to the secured URL with the request intact. I’ve never even seen a 308, but my education in redirects stopped decades ago with an SEO cleanup.

Anyhow, curl -v to the secured URL with no port qualifier told me curl and the API were talking, so I remounted the Kobo, changed the config to point to the PikaPod’s API endpoint and now there’s ping. Plus a ton of duplicate books, because Calibre-Web is configured to serve up a .kepub (a Kobo-specific epub variant more amenable to location sync) as well as any .epub it can find, and I didn’t take the time to narrow that down.

At least I can start the work day knowing the most mysterious part is working.

Say what again?

PikaPods is a web service that lets you host common/popular webapps. It’s pretty neat: You pick one, click the little deploy button, and it fires up a container with its own URL and the option to point a CNAME at it, plus instructions on enabling sftp connections if you need them. Calibre-Web is one of the services PikaPod will host for you. It’s an online ebook library that works with Calibre, a popular means of converting ebook formats. Among its other capabilities, Calibre-Web can serve up your library to a Kobo device and manage location sync between all the clients. A nominally loaded PikaPod running Calibre-Web is supposed to cost only a couple of bucks a month, and the billing is all metered.

I gave PikaPod a try because the instructions for getting a Calibre-Web container to run on my Synology were all so impenetrable that I decided there had to be a better way. Ironically, by the time I had the PikaPod running I understood what I was getting wrong with the self-hosted containers. So there’s a chance my inner autodidact will have no rest until I have my half-assembled container working correctly.

But PikaPod is cool.

I set up a Linux PC over the weekend, and I’m going to give Pop!_OS a try on it. I want to be able to use this machine for work sometimes, and there are a few desktop-y things that work better under Pop! than they do Fedora, maybe owing to Pop! remaining on xorg. Screen sharing in Zoom, for instance, works like you’d expect on xorg and does not under Wayland. Apps with taskbar icons also work without the need for an extension.

You can tell Pop! is a little behind Fedora 39, but I’m not sure it’s that big a deal. I found a PPA for Emacs 29.1, but don’t worry about much else: The stuff that moves with any speed is coming from a Flatpak. My ~/bin, ~/.fonts, and ~/.config/doom are all handled via SyncThing.

What else?

• I noticed that my Elgato CamLink 4k + FujiFilm X-T2 work with a little less lag. I think there still is some, but it’s pretty smooth.
• shairplay-sync has some permissions issues as a service, but works fine when I start it in daemon mode, so I’ve moved my bookshelf speakers over to this machine: It acts like an AirPlay 2 endpoint for all my other stuff, and I can use Cider to get at my Apple Music stuff when I’m working on this machine.
• There’s less font weirdness than under Fedora, meaning most apps show most fonts at a normal size out of the box and don’t require passing environmental variables along or messing with config files.
• My Jabra Engage 75 works fine with this thing, so no more messing around with AirPods: I just plugged it into an open port and I’m back to reliable audio.
• The rbenv and ruby-build that ship with Jammy don’t have any of Ruby 3.x available. I just installed that on my own and added ruby-build as a plugin. Problem solved.

Otherwise … I got through a day with it and it worked great: No weird glitches, crashes, or whatever. Multiple Zoom calls. Oh, and I’m down to my last possum sticker, but the wireless scanning stuff works great, too: I managed to get a hi-res scan of my last sticker so I can make more.

Bad company

I like company-mode in Emacs when I’m coding, I hate it when I’m writing prose. It slows everything down to suggest words I do not need suggested. This incantation fixed it:

(setq company-global-modes '(not text-mode markdown-mode org-mode))

Don’t spin me

I enjoyed the most recent episode of Bad Faith, “Vibecession?”, partly for the analysis and partly because one of the guests got to the thing that has been bothering me the most about the discourse around the economy:

“… as to why people are so heated in the first place I think you have a few things going on. One you do have people who are just kind of concerned about Biden’s electoral prospects they’re worried about Trump and they’re worried about […] a negative narrative.

“You’ve always got people out there who although they […] appear to be kind of making objective arguments about this or that topic they’re really mostly worried about trying to kind of steer the discourse in one way or another to to be more favorable to Democrats or less favorable to Democrats or whatever so there’s that aspect […] of the election worrying …”

I posted about it a few days ago:

… and then:

… and then I favorably boosted this:

… because if there’s one word I have worn some grooves into over the past four years, it is “precarity.”

I don’t know. We can either speak truthfully or we cannot, and I am not responding well to progressives or leftists or whatever who do not want to speak truthfully because they believe that are actually unpaid press secretaries for the Biden administration.

I’m not telling anyone what to do with their spare time, I’m just saying that if you’re talking to me, leave me out of the four-dimensional chess game. I show up every election and vote exactly as you’d expect. It is okay if, in December of the year before an election, I say “I wish we had a better alternative than Biden.” And it is super okay if I say, “you know what, I wish we had a better alternative than this entire way of being we’ve landed on.”

A Disturbance in The Force

A Disturbance in the Force is a documentary about the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special.

Al and I went to see it at the Hollywood Theater several years ago. I managed to win a cool Boba Fett poster (the cartoon version, from the special). It truly is wretched, but the documentary does a nice job of explaining that actually everything in 1978 was at least a little wretched, including the entire variety show genre.

And it does a nice job of explaining why the silly thing even mattered to anyone.

I had just turned nine when Star Wars came out. My family went to the theater to see a 6 p.m. showing on opening weekend in 1977, and ended up waiting around for a special 10 p.m. showing the theater added. It stayed in that theater for the better part of a year, and it became a way to just get me out of the house: Mom would give me ticket money, I’d walk across the field and hop a ditch to get into the loading dock area of the mall, then walk around to the theater. When we visited relatives that year, “what would Mike like to do” was always “go see Star Wars.”

I was completely saturated in anything Star Wars I could get my hands on. Magazines, copies of People featuring any of the cast, the novelization, the comic books, aaaaanything. So the Holiday Special was a huge deal because it was gonna be more actual Star Wars and not just stuff about Star Wars.

And, as someone points out in the documentary, Star Wars was a very wild property at that point. Like, there were hints of deep lore and all, but the only “canon” you had to work with was the movie itself and wild theorizing. Some heretics thought Darth Vader was actually a robot. There were rumors that there would be a whole movie about Wookies. It was just this crazy thing that had landed in our pop culture lives and nothing was ever going to be the same again. So we were ripe for whatever George Lucas wanted to churn off the assembly line, including, apparently, a superannuated Wookie grandfather perving out to VR porn with Dianne Carroll.

Anyhow, the documentary is a fun 90-minute diversion. Not super heavy, but cool to hear from people who actually worked on it, and fun to see a lot of period clips, like the bonkers Donnie and Marie episode with Kris Kristofferson Han Solo and Paul Lynde Imperial officer.

Hugo Previews in Emacs

I made this function to spin up the Hugo preview server while still working in Emacs:

(defun my-start-hugo-server ()
  "Run Hugo server with live reloading."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((root (projectile-project-root))
         (default-directory root))
    (compile "hugo server -D --navigateToChanged" t)))

(defun my-stop-hugo-server ()
  "Stop Hugo server."
  (interactive)
    (kill-compilation))

(map! :leader
      (:prefix ("H" . "Hugo")
       :desc "Start Hugo Server" "S" #'my-start-hugo-server
       :desc "Stop Hugo Server" "s" #'my-stop-hugo-server))

Politics feel more cultural than political these days. And in the wealthier corners of the world, the culture around educated people involves a sort of pained, fretful play in which we problematize virtually everything. It’s not the best hobby, but it’s widespread enough that good liberals have decided “virtue signaling” suffered from right-wing capture but was perhaps in need of a suitable conceptual approximation because “forced allyship” is a manifestation of it, whatever you want to call it.

I’ve pointed to it in the past, but the Chomsky-Foucault debate really does strike me as a bellwether, Chomsky earnestly arguing there’s a point A, and a point B, and that the law or state may or may not be relevant to how you affix those points in your ethical charts, but they exist; Foucault averring a veritable Xeno’s paradox of morality that has since driven the progressive left into a kind of recursive, somehow-other-directed narcissism that undermines and sometimes destroys the things it most seeks to champion and ally itself with.

I’ve come at this idea through a bunch of different lenses in the past several weeks — Supreme Court rulings, the billionaire submarine, a friend’s tweet about an obtuse NYT column, Twitter, Lemmy, reddit, Bluesky — some of them written down, some diverted into tangents far away from this, some dying as drafts.

I think this essay brought it closer to a boil:

“Expect more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain, more sleazy land acknowledgments (‘Sorry I stole your house!’), more performative white self-flagellation, more tokenization of minority faculty members.”

Go ahead and place a bet with yourself on the likely cultural/political alignment of the author before clicking through.

We were in the streets, furious, three years ago. I’m not entirely sure what happened, exactly, but something went wrong or got lost, and the fingerprints of our conflation of politics and culture are all over it.

People on the identity left will not like the observation that some of the most strident voices in their faction are performing something that manages to look like self-abrogation while preserving their economic privilege and social status. People on the socialist left will be resistant to any attempt to reclaim or redeem identity politics and standpoint epistemology. Jacobin has already published an uneasy review arguing, more or less, that identity politics have always been an elite preoccupation. It is also a pretty circumlocutious piece of writing that reminds me how much “political writing” is a vehicle for assorted cultural battles.

Táíwò tries to thread the needle between these two camps and I welcome the effort.

It’s a thin book that mostly serves to flesh out an earlier essay you can still find online. You can try the essay out and decide whether you want a bit more of the same thesis in the book.

Whether it’s the book or the essay, I recommend Táíwò’s writing. Between him, the Fields sister’s Racecraft, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling, Catherine Liu’s The Virtue Hoarders, and Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal!, I’ve spent the last year or so reading a lot of streams that could serve as tributaries to a river of left populism. These streams all exist in uneasy relationship to each other, sometimes making the contradictions of the several left tendencies uncomfortably obvious but all of them offering a piece of the puzzle.

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò