I want to have access to my Denote notes via SyncThing on a machine I don’t completely control (but is not, to be clear, operating in a hostile environment) and I want them to be encrypted, same as my org-journal files. I should probably just ask Prot, but as near as I can tell the clean way to encrypt notes in Denote is to add an “org.gpg” type to denote-file-types, like this:

(add-to-list 'denote-file-types
             '(org-gpg
               :extension ".org.gpg"
               :date-function denote-date-org-timestamp
               :front-matter denote-org-front-matter
               :title-key-regexp "^#\\+title\\s-*:"
               :title-value-function identity
               :title-value-reverse-function denote-trim-whitespace
               :keywords-key-regexp "^#\\+filetags\\s-*:"
               :keywords-value-function denote-format-keywords-for-org-front-matter
               :keywords-value-reverse-function denote-extract-keywords-from-front-matter
               :link denote-org-link-format
               :link-in-context-regexp denote-org-link-in-context-regexp))

It looks like a lot to do a little, but it’s just a clone of the org type that’s already in that list, with the extension changed. I suppose one could just alter the org type, but then you don’t have an unencrypted type if you want it.

With that in place, you can do:

(setq denote-file-type 'org-gpg)

… and anything you create with the denote command uses that type, with the correct extension. Given the right general config:

(require 'epa-file)
(epa-file-enable)
(setq org-crypt-key "foo@bar.baz")

… it all “just works,” with decryption handled transparently provided the gpg agent is set up correctly, and I preserve the option to have unencrypted notes for whatever reason I might want them at some point.

To get my existing notes into an encrypted state, I used this script:

#!/bin/zsh

encrypt_file() {
  local file_path="$1"
  local recipient="$2"
  local encrypted_file_path="${file_path}.gpg"

  gpg --encrypt --recipient "$recipient" --output "$encrypted_file_path" "$file_path"

  echo "File encrypted: $encrypted_file_path"
}

encrypt_files_in_directory() {
  local directory="$1"
  local recipient="$2"

  for file_path in "$directory"/*.org; do
    encrypt_file "$file_path" "$recipient"
  done
}

# Usage: ./encrypt_files.sh directory recipient_email
directory="$1"
recipient_email="$2"

if [[ -n "$directory" && -n "$recipient_email" ]]; then
  encrypt_files_in_directory "$directory" "$recipient_email"
else
  echo "Usage: ./encrypt_files.sh directory recipient_email"
fi

The mobile problem

The tradeoff with that approach is that your mobile use case gets harder. I can still do something like mosh my way in to the Mac Studio with Tailscale, I guess.

I have the nagging feeling that Emacs-centric note taking wouldn’t work great for me if I were dealing with a commute or other scenarios where mobile access is more important. Yes, there are beorg, Plainorg, and a few other options, but the syncing layer is the complicator. Some people seem to live fine just using git and maybe git-auto-commit, or just generally being more disciplined about their file use. I have generally felt better served by bespoke solutions, like you get with Obsidian, Things, and others. They’re still subject to the occasional screwup, but I don’t feel like I see them as often as I do with things that simply watch a file system and try to react appropriately.

I have been doing a little personal journaling about my preoccupations with mobile stuff. After tracing things back over the years, I recently realized that a lot of my fixation on getting stuff to work on a phone came from a pretty terrible time during the 2001 downturn.

All my teammates had been laid off and I was holding down a small network of Linux/open source sites that had previously involved a much larger team. If I didn’t want things to get out of control I had to keep an eye on them over the weekend. That mentality caused a lot of lines to blur and it took years to unblur them. I was an early iPad enthusiast because I’d internalized the idea that I should be able to do all kinds of work from anywhere at any time. Before that, I was really into the netbook thing because I could put an eeePC into a hip bag.

By the time I got to Puppet in 2012, working from home wasn’t a novelty or an aspirational goal: I’d been doing it for 13 or 14 years and was really glad to have an office to go to. Covid lockdown sparked a pretty bad reaction after the initial “let’s build a fire and sing songs while we wait for the drop ship” phase because lines started blurring again.

At the same time, just last week I had a pair of things to do in the afternoon and I’d written some thoughts down about one of the events that I wanted to review while I was out of the house. Well … apparently SyncThing hadn’t picked up on the changes before the machine I wrote them on went to sleep, so none of the other machines in the mesh — including a Synology I put SyncThing on for just these occasions — knew the notes existed.

At some point, “oh, no problem, I’ll just Tailscale in to the home network and WoL the Mac Studio so I can wake up SyncThing and then sync my changes down” loses all its charm.

Ugh. Need to stop before I talk myself into doing something rash and disruptive.

Hugo previews while working in ox-hugo

I’m not sure if there’s a better way to do this, but this is working for me:

(defun mph/start-hugo-server ()
  "Run Hugo server with live reloading and open the server URL in a browser."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((root (projectile-project-root))
         (default-directory root))
    (compile "hugo server -D --navigateToChanged" t)
    (run-at-time "3 sec" nil (lambda ()
                              (browse-url "http://localhost:1313")))))

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

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

I get a little Compiling treatment in the modeline while the preview server is running. My browser reloads any time I save my work.

What happened to V

I always sort of wondered what happened to V between the miniseries and the regular series. I had a vague sense it had gotten worse, but I was also a teenager and didn’t have a lot of critical faculties beyond “this seems sort of sucky and boring now.” Well, now I know: They got rid of the person who created it, made it cheaper, and tossed out what someone thought were the dumb parts, which were actually the good parts.

Interesting factoid:

V was watched in more than 33 million homes, which amounted to 40 percent of all TV viewership. (The most popular series in America today, Yellowstone, averages 13.1 million viewers per episode.)

I recently tried to dig up what’s considered “good numbers” in the streaming era and didn’t get many satisfying answers. Seeing that a modern phenomenon like Yellowstone pulls about 40 percent of V’s numbers is helpful. V was hyped all to hell at the time, so its “television special event” status probably skews things a little. (The M*A*S*H finale did 105.97 million total viewers, and that record may be impossible to break as streaming-driven atomization deepens.)

“The Phony Solidarity of the American Pundit Class”

I got to this post in The Nation after it sat on the read later pile for a while.

It’s very strange to see the post-2016 realignments continuing apace. This particular link targets the slice of the center-left-to-center-right commentariat that has learned to talk about “working people.” That tic — the “won’t somebody think of the working people” tic — feels symptomatic of a kind of elite capture all its own.

I wrote a few years ago:

“I have a lot of time for some heterodox thinkers. I wish ‘heterodox’ was narrow-able to something less broad than ‘a coalition of middle class trolls, rebadged culture warriors, people who hate how much they get ratioed, and well-meaning independent thinkers.’”

I think I may need to retract that. I was going through the podcast searching for an episode and saw a few descriptions here and there that tell me “heterodox” has stopped being a word one lands on after casting about for a better one, and has become a sort of branding exercise.

Less a big thing to write about and more a thing I learned that was helpful after pounding my head against this wall:

mixed-pitch-mode allows for both variable and fixed pitches. It’s nice for org-mode, where you’ve got a mix of prose and more code-looking stuff – headings and body text look nicely typeset, property drawers and tags continue to use a fixed face.

My Doom font setting is pretty basic:

(setq doom-font (font-spec :family "Fira Code Retina" :size 15 :weight 'regular)
      doom-variable-pitch-font (font-spec :family "SF Pro" :size 16))
(

… but for reasons that eluded me, when I entered mixed-pitch mode, my variable pitch font was way too small, except when it was way too big.

I did a lot of poking around, a lot of searching, and a lot of scrolling forums, then I broke down and asked ChatGPT, which told me to add this:

(setq mixed-pitch-set-height 16)

That did it. Combined with the doom-earl-grey theme, I’ve got a pleasant, low-contrast, paper-like display to work with.

A rare political link

I was braced to hate this column, but ended up appreciating it a lot:

No, You Absolutely Do Not Have to Hand It To Tucker Carlson (The Nation)

“… there’s every reason to view Carlson’s alleged anti-war politics and putative politics as a fraud. It’s true that Carlson worries about escalation in the Ukraine/Russia conflict and has pushed for diplomacy. But his position on that issue is based not on any aversion to militarism but a belief that the United States should focus its firepower on other enemies, notably Mexico and China. Rather like the late Gore Vidal (who, alas, made this argument in the pages of The Nation), Carlson wants an American-Russia alliance against the non-white hordes. International relations scholar Daniel Drezner observes, ‘It’s also hard to claim that Carlson was opposed to U.S. military adventurism; it’s more accurate to say Carlson preferred aggressive military adventurism closer to home. Carlson repeatedly called for using the military south of the border in Mexico.’”

… and

As for economic populism, Carlson is far more likely to criticize big corporations for “wokeness” (in other words trying to keep up with changing social mores) than union busting. His populism is the kind that worries about gender ambiguity in M&Ms candy—not rampant inequality. He’s all too quick to revert to GOP business-class norms when there is a partisan battle. Business Insider reported on a telling moment in 2021 when Carlson “accused President Joe Biden of proposing a tax hike on wealthy Americans to ‘punish’ them.” This was a tax on people earning more than $400,000 per year—hardly a fitting target for proletarian outrage.

In sum:

His occasional populist and pacifist sentiments only exist in the context of a politics that aims to take justified anti-establishment outrage and harvest it for far-right ethnonationalism.

Why was I braced to hate it?

Because one of my core theses about What is Going on Right Now is that formerly cherished political categories are disintegrating, but we’re not doing a great job of understanding what that means, or allowing each other to explore what that means. So while it’s good to call out a charlatan like Tucker Carlson or assorted other faux populists (fauxpulists?), it’s not great when we just shoot on past that useful distinction-making and on into the territory of “therefore, nothing they’re saying should have any resonance with decent people.”

The danger of Tucker Carlson and others like him is not, to me, that they think bad or dangerous things. It’s that they are accomplished ideological entrepreneurs. They’re good at catching scent of shifts in the popular mood, understanding the language of those shifts, and then folding those shifts into whatever their real political commitments are. I’m not sure who you could name on the left that has shown the same acumen for that kind of political marketing. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Katie Porter come to mind as politicians working the left populist beat. In terms of commentators? Not sure.

One bad side effect has been the rise of commentator who exist outside the mainstreams of conservative or liberal thought and engage in their own entrepreneurialism despite being badly confused about their own political commitments.

I’m thinking of people like Batya Sargon Unghar, who wrote a snarling takedown of student loan forgiveness as a populist issue because, she said, it wasn’t helping “enough classes of people,” implying that there couldn’t be any working people with student loan debt. She has made some good observations about the cultural and class proclivities of the professional media “class,” but that’s just it: She doesn’t see a working reporter as a “working class person.” The top one percent of households in the US control a third of the wealth, the bottom half of US households control 2.6 percent of it, but let’s pit the nurse (or reporter, or software developer, or corporate recruiter, or technical writer) paying off their student loans against the person working a job that didn’t require college.

And I’m also thinking of the contrarian class – people who probably have some sort of left political commitment but respond poorly to reflexive rejection of an idea because the wrong person coopted it, and who end up contributing to a feedback loop: They become impatient with the echo chamber, they resent the lazy dunks and thoughtless inconsistencies of politics built around cultural antagonisms, and they get lumped, in turn, with “the dark side,” tainting anything they’ve ever put forth regardless of its worthiness.

Anyhow, my point, I suppose, builds off this one:

The strategy of selectively borrowing left-wing ideas in order to bolster a program of nationalism, racism, and gender conformity is not new. As Meyerson and Mavuram rightly observe, this is a familiar tactic of fascism, which typically emerges in a time where establishment politics are in crisis and the public is open to multiple solutions.

I appreciate an article that can acknowledge that selective borrowing, and remind readers that Carlson and other fake populists like him are identifying “what works” about left political ideas. That doesn’t mean we should spend our time understanding how we could rehabilitate Tucker Carlson: He does not want to be rehabilitated. He is a cynic whose commitments are not mine. But we should spend some time understanding what in there both resonates with our own politics and speaks to people who are suffering.

Affiliate links and ethics

If you truly think a product is too bulky, pointlessly prods people toward buying a thing that replaces a shared good they probably already have, is hard to use, leaks water, takes forever, and is only worth a score of “5/10” even though you couldn’t even get your own spouse to try it out, I’d propose that you not put affiliate links in your review.

I think this cuts to the core of my issue with modern review sites. The only way to get the reviews is to accept that they need affiliate link revenue; but you end up in situations like this, where the product is a sustainability nightmare about which the only nice things you can say are “doesn’t smell,” “looks cute,” and “good if you don’t have an outlet” (even though you also note it is too big and heavy to actually carry anywhere there are no outlets). They still feel okay tossing up the affiliate links, even though their review nets out to “useless; do not buy.”

I’m just picking on this review because it went by in the news stream last week. There’s much worse.

But man it could also be better. There is so much electronic junk in the world – drop-shipped ripoffs, poorly thought out Kickstarters, parts-bin garbage. There should be less of it. It should not be okay to make something out of plastic and toxic battery components then render it useless in six months.

It’s fine for the Verge to do its journalistic duty by fairly reviewing a bad product and saying it’s bad. It’s correct for the Verge to disclose the existence of affiliate links to better educate people on how they’re incentivized. It would be awesome if the Verge, and sites like it, would go one step further and say “we’re not going to help you buy this thing” when they plainly don’t think the thing is worth buying, and when that thing is going to be turning up in a landfill.

Okay. That’s it for today. This afternoon is spoken for.

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