mahiwaga

I think one of the ways our culture contributes to ongoing violence is the way it consecrates and sanctifies Darwinian competition. So ultimately all our relationships are adversarial. You’re either for us or against us. You have to pick a side. It’s a zero-sum game. There’s no room for more complex paradigms involving sincere cooperation and altruism. The idea that we’re not just all selfish assholes looking out for #1 is looked upon with utter disdain and contempt.

crossposted on Facebook

I’ve been binge-watching “The Expanse” and all the Don Quixote references have made me ponder how Cervantes basically anticipated a lot of the themes in “The Matrix” and in “Inception” and it’s making my perception of “The Expanse” feel way more Philip K. Dick-ian than it might deserve.

With the mention of the grueling physical violence that the protagonist is subjected to, it also makes me realize that Cervantes anticipated a lot of the tropes in “Fight Club” (and by extension, “Mr. Robot”)

There’s a Reddit post about how “Fight Club” is really just Don Quixote from the viewpoint of Sancho Panza, but I think that’s off the mark. “Fight Club” is Don Quixote from the viewpoint of Alfonso Quixano, and I wonder if someone has already written an actual version of Don Quixote in this manner….

Did Miguel de Cervantes Invent Fiction With ‘Don Quixote’? • 2016 Feb 17 • Jonathon Sturgeon • Flavorwire (h/t S.L.)

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In some tangential synchronicity to this post about Don Quixote I learned from digging through some Ruby documentation that Cervantes and Shakespeare did not in fact die on the same day, since Spain had already adopted the Gregorian calendar at that point while England was still on the Julian calendar.

When should you use DateTime and when should you use Time? • DateTime • Ruby Std-lib 2.3.1

Whitewash all the things.

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One of my regrets in life is when I once went to the Midnight Special Bookstore in Santa Monica when Octavia Butler was signing books. I wanted her to sign my used copy of the Xenogenesis trilogy but I could only find my beat-up paperback copy of Adulthood Rites and I got shy and didn’t ask her for an inscription.¹

I also find it ironic that the only reason I started reading Octavia Butler was because Orson Scott Card used her writing in multiple examples in his book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy²

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent on Utah v. Strieff, a Fourth Amendment case about police searches:

See also: - “No One Can Breathe in This Atmosphere” • Everyone should read Justice Sonia Sotomayor on how police stops are life-and-death experiences for people of color • 2016 Jul 7 • Dahlia Lithwick • Slate - Justice Sotomayor’s Ringing Dissent • 2016 Jun 20 • Matt Ford • The Atlantic - You need to read Sonia Sotomayor’s devastating, Ta-Nehisi Coates-citing Supreme Court dissent • 2016 Jun 20 • Victoria M. Massie • Vox

Yes, it’s possible that blowing up Michael Xavier Johnson with a robot-delivered bomb saved lives, but at the same time, this is basically one more step down the road of relying on extrajudicial killing to maintain law and order instead of allowing the criminal justice system to work as intended. In addition to robotic bombers, it’s not difficult to imagine LE relying on heavily armed drones to take out suspects. And if it’s a human rights violation for the POTUS to take out suspected terrorists with drones without due process, surely it’s also a violation of civil rights if local and federal LE do the same thing.

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Using a Bomb Robot to Kill a Suspect Is an Unprecedented Shift in Policing • 2016 Jul 8 • Jason Koebler and Brian Anderson • Motherboard

That the suspect is heavily armed does not necessarily mean deadly force is necessary to subdue the suspect, considering that both the Charleston church shooter and the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter were taken alive.¹