Sumana

I'm running a fundraiser for the Election Protection Hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. No matter your position on the 2024 US election, I'm guessing you want the votes counted fairly. So I'm trying to raise USD $25,000 for Election Protection.

Not a US resident or US citizen? Hate all the major parties? No problem! You'd be donating to The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan US nonprofit founded in 1963, which houses the Election Protection Coalition. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can donate.

Then, on Saturday Oct. 26th, expect 8 minutes of nerd jokes about open source software and how programming skews your brain, and none about politics. (Only 8 minutes because that's as long as a stand-up meeting should be.)

Please donate, and spread the word!

(Mastodon/Fediverse, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Twitter. Here's a square image for groupchats/Instagram.)

Kamala Harris's campaign sent out a press release saying, among other things,

That phrasing, with the question mark, is (per Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguistics expert), reads as more internet-y than we usually get from US Presidential candidates:
I'm also struck by the informality of "this guy" and the choice of a comma rather than a colon for "we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?"

The "quite weird?" line has struck a chord with some folks (examples from Bluesky):


And some folks are thinking about the usefulness of the subjective word "weird", and its splash zone.


and


response:


I'm late getting ready for my day, but I want to mark how useful the intersubjective derogatory power of "weird" is. It's like "creep" or (per this Black programmer's experience) saying something is "uncomfortable". It's easy for a person with structural power to use "this makes people uncomfortable" to deflect accountability for a decision. But also the subjectivity of "uncomfortable" is why it has extra power for marginalized people, as Erynn Brook discussed on Twitter a while back.

I am not making the time right now to think about this in more detail, but, it's interesting.

"My Mother In Law is queen of 'that sounds hard, so you shouldn't even try.'" On the connections among fixed mindset, conservatism, and unconstructive survivalist prepping. From the same author: on survivalism and prepping and silver and gold.

As I celebrate my fifteenth wedding anniversary and think about the long durable things we work on, I am thinking about patience.

"Somebody Will". "I am willing to sacrifice something I don't have / For something I won't have / but somebody will someday."

I've been attempting to work on my patience. I'm working on a book which will be the longest document I've ever written, and which will probably go through more and longer editing and revision passes than anything I've ever made. I'm doing this because I see an infrastructural need in free and open source software, and even if this book succeeds it will take years to change the field. The project of FLOSS, itself, trying to liberate people from being programmed by the software we use, is so huge and slow. And that's only one of the wheels against which I want to put my shoulder; there are so many gross, exploitative, destructive systems I want to smite.

I'm sustained by words by Tressie McMillan Cottom:

"You just have to know that they won your lifetime. It doesn’t mean you don’t try or work or whatever but you have to learn to fight for wins you won’t experience. That’s life, I think. That’s what I get from old Black people. You do it because it needs to be done, not because it’s being done for you."

and by João Costa Vargas:

“Once we accept that we are not wanted. Once we accept that we are not loved. It is very liberating. .... once we accept the logic of the runaway slave.... we can begin to do the work of abolition.”

I am loved; the support of loving friends -- like my spouse -- makes it more possible to accept the possibility, the reality, that I/we have opponents and that they do not love me/us. And to plant seeds that I hope the next generation can harvest.

[JOKE STARTS HERE]

As a woman of color over 35 years old who is a US citizen, I was of course approached by the Biden campaign as a potential vice presidential nominee.

Biden, 77, says he wants a running mate who is ready to assume the presidency, who shares his priorities and with whom he is “simpatico.”

Bio: Tech entrepreneur since 2015; has served on multiple nonprofit boards and testified before state legislature and city council committee hearings; first woman of color to be a maintainer of the Python Package Index; has memorized several US Presidential campaign theme songs via Oscar Brand's Smithsonian Folkways album.

How seriously is she being considered?: Opinions differ on this point. Sources in the Harihareswara camp say she's "quite a contender" but Biden staffers suggested that "who?" and "how do you spell that?"

Signature issues: Has championed sustainability and inclusion in open source software; worked towards open data in government; played a high-profile role in ensuring consistent supplies of biscotti in her household during the pandemic; as a project manager, consistently used time zones when referring to times (e.g., "8am ET") in meeting planning emails, rather than leaving others to guess.

Relationship with Biden: They are not close, but have multiple times been in the same city at the same time.

Pros and cons: Harihareswara is among the 20 best-known leaders in the key "Dreamwidth feminists who also use emacs" demographic, and her fanvidding skills may come in handy in case the digital media team needs help at crunch time. Also, even though she cannot fluently speak Kannada or Hindi, some Americans of South Asian descent will be mildly more likely to vote for a ticket with an Indian name on it (although Biden's opponent can point to his many appointments of South Asian-Americans to counter this factor). However, she is a less prominent voice on issues that party insiders feel will be more central to this year's election, such as domestic politics, international politics, the economy, health care, policing, the environment, food security, reproductive rights, constitutional law, tax policy, the role of religion in public life, racism, the Due South Ray Wars, and agriculture.

On being considered for vice president: "Was this in an email? I'm behind on email."

[END OF JOKE]

Today I learned:( US history, Civil War )

(Capsule review by my spouse at his blog.)

I saw ads for this on Indian TV around Republic Day and thought, cool, sort of Wonder Woman action vibes plus a martial-arts-dance sequence plus anticolonialism! It's a big enough blockbuster that it's showing in some NYC theaters, so I took my spouse plus a couple friends to it the other night.

The friends in question are white, and one of them likes big action movies (we see the MCU together) but is pretty ignorant of history, especially world history. So I prepped them, double-checking that they did know that the British occupied India for basically most of the 19th century, and that we weren't too keen on that. I didn't want to spoil them for the film but I wasn't sure of exactly what events would be covered in the film. So I told them: I'm pretty sure that this film assumes you know that, in 1857, there was a rebellion against British rule. From the fact that India got its independence in 1947, you may infer that this rebellion didn't work out for us. So, British rule depended on a middle management layer of locals, including Indian clerks and Indian soldiers called sepoys.... And I explained the bit about the cartridges.

And we wondered what exposition would happen -- would there be a Star Wars-style info crawl at the start explaining who/what/when/where? Nope! More like, halfway through the movie, you see some soldiers and an onscreen caption reading "Cartridges were sent...." and then, mutiny montage. So I unknowingly guessed THE EXACT RIGHT chunk of history to preload into my friends' heads so they weren't COMPLETELY at sea.

But of course I could see/hear some other messages that they couldn't. Like how Manikarnika was being positioned as a kind of figurative avatar of Kali or Durga. Or the chanting of "Har Har Mahadev" (anodyne English subtitle: "Victory is ours"; actually an invocation to Lord Shiva so specifically Hindu that Hindus yell it during anti-Muslim pogroms and chanted it during Partition violence, and it's super noteworthy when Muslims say it as part of a "communal harmony" initiative). The anti-casteism message (the scene where the villager serves Laximbai milk) is tiny, and the "hey Muslims were a huge part of the mutiny!" message feels practically nonexistent. And yeah that closing where there's an Aum symbol written in fire on the ground (also sort of end-of-Ramayana Sita imagery, as I read it). And the pointed scene where the Queen of Jhansi rescues a calf from being slaughtered (read: only awful barbarians might want to kill and eat cattle!). And all the treason and betrayal by other Indians, and all the "motherland" and "we try peace but we'll fight to defend ourselves" and "honor" and "so awesome to have a chance to be a martyr!" talk. This is a disturbing movie. It has fun bits in it, it has moving bits in it, but I came away distressed.

See, I haven't seen Lagaan* in a while, but in Lagaan, all the Indians work together. All castes, Muslims and Hindus together, women and men together, a guy with a disability turns out to be an amazing pitcher, and so on. Aamir Khan's character shows some leadership and you get a lot of training montages and it's about beating violent coercion with excellence and discipline and cleverness. Manikarnika is not like that. Manikarnika is about the joy of killing British soldiers, about the indivisible pride of the motherland and the people on/from it, and about a vision of Hindu nationalism that has no room for Ambedkar or Gandhi. And this is a huge blockbuster hit in a country that means a lot to me.

I need to read Harleen Singh's The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014) or a similar work before I say: this movie is historically inaccurate. And it weirds me out that it's hard for me to find reviews where people talk in depth about what's going on in this movie, politically. Is it all happening in Hindi, which I don't know and can't read? Am I completely misreading it? Is it not even worth explicating because it's so obvious to every Indian sourcelander watching it? (Indian news sources do point out that this seems almost part of a BJP pre-election campaign push.)

I'm worried, you know? Maybe one reason I'm not seeing people talk about this online is because they're afraid of retribution.

* I could swear that one of the British officers in Manikarnika is played by the same guy who played the main villain in Lagaan. IMDb seems to disagree. Maybe it's just similar facial hair.