Bright End of Nowhere

I am pretty close to drunk at this point, but whatever, it's kind of a "holy fuck, the boys and girls in blue got the asshole alive" and "fuck yeah, we're alive!" night.

So, because I'm drunk right now, I'm going to run my mouth on Unpopular Liberal Opinions right now.

Hi, yes, I spend most of my day indoors, unable to go to work based on the MBTA shutdown, the MIT advisory against staff coming in, and the stay-in-place advisory for Cambridge. After getting dinner/drinks with some people displeased with that, I respectfully tell them to stuff it. Yeah, okay, the militarization of police is a concern. The fact that there were MPs at T stations this week: also concerning! But guys, maybe it's just me, but as an MIT alum, I wanted the goddamn asshole taken alive. I was quite happy to comply with police and the state government asking me to stay indoors, even though North Cambridge is at least 3 miles from where things were happening in Watertown.

They killed one of ours. And sure, call me an asshole or whatever because I only got this worked up after the MIT officer was killed instead of thousands of other human beings every day. I don't care. Officer Sean Collier was one of ours. And he died to keep my campus safe. I don't know if people realize that the MIT Police are actual cops. And they're actual cops who will and do go to bat for students against the Cambridge PD, saying that some things are an internal issue and will be handled by the Disciplinary committee. Or that the CPs are honest-to-god more concerned about student safety above all. I've dealt with them before, and even when we complained about it, some of the best people we could have looking out for us.

And if staying indoors would help police and government agencies catch Sean Collier's killers, than I was more than happy to comply. Even beyond "oh shit, there's people with no compunction against hurting hundreds with guns and explosives running around". Yeah, even where I was, I heard the grenades and explosive ordinance these assholes were throwing around.

These people, as a whole, give so goddamn much to keep us safe. And yeah, they fuck up sometimes, and we call them on it. But we don't say "thank you" enough. They do so much for us, but we only recognize them for their failures. We don't tell them "thank you" enough for the times they succeed.

And I don't give a shit if you say that "only 4" people were killed in this shit that went down this week in Boston by these two, and that maybe I should pay attention to the rest of the world. A comment on Twitter I saw today sums it up: "Homeboy killed an MIT cop, now being hunted by machines built at irobot by MIT-trained engineers."

Officer Sean Collier was one of ours, and he died keeping my multi-national community safe. Martin Richards was 8 years old. Krystle Campbell lived in the next city over, which in Boston terms, is probably about 10 minutes away by car. Lu Lingzi died so far away from home, coming to our shores to make the best of herself.

And tonight, I drank to the dead, and I drank to the living. And when the entire bar busted out singing along to "Sweet Caroline", we were singing and drinking to the city as well.

-I blame friends of mine for getting me utterly addicted to Longform.org. What is Longform?

"Longform.org posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web, that are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.

We recommend enjoying them using read later services like Instapaper and Read It Later and feature buttons to save articles with one click."

You know, like Jack Kerourac on Fiction, or a profile of Buster Keaton, or Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert.

That sound you heard rushing by? My free time. I knew I should have only stuck with Ars Technica.

-Speaking of Longform.org, it and Metafilter pretty much destroyed my lunch hour with the harrowing and rage-inducing article on Vanity Fair: Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next Door. It's well-written, and hearing the stories of women and girls in this hell broke my heart.

-Why You Hate Comic Sans, because at some point I apparently started caring about typography, and this is an accessible explanation on what drives typography geeks nuts about Comic Sans.

-Persona 2: Innocent Sin is coming to North America, 12 years after it came out in Japan. It's a port of the PSP remake, but it's the only Persona game that's not come to NA officially until now. Between that, Catherine (much to my embarrassment), and Devil Survivor 2 (seriously, some of the art coming out for that is great), Atlus has perfected the art of separating me from my money.

I spent a good amount of time the last few days (since about Wednesday night) explaining to friends the context for what's happening in Wisconsin right now. See, my mom's a public school teacher and my dad's an administrator for the same district (MPS), and the net result is that after living 18 years under the same roof, I know far more about the intricacies of operating an urban public school district and the politics involved in contracts than I have any right to. (Because I'm an engineer, not an economist.) Not only that, but when I called my dad yesterday after I found out that MPS closed due to teacher absences, he told me that it was the teachers from my high school who were spearheading the MPS contingent at Madison.

So it's rather unsurprising where my loyalties on this issue lie.

The Metafilter thread I linked is long and winding, and has a lot of information coming out as it happened (and possibly things that were later proven false). I stopped reading it after about 200 comments because I was fielding questions of my own for people, and it wasn't giving me much information I didn't already know.

Salon has some decent context for some things:

Historical context for labor vs. the state
A summary of the actual realities of Wisconsin politics (this is something I've had to explain many, many times. There's a big divide in the political leanings of people in the cities [Madison and Milwaukee, namely] and everyone else.)

I am deeply worried about the situation, because it does directly impact my family. My parents both have a few years before retirement, and right now, their current livelihood and future pensions are on the line. Because right now, it's for state workers, but everyone knows that city workers are next under the axe.

(Probably doesn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway: I will field questions/comments to the best of my ability on this.)

I'm watching the latest from RaceFail 2009, and I'm agreeing with abyssinia4077 on it needing to be renamed HumanityFail 2009. (The ever-amazing rydra_wong has the links. Here's the SparkNotes version.)

Now, I thought it'd died down to a quiet simmer and went to focus on other things (aka "omglabs"). But the events of this past week have drawn be back in, and, quiet honestly, are pissing me off. And I managed to pin down exactly what made me see red: actions that are flagrantly against my moral and ethical code of behavior online.

( I don't think I'm coming from beyond left field over here. )

ETA: Edited to fix broken lj-user tag. My inability to type bodes poorly for the paper I have to write.

I've kept my mouth shut about the American election all cycle. All I want to say is if you're American and of age, go vote. I don't care if you vote for Obama, McCain, or the Goddamn Batman. Because I think you're all intelligent people and have your reasons for voting the way you do.

Because no matter what happens, tomorrow's a brave new world. And we're all going to have to live with each other.

(As for me, well, I'm a female, mixed, liberal, secular, feminist scientist who lives in Massachusetts. :) Interpret that as you will.)

So, I've been seeing the International Blog Against Racism Week show up on my flist. And it got me thinking. A lot. And I've never really talked about this before, I think it needs to. Because I'm seeing the intersection of various -isms in my life, and they're not the good -isms. And I've been meaning to write an essay about growing up a gamer geek in the Midwestern USA, but as I thought about it, that's just a fraction of all of this. So even though I don't have an icon for IBARW, we're doing this anyway.

( So I'm going to tell you a story )