Musings of an anarchist misfit
Published at 09:03 on 17 July 2026
While nobody can predict the future with absolute certainty, I will just say that both this and this both dovetail perfectly with my earlier prediction that a) the Trump fascists will try to steal the coming election, and b) have far more success at doing so than many presently realize.
Published at 09:44 on 14 July 2026
Graham Platner Was the Perfect Twitter Candidate (via Slate)
Published at 08:29 on 10 July 2026
They suck because a) they are free, and b) there is no easy way to cancel. So what happens is that people who think they might want to go make reservations well in advance, just in case, and then often become no-shows as their plans change. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no real downside… for them, that is.
The downside comes for the rest of us who like to embrace the moment. Yesterday, there were no all-day parking reservations available, despite the parking lot looking like this:
And that exercise in bureaucratic stupidity settles it: from now on, I forget about Buntzen Lake and continue past practice of just going to nearby Sasamat Lake (which has more sensible policies, and has a shuttle bus from the nearest SkyTrain station) instead.
A more reasonable situation would be paid but fully refundable reservations. Charge, say, $10 to make a reservation, then refund the $10 if you either explicitly cancel or if you show up. No-shows lose $10. The park remains free, overcrowding remains controlled, and those who make reservations have an incentive to cancel them and open up their slots to people who show up same-day.
Published at 08:01 on 10 July 2026
Originally, Zionism (and related words like Zionist) pertained simply to support for some sort of Jewish state somewhere (not necessarily even in the Middle East). Support a Jewish state in Argentina or Alaska? You’re a Zionist. Support a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one? You’re a Zionist. Support Israel being compelled to give back the lands it occupied post-1967, but there still being an Israel? Still a Zionist.
Things seem to be changing. From a recent poll of Jews in Milwaukee:
The survey, released last week by the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, found that 43% of Jewish adults said they identified as Zionist, while 42% said they did not. A much higher share — 69% — said they feel somewhat or very “emotionally attached to Israel.” At the same time, 52% of respondents agreed that “Israel regularly violates the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
This is, I think, something to keep in mind when one hears explicitly anti-“Zionist” rhetoric in the Palestine solidarity movement and on the Left generally.
Published at 10:56 on 7 July 2026
Just take a trip down memory lane to last October. Even my most recent, more positive assessment of the guy (who wasn’t my first choice but I don’t choose the candidate, Maine voters do) mentioned the possibility of there being “more skeletons in his closet.” It was not precisely a difficult call.
There’s been pretty credible accusations of sexual assault against him before that for some reason were overlooked by voters. The latest news, which pretty much unequivocally describes a rape, is apparently too much. There’s been a huge wave of former supporters denouncing him and asking him to drop out.
If he drops out, of course he can’t win. If he stays in (and he’s self-centred enough that he just might), he also can’t win. Collins will survive another term.
Suppose he drops out. Then what? The law says the party gets to choose his replacement. Which probably means they pick Mills. She’s who they wanted in the first place, and she got around 20% in the primary (finishing second after Platner) despite having suspended her campaign.
Suppose they don’t pick Mills. They will pick someone equally uninspiring. This is the Democratic Party establishment we are talking about, after all.
Finally, even if, by some miracle, the party elite manages to pick an actually good candidate, it probably won’t matter. This whole fiasco has irreparably damaged their brand in this race.
It’s the progressives’ fault. It was the Left that fell in love with Platner, piled the endorsements on him, and kept the endorsements even when the skeletons in his closet started coming to light. There were other candidates in the primary besides Platner and Mills. At least one of them was a progressive. Could have (and should have) backed someone else.
This whole situation is the converse of the recent NYC mayoral race. Then, it was the Establishment who damaged their own cause by backing flawed candidates like Cuomo and Adams. Just like there were better progressive candidates in the Maine primary, there were better establishment ones in the NYC primary.
It was wrong for the Establishment to blame the Left then, and it is wrong for the Left to blame the Establishment now.
Yes, it’s not fair that the Establishment gets to bat last on this one by nominating Platner’s replacement, should he drop out. Well, boo hoo hoo. Life isn’t fair. Part of being an insurgent movement challenging the status quo is by definition the fact that you don’t get the status quo advantages. Your job is to win despite that. If you can’t, you are not up to your historic mission.
The solution is to choose better candidates, ones that don’t self-immolate like this one just did. Pick a Mamdani next time, not a Platner.
Published at 09:32 on 6 July 2026
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote: “Unless … I encounter a use case that justifies my investment in an ebook reader with a sure-thing, short payback period, ebooks just don’t seem to make much sense to me.”
Well, use case found: technical floras. I have found ones for both British Columbia (where I live) and New Mexico (where I visit periodically) downloadable for free online. These are real static files, with all the rights of ownership. Of course, being available for free, I can’t expect to sell them for money, but who cares. The main thing is that someone can’t set a record in a database somewhere and make my books vanish from my reader.
The print version of even a single such flora costs over twice what basic ebook reader costs, so such a device pays for itself basically immediately. Sure, there’s a good chance the reader will be dead in about a decade, making me replace it, but even then, the cost disparity makes buying two readers justifiable. By then, we’re getting to around twenty years, by which time a) it’s likely I won’t be going on long hikes anymore due to my advanced age, and b) the floras I have will be obsolete anyhow, due to nomenclature changes.
A further bonus is weight and bulk: an ebook reader is lighter than even a condensed, single-volume version of a technical flora, and the two above are only available in their full-size, multivolume versions. That’s really important for something I want to take along on hikes.
Published at 09:46 on 5 July 2026
Some time ago I ran across this sign in Queen Elizabeth Park:
Time for a trip down memory lane: it didn’t used to be that way. Oh, there’s been pay parking in that park for decades now. It just used to be via machines that took cash. This once caused me trouble when I was up for a visit from Seattle, since I didn’t have any loonies on me at the time.
There is a way to use technology to improve such bad user experiences. Install machines like this:
Those take, in addition to cash, credit cards. They dispense time-stamped receipts that you then adhere to an inside window as proof of payment. As a bonus measure, add the appropriate near-field communication support and such a kiosk can easily support things like Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
But that’s become old-fashioned, I guess. Just expect people to have their phone with them at all times. Even if they may be international visitors who haven’t yet purchased a Canadian SIM card, or sprung for international roaming. Even if they are trying to detox from the Internet and have chosen to leave the phone at home. To paraphrase Jello Biafra: “Shut up and be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory.”
The turd on top if it all is that you can’t just use your phone to pay for parking. You have to download a special app and use that. There is simply no reason for this requirement. None. Web servers have allowed people to pay for things for decades now. The only thing that requires is a web browser, a standard multipurpose application that ships with every phone.
Every app one installs might have security issues. Some apps one installs will have security issues. Sooner or later, it is bound to happen. The way to minimize the risk is to minimize the number of apps one has installed.
Related to that is how no single payment app can do it all. (Contrast with a web-based solutions, where one browser can visit any payment web site.) So what happens when a visitor, even one with local cell service, happens across a parking lot that doesn’t support the app used in the visitor’s hometown? They have to download the new app, of course. Which can be a slow, painful process on a mobile Internet link. The problem is made worse by such apps generally using frameworks like Electron which produce badly bloated software. Upshot is that the simple act of paying for parking, which used to take under a minute, can easily take five minutes or more.
Part of the problem, of course, is the widespread prevailance of garbage frameworks like React, which use bloated, inefficient Javascript under the hood. This makes the websites in question a dicey proposition when run from a possibly bandwidth-limited mobile Internet connection. But, that’s still mostly a cultural problem (groupthink has made garbage frameworks popular, when rational behaviour would have shunned them into irrelevance). There’s no technical reason the Web has to be such an obnoxious user experience for mobile device users.
And yeah, I realize that this might make me look like an old guy shaking his fist at a cloud. So be it. Nothing I have said above is untrue. The Internet does not have to suck as much as it does. Better technology exists now, waiting to be used.
Published at 18:42 on 1 July 2026
But will the Dem establishment and the Dem centrists learn the lesson? I doubt it. They show all signs of being too stuck in their ways to be able to change. Hence my expectation that they end up in the dustbin of history.
Link to Bluesky post here.
Published at 07:37 on 30 June 2026
I am not saying Platner is going to win but I will say that if he does win, it will be a real wakeup call for the Democratic Party establishment. And he’s currently ahead by a narrow margin in the polls.
This is because Platner is up against a headwind. He has high negatives (if I lived in Maine, I would have ranked him last or not at all in the primary). Plus, he’s running against an incumbent in a seat that has been Republican for many decades. If, despite all that, he wins, it means a lot.
Plus, it creates a result asymmetry: if Platner loses by anything other than a landslide, it will not be as damning for the prospect of Left politics in swing states as a narrow win would be an endorsement of the same.
Facebook’s algorithm recently fed me some of his ads and his messaging seems to be very tight and in tune with what can fly in a swing state.
The main questions now are if he has any more skeletons in his closet, if the Collins campaign is going to drop an October surprise, and how bad any such dirt is. We shall see. But make no mistake: if he wins, it really says something.
Published at 06:54 on 29 June 2026
I’m going to be giving posting something of a break for a while (because, yet again, I need to back away from the Internet), but the recent whining from the centrist wing of the Democratic Party is so bad that even the humour columnist of USA Today recently came out with a satire of it. In other words, it is another aspect of the left narrative that seems to be getting traction in the mainstream.
Now, anecdotes are not data, but this is consistent with both my thesis that centrists are throwing hypocritical tantrums and my thesis that they will end up in history’s dustbin if they don’t snap out of it and start acting more rationally.
And, frankly, I don’t think they can do the latter.