Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, October 31, 2016

Teaching In The Homestretch...

William Burroughs, Elizabeth Grosz, Aldo Leopold in my graduate fetishism seminar in the City today, Terence and Roman satire at Berkeley tomorrow... Election frazzled, and waiting to be post-election dazzled... Let's just get this goddamn thing over with! Do we get a Senate with a working majority and a shell-shocked House ready to punish its nihilist caucus when they can't even keep the lights on? Teaching Cicero's invectives through late Roman Republican elections in the midst of Trumpmania was an utterly terrible demoralizing idea, I must say.

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Lousy T-Shirts of the Future

All t, all shade...

I Know You Aren't, But What Is Anything?

After the serial failure of better-than-real virtual reality just around the corner prophesies it would seem futurists have simply declared actual reality a simulation anyway.

Friday, October 28, 2016

I propose the following Grand Bargain:

For the next four years Democrats govern the country and leave Republicans to read Clinton e-mails.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Long Teaching Day

Made it through another long teaching day with relatively little sleep to get me through. In my morning seminar in the City we screened and discussed John Carpenter's They Live, which is always quite a lot of fun and today's discussion was particularly spirited, and then this afternoon at Berkeley we finished up several lectures in a row about Cicero by working through De Oratore. It was a great day of teaching actually, but all the more exhausting in the aftermath for having kept me in a highly charged place most of the livelong day before I crawled onto my final bus home for the night. Rain has been coming down all day, and it has been grey and clammy and dark on top of everything else. Ready for a little recuperative weekend!

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Two Weeks Out, Clinton Makes Her Closing Argument

IP ID

Progressive partisan election and reform politics are about getting best available candidates in office to serve as imperfect tools to solve shared problems and accomplish good governance in the service of sustainable equity as best as may be in the context of real stakeholder diversity. Partisan election and reform politics are not the whole of politics nor do they ever perfectly incarnate ideal politics -- given the indispensability of compromise and reform in the diverse shared world governed by politics this should go without saying -- and there is plenty of education, agitation, and organization beyond the legislation arising from partisan election and reform politics, shaping the legible terrain of the possible and the important on which partisan election and reform politics plays out. Given the unique historical moment when an historically unique world power is governed by a duopoly one party of which has gone palpably insane, partisan election and reform politics have taken on a special urgency frustrating to those of us whose radicalism can never find perfect expression in any nationally-viable organized instrument so diverse and compromised as the Democratic (or any other) Party happens to be. Anyway, though I don't think I am saying anything particularly original or insightful in saying these things, still there is a lot of forgetfulness and denial and resentment and useless rebelliousness occasioned by frustrations over these basic truths that leads to hurt feelings among sympathetic allies, charges of collaboration for good-faith compromises, self-indulgent exercises in purity cabaret, and so on -- none of which finally helps anybody clarify matters or get anywhere they really want to go. At the most affable and friendly and respectful end of such conversations, frustrating but necessary conversations I find, is this recent exchange in the Moot with long-time friend-of-blog "Lorraine" seemed worthy of upgrading into a post of its own...

"Lorraine" commented on my throwing shade at kindles yesterday:

Might I ask what is relatively inappropriate about Kindle technology? For me it's Digital Restrictions Mechanisms (DRM). You Clinton supporters tend to be pro-IP so I assume for you it's something else? I too have a large collection of bound volumes, but I've been exposing myself to classic (as in old enough to be out of copyright) works via the open source FB Reader app for Android.

I replied:

I wrote on Thursday, July 21, 2011:
When you finally toss your crappy Kindle in the trash because it cracked, or because of the expense, or because of the censorship, or because you grasp renting isn't owning a book, or because of all the ads you can't skip (and believe me, it's coming), don't pretend there wasn't somebody warning you and there isn't somebody laughing at you.
I have lots of reasons for preferring bound volumes to e-books, but you'll forgive me if I don't know whether they are reasons shared by the "You Clinton supporters" tribe or gang or species to which I now apparently belong to my misfortune. I missed the meeting in which kindles were discussed and so cannot say if I share the "tendencies" you so kindly ascribe to me on the subject because I preferred Clinton to the ill-prepared and rather vapid (in my view) Bernie Sanders in the primary and now prefer her to the authoritarian bigot idiot (in my view) Donald Trump in the general. I assign open source texts in my classes and have read many as well to my delight and edification -- do try not to think too terribly harshly of me as I serve my monstrous queen.
Delete
"Lorraine" responded:

I also found Sen. Sanders a bit vapid, at least on foreign policy. Much of the labor movement seems to have gone on a pro-IP bender (especially the Hollywood unions of course) if paid placements in Fecebook are any barometer. Probably unfair of me to ascribe such a tendency to Clintonistas in general. Clinton is, after all, nominally anti-TPP at this point history.

I continued:

I distrust Clinton's trade politics and my own anti-IP stance (my dissertation touched on these issues back in 05) is not where the Democratic Party seems to be landing. Clinton's always been more left than she gets credit for -- back in her husband's administration I considered her very much to his left -- and she's moved more left still lately in a sensible recognition of the way the wind is blowing through the Obama epoch, but I'm still to her left on trade (as so many) issues. The coziness of the Democratic Party to tech VC talkers worries me enormously as you may recall, indeed I regard this as one of the greatest threats to an emerging working real-left Democratic Party coalition in a diversifying, secularizing, planetizing America -- as the GOP immolates itself the many moneyed rats are likely to turn to the Dems and their present embrace of "tech-friendly" innovation/disruption/acceleration pieties provides a terribly friendly opening for reactionary mischief. This is a culture/discourse/rhetoric war, and one I am fighting in my teaching as well as my writing as you know. As for IP, I personally think fair use should be greatly expanded, copyright terms greatly truncated, and public subsidization of research and writing and culture should be the norm rather than the current chaotic and fraud-prone profiteering -- of course I disapprove libertechbrotarian strategies that sound as they approve something like these very ideals in order to rationalize shar(ecropp)ing feudalization of creative expressivity in the present and so I realize the politics are tricky here. I think the politics should focus on expanding public grants and long-term unemployment benefits and raising education salaries first to ensure that re-opening cultural commons does not amount to predation.

An enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation, of a kind that became harder and rarer during and since the primary contest I find, I do hope there are more to come...

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Luddite!

I don't have a kindle, but I have many thousands of books.

This is not an "anti-technology" stance, but my appropriate technology decision.

Good Government Against Bad Establishments

A problem with blanket anti-establishmentarianism is that effective anti-corruption anti-concentration politics really can't be disorganized and unprofessional.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

No Whammies! Stop Gloating!

Some are too quick to squash the real joy arising from partisan politics with all its compromises, impurities, miscommunications, struggles. Sure, we don't want complacency given the stakes, but why the knee-jerk denigration as "gloating" of Democrats feeling our rising winning strength? Feeling a righteous wind at your back isn't "gloating" -- and it can fuel winning coalitions and compensate inevitable setbacks. If Texas and Georgia Democrats were doing more of what gets criticized as "gloating" it might mean that they were organized and energized enough already to be winning winnable races for the diversifying, secularizing, planetizing emancipatory coalition of the REAL Real America with which President Obama won the White House twice and which grows by the day.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

We Already Have Term Limits: They Are Called Elections

A commonplace slogan, but I think it is a true and important one. I have noticed several people online declaring that fear of the rise of figures like Donald Trump explains or even justifies calls for the institution of term limits in our politics. I must point out that Donald Trump himself calls for term limits. This is because reactionary fraud, looting and no end of amateur-hour nonsense is enabled by the de-professionalization of public service and political representation. Trumpian politics are not threatened but thrive when politics is disorganized and does not provide for pathways in which public servants gain practical experience, build trusted coalitions, overcome their limitations, and are rewarded for their dedication. I was quite happy to vote for Hillary Clinton, but I must say voting for a third term of President Barack Obama would have thrilled me more. Term limits, like the endless tax-cut mantras of our politics, reflect the deep-seated anti-governmental resentment of the spoiled, insulated, irresponsible American infant-citizen in an incomparably rich, comparatively isolated and secure continent forever greedy to get something for nothing, to declare our luck the result of our effort and to retro-actively rationalize whatever abuse got us what we have or where we are. Professionalism -- prone, no question, to its own parochialisms, exclusions and abuses -- is nevertheless one of the few countervailing forces in our personal and public lives that resist the race to the bottom and the utter abandonment of this shared world to the deceptive, hyperbolic, appetitive, robotic norms and forms of advertising lies and promotional flim-flam.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

The Usual

A long teaching day ahead, a sleepless night behind. Insomnia is the bane of my existence now. This morning in the City I'll be teaching Debord and Naomi Klein, then this afternoon across the Bay in Berkeley I'll be teaching Cicero. The Roman readings are the ones that truly excite me these days, but exhaustion starts to get in the way and scatter my thoughts a bit by three when my second lecture begins. As Trump would say: Sad! A change of topic, but I really do hope recreational cannabis legalization will make it easier for me to access indica-emphasis edibles to deal with this nightmare insomnia issue (sativas are more raucous fun for me personally, but relief from aches and pains and anxiety and insomnia is what I am pining for) -- I could probably go for a medical use license already but it seems such a bother, and I assume many other people will use recreational legalization to make recourse to what might be deemed legitimate therapeutic uses as well. Just one more reason to approve the proposition if you are wavering (I rather doubt regular readers here would). I am thinking post-legalization reasonably priced reliably dosed edibles will be as deliverable here in the Bay Area as pizzas in no time flat. Hope I am right about that. Nine out of ten of my delivery drivers seem high as kites already, I must say. Anyway, time to gather my notes and my wits and begin the long slog. Wish me luck!

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Cry

When Obama won the Presidency I cried in pure joy. When Hillary wins I will cry again, in pure relief that this nightmare campaign is over.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

"The Future" Is Rhetoric

Monday, October 17, 2016

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Women, POC, and Queerfolk Vote For Our Lives


Gross Robocultist Peter Thiel Donates 1.25 Million to Bigot Clown Trump After He Brags About Sexual Assault And Sows Violent Discontent Among Supporters

I'm been warning people about vile Peter Thiel for years, of course, but the latest news was good for a few shits and giggles on twitter.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

The left won the culture wars:

And this makes the right feel threatened in ways they aren't and the left feel complacent when we shouldn't.

Friday, October 14, 2016

2016


Tolkien Gay Translator

Elf-Friend = Friend of Dorothy.

Tech Talk Trump Talk

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Long Teaching Day

Long teaching day ahead... Barthes this morning, Aristotle this afternoon. My cold is in retreat, we voted by mail yesterday afternoon, things are looking up.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Four More Years

Another extraordinarily polished video from the HRC campaign, distilling one of President Obama's recent barnburners into just over two minutes, driving it with an urgent pulse of chimes and subtly aspirational strings, filling the frame with an accelerating montage of iconic images of the Obama presidency as his approval numbers soar miles higher than her own, framing an implicit rebuke against Trumpism (eg, "accomplishments despite obstruction, discrimination, hatred, fear") as a positive message to counter Trump's own vote-depressing doom and gloom ad strategy, trying to ensure enthusiasm and turnout in the diverse Obama coalition that prefers her over Trump but is not so passionate in its preference this time around. As a rhetorician I think it a masterly ad, as a Democrat I truly hope it gets a lot of play:

Monday, October 10, 2016

Let's Ask These Undecideds...

People still "undecided" at this point in the election are either incapable of deciding or lying about it. Stop paying attention to them.

Change Election

People who want "change" without any risk or cost to themselves, without any interrogation of their assumptions don't want change.

Sunday, October 09, 2016

Fifteen Minutes of One Of My Lectures

Recuperating and feeling a bit better today, still coughing and sore and trying to take it easy before embarking on the rigors of mass transit and public performance looming ahead. The following transcibes the first fifteen minutes or so from my lecture Thursday at Berkeley in my Patriarchal Convention and Conviction in Greek and Roman Antiquity course. Sometimes readers express curiosity about my teacherly practice compared to my bloggity practice. I don't read from notes, but expound from bullet points I usually scribble in the hour before lecture just detailed enough to remind me of my key points and the order I think I should make them. These remarks were spun from nine bullets:

Since we met last I have caught some kind of bug, so you will forgive me if I am not my usual effervescent self. In my lecture in the City earlier today my voice gave out a couple of times, so fingers crossed that doesn't happen today. We have a lot to cover today, in fact I would say today is one of three key turning points in our course. You'll remember from the first lecture that this course is making a semester-long argument or telling a semester-long story, and today we turn a page in that story. 

In any of our Department's four Core classes, whatever else the course is doing, the course will always be interrogating a set of basic questions: What is rhetoric? What is rhetoric good for? In our course, a related question is why exactly are texts from Greek and Roman antiquity especially illuminative of those questions?

We are reading many texts in this course that are best described as philosophy, or history, or literary texts -- and I think it may seem very reassuring to fall back on familiar categories like these, especially when the texts we are reading seem at once so alien and yet so resonant and so freighted with canonical authority. But I have to insist that rhetoric is not philosophy, history, or literature, and reading these texts rhetorically is something rather different as well. In part, in our course we are telling the story of the emergence of this difference and in part, in our course we are modeling and provoking forms of reading that materialize this difference.

This is a course that takes place in a Rhetoric Department. The substance of rhetoric -- what I have called interested, occasional, figurative practices of persuasion -- heck, ever the TERM rhetoric derive in a crucial sense from the Platonic project of philosophy. Forming the backdrop against which Platonic philosophy elaborated its anti-rhetorical project we engaged first with a Homeric agentic imaginary of public words and deeds -- and we went on to observe the way that Homeric agentic field was further elaborated and even subverted by figures like Sappho and Thucydides. That Homeric agency, I have repeatedly reminded you, is indicatively patriarchal, at once assertive and insertive.
  
Now, for the last few weeks, we have focused on a trilogy of key anti-sophistical dialogues by Plato, each staging a contest between between Socrates and a famous sophist -- Protagoras, Gorgias, Lysias -- and used by Plato to define his own philosophical outlook as well as market his method in competition with rival schools and intellectual movements to his own Academy.

The Socratic or Platonic aspiration to form a community of True Friends, fellow inquirers into Virtue and Truth, affirming a True Politics that doesn't seem very much like actual practices of politics and a True Rhetoric (Philosophy) that doesn't seem very much like actual practices of rhetoric may seem like an inspiring and abstract vision but I have insisted that it served competitive interests in the thriving and contentious world of Athenian intellectual life, and I have also emphasized that it was fueled by specific and ferociously critical position on and within the contemporary Athenian political scene between the Persian Wars and the Alexandrian conquests, the period of the Peloponnesian civil wars and the norms and forms of Periclean Athens.

I have drawn your attention to the recurrence of the figure of Pericles in Plato's philosophical critiques, the foreigners and rhetoricians Pericles welcomed into the city (many of whom are Socrates chief interlocutors), his children, his partner Aspasia (Plato lampooned her, you will remember, quite egregiously in the early dialogue Menexenus which included a clumsy parody of Pericles' famous funeral oration, a portrait that intriguingly seems to have been a dress rehearsal for Socrates tale of Diotima in the Symposium we read for today), and so on: 

Glimpsed in the fragments of surviving sophistical texts and in the speeches of Socrates' opponents in Plato's texts we elaborated a sophistical worldview of openness to outsiders, of celebration of provisional compromise and collaboration, of resignation to the inevitable contingency of human affairs, of recognition of the partial and fragmentary character of truths communicated by the imperfect but still beautiful instruments of public words and deeds.

We are about to turn our attention next week to the ambivalent embrace by Plato's most famous student, Aristotle, of the politics and rhetoric of Periclean public life which sets the stage, in turn, for Cicero's adaptation and glorification of that vision in his failed alternative to Caesar's revolution in the dying days of the Roman Republic. But first, let's talk a bit about one last Platonic dialogue, my personal favorite, The Symposium, and put it in coversation with an extraordinary comedy by Aristophanes called Wasps….  

Saturday, October 08, 2016

Nurse!

Spent yesterday in bed recovering from Thursday's long exhausting teaching day, still quite ill and zonked, and I must say the Trump fiasco felt a bit like the unspooling of a fever dream...

Thursday, October 06, 2016

Back to the Grind

A long teaching day ahead, lectures on both sides of the Bay, Freud in the morning, Plato and Aristophanes in the afternoon, lots of material to cover as I play catch-up a bit on my Berkeleyy syllabus... but what makes all this daunting is that my dreaded insomnia is back again and I'm battling a bug. Sleepless, stress head-ache throbbing, congested and runny, forever afraid I'll have a repeat of the horrific bleeding episode earlier this year at the worst possible time, say, stuffed in a morning rush-hour train stalled beneath the Bay... at least RuPaul and Runway await us at the end of this terrible ordeal...

Wednesday, October 05, 2016

Unskew The Yardsigns

It's happening! It's happening!

Veep Debate (UPDATED)

Mike Pence probably won the hour, but Tim Kaine won the week. Pence is a gross homophobic racist theocratic asshole, but he seemed calm while Kaine seemed unduly aggressive, and this contrast didn't play well for Kaine especially in the first half of the debate. But each candidate had a job to do and Kaine did his job in ways that will pay dividends (and already are on social media). Both candidates were speaking to and shoring up their respective bases, and since few undecideds would be watching a vice-presidential debate this makes sense. Both succeeded in that task. Pence was shoring up Christian evangelicals (and making his play for that constituency in 2020 against Ted Cruz) while Kaine played selections from the Democratic coalition hymnal -- somewhat superficially given the rapid pace of the debate format, but I was quite happy to hear his "Trust Women" formulation on choice, which is kinda sorta all I want to hear in a discussion of abortion rights in which straight white men are doing all the talking. Another job the candidates had was to defend their respective Presidential partners and while Kaine did this in spades -- his happy warrior discussion of the Clinton Foundation was textbook veep debate workmanship -- Pence repeatedly failed to defend Trump's outrageous comments and positions, and indeed seemed to deny their abundantly evident recorded reality while implying nobody in their right mind would say these things Trump has been saying. While this might be good for Pence's future ambitions as a national figure (that's why he took the risk of this stinkbomb of a vice-presidential gig from hell in the first place as his Indiana governorship was going down the tubes after all), it amounted to a serial failure to do what he came to the debate to do as a candidate on a ticket and provided material for ads and memes and taunts and late-night comedy that will get deeper and deeper under Donald Trump's skin all week long, right up until Sunday night when he returns for round two with Hillary Clinton who wiped the floor with him last time around. I do think it is pretty clear that Kaine's debate prep included quite a bit of trap setting for Pence along precisely these lines and that the campaign probably calculated that a bit of aggressive needling was just the ticket to get Pence to provide social media content for the next few news cycles. I daresay they remembered that Biden's aggressiveness in the 2012 vice-presidential debate went down quite well and they probably imagined Kaine would play much the same in the hall and on screen… which it did not. In the sound bites, though, these aggressions will have a nice rhythm and concision and Pence's denials and evasions will play to clip after clip of instant refutation. This debate was about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and it seems to me that only one campaign really knew what it was doing there. You know, the usual.

UPDATE: As predicted, this stuff is everywhere today.

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Veep Bleep

Hoping I'm back home from lecture in time for the Vice Presidential debate, which is expected to draw an historically small audience after the last Presidential debate which drew an historically large audience -- proving the deep seriousness of a voting population that licks its chops at the prospect of a brainless bigotry circus and rolls its eyes at the prospect of wonks disagreeing about policy. By the way, the narrative of a clash of boring wonks is bad enough, but better by far than the grotesque equally popular framing of the debate to come as a clash of boring sit-com dads in a straight white middle-class suburban weekend backyard in a fantasy 1950s sparring over a grill in floppy chef hats with a laugh track provided via live-tweets.

Of course, Mike Pence passes for a boring wonk (let alone sit-com dad), only because too many of my fellow citizens don't seem to know anything about the terrifying misogynist racist homophobic theocratic authoritarianism of his actual views. I have been shocked at the blase assignment for years and years of the term "wonk" to Paul Ryan, who spews utter arrant nonsense about economics on a regular basis and gets treated as some lovably pedantic details-guy by the pundits -- and don't get me started at those who imply the doll-eyed dolt is a "young gun" sex symbol in even the remotest construal -- but the thought that a rabid extremist like Pence who has actually made something of a public fool of himself as governor of Indiana can be transubstantiated into an easy-going reassuring mainstream professional politician simply by standing next to the reality tee vee hate talk con-man circus freak Donald Trump in the media is actually nearly as terrifying to me as the fact that one of our two major parties no longer has the intellectual and organizational resources to ward off a takeover by Trump in the first place.

Teaching More Plato

Finishing up Plato's Phaedrus and starting up his Symposium today... still a bit behind my syllabus, still feeling teaching this term is a bit of a relentless grind, even though the texts I assigned are texts I adore talking about when it comes to it.

Monday, October 03, 2016

Trek Against Trump



Star Trek has always offered a positive vision of the future, a vision of hope and optimism, and most importantly, a vision of inclusion, where people of all races are accorded equal respect and dignity, where individual beliefs and lifestyles are respected so long as they pose no threat to others. We cannot turn our backs on what is happening in the upcoming election. Never has there been a presidential candidate who stands in such complete opposition to the ideals of the Star Trek universe as Donald Trump. His election would take this country backward, perhaps disastrously. We need to elect a president who will move this country forward into the kind of future we all dream of: where personal differences are understood and accepted, where science overrules superstition, where people work together instead of against each other.
The resolution of conflicts on Star Trek was never easy. Don’t remain aloof –vote! We have heard people say they will vote Green or Libertarian or not at all because the two major candidates are equally flawed. That is both illogical and inaccurate. Either Secretary Clinton or Mr. Trump will occupy the White House. One is an amateur with a contemptuous ignorance of national laws and international realities, while the other has devoted her life to public service, and has deep and valuable experience with the proven ability to work with Congress to pass desperately needed legislation. If, as some say, the government is broken, a protest vote will not fix it.
Have you just turned 18? Have you moved? Have you never voted before? Some states have early registration (early October) and/or absentee ballots. You can’t vote if you are not registered. So make it so. Go to https://www.rockthevote.com , a non-profit, non-partisan organization, and fulfill your civic duty. Because, damn it, you are a citizen of the USA, with an obligation to take part in our democracy! Do this not merely for yourself but for all the generations that follow. Vote for a future of enlightenment and inclusion, a future that will someday lead us to the stars.
Endorsed by:
J.J. Abrams
Allan Apone
Richard Arnold
René Auberjonois
Scott Bakula
Ira Steven Behr
Rick Berman
John Billingsley
Christopher Black
Paula Block
Paul Boehmer
André Bormanis
Brannon Braga
Mark Robert Brown
LeVar Burton
Terri Potts-Chattaway
John Cho
Tracee Cocco
George Colucci
Mimi Cozzens
Denise Crosby
Dan Curry
Joseph D'Agosta
Peter David
Nicole de Boer
Keith R.A. DeCandido
John de Lancie
Jonathan Del Arco
John DeMita
Chris Doohan
Paul Eiding
Aron Eisenberg
Terry Erdmann
Terry Farrell
Lolita Fatjo
David C. Fein
Juan Carlos Fernandez
Louise Fletcher
Jonathan Frakes
Bryan Fuller
Dave Galanter
Tim Gaskill
David Gerrold
Robert Greenberger
Bruce Greenwood
Max Grodénchik
Martha Hackett
Glenn Hauman
Manu Intiraymi
Michael Jan Friedman
Dominic Keating
John Knoll
Walter Koenig
Alex Kurtzman
Judith Levitt
Jeff Lewis
Justin Lin
David Mack
Dennis Madalone
Chase Masterson
Dakin Matthews
Gates McFadden
Robert Duncan McNeill
Nicholas Meyer
Anthony Montgomery
Ronald B. Moore
Tom Morga
Kate Mulgrew
Larry Nemecek
Adam Nimoy
Susan Nimoy
Robert O'Reilly
Linda Park
Leslie Parrish
Robb Pearlman
Simon Pegg
Randy Pflug
Ethan Phillips
Robert Picardo
Sandra Piller
Chris Pine
Emmett Plant
Zachary Quinto
Michael Reisz
Andrew Robinson
Eugene & Heidi Roddenberry
Marvin Rush
Tim Russ
Zoe Saldana
Ralph Senensky
Naren Shankar
Armin Shimerman
Gregory Smith
Brent Spiner
Rick Sternbach
Peter Sternlicht
Eric Stillwell
Jay Stobie
Sandy Stone
Carel Struycken
Marina Sirtis
Michael Sussman
Kitty Swink
George Takei
Michael Taylor
Hallie Todd Withrow
Connor Trinneer
Karl Urban
Wil Wheaton
Herman Zimmerman

UPDATE: Joseph Gatt, Melissa Harrison, Jeri Ryan, Susan Shwartz, Tucker Smallwood, and Scott Trimble have endorsed the statement!
Further Endorsements (Received after initial release of statement):
Rhonda Aldrich
Jim Beaver
Christopher L. Bennett
Kirsten Beyer
Molly Brink
Art Codron
Michael Dorn
Doug Drexler
Dorothy Duder
Harlan Ellison
Joseph Gatt
Rich Handley
Melissa Harrison
Hana Hatae
Robert Hewitt-Wolfe
Michael Klastorin
Denise Okuda
Michael Okuda
Robert Pine
Jeri Ryan
Nick Sagan
Robert Sallin
Susan Shwartz
Tucker Smallwood
Kurtwood Smith
Melinda M. Snodgrass
Arne Starr
Scott Trimble
Garrett Wang
Celeste Yarnall

Sunday, October 02, 2016

Fun With Mail-In Voting

Eric and I received our Alameda County, California sample ballots and guides this weekend -- we're gonna Leslie Knoping the shit out of them asap.

Saturday, October 01, 2016

Jennifer Granholm's Feisty Trump Slam

Millennials: #ImWithThem AND #ImWithHer

Entirely predictably (for the twitter-medium, not the generation, I mean), the first tweet gets the RTs and its two companions get few to none.