Tag: politics

Weekly Round-up, January 18, 2025

John Winkelman

A sprig of purple kale peeking out of a pile of snow.

[A sprig of decorative purple kale peeking out of a pile of snow just outside of Martha’s Vineyard in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]

Another week in the hopper, and I am exhausted. This week I worked 51 hours and managed to avoid missing the evening classes by logging in between 6 and 7:00 in the morning. But we have two more days to go, though I am sure the project leads would love for me to work through this three-day weekend, that just ain’t gonna happen.

The next blog post – indeed, the next couple of hundred blog posts – will be sent from the newly-formed Fascist States of America, headed by several billionaires stuffed in a sagging, ugly, shit-stained Donald Trump costume.

This state of affairs became inevitable when the Supreme Court passed Citizens United, which codified into law the idea that money is exactly the same as speech, and that the richer a person (or corporation) was, the more deserving of free speech they were. It is no coincidence that these billionaire broligarchs consider themselves “free speech absolutists”, but only when it comes to the dissemination of white supremacist and other forms of hate speech. Note how quickly they close down any criticisms of themselves on their own platforms.

So in that sense, Donald J. Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and the other wealthy media outlet owners are the most cowardly men on the planet. They have gone to astonishing lengths to build up enough wealth to not only shield themselves from the consequences of any of their actions, but also to shut down most avenues of criticism of them and the members of their cohort. They are the living embodiment of Wilhoit’s Law: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Reading

I have passed the halfway point of Doctor Zhivago, but it is still slow going. Maybe the long weekend will afford me time to get in some pages.

Writing

I am giving up on writing anything substantial until February. This month has been a total wash.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, Cryptids
Setting: Ruins
Genre: War

Listening

Aphex Twin, “On”

Interesting Links

  • With the annual State of the World address wrapped up, a new conversation is ongoing at The Well: “State of the News 2025“
  • Have a couple of decades to kill? browse the Magazine Rack at the Internet Archive.

Weekly Round-up, September 14, 2024

John Winkelman

Looking south down the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids.

[ Looking south down the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. The river is exceptionally low. ]

It was another busy week here in West Michigan, as I worked through the final week of one work project and began ramping up on another. I have some vacation time coming up soon so I want to get as much off my plate as possible so my vacation can be an actual vacation, and not just a deferred workload.

The Harris/Trump debate took place this past Tuesday, and Harris absolutely mopped the floor with Trump. Trump has always been a laughing-stock and a buffoon, but he is also aggressive and a bully. To see him taken down in a venue where he can’t intimidate those around him, or fall back on the adulation of his bootlicks and coprophages, was  one of the more enjoyable experiences of this election cycle. His aforementioned supporters, who are all apparently suffering from terminal boot-polish poisoning, are of course saying he won, and using racist and misogynistic attacks against Harris to back up their arguments. So things are progressing as usual.

Reading

I’ve been working my way through back issues of magazines and journals which I have accumulated over the last decade. This week I finally opened Dreamforge #2, which I received back in 2019 after helping to fund their Kickstarter.

Writing

This past week I didn’t put a lot on paper. I am taking notes for some writing projects I want to tackle during my upcoming time off, but I do not hold any illusions that my plans will go as expected.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Portals, Possession
Setting: Boardroom
Genre: Weird Fiction

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, July 27, 2024

John Winkelman

A stream crossing the path at Rosell Park

[ A stream crossing the path at Rosell Park. ]

And things continue to be exciting, here in the USA. As of this past Sunday (July 21), Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris as the new candidate. Assuming the Democratic party power players don’t fuck this up – and there is every reason to expect that they will, in fact, fuck this up – I look forward to voting for Harris. I don’t think she is a perfect candidate, but she is the best one at present for beating Trump and slowing the inevitable slide into full-on Nationalist Christian (or “Nat C”, which has an appropriate ring to it) totalitarianism.

Reading

I finished M. John Harrison’s Viriconium after almost a month of steady progress. What a beautiful, dense, poetic, difficult read! As I commented on Bluesky, I would shelve Viriconium between Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. More for writing style in the latter case than for content.

Writing

Though I am on vacation this week and next I find it difficult to put my head in the space necessary to put words to page. That said, I am making some good progress in my world building for Cacophonous (and slight progress for Up the River to the Mountains), and have come up with some interesting ideas for past weekly writing prompts. If only I had the focus to follow through with any of these.

And I also wrote a poem! And made some notes for improvements!

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Dragons, Revenge
Setting: Library
Genre: Romance

Listening

Molly Hatchet, “Dreams I’ll Never See”

Interesting Links

  • “Free George R. R. Martin from The Winds of Winter” (Maddy Myers, Polygon) – This article caught my attention (ha!) due to its discussion of ADHD and “ADHD paralysis“, in particular the line “you do want to write — you just cannot get yourself to start.” That is where I am and have been for most of the year. I don’t know if I have the ADHD part, but I definitely have the paralysis part when it comes to long-form writing.

 

Weekly Round-up, July 20, 2024

John Winkelman

Poe, checking out the neighborhood.

[Our ginger girl Poe, checking out the neighborhood.]

Well, it’s certainly been a week. Just after I posted the previous roundup, word came out that disgraced former President, adjudicated rapist, and convicted felon Donald Trump was slightly injured in a shooting at a rally in Pennsylvania. Much more importantly, one of the attendees, Corey Comperatore, a retired firefighter, was killed, and two other attendees seriously injured in the attack. The gunman, a 20-year-old white male Republican armed with an AR-15, was immediately killed by secret service agents.

Already Trump’s bootlicks are blaming anybody except young white male Republicans with easy access to assault weapons. And they are blaming anything except the violent rhetoric of the previous president, who lost tremendously to President Biden and then threw a temper tantrum and tried to stage a coup. At every stage of his political career Trump has advocated for and encouraged violence in the political arena. The only way it should be a surprise is that, rather than targeting a classroom (as young men with easy access to assault weapons usually do) the gunman targeted Trump.

And already, Trump’s bootlicks are trying to make him out as a hero. This is demonstrably false. There is nothing different about Trump today than there was in the hours before the attack. He is the exact same violence-cheering fascist he was before one of his own tried to take him out. Trump is not a victim. Mr. Comperatore is a victim. Comperatore’s family are victims. Trump is not.  David Dutch and James Copenhaver, the two attendees who were critically injured in the attack, are victims. Trump is not.

Trump is spinning his survival and minor injury during the attack as proof that he is fit to be president, which demonstrates a level of political intelligence expected from a failed reality show host. And the people who vote for him are eating it up. From their point of view, anyone who encourages such high levels of violence and division must be doing something right, and they feel if Trump returns to office they will be part of his in-group and will be allowed to indulge in the violence which Trump has been advocating for his entire political career. They’ll just turn it outward against their myriad imaginary enemies and oppressors, rather than inward toward the ideology which has given them permission to openly be fascists.

As the meme says, bad things happening to bad people doesn’t turn them into good people.

On Monday, Trump’s owners picked J.D. “Bougiebilly” Vance to be Trump’s running mate.

At the moment this post goes live, Trump and Vance are holding a rally about a mile from here, accompanied by a massive fleet of emasculated manbabies in big trucks which are covered with decorations which advocate for violence both abstract and particular. Which is redundant, since the existence of MAGA is an act of violence.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Reading

I am still reading Viriconium. The events of the past few weeks are keeping me distracted enough that I don’t have the focus to dive into this beautiful book as deeply as I would like.

Writing

Based on a recommendation from a member of my writing group, I set up an account at Notion.so, and am playing around with building a wiki for my work-in-progress Cacophonous. I want to test things a little before I move several years of notes to a new platform.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Super Powers, Kaiju
Setting: Virtual Reality
Genre: Horror

Listening

Interesting Links

Weekly Round-up, June 1, 2024

John Winkelman

A flower and a bee outside our house.

[A small bumblebee, laden with pollen, attending to a flower outside our house]

Happy June, everyone. And happy Pride Month! This past week was, for lack of a better word, good. I had a productive and relatively stress-free (and short, thanks to the holiday) week of work. I read a lot. I wrote a little. I spent quality time with my girlfriend. I relaxed with our cats. And I put the finishing touches on our raised bed/container garden. Not bad for someone who will turn 55 in a few days.

And best of all, Donald “Trouser Trumpet” Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump, being a coward, is crying foul and saying that it was rigged, and that he was the victim of a witch hunt, etc. To the surprise off nobody, his brownshirts are already threatening the jury, the lawyers, the judges, etc. Basically all the things he has been saying from the first time anyone ever told him “no.” Which was probably when he was about four years old, and that’s apparently when his personality stopped developing.

Just to be clear: Trump has never been a victim of anything except delusions of adequacy (and possibly child abuse, considering the father was very much like the son). Not once. Not ever. There has never been a witch hunt. There has never been a conspiracy. Trump and his coprophages, bootlicks, and other assorted enablers have spun a wildly false narrative of being downtrodden fighters against overwhelming odds.

MAGA behavior is textbook “predatory victimhood” which is part and parcel of the supremacist mindset (white supremacist, male supremacist, Christian supremacist, etc.) Anyone who is a member of an in-group, who tries to spin being a member of that in-group as really being part of an out-group (vis. the people complaining that there is no “straight people pride month” to counteract June being Pride Month), is a person whose every utterance, indeed their entire world-view, can be dismissed without further consideration. Ignorant cowards, one and all.

And that’s all that needs to be said about convicted felon Donald J. Trump, and his ilk.

Reading

The Black Company by Glen Cook. This is a re-read. It is of a similar vibe to how I want one of the novels I am working on, so I wanted  to get my head into that space before I dive into a major re-draft this summer.

Writing

I spent some time moving the more promising of my NaNoWriMo drafts to new folders in preparation for re-writes and edits. So more prep for writing than actual writing.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Music, Addiction
Setting: Library
Genre: Weird Fiction

Listening

Back in 2000, when I worked at CyberNet Engineering at the beginning of my career as a web developer, I listened to “Flat Beat” a LOT! The rest of the album, Analog Worms Attack, is excellent as well. You can listen to the entire thing here.

Analog Worms Attack was released in October 1999, just weeks after the official start of my career, which began when I volunteered to build the first website for my employer at the time. The fact that I only lasted about six months in that role should tell you how well that went.

I only lasted about eight months at CyberNet, which should tell you everything you need to know about how THAT job went as well. Thus was my career born in pain and sadness.

But at least I had Flat Eric to help me through the worst days.

Interesting Links

Post-Election Exhaustion

John Winkelman

New books for the week of November 6, 2022

With the midterm elections mostly in the rearview mirror, barring a couple of races which were so close that they are going into runoff, or are still being counted, the world is returning to whatever passes for a state of normalcy. Donald Trump, along with all of his supporters, was once again proven to be a pathetic loser, and most of the neo-Nazi bootlicks who rode, or attempted to ride, his coattails into political office were rightfully kicked to the curb. There were the usual tears and accusations of rigged elections from the emasculated wingnut manbabies of the GOP/QANON/OANN/KKK/Fox News bloc (which is many different names for the same undifferentiated mass of jackboot fetishists), and there will inevitably be a backlash of new bills introduced which will attempt to limit voting rights to only conservative white Christian men who own property. Such are the goals of conservative white Christians in America.

Anyway. Enough about politics.

Only one new book arrived this week – Death in the Mouth the most of the recent spate of Kickstarter rewards. Friends, this book is gorgeous!

In reading news, I finished K.S. Villoso’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. It was great! When I am ready to start buying books again, I will pick up the sequel which, based on the excerpt published at the end of Wolf, should be excellent.

I just started Terminal Peace, the final volume of Jim C. Hines’ Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse trilogy. So far, it is every bit as good as the previous books in the series.

And on a whim, during breakfast this morning, I cracked open Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy, which I can already see I will need to put down until after November, else I will be so consumed reading it that I will not have any time to write.

In writing news, I am at something over 25,000 words in my NaNoWriMo story Cacophonous. Things are going very well so far and I expect to hit 50,000 well before the end of the month.

August Inertia

John Winkelman

Fake Eyelash Abandoned on the Blue Bridge

As I finish off this post, we are in the middle of the first cool, gloomy day in months. A little thunder, a little lightning, and some of the very few cool, comfortable nights of the summer.

It’s blissful. Comfortable and quiet.

Nothing new arrived at the house this week, so here is a photo of a fake eyelash someone lost on the Blue Bridge. I first saw it on Monday, and it was still there on Friday. I guess nobody wants to claim it.

In reading news, I just finished J.M. McDermott’s Maze, published by Apex Book Company and received here at the Library back in May 2021. And I am still working my way through my stack of The Paris Review, and still quite enjoying it.

I have just started reading Michael Marder‘s Political Categories: Thinking Beyond Concepts. It is too early to offer thoughts or opinions on the text, but it feels good to be reading philosophy, and I am very happy to be reading this book with a group of friends

In writing news, still not a lot to report. My brain is just tired.

May 2022 Reading List

John Winkelman

What I read in the month of May 2022

This was another very poetry-heavy month, though I did manage to sneak in a couple of books about politics and the like. This quantity of poetry reading is putting my head in an interesting place, and I have written a couple of poems about the effect of reading so much poetry in a compressed time-frame. Perhaps this is what it is like to be an English major.

Two items of note here: Between Clay and Dust, which is the first fiction I have read since sometime in March, and Kameron Hurley’s short fiction, which is the first such I have read this year. 2022 had been like that.

Books and Journals

  1. Poetry Magazine #215.6 (March 2020) [2022.05.04]
  2. Poetry Magazine #216.1 (April 2020) [2022.05.05]
  3. Poetry Magazine #216.2 (May 2020) [2022.05.08]
  4. Poetry Magazine #216.3 (June 2020) [2022.05.10]
  5. Poetry Magazine #216.4 (July-August 2020) [2022.05.11]
  6. Poetry Magazine #217.1 (October 2020) [2022.05.15]
  7. Poetry Magazine #217.2 (November 2020) [2022.05.16]
  8. Poetry Magazine #217.3 (December 2020) [2022.05.17]
  9. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities [2022.05.18]
  10. Poetry Magazine #217.4 (January 2021) [2022.05.19]
  11. Poetry Magazine #217.5 (February 2021) [2022.05.20]
  12. Poetry Magazine #217.6 (March 2021) [2022.05.22]
  13. Poetry Magazine #218.1 (April 2021) [2022.05.23]
  14. Duncombe, Stephen, Dream or Nightmare [2022.05.24]
  15. Poetry Magazine #218.2 (May 2021) [2022.05.25]
  16. Poetry Magazine #218.3 (June 2021) [2022.05.26]
  17. Poetry Magazine #218.4 (July/August 2021) [2022.05.27]
  18. Farooqi, Musharraf Ali, Between Clay and Dust [2022.05.28]
  19. Poetry Magazine #218.5 (September 2021) [2022.05.29]
  20. Poetry Magazine #219.1 (October 2021) [2022.05.31]

Short Prose

  1. Hurley, Kameron, “Sky Boys”, Future Artifacts: Stories [2022.05.29]
  2. Hurley, Kameron, “Overdark”, Future Artifacts: Stories [2022.05.31]

A Long-ish Weekend

John Winkelman

New books for the week of May 22, 2022

Oh, what a month it has been. The days are longer, the weather is warmer, and we are not far from the halfway point of 2022. Suddenly this long year has become surprisingly short.

Three new books arrived in the past week.

First up is Kameron Hurley‘s new collection of short stories Future Artifacts, recently published by Apex Book Company. I met Kameron at the ConFusion science fiction convention some years ago, and she has graciously signed several of her books. I haven’t read any of her work in a couple of years, so I started reading it on Saturday.

Next on the stack is Issue 22 of the Boston Review Forum, titled Rethinking Law. I had let my membership to the Boston Review lapse, but they had a re-up offer which was too good to pass up. And since it’s only three issues a year, the additional weight in my house should be manageable.

And on the right is Bad Eminence by James Greer, delivered Saturday afternoon from And Other Stories.

In reading news, I am caught up to autumn of 2021 in my read-through of the pile of unread back issues of Poetry. Time and energy permitting, I may catch up to present sometime in June.

I finished Stephen Duncombe‘s Dream or Nightmare. Though unintended, it was the perfect follow-up to Benedict Anderson‘s Imagined Communities, as though the Anderson is about nationalism and the Duncombe about progressive political strategies, they both make the point that, when it comes to politics (which is to say, practically everything about society), people qua people don’t really notice or care about the minutiae of daily life outside of their immediate reach. What they notice are the stories, the narratives in which connect the individual to the people, places, ideas, and events outside of their immediate purview. This is how conservatives are able to convince their followers that fascism and freedom are synonymous, as long as the Right People are in the in-group. This is also why progressives and lefties are so much less successful at spinning inclusive narratives, as (a) progressives are much more grounded in facts and the real world than are conservatives, and (b) the 15% or so of the USA who are actually left-of-center tend to fail each others’ purity tests when it comes to the work of gathering a community.

To clear my head of modern stresses, I picked up Between Clay and Dust, a novel by Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi, which arrived at the house back in February of 2016 as part of my (now lapsed) subscription to Restless Books. I finished the book in three days, and it was beautiful. I rated it five stars, and recommend it unreservedly.

As stated above, I am now reading Kameron Hurley’s Future Artifacts.

In writing news, I haven’t done much lately. Too many other things taking up space in my head. I do plan to finish transcribing my National Poetry Month poems over the next couple of weeks.

Wow, This Month is Going By Quickly

John Winkelman

Sunrise over Huff Park, May 15, 2022

I looked up a couple of days ago, and June was closer than April. As the saying goes, the days are long but the years are short. The months are pretty short too, now that the weather has turned and people are going outside again. The change from weeks of Nothing Happening to weeks of Everything Happening occurred so quickly that I feel a sort of emotional or psychic backlash; the abruptness of the switch to something vaguely resembling the “normal” of the Before Times has put me in a vague state of panic and agoraphobia. Too much peopling too quickly.

No new books arrived this week, so the photo for the post is one I took on the morning of May 15 at Huff Park in Grand Rapids.

In reading news, as I have for the past six weeks or so, I am still working through my backlog of Poetry Magazine. I am caught up through the beginning of 2021, which means I am only a little over a year behind schedule.

I finished Benedict Anderson‘s Imagined Communities. Highly recommended. Reading about the instantiation and reinforcement of nationalisms of the past, I can more clearly see the various and myriad ways in which the conservative ideologues of America maintain and increase the nationalistic, imperialistic fervor of the idea of the United States.

With the Anderson complete, I have just picked up Stephen Duncombe‘s Dream or Nightmare, in which he discusses the rational, fact-based approach (e.g. progressive, liberal, productive) to politics in relation to the narrative based approach (in this case, nationalistic, revanchist, nihilistic) practiced by conservatives, and why the narrative-based approach is so much more effective when it comes to politics, where reality and facts have never really been effective tools. Though I had not intended it this way, the Duncombe does seem to be a good follow-up to the Anderson.

In writing news, I haven’t done much, though I am assembling a few poems for an open mic night coming up in a few days. This will be my first time reading in public in at least four years, and possibly closer to five. Yes, I’m a little nervous.