Ideas

Blueprint for a Barely Functioning United States

Posted on by Jimmy

With the untimely passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Republican hypocrisy regarding SCOTUS confirmations that liberals seem to think will eventually shame the GOP into doing the honorable thing (it won’t), massive unrest over the troika of economic, social, and environmental conditions, the contradictions in American life have become much too obvious for anyone with half a brain to ignore.

I hate to admit it, but there is no Left with any real power. And The American death cult and its financiers faces a weak centrist façade that placates and sloganeers. History will show the DNC to be the party of dangerous (white) moderates. The rest of us simply have no other viable vessel for political expression.

Nobody’s asking me, but this is my blog and we could start demanding some things to make life more livable:

  • Restructure the immigration system and dismantle ICE: Family separation, hysterectomies in immigrant concentration camps, young Americans of color locked up for weeks despite having citizenship, raids in hospitals. Tell me where to stop.
  • Abolish the Senate: An antiquated chamber that is wholly undemocratic. Wyoming and California are not equal. It impedes progress. But look, it was designed that way, a mechanism for the new American aristocracy to keep a lid on the popular classes.
  • Along with the Electoral College: Popular vote.
  • End impunity for the ruling class: Bush and Obama for American war crimes and accessories to Saudi crimes in Yemen. Trump for corruption, along with those senators accused of insider trading before the pandemic. If not in court trials at least a public reckoning. As a two-time Obama voter, it’s hard to deny his epic failures on Guantanamo, the Middle East wars, deportations, and more recently orchestrating the consolidation of centrists during the democratic primaries for Biden and squashing an NBA wildcat strike with a phone call. Sound like an impediment to hope and change? Thanks Obama.
  • Close the racial wealth gap and pay reparations: I’ll defer to Darity and Coates.
  • Green New Deal for planetary survival: Fires, floods, heat waves, droughts, etc. It’s happening and it’s finally not just confined to developing nations in the global south.
  • Legislate Medicare for All: Again, the only industrialized country to not have public healthcare. Pandemic, meet employer-based plans that work tooth and nail to deny coverage.
  • Cancel student debt: Give more economic freedom to the generations crushed by debt. It’ll be in everyone’s interest.
  • Reform the courts: Lifetime appointments are monarchical.
  • Demilitarize/defund the police: Duh. They keep murdering people of color without repercussions. They don’t need tanks, they don’t need heat rays, they need accountability.
  • Take away the assault weapons, at least: This one should have happened already.
  • Promote homesteading and invest in rural communities: The rise of masks, staying home, social distancing and telecommuting have pointed the way. Let’s be pioneers,
  • Reduce the workday: 6 hours at most. Let people live. Or at least be able to help their kids with Zoom school in the immediate future.
  • More municipal/state rights: How do we undermine an imperial presidency? By diminishing the reach of the office, building local power, and affecting change at a smaller, and more manageable, administrative level. We have a federal system. Things like health and LGBT rights must be built in to the whole system, but sustainable energy solutions, how to participate in civic life, and what to grow are all regionally and culturally dependent.

And many others. Stop the wars, stop the fracking, stop the pipelines over indigenous land.

Yes; Republicans, structural barriers inside the our political institutions, the “both sides”-ism of the corporate media, and disinformation on social media are huge hurdles to overcome. You know what is also a hurdle to progress? The Democratic Party. I’m almost 34 years old, and as much as I hoped and dreamed for the DNC to be a progressive party.

No more funding equivocating on economics or norms. One guy demolished all our norms and the economy almost collapsed just because people were staying inside and only buying essentials. We just gave away billions to corporations and dead industries like cruise lines. Planes are flying to nowhere to secure contracts with airports, despite their massive carbon footprint. And the government has left Americans with $1,200 (for some, not even that’s).

Whatever happens in November, we’re at the eleventh hour and it’s high time for radical thinking.

Hey Apple, Add A Galician Keyboard in iOS14

Posted on by Jimmy

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) wrapped up yesterday. This year’s was pretty different. With the coronavirus pandemic unabated, the whole conference was moved online and made more accessible and streamable for all, providing safety and convenience to regular attendees as well as enthusiasts who have never made the trip to San Francisco or San Jose.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I no longer desire the latest and greatest hardware, so iPhone events don’t interest me greatly. While iPhone prices have risen (excluding the new very affordable and cool iPhone SE 2), Apple has extended the shelf life of older iPhones by continuing to support them with iOS updates. I was never one to upgrade every year, but that didn’t stop me from wanting shiny new things. As I’ve adjusted to a lower salary (but improved quality of life), secondhand iPhones with a home button and an older but functional iPad totally work for me. This is a testament to how well Apple supports these devices and it’s commendable.

But I’m still a software geek at heart and enjoy seeing what the company and the dedicated iOS developers around the world bring to the operating systems, iOS and iPadOS, every year. I’ll write something more about the things I’m most looking forward to, but today I wanted to write something about software keyboards.

It’s not a particularly flashy topic. Anglophones have typically taken for granted that our language dominated the internet, which means technology is much more accessible to us than others. Before smartphones, my friends and I quickly learned to type with T9 as we relied on the system to understand which words we wanted to use depending on the combination of numbers we pressed, rather than press 2 thrice for the letter c. For speakers of other languages, this might not have been the case.

When the iPhone was revealed all those years ago, it did not feature a hardware keyboard with buttons like the once-popular Blackberrys had. This allowed the iPhone to have a larger screen, since it could hide the keyboard when it wasn’t necessary. It also allowed for different keyboard layouts. Most of us primarily input information into our iOS devices through typing. If we’re quick or careless, we rely (heavily) on autocorrect and keyboard suggestions. Some of us have reduced or even stopped traditional computers with hardware keyboards in place of phone and tablet screens.

Having a good keyboard with its own dictionary and intelligent suggestions is an important and often overlooked technology. And while there are apps that we can download to add keyboards for other languages like N’ko or that provide certain functions like Gboard, nothing beats having a default, system-wide keyboard built into the OS.

I live in Galicia. It’s one of the few historical nations and regions inside Spain. I go to the bank and I’m able to request the ATM’s language in various languages, including English, before I make a transaction. If I go to Eroski, a Basque supermarket chain found all over Spain, most of the products are labeled in Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Basque.

But when I try to add a Galician keyboard to practice writing (and learn spelling and where to place accents via autocorrect), it’s missing. It’s time for Apple to add a Galician keyboard.

Some Background

Galician, or galego, has a legitimate need for its own keyboard on iOS/iPadOS (from here on, just iOS). Adding it would further Apple’s mission of connecting more people together using its devices and service in a language that a few million people speak and feel comfortable in using.

The Galician-speaking community in Galicia, around Spain, and worldwide is sizable. With around 2.4 to 3 million first- and second-language speakers, Galician has a deep history, intertwined with the broader history of Castile/Spain. From the late 12th to the 14th century for example, Galician-Portuguese (then a single unified language) was almost exclusively the language of lyrical poetry in Christian Iberia.

It is a co-official language of the autonomous community of Galicia, used in schools and universities, at home, in gaarden, churches, amongst political party members, at sea, on television channels and radio stations, in newspapers, and in town halls. It a language with a rich lyrical tradition dating back to the 13th-century. And it is a language with speakers dedicated to preserving it, and thereby, their culture, in spite of the more historically dominant Spanish language.

There are also significant numbers of Galicians living in other parts of Spain and around the world, especially in the Americas and other European countries, due to a history of emigration in the mid-20th century.

While related to Portuguese, Galician is a separate language with different orthographic norms officially administered by the Real Academia Galega. Simply, Galicians care deeply about their language and culture and strive to valorize it in myriad ways.

During the fascist regime of Franco, who ruled the country from the civil war in the late 30s to 1975, Galician and other regional languages like Catalan and Basque were suppressed. And even before, Galician was thought of as a backward, rural language for farmers, lower in value than the “urban, sophisticated castellano”.

But this is changing. There are countless people, social movements, social media campaigns, and organizations dedicated to the preservation, use, and advancement of Galician. There is a desire for a Duolingo course to learn Galician. Some quick searches in in English, Spanish, or Galician will prove this. In short, many people learn, speak, and write in Galician. Those of us who don’t, want to.

Just Following A Trail

Apple providing a native, system-level software keyboard with autocorrect and suggestions would deepen its commitment to fostering creativity, education, and productivity for Galician speakers. This would have enormous benefits for different groups of people; younger generations of digitally native Galician speakers, neofalantes (people who did not grow up speaking Galician but choose to learn and speak it for various reasons), immigrants such as myself who wish to learn it to better communicate, and of course older Galician speakers who rely so much on Apple’s intuitive ecosystem to stay in touch with family.

What I’m writing isn’t anything new. I haven’t necessarily seen anything in English but I first saw the website Queremos Galego years ago. The last post is from the days of iOS 8. On Twitter, Galician triple jumper Ana Peleteiro is just one of many to lament the fact that they must either use a Spanish or Portuguese keyboard when they write, both of which are insufficient given orthographic and vocabulary differences between the three related Romance languages.

I find it very sad to have to put the keyboard in Portuguese to be able to type in Galician on my iPhone. I think Galicians should be more proud of our language and give it much more use. — Ana Peleteiro

There have a few Change.org petitions that get passed around the internet. While it is true that iOS users can add Galician (Galego) to a list of Preferred Language Order in Settings > General > Language & Region, they cannot change their iPhone language to Galician nor can they add a keyboard to write properly in Galician.

How Apple Can Help

So where does Apple fit into this? Simply, they can help people write in Galician on their devices by adding a systemwide keyboard. This would eliminate the need for lower-quality third-party keyboards. Then, Galician speakers and learners could use it everywhere, with correct spelling, autocorrect, suggestions, etc. Catalan, another regional language of Spain, has its own keyboard. Why not Galician?

Millions of people use iOS everyday. With the current global pandemic and during the quarantine, we rely on our iPhones and iPads even more. This is of course anecdotal but from my own perspective, younger Spaniards prefer iPhones to Android. My sister-in-law is a university student in Madrid and the vast majority of her friends have or want iPhones.

Keyboards for Languages With Less Speakers Than Galician

Presupposing that Apple cannot include every language keyboard (even though I think they should try), I’ve listed a few languages that, according to various census data pulled from Wikipedia, have fewer speakers than Galician. Some of these figures include L2 (second-language) speakers.

If these languages have been prioritized and given a keyboard, it is because there is a need, a demand, for writing in them. It is because there are users or employees inside Apple who have petitioned for them, spoken up for them. If this is the case, then surely Galician deserves one too.

Get Involved

While I am writing to show a specific absence of a default Galician keyboard, other language communities should support the Apple in Galician effort, just as we should support other communities petitioning for better accessibility and more multilingual keyboards. Basque does not have its own keyboard, for example. And this is only Spain. Wherever there is a sizable language group, we should be pushing for more multilingual accessibility to Apple products. So let’s reach out:

  1. Make some noise: Tweet this article, send it to Apple employees, translate it into Galician and Spanish, use the hashtag #AppleEnGalego, etc.
  2. Write to Apple directly: Use Apple’s Feedback Assistant

Belief and Dogma in These Times

Posted on by Jimmy

An small anecdote. An eminent conservative traditionalist scholar of Islam from a certain country tweeted about their country’s mosques re: the coronavirus pandemic. In it, he stated that those coming to prayer must have gloves, a rug of their own, must not shake hands, and that it is not necessary to line up shoulder-to-shoulder. I glanced down and saw a reply:

May Allah reward you well…would you kindly provide evidence that “the worshipers do not have to line up and do not converge” in this case?

In this new era, where everyone will have to adapt in order to protect each other, someone is asking for evidence. Is there a precedent, I imagine a hadith, that is attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that confirms this change in the prayer in extraordinary circumstances?

Here is an example, one but not unique, of the line of thinking that leads to dogmatic (and perhaps fatalistic) religious worldviews that secular people rightly cannot understand. I’m sure this person was being sincere, so maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. And I do not mean to paint with such a broad brush, but it is a sample of the conversations and experiences I’ve also experience in Muslim communities. I see this and worry a bit. Do we need evidence to keep our distance in practicing our faith without the worry or threat of contagion, endangering not just the men standing next to you but their families and anyone they come into contact with as well?

Belief doesn’t need to rely on looking back to old world thinking or an over-reliance on others. For me (because I always only speak for myself) it is an opening up to possibilities beyond the material and should aid in our progress towards an appropriate mission, caring for the material and spiritual needs of all creation. It brings confirmation that the human journey is much longer and deeper than what we experience it, not as some deviation from a more pious past.

Another anecdote. A different scholar, American, but no less traditionalist, tweeted regarding mosque closures in other countries. This is in response to someone sharing a link about why UK mosques have remained open:

In other times, it’s an amusement at best or a nuisance at worst to see ill-trained students from madrasahs try to flex their literalist muscles against critical thinking and common sense. Right now, this attitude will inevitably cause deaths and cannot be tolerated. Avoid socializing!

More rational, yet quite a few pushed back on and felt scholars and their institutions were being attacked.

This is why I have chosen to ‘self-quarantine’ myself from orthodoxy. This is why I have to look more closely and critically into the history, the power relations, the primary and spurious secondary sources of my adopted belief system much more than following personalities, also swayed by their education, yes, but by their own histories, reactions, and opinions to the times.

And this is what belief brings me. It brings me some sense of serenity (some, I say) to prepare for the oncoming of what the troika of crises (coronavirus, climate, capitalism) will bring about. It is spiritually lonely, I admit. But it squares with my reality much more than arguing about mosque closures. Talk to some Muslim women who have been boxed out of the mosque explicitly or otherwise for their entire lives and pray at home.

The Qur’an, the starting point and end point of Islam, is dynamic, filled with signs and admonitions to reflect upon. But it will only remain so in the hearts of dynamic, open-minded individuals who choose to prioritize it over the whims and opinions, however educated, of other humans. The times are strange and filled with uncertainty and disinformation.

Playing Against A Stacked Deck

Posted on by Jimmy

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” — D.H. Lawrence from his Studies in Classic American Literature

A thing I’ve noticed on Twitter, besides the obvious Bernie Bro myth and especially after the Super and Mini Tuesdays, is the disgust by some liberals when those on the socialist left say they will withhold their vote for Biden in the future. I’d like to unpack this a bit. To be very clear, I don’t know what I will do if Joe Biden is the democratic nominee. I’m not saying yes to voting, and I’m not saying no. What I want to do is try to explain why some on the left need to withhold their vote come November.

For the last few months, from afar in my corner of Galicia, I’ve watched with resignation as the American media and the DNC elites have manipulated public opinion against Bernie Sanders, while scaring everyday voters into believing Joe Biden is the one to take on Donald Trump.

I will call out my own biases before I get into everything. The nation, now more than ever with the omnipresent coronavirus and its lethality, needs:

  • Universal healthcare in the form of Medicare for All, guaranteeing free-at-the-point-of-service to anyone and everyone residing in the United States. This is even more obvious with the pandemic. There is nothing radical about universal healthcare and would only align us with most major industrialized countries.
  • Climate action in the form of A Green New Deal. This is a no-brainer. Anyone who squawks about how we will pay for it is either engaging in a bad-faith argument, does not understand the consequences are already being seen and experienced around the world and even in poorer communities than their own, or does not value human life and a thriving biosphere for future generations. Or they’re billionaires who will blast off to Mars or somewhere else before it gets really dire.
  • The further democratization and progression of American social, civic, and political life. Here is my catch-all for making the country more equitable to all, in the form of stronger unions, better wages, more police accountability, tuition-free college, cancelling student debt, dismantling the carceral state, abolishing ICE, etc.

Many people believe Trump is an existential threat to the world. Words like fascist, white supremacist, or nationalist are used. I use them. In a sense, I believe all are valid and true. Closing the border to vulnerable immigrants, whose own countries were destabilized by our own government (some from the Obama administration) is odious. Given the impending climate catastrophe, there will be even more refugees and the world needs to move beyond the conventional paradigm of the nation state to accommodate these issues.

But I will call out bullshit when I see it. Joe Biden will not return us to normal. If he even wins the nomination at all (the political and nepotistic baggage of Hunter Biden and his post at a Ukrainian firm has more implications than Hilary Clinton’s emails), his obvious cognitive decline in the last four years is a huge liability. His continued contempt for the working class and millennials is antagonistic. Plus, back to normal is actually pretty terrible for many people. Largely, white democratic moderates were thrilled during the eight years of the Obama regime. I was one of them for many years. I voted for him twice. But politics was de-emphasized for many who saw him as a decent man. Let’s remember Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, the bombing of a handful of Muslim countries,

If you’re reading this, you might have found this through Micro.blog or Twitter. There is a large concentration of white moderate technologists on those sites. Perhaps you consider yourself on the left. Perhaps you think we’re out of our minds. Well, maybe. But here it is: there is no normal anymore. We are facing a choice that has global ramifications for better or worse. We cannot go back to centrism or rely on elites to dictate what is politically possible. The future is unwritten and remains in our hands.

This is not a post villifying the electorate for turning on Bernie Sanders. I get we’re all shell-shocked from four years of Trump. But I have seen, again from afar and from interactions with friends and family back home, how utterly manufactured this democratic primary process has been. Matrix fans might call it the red pill. But reading Marx, understanding our historical antecedents, and marinating in independent left media gives more perspective than the neutral horse-race mentality of the bought, billionaire-funded mainstream media.

So if you’re still reading, thank you. If you’re asking us in good faith why some would ever abstain and not “Vote Blue no matter who”, hopefully I can add another voice to that. Let me walk you through why the socialist left feels so dispossessed of any real power, and why a possible demonstration of our collective leverage might be to withhold our vote in strategic situations. Again, I am not trying to advocate this particular thought. I don’t know what I will do. Harm reduction voting might need to take place as well. There’s still a lot of primary to go, and everything is very much on unstable ground in these times.

Democratic Elite Consolidation before and after South Carolina

With the Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada primaries, there was already something strange going on. They scrapped the last major poll of the Des Moines Register before the caucus, apparently due to a complaint from the Buttigieg campaign. Some reporters who had seen results said Bernie was in first with his largest lead. That is not insignificant.

Then there is the night of the Iowa caucus. Pete Buttigieg declared himself the winner without any of votes being counted. Some, not me, will explain this away by saying the Buttigieg campaign had favorable internal data. Okay, but if it was so good, why not wait? Regimes in other countries have been toppled for less. Bolivia comes to mind. And it was wrong anyways. Bernie Sanders, in both the first caucus vote and the re-alignment, received more of the popular vote than Pete.

So why did he do this? Media narrative, I assume. Iowa is not a delegate-rich state nor is it representative of the democratic demographics of the country at-large, so the narrative driven by the media is super important going forward into the New Hampshire primary. For people paying attention, earned media is huge for momentum in these early states. In a crowded primary race, it was important.

How about the Iowa app, created to facilitate precinct captains and the Iowa Democrats to count votes and do strange (I’d argue unnecessary) delegate math? It was created by the mysterious tech startup Shadow and their think thank ACRONYM. I won’t get into the details about this. More ink has been spilled elsewhere and I’ll link to some at the bottom of each section. Regardless, ACRONYM’s founder Tara McGowan’s husband worked for the Buttigieg campaign in Iowa. Conflict of interest? Yes. Also, linked to the app/think tank are the Pod Save America crew. Google it. They waved it off with some phony outrage on the episode after Iowa. But my question, since the beginning, is this: Will anyone be truly held accountable? America basically caught the Iowa Democrats fixing or manufacturing results.

Despite the numerous irregularities of all that went down, Troy Price, the former head of the Iowa Democrats said the party would not re-evaluate the false delegate math. As of today, Sanders has over 2,000 more votes, 1 less state delegate equivalents, and oddly, 2 actual delegates less than Buttigieg. That’s a head scratcher.

You can say all these things are unfortunate circumstances or you can it for what is is; an attempt to rig the Iowa caucus in favor of someone who toes the Democratic Party line more than Bernie Sanders. It’s not a tinfoil hat scenario. It’s Occam’s Razor.

The democratic endorsements pushed Joe Biden into the spotlight.

  • Pete Buttigieg came in 2nd in both Iowa and New Hampshire and 3rd in Nevada. But after South Carolina, he drops out and the next day throws his support behind Biden. This is the guy who said Joe Biden was not right for the times and that a new generation needed to take up the mantle.
  • Beto O’Rourke called Joe Biden a return to the past. Suddenly, at exactly the necessary time (you know, when Bernie Sanders was looking to run away with the contest), Beto endorses Biden. Hmm.
  • Amy Klobuchar endorses Joe Biden.
  • Kamala Harris, who called Joe Biden out in an earlier debate on his racist, segregationist opposition to school busing, endorses him as well.

Biden was practically written off before the South Carolina primary. Conventional wisdom was that Biden just loses primaries. He has for all the previous presidential primaries. Obama picked him to assuage white voters for his own run in 2008. It was strategic.

And here’s a thing that annoys me to no end. Like Hilary, Biden is a manufactured avatar of a ‘good politician’. Collectively, we whitewash the horrible shit they have done as politicians. You know who hasn’t engaged in support of toppling the Honduran government or opposed busing or wrote the crime bill that has left countless black boys and men behind bars so much so that our prison population exceeds China’s? Bernie Sanders. Enough said.

Joe Biden has baggage. His brother, his son, himself. These are all liabilities that will absolutely be weaponized by Trump. Indeed, he’s already started. Can we just side-step this whole mess and vote for the policies who most of the democratic electorate agree with (minus the DNC)?

I decided to cut this short and not bother with links. You can find all of this easily. I might take this down at some point. But here it is. I would love to hear any comments or criticisms in the comments.