This tree saw a dumptruck up on a pile of rocks. Maybe it was full of caveats.
It never rains but it pours, some more.
I installed a bypass for the filter system. It was a lot of work – I was a full-time plumber today.
I turned it on. It doesn’t leak. The filters shown here are not functioning – they’re missing internal pieces that we ordered. The pipes encircling the filter system are my day’s assault on plumbing and engineering standards. I should have taken a “before” photo but I didn’t.
This all works, so I disconnected the temporary hose bypass mentioned in yesterday’s blog post, and decided celebrate by re-hooking up the washing machine and doing some laundry. Unfortunately, the door latch mechanism on the washing machine is broken. This has happened before: see blog from 2 1/2 years ago. I’m exhausted and beginning to feel burned out on home- and boat-repair issues. And the end is not in sight. I guess I’ll mess with the washing machine tomorrow.
This tree is awaiting more rain.
It never rains but it pours. On top of the boat problem, this morning it turned out the UV water filter system had managed to stop working during a brief power outage yesterday. it turned out the florescent UV bulb inside it was burned out. Art did have a replacement on hand, but unfortunately there’s a glass protective sleeve that goes around, that somehow broke on trying to reinstall things – I suspect I was doing something wrong. But in all the cardboard tubes which I thought had spare, additional glass protective sleeves, there was nothing but air – Arthur was saving them for some reason, but the result was that I thought we had more backup inventory than in fact we had. So now we have to await a re-order of protective sleeves from Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that when Arthur built this filter system, he didn’t take into account the possibility that it might need to be bypassed temporarily. There’s no bypass route or valves. So… I had to construct a bypass using a garden hose from an upstream spigot to a downstream spigot – the latter being the water source for the washing machine. Here is the hose, coming up the stairs…
… and connecting behind the washing machine.
This more-or-less works for water supply, though our laundry facility is disabled. But now we wait 10 days while Amazon delivers the part we need. I will work on re-engineering the filter installation area so that it has an actual, workable bypass system for events like this in the future.
This tree saw a fog-bank attacking the midsection of Sunnahae Mountain.
Except for our trip to town for Thursday shopping, I spent almost the entire day trying to troubleshoot or fix the boat’s engine – problem was described two weeks ago on our abortive fishing trip. I made very little progress. I changed spark plugs, fuel filters – not super easy, given the boat was in the water and my own lack of experience with marine engines, but I’m good at reading a manual. I added stabilizer to the fuel system. I ran the motor for several hours, messing with the throttle and trying to get the idle to stick. No luck. And taking the boat in for service is not in the cards: the guy in town who does boat service is booked until October. Seriously.
This tree stood in the background while I exploited a moment of non-rain to begin trying to diagnose our boat’s engine’s problem. Something is causing it not to idle. I took out and inspected the spark plugs. Turns out Art doesn’t have a spare set – so I’ll shop for them tomorrow.
This tree experienced having a wind-chime attached to it.
The wind chime was a gift from neighbor-down-the-road, Penny. It was a treehouse-warming gift, as she explained. But in fact I had bought the exact same wind chime at my place of work two weeks ago. That one was hung in my treehouse already. So instead, I took this second wind-chime and suspended it in a tree in front of Arthur’s house. I wonder if he will notice it. It might be a while – I’m not going to tell him, and see how long it takes. I’ll try to remember to report when he notices it.
After a very long winter season, we resumed fishing today. As usual, Arthur gave me basically zero notice of his expectation. His approach has always been “military style”: never announce plans in advance, better to catch those around you unawares with whatever project you have in mind. His idea of advance notice is to say something at bedtime the night before a proposed early departure. Still, I’d more or less expected it – it was bound to happen sooner or later. He has a hard time conceptualizing the idea of “preparing” for going fishing – in his mind, the boat is always ready and nothing could possibly go wrong, it’s just a matter of walking down to it, staring the engines, and pulling away from the dock.
That said, really, it wasn’t much of a fishing trip. It was more of a “shakedown” cruise to see where we stood with boat after such a long period of non-use.
On the positive side: it still floats.
On the negative side, we seem to have some increasingly serious engine issues – the stuttering problem we’ve seen on and off in previous years (and which has never been diagnosed) did NOT return, but we did have issues with the engine not staying running on idle – which is very problematic, because it must be in idle to shift it into gear – and we got the “overheating” alarm several times, essentially randomly. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it may need a visit to the mechanic for service. The problem, of course, with that, is that it’s a quite involved process to get the boat to the mechanic. We may pull it out of the water and try flushing the engine’s cooling, and I might research online on how to adjust the idle on these types of engines (if possible – I think they’re without carburetors, using fuel injection instead).
Another negative – one of the downriggers wasn’t working. An electrical problem, in the source cable – not in the downrigger itself, as it worked fine when plugged in to the other downrigger’s socket. So I’ll have to try to solve this electrical problem. I’ve messed with this issue before (last year? Or was it the year before that?).
We departed the dock at around 8:30. It was overcast but flat. We went to Caldera, a spot which I associate with luck with catching coho early in the season. We got a tiny black bass and tiny rockfish with our one working downrigger, which was reassuring – we know the hooks are working, right? But no coho.
The wind picked up shortly after we started trolling. The forecast was that a big storm with 4- or 5-foot swells on Bucarelli was coming in by this evening, so we decided we’d done enough testing of our systems, and got home again by noon. Arthur was cold. He suffers a lot from feeling cold, these days – it might be one reason why he has much less patience for fishing up here than he used to.
Coho: 0
Kings: 0
Halibut: 0
Other: 0
Too-small fish sent home to mama: 2
Here’s the boat before launch, anticipating its upcoming short voyage.
I guess this business of making the treehouse into my “outdoor bedroom” is a kind of instantiation of the “nesting instinct,” right? But given it’s up in a tree, it’s maybe a bit more literal than your average human “nesting” behavior.
I took some pictures of the interior of my treehouse, now borderline habitable.
Here is a tatami mat I’ve owned for several decades but haven’t much used. I put it down on the rough plywood floor to be my “bed” – I’m always a floor-sleeper (Korean/Japanese style), so that’s fine with me. You can see the complex pieces of plastic I’ve put over the window holes – this is temporary until I make actual windows, which is really my next major project, but it’s going to be a slow process I think.
Here’s my screen door on the east side – facing the high-tide line and Arthur’s dock. You can see I put a little railing now at the edge of the balcony. There are two smaller trees poking up through the floor of the balcony, hidden to the left behind the wall.
Here’s the screen door on the west side, where the stairs are.
Here’s my bed after I’ve made it up for sleeping in, and I found some old throw-rugs to put down.
Just now we’re having a very rare Southeast Alaskan thunderstorm. There was a big boom.
July 4th, 2013 was the day I underwent a 9-hour surgery to remove the tumor at the root of my tongue and the lymphs on the left side of my neck. It seems an odd day for a cancer surgery to Americans, but bear in mind I lived in South Korea. It was not a holiday – just a regular day. A Thursday.
I remained in the hospital for the rest of July. And in late August and through September, I underwent radiation (x-ray tomography) to further ensure I was cancer-free, but I like to celebrate July 4th as my cancerversary.
Last night I slept in my treehouse. That was the very first time I’ve done that. I mostly have waited because I have wanted to try for some modicum of bug-freeness. With my two custom-made (somewhat slapdash) screen doors installed, and my third door opening simply blocked off with plywood, I felt that I could hope that at least some portion of the bug inhabited spaces outside would leave me alone. I think some bugs still got in, but not any worse than sleeping in the attic, I don’t think.
I slept fine. The birds seem louder out there. Notably, the traffic on the road has a different “sound” than sitting in the attic with the window open, so the first few times a vehicle went by, I was disoriented as to where they were driving – it sounded like they were coming down the driveway. My position relative to the various nearby steep slopes is somewhat different, and so I guess echos and such things are arranged differently.
I could hear the sea sloshing, and around midnight, there was some wind that was rang my wind-chimes and woke me briefly.
This tree is a guest tree from my past. It’s a tree under a giant flag at Juyeop plaza in Ilsan, Korea, which I walked by in January, 2009.
I ended up working for about 1 hour when Art and I went to town today for shopping. I parked Art at the Veterans Center with Jan (which runs every Thursday) while I did a last-minute framing job for the town police chief (don’t wanna get on the bad side of the police, right?).
This tree was nearby as a dog smelled a boat and gazed at a distant waterfowl.
I made a proof-of-concept door for my treehouse. Now I need to buy some hinges.
This tree had an eagle in it (exact center).
I spent my whole, long weekend working on a particular computer/database problem, related to what’s called the overpass API and overpass-turbo application for the map server.
Not even sure it’s working properly. But anyway, it’s sorta working.
I spent the day doing a very strange thing (for me): I was working in Microsoft Windows on my computer. I always use linux. I’ve been using linux at home quite consistently for 10 years now – I remember when I triumphantly installed it on my posh new home desktop in that old, run-down apartment in Juyeop in Korea in the Spring of 2012. I remember the smell of the street through the open windows and the sound of traffic.
But something prompted me to make sure the old Windows boot on my current desktop computer still worked, to run updates, to make sure I could at least do some basic stuff with it. I think I’ve been feeling that my computer skills have been getting “fragile” – that I depend too much on linux and suffer a lack of “tech resiliency”, or something like that. I want to remain able to adapt.
Windows is pretty sucky, but there have been some improvements. One thing that is to be found in recent windows versions: the so-called “Windows subsystem for linux (WSL)”, which allows a linux hacker like me to use familiar bash commands to do things while working in windows.
One thing that I did get working, somewhat unexpectedly: iTunes. Apple doesn’t make an iTunes version for linux, but it does make one for Windows, and I did get it working. I think this is important because Arthur’s capacity to navigate his quite baroque iTunes arrangement on his macbook sometimes seems dangerously compromised, and we somewhat rely on this for our evening entertainment (the ripped-and-stored TV shows and movies that we watch on his AppleTV).
So it’s good to have the possibility that I could host these TV shows if Arthur ever eventually decides to give up doing so, or simply can’t. I struck another blow against excessive “tech fragility”.
I voted today: a vote-by-mail jungle primary, for the at-large Congressional seat vacated by the death of Don Young, Alaska’s Representative since the Early Paleolithic. There are forty-eight candidates. But the choices are best summarized by the names at the top of the two columns on the ballot.
Apparently Santa Claus is a real guy’s legal name – he lives in North Pole (a suburb of Fairbanks) and serves on the city council there.
This tree saw me making some steps along the path from the driveway down to the treehouse. These are not the only steps necessary – more, other steps are necessary; but these steps seemed the most necessary – there’s been a little mini cliff that I had to navigate along the path until now.
This tree saw the former storage tent (“studio”) finally rest in peace. I have completely cleared the original location of the storage tent.
It involved a lot of walking back and forth, carrying stuff – I made a new “under tarp” storage facility in a different location.
This tree saw the return of the GDC (RV camper) to Lot 73.
I had loaned the GDC to some neighbors-down-the-road. Brad is energetically building a house at 12 mile, and wanted a place for one of the workers he had to stay in. So in exchange for some much-needed maintenance work, I loaned him the RV.
It’s been a whole string of frustrations and disappointments, these last few days. I finally got Alaska Power & Telephone (the local utility) to come out and hook up the new meter-base for electricity for Lot 73. I learned there was an unexpected, quite high charge associated with this hook-up. Essentially, it’s a bureaucratic “reactivation fee” because I took so long in the time between when I first had the utility pole and power drop set up and when I got the meter base installed. It’s a kind of “procrastination fee.” I’m disappointed because I specifically asked, at the time the pole was put in 3 years ago, if there would be other charges if I delayed putting it in, and the people at that time said something to the effect of: “nothing major, a small fee.” $700 doesn’t seem small, to me.
Then today, I was planning to drive into town to JS Hardware (the one and only hardware store on the island), with the cargo trailer. I wanted to buy some more plywood and longer pieces of lumber, to best continue my treehouse project as well as to construct a small shed to replace the weather-destroyed storage tent.
I had the trailer all hooked up to the Blueberry (the Chevy Tahoe), and the brake lights were even working, and I realized the trailer’s registration was expired. Although evidence is thin on the ground, I suspect Arthur simply forgot – despite surely having received some kind of reminder in mail form and probably email form as well. And I blame myself, because at this point in things, it’s really my job to keep track of Arthur’s multitude of bureaucratic obligations. I simply didn’t think about it. But my luck being the way it is, I’m not going to drive to town with expired tags – that’s inviting a revenue-raising stop by the Craig Police.
So the trailer was re-parked, and we’ll have to sort out the expired trailer registration. Because the DMV in Craig is only open 4 hours a week, by appointment only, that is not something resolved promptly – it’s on “their schedule.”
These experiences just reinforce my feelings of general incompetence, lately.
This tree is a guest tree from my past. The tree is guarding an entrance to the Samgakji subway station in central Seoul – just southwest of the former Yongsan US military base. The base is “former”, now, but when I took this picture in April, 2008, it was still active. In the haze in the upper background you can see the Namsan Tower.
I went to work today – not a normal thing for a Monday, but I have a somewhat rearranged schedule this week.
Castine is an imaginary country that once existed on the imaginary planet I prefer to call Ogieff. In fact, the imaginary planet doesn’t have an official name – it’s hosted at opengeofiction.net, which all the users call, simply, “OGF”. That initialism leads to my preferred name for the planet – just sound it out.
I joined OGF in 2014, and Castine appeared and began evolving some time in the year after that, I think – in 2015. I also became an admin on the opengeofiction.net website in that year.
During the period from 2015 to 2017, Castine became the locus of a kind of meta-proxy-war, where I used it as a stand-in for a never-ending argument I liked to have with my fellow OGF admins.
The issue in question was the rule about “verisimilitude”. I had long felt (and continue to feel) that OGF’s verisimilitude rule is a bad idea – it’s vague and impossible to enforce consistently. It has no objectivity. The principle is that mapping on the OGF world is supposed to be “realistic” in the sense that it eschews fantasy and sci-fi elements, and doesn’t contain cultural or cartographic artifacts that couldn’t reasonably exist in the real world. Hence, people who build 50 km bridges or tunnels are called out for violating verisimilitude, likewise more science-fictional elements like space elevators or fantasy elements like dens of dragons or nations of 1920’s-era talking sheep (all these examples really occurred at various times on the OGF planet).
Castine was (is) a borderline case of violating verisimilitude. Some users felt it violated the rule, others felt it was okay. My position was always something like: “since we can’t decide if this violates verisimilitude or not, but it’s really good mapping… c’cmon, people, let’s drop (or at least, fix) this stupid rule.”
Of course, this was an unpopular stance. And in the long run, I lost the battle to remove or even alter the verisimilitude rule on Ogieff, and I made my peace with it.
One way that I made that peace with it, was to create my own, separate planet! In 2016, I started the planet Arhet as a kind of alternative project to Ogieff. By 2018, it had several active mappers and its own emerging community. The principle concept behind Arhet is to be a kind of “libertarian” reinterpretation of OGF. It has very few rules: no verisimilitude rule, no assigned territories, etc. And somewhat to my own surprise, it sorta kinda works. The key to it working, I reckon, is that unlike OGF, Arhet is not “open” to any and all comers. There’s an application process to join, and although I enforce almost no rules for the planet, I do stand firm that arguments or disagreements between users that escalate to my remit will simply result in immediate banning of all parties. That keeps everyone participating on best behavior, I guess.
The irony is that then, in 2021, I took over the hosting of the original opengeofiction.net. So now I host a little federation of two imaginary planets, Ogieff and Arhet, which have substantially overlapping user communities but having quite different rule systems. And I’m okay about that. I inevitably yield to my fellow admins, whose hard work and dedication to the project I admire, when it comes to matters of rules and judgements on Ogieff. But off to the side, I run Arhet singularly, and I insist on its fundamentally anarchic state.
In around 2020, the creator of Castine (Ramasham) was banned from Ogieff – ultimately for violating another, different rule: the rule prohibiting direct upload of data copied from OSM. OSM is OpenStreetMap, which is a map of the Real World™ in the same technological vein as our two imaginary planets. This is the so-called “slippy map” paradigm, originally popularized by mapquest and perfected and dominated by google maps. OSM runs on and supports a whole complex ecosystem of software that is all open source, as a kind of alternative to google maps, and that’s why it’s easy (uh, “easy” in a financial sense, not “easy” in a technical sense) for us to use the same software to run OGF and Arhet.
Anyway, there is (and there has always been) a rule prohibiting copying OSM data into OGF. Ostensibly this is motivated by paranoia about copyright violation, but in fact copyright has little to do with it, in my own estimation – there are easy ways to avoid issues around copyright as long as you follow along with OSM’s “attribution and re-use” rules. The real motivation for the prohibition is legitimate, though: on OGF, we want to discourage mappers from spamming the planet’s map with cut-n-paste copies of real-world places. It’s low effort geofiction and discourages creativity.
That said, when I set up Arhet I decided to also not enforce OGF’s “no real-world (OSM) data” rule. And indeed I myself played around with cutting and pasting some data from OSM, including an ephemeral instance of country I called “Lingit Aani” (this is Tlingit language) – a copy of the islands of Southeast Alaska but minus any nearby continent, as an open-ocean archipelago. I later deleted this, but there are multiple copy-the-real-world geofiction projects going on in Arhet, these days, including clones of Sakhalin Island (Siberia) and Romania’s Bucharest, and at least two Polands – perhaps more.
I guess Castine’s creator, Ramasham, had been doing some copy-pasting of OSM data to increase the detail and complexity of Castine’s cartography. Notably, this airport is a modified cut-n-paste copy of one in the real world, with only the names of things altered. And so Ramasham was banned from OGF. Rules are rules, and that “no copy from OSM” rule is actually probably the most common reason for mappers to be banned from the site.
Now we come to February of this year (2022). The admin team at OGF, moving to “clean up” various abandoned territories around our (imaginary) globe, decided finally to delete Castine once and for all. And I had a moment of deep sadness and regret. Despite my having leveraged Castine back in 2016 as part of my proxy war with the other admins over the verisimilitude rule, in fact I really, really like Castine.
From a technical standpoint, Ramasham was at best a mediocre mapper. But the imaginary country is full of cartographic whimsy and playfulness, the naming is thorough and inventive and culturally intriguing, and the detail in some parts is quite incredible. I thought it was worth preserving.
So I considered: Ramasham’s ban from OGF was for violating the “No OSM data” rule; if there were any other issues with Castine, they were issues with the “verisimilitude” rule; so… hey – Arhet doesn’t have those rules!
The solution was obvious. I decided I’d move Castine to Arhet. And even more conveniently, the exact latitude and longitude of Castine’s old Ogieff location was open and unused on Arhet. I figured it should be quite easy to simply “cut-n-paste” the whole of Castine into Arhet.
Yikes! This turned out to be the far from the case – it was not easy. Not at all. Castine included almost 2 million distinct GIS objects: nodes, ways, relations. This was not trivial to simply cut, paste, and upload into the new site. And further, the data quality was quite poor, from a technical standpoint. Thousands of improperly stacked ways on shared nodes, hundreds of lazily-crafted or incomplete data relations, etc.
I have spent the last week in a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland nightmare of trying to rescue Castine and upload it to the Arhet planet. I think that as of this morning, that I have succeeded, but not before almost destroying the Arhet server altogether in the process.
Without going into a lot of detail, it seems that there were a couple of relations (a technical term in this case for a type of data object used in OSM GIS software) that were apparently so badly constructed that they broke the server’s database. Since I had to do a kind of trial-and-error search to finally identify these objects, it took a very long time. I’d upload some subset of the full Castine dataset, and watch to see if the database crashed or not. If it didn’t, fine, I’d try another set of data. If it crashed, I’d have to go back to the last backup of the server, restore it, and try again. I think I did a backup-restore cycle maybe 12 or 14 times over the last week on the Arhet server. It was painful, and tedious, and immensely frustrating.
The crash-provoking objects in question are puzzling. I still don’t understand why they crash the database. And given my difficulties in identifying them (and surviving them – see below), I probably won’t spend time, any time soon, trying to figure them out. They are “Giant Chessboards” – three of them. Interestingly, Castine also has other “Giant Chessboards” (e.g. here) that do not cause any kind of data problem. They are apparently implemented differently, in their details.
The problem was compounded yesterday, when, much to my shocked dismay, the server-level backup-restore functionality offered by my hosting provider, Linode – that I’d been so repeatedly abusing – suddenly and inexplicably failed to work.
So for a day (yesterday) the world was Arhetless. The server was down. I was in a panic because it seemed I’d have to fully rebuild the server from scratch. And it was only pure luck that I even had a copy of the map data, because I was still running a kludgey render engine (map drawing process) for Arhet on a different machine.
I wrangled with tech support at Linode, and they finally held my hand (or was it that they held my server’s hand?) through a successful if stressful restoration of the server’s image.
Let’s just say, these days Castine now has a quite colorful meta-history.
I reached out to the creator of Castine, sending an email to the address on record at OGF, announcing its restoration in Arhet. I would absolutely welcome and be pleased if that person would come back and take up work on the country, again – they won’t be constrained by the rules and regulations on Ogieff. Unfortunately I haven’t heard back. I speculate that there might be some bitterness about the whole business of having been first praised and then banned, back a few years ago.
Please feel free to explore. I decided not to bother with adding extensive screenshots for this blog post – the point of having the Castine map hosted on the server is that you can explore easily directly on the website.
Happy mapping.
What I’m listening to right now.
Dawg Yawp, “Lost At Sea.”
Lyrics.
[Intro]
Tk tk
Hey! Hey!
[Verse 1]
Lost at sea
Is where you'll find me
It's got everything I want
But nothing that I need
[Verse 2]
Does anybody feel
All this talk ain't real?
Does anybody see
That the truth is in the mystery?
Could it be sweet
Standing on my feet?
[Chorus]
I don't know, but I'm gonna try
Thinkin' up ways not to wash up in alive
(Could it be sweet?)
Everybody's tellin' me it's not too hard
If you keep swimmin' it don't seem far
[Verse 3]
There's a place you can go
Where you'll never be alone
And you'll always be free
Lost at sea
Could it be sweet
Lost at sea?
[Chorus]
I don't know how they're gonna find me
Now I'm lost at sea and there's no way to deny
(Could it be sweet?)
If I'm ever talkin' like I don't care
Look at me and smile, baby
Take me there
This tree (and this tree and this tree and this tree, too) was cut down in the prime of its youth by me to accommodate the fact that it was encroaching on the path of the power line down from the pole to lot 73.
The electrician was out, doing initial work on installing electricity for the lot, using the utility pole I had put in 2 years ago.
I also tried to remove a much larger tree but ran into technical problems with the damn chainsaw and, unable to resolve them, gave up. I’ll have to tackle it another day. I don’t get along well with chainsaws.
Russia’s leadership (not just Putin, but various other power-holders, including at least some oligarchs) may actually welcome sanctions, and Western sanctions, far from being undesirable, were in fact the intended outcome of this war. Here’s how this works: these past 30 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has been a net exporter of capital. This is due to multiple reasons, but in essence businesses (both Russian and foreign) extract things and ultimately remove the capital. Putin & Co. cannot directly force Russian business to not export capital. The war and the imposed sanctions make the West do the work, and take the blame. This can help Russia to fulfill the autarchist (anti-globalist) fantasies commonly held by fascist-leaning thinkers of all stripes.
This tree was there as I pulled the tarp off the GDC (RV) and got it started and moved it 20 feet. It all worked, somewhat to my surprise – I hadn’t started it since January, and I was worried I’d let it sit too long. I also managed to “cure” its fuse problem – though I confess I don’t know quite how I did that. So electrical systems seem okay now (unlike in January).
I was talking to Arthur, as we drove home from the store today. Sometimes I blather on: “I really like this pothole. It’s my favorite. It has plenty of width and depth, so you can drive down into it and not just bounce across it, and it’s as wide as the whole road. It’s the kind of pothole you can talk to your friends about with pride.”
This tree saw additional precipitation added to the local environment, as part of a drought-mitigation project initiated by the rainforest maintenance authorities.
Meanwhile, the heating-oil-burning heater down in the boathouse (basement) seems to have developed a leak – there is heating oil on the floor down there. Which is concerning. Art and I spent time cleaning up some and trying to diagnose the leak. I think (hope) we found it. We’ll keep an eye on things.
Scott Alexander posts a very interesting discussion of the question of “self determination” on his blog. This is a topic that has fascinated me for my entire life, but, as Alexander observes, defies simple answers.
Suppose that we concede that Ukraine has a right to self determination. Then so does Crimea, right? And also, Donbas. But then… so does that one Ukrainian-majority town within Russian-speaking Donbas, too, right? And if that one Ukrainian-speaking town within Donbas has a right to self determination (i.e. the right to not be incorporated into Russia), what about that one Russian lady in that Ukrainian-speaking town?
Self determination suffers from a kind of fractal defect, that washes up against concepts of personal autonomy and individuality on the one shore, and up against principles of universal humanity and world government on the other shore.
I think there are no easy solutions, but I tend toward what might be termed the “Quaker response” which is that although self determination might be an unresolvable question, it is violence that should be avoided, condemned, and prevented. This especially works if we are sure to include an opposition to structural violence as well (i.e. oppression).
I think there is no denying that there was structural violence that Russians found objectionable in pre-invasion Ukraine. Specifically, the government’s efforts to “Ukrainize” the Russian-speaking population through enforcement of language laws and such. But that fact does not justify or legitimate the actual violence of Putin’s regime in response to that. Illegitimate violence begets more illegitimate violence, ad infinitum.
The only place a person can take a consistent moral stand is against violence, not on something nebulous like “self determination.”
I find myself increasingly occupying what seems a severely underpopulated “libertarian center”. The right is populist-authoritarian (trumpism), the left is socialist-authoritarian (wokism). The center – the traditional liberal (in the lower-case, European sense of the word, dating to the 18th century) center of American politics seems to have been abandoned.
A coworker and a regular customer are in the store. The customer is talking about the fact that he’s moving back to Florida (I hadn’t realized he was from Florida). My coworker asks him, “So, what’s it like there? Is it a good part of Florida?”
The man makes a thumbs up gesture. “Oh yes. It’s north central, west of Gainesville. Dixie County. Confederate flags everywhere, freedom, lots of trucks with gun racks. You don’t have to worry about city people, criminal types.”
“That’s excellent,” my coworker grins. “That’s perfect for you. K [name of his girlfriend] will like it there too.”
Notice how things are coded, in the above conversation. None of what was said was meant ironically, in any way. Terms like “city people, criminal types” refer to minorities and immigrants. There is such an immense amount of fear.
Here is a half-formed reaction to someone else’s thought.
I read a recent blog post by Niccolo Soldo (his alarmingly-named blog is called Fisted by Foucault).
I found his thesis quite thought provoking, but I can’t really feel that I’m in agreement. I’ll not attempt to summarize it here – you’d do better to just read it yourself – but I do have some reactions.
Essentially, nowhere in the essay does Soldo really grant any kind agency to the Ukrainians themselves. He blames the US for “provoking” Putin with the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. The problem with this is that… well, what if the Ukrainians themselves decided, after evaluating their geopolitical situation, that they wanted to try for NATO membership? How could the Europeans and US Government sincerely refuse? Sure, it provokes the Russians, but the Ukrainians are surely aware of the risks.
And I don’t mean to imply that Ukraine was in some way naïve. This may have been a quite intentional provocation on their part. Further, it may be that, at least at the start, it was only the current Ukrainian government and the country’s business elite who were on board with this. I’ve considered before that the regardless of the outcome of this war, Putin’s invasion will provide the Ukrainian “nation” with a nice, simple foundational myth such as they’ve never had before. Perhaps for a certain class of cynical Ukrainian nationalist (whether of liberal or illiberal inclination – there are plenty of both), the expected invasion and war would be a price worth paying for the outcome: a fervently patriotic Ukrainian populace (perhaps even including the ethnic Russians – look at the shift in public opinion in Odessa!) and a now-unconditional endorsement of NATO membership by the existing alliance. So sure, if you’ve got the right kind of cocky confidence, poke that bear right in the eye – if nothing else, it will certainly build character.
I don’t disagree with Soldo that the US’s faithless encouragement of this act was at core cynically unethical. The war progresses, and you see the evolution of the Ukrainian nation, with instances of undeniable heroism and demonstrations of character. I not only think it’s a mistake to deny the Ukrainians their own agency in this, I think that the US and Europe could take from the lesson a capacity for looking more empathetically at other victims of global bullying and misguided invasions: Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, (how far back do we want to take this?).
In fact, the knee-jerk pro-Ukraine stances adopted by most of the pundits and elites in the West (Justin E. H. Smith succinctly sums this up with the observation that the Ukrainian flag is suddenly a “a de-rigueur semiotic accessory”) seem to represent a turning back of the equally knee-jerk, self-hating “wokism” that had been increasingly dominating discourse. The Ukraine situation is holding up a mirror and enabling the West to see its best self, in a weird, admittedly jingoistic way (and maybe jingoism has always been a bit definitional for the West?) – to see what could be possible if we make an effort to hold liberal values uncynically.
Regardless, it’s unethical to deny the agency and self-determination of peoples – regardless of what great power they happen to have offended. It was unethical in Iraq, it was unethical (twice? three times?) in Afghanistan, it’s unethical now in Ukraine. But when confronted with the “facts on the ground” – country X is bullying us and denying us our self-determination – then resistance is warranted and appropriate. That includes the right to manipulate or lead on other powers to make that resistance as successful as possible. The Iraqis had a right to egg other powers to help them (e.g. Al-Qaeda’s rump, Russia, ISIS, or whatever). The Ukrainians have the same right (e.g. NATO). The extent to which the “Ukrainian on the street” is resisting, now, is a very strong indicator of the fact that this is, indeed, a question of self-determination, and not some astro-turfed, propaganda-induced pro-Westernism.
I didn’t follow the run-up to last week’s presidential election in South Korea very closely. In fact I lost track of it happening, and it took a local acquaintance more tuned in to world events than I to point out to me that it had happened last Wednesday.
But looking at and thinking about the results, I’m mostly unsurprised. I remain, as always, intrigued by the electoral map, though.
The ancient province of Jeolla stands out as starkly and quite isolatedly leftist – more so than previous maps I’ve looked at, it seems to me.
Meanwhile, suburban Seoul seems more consistently left-leaning, too. But the rest of the country swung even more rightward, more than compensating for these leftward trends in those limited areas, and ensuring a victory for the conservative, Mr Yoon.
I would almost hazard to say the map looks like evidence of increasing polarization. Which is to say, perhaps an Americanization of Korean politics? I don’t know.
So, these days, what’s on my mind? Obviously, the war in Ukraine. A half-formed thought.
It’s an important question, but difficult to ask: how is what’s happening right now in Ukraine qualitatively different from what happened in Iraq about 20 years ago? Except for the minor difference that we (Americans) are on the other side? I don’t raise this question because I am trying to defend Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but rather to make sure you can empathize with some of the never-resolved discomfort I felt about that other war. There are other differences. The US-led coalition was “bigger” or broader. The US military seemed at least somewhat more competent – perhaps at some things. But not more competent at all things: more competent killing people? Yeah, maybe; more competent not getting killed? Yeah, definitely; more competent at getting praised and welcomed with open arms by the liberated populace? Uh… not really. But mostly these are quantitative differences, not differences in the moral foundations of the enterprise.
At the geopolitical level, I think Putin and the Russian military have miscalculated.
Despite this (or preliminary to this), I should go on record that I actually agree with their “logic” on one key point: Ukraine, historically, is a part of Russia (or, depending on the point in history and the particular patch of land, Poland). Which is to say, Russian revanchist fantasies have some foundation in historical fact. The separate Ukrainian SSR was only carved off of Russia by Lenin in the 1920’s, and the Ukrainian national identity was essentially an artifice wrought by the half-hearted multiculturalist tendencies of the Soviet experiment. As Lenin said (hypocrisy alert), “The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.”
This Russian mistake, however, will be their undoing. If Ukraine lacked a “founding myth” and identity before now, Russia’s invasion is giving them one. From now on and far into the future, this Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the kind of foundational myth for Ukrainians that they never had before – and that will happen regardless of whether they win or lose the current war. If they win, then it will be a myth on the same level as George Washington and the American Revolution. If they lose, they become guerilla partisans like the Palestinians on the West Bank, and forge a distinct Ukrainian identity on that basis.
There is no scenario under which Ukraine fails to become a truly distinct nation in the geopolitical sense, as a direct consequence of Russia’s actions. And personally, I think that’s something that had been in doubt, until now. Putin’s “real-world geofiction” is not going to alter the map in the way that he hopes.
Here is the Ukrainian Highway Signs Agency, contributing to the information war:
The sign has been altered to say, loosely, “Fuck Off / Fuck Off More / Fuck Off Back to Russia”.
Just so you don’t think I never pay attention to current events, anymore: hey, what happened to the Russian ruble, this morning?
Russian ruble, Ukrainian rubble.
This tree was along a long and winding road.
I left the Gift Shop early, today, because we had an appointment with an electrician out here at the house.
This was perhaps (hopefully) the concluding chapter in our saga of the weird brown outs. After looking over our system, and trying some things out, and despite our being able to reproduce the described problem, the electrician decided that we had a corroded main breaker (in the box on the utility pole). I found this plausible, as when he flipped the breaker switch one time, it made ominous buzzing noises, and he said he saw it arcing. Which was kind of scary – the electrician jumped back in alarm at that.
So he installed a new breaker. We’re running the heat pump, no problem, the rest of the afternoon and evening. Meanwhile I set out with the chainsaw to replenish our much-reduced firewood supply – since we’ve been heating the house more with the wood stove these past weeks (due to the heat pump not running).
Here is a picture of the old, corroded main breaker that the electrician removed.
[daily log: walking, 5km; plumbing, 8hr; c106063072084s]
