Josh Thompson

Continuos Glucose Monitors (part 2)

2026-03-12T13:00:00+00:00

About a year ago, I wrote this post about continuous glucose monitors, that’s sorta ‘part 1’ of these two parts.

Since then, and parallel to this most recent time with the sensor, I’ve encountered improvements to the ecosystem. The sensor technology is way better, as is the app/rendering of the data.

The long story and comparison between the new system and the old

the technology has gotten way better and now costs $50/sensor instead of the $100/sensor it was as recently as a year ago, and I’ve updated my mental models in this space. It was time for an update on that post. Here it is.

My disappointment with the original implementation of the CGM device was that it was difficult to obtain and expensive, at $100 per two-week-long sensor, the sensor stored only a few hours of data on itself and needed frequent syncing, and the syncing was delicate. The phones NFC reader had to be almost exactly on the sensor itself. The apps for viewing the data were clunky and slow as well. There were two of them.

That’s all gone now! The default Amazon device is finally good enough! Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor.

I also don’t have diabetes, and don’t have any warnings signs of pre diabetes or ‘metabolic syndrome’. I’m simply an intensely curious person.

The last time I checked the ecosystem for continuous glucose monitors, the sensors were still costing $100 per sensor, which lasted for two weeks. Wildly expensive, for something that doesn’t have too much going on inside of it. The actual cost to manufacture the sensor must be low numbers of dollars, to perhaps maybe even less than a dollar per sensor, at a certain scale of production.

Anyway, in the greater united states the price is now down to $53 per two week sensor, and is finally available via Amazon, instead of jumping through insurance-related hoops.

improvements in the sensor/app

The sensor collects the data, the app displays it. The old sensor had a crappy app, and allowed for a brittle and slow third-party integration so the data could get off the ‘walled garden’ of the company that produced the sensor, and into a usable app. The integration was so slow I’d mostly use the default app, even though it was pretty bad.

Now the default app has a better UI than the third party app I used before, and the data syncs immediately. The device uses bluetooth to talk to the phone. The old CGM used near-field communication (the same technology for a cell phone’s ‘tap to pay’ feature. I had to tap my phone against the CGM to read it)

Now, because the device uses bluetooth, I no longer have to tap my phone to my upper arm to read the data. I open the app, and it pulls the data in in just a few seconds.

The app supports meal logging and exercise logging. (when one is exercising, often enough blood glucose goes up. Muscles are requesting energy, the liver responds by dumping a little bit of the 150 grams of glycogen it stores into the blood stream as glucose.)

The app is opinionated, and is designed f with diabetes, and labels all spikes in glucose as potentially troubling - if you log exercise it won’t count the rise as a negative thing. If it’s food-related, it counts the rise as a bad thing.

When I eat low-carb, no-sugar meals (which is my default meal) it’s sorta uncanny to see my blood sugar change not at all compared to the giant rise and eventual fall in my blood sugar after eating something carb-y and/or sugary.

How much glucose is in a human body anyway?

At one point I was trying to figure out how much glucose was in my body anyway. Here’s my math, I was surprised at how small the actual figure was.

Supposedly, people who weigh what I do have about 4.5 liters of blood in their body. Imagine four 1 liter bottles side by side.

normal blood glucose readings are above 70mg/dL and below 140 mg/dL

if we were to convert those readings to grams per liter, what would it be?

How much sugar would i add to each liter of water, before it has the same sweetness level is normal in blood?

Does 7 gram per liter sound right? It sounded plausible to me - 7 grams of sugar mixed into a liter of water would make it perceivably sweet. it couldn’t be 70 grams of glucose per liter of blood.

What about .7 grams of glucose per liter of blood?

TURNS OUT THAT IS THE CONVERSION!

so my entire circulating supply of blood, when the reading is on the lower side, contains 3.15 grams of glucose. And at the higher side, contains 6.3 grams of glucose. That’s wild to me. That figure is so much less than I expected.

I use a food scale for brewing coffee and baking, so I know how small 5 grams of something is. That’s how much baking soda I’ll put in a single loaf of banana bread. I might put 70 grams of brown sugar into that loaf.

so, when my blood glucose is on the lower side of things, at .7 gram of glucose per liter of blood, with 4.5 liters of blood, I’d have 3.15 grams of glucose, in my entire blood stream.

A high level of glucose is 140mg/dL, or 1.4 grams of glucose per liter of blood.

My whole blood stream would be containing about 6.3 grams of glucose, max. I notice that this is less than I expected, and I’m sorta impressed with how quickly perhaps my body can use what’s in the blood stream, and can get more glucose into it.

Now I’m more impressed with my body’s ability to metabolize carbs and sugar than I was before. I was sorta off by a factor of 5 or 10, in my mental model for how this worked in my body. Whoops. I’m also impressed at my body’s ability to manage digestion in such a way, that even when I eat tons of sweet and carby things, the blood sugar doesn’t go through the roof.

Giant qualifications about health and eating

Supremacy and purity culture/abstinence goes together. I talk a lot about food, but I don’t abstain from anything (including sex! but also food!) sorta ever. I’d rather feel extremely nourished, and when it comes to food, I do. When I talk about fasting or fasting essentialism stuff, it’s from a place of satiation and curiosity, sorta a sense of wow, I’m shocked to not yet feel hunger, how convenient all the other things I can do with my time/life/energy… sorta way. Not suffering. This concept is why I hate the concept of ‘counting calories’, either in or out. More on that another time.

I also try pretty hard to avoid anything that feels too eating-disorder adjacent. For fun, I read a memoir from someone with an eating disorder, to see if my relationship with food seemed sufficiently different than the one modeled in the book. Indeed, my suspicion/hope is satisfied, it doesn’t seem like an eating disorder.

It’s simply an idiosyncratic, adaptable/flexible/consistent form of feeding myself, alternating between periods of not eating, interspersed mostly with eating really nice, healthy meals.

I mix in a bit of ‘working out’. Same as how I sorta hate american hunting culture, I sorta hate gym culture.

anyway… I’ve been freaking loving these “isometric bar holds” I’ve been doing. That’s part 1, and I have a part 2 soon to land. It’s been huge, for me, and a bunch of friends have tried these lifts with me, and they give pretty good reviews.

mixing it all together - slightly timing meals, and eating plant fat + mushrooms + cruciferous stuff

The original thesis was mostly that intermittent fasting is cool (like skipping breakfast) and otherwise model sugar as to be avoided and bread-type-things as overall delicious but best avoided. Fat, especially olive oil, I treat as a health food. The more the better.

I hope we all add at least 10-15 g of olive oil to every meal for the rest of our lives.

if there’s enough fat, and/or glucose isn’t extremely plentiful/overly-saturating, eventually the body burns through some glucose stores (seemingly mostly in the liver, a few hundred grams of it) and then turns on this whole cool-as-heck freaking ‘energy generation via ketone bodies’ thing.

the tl;dr is the body CAN make glucose out of fat, and can metabolize fat directly for energy.

The liver can make molecules out of fat (it can also make glucose out of fat), and some of these molecules are called ‘ketones’.

and then mitochondria, which usually use glucose to generate energy can also generate energy via these ketone bodies.

There’s urine tests one can use to measure ketones, or breath ketone detectors, or blood ketone detectors. All look at different molecules, but in all cases nearly levels of any of the looked-for molecules count as ‘being in ketosis’

Mid levels of ketone readings, in the blood, is like .4 grams per liter, once that system is in operation. Close in amount to the amount of glucose that is in the blood.

And it’s not ‘glucose OR ketones’, it’s always ‘glucose AND ketones’. There simply will not be any ketones made by the liver until the glucose levels stay low for a long enough time. Then the liver begins to make ketone bodies, along with glucose.

A reluctant book recommendation: Brain Energy

I encountered a few more books. Turns out the brain functions pretty differently in a high/medium sugar environment vs. low-sugar and ketones environment.

Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer was… adequate. I sorta hate books written by western doctors, usually. They seem patronizing and self-aggrandizing, but maybe that’s me projecting my own least favorite parts of myself onto the author. lol.

The book Grain Brain was interesting enough to justify renting it from the library and listening to the audiobook. I dislike something that seems to be common among books written by medical professionals. It seems nakedly condescending, and paternalistic, at times. alas, still worth sifting through. The focus on the brain was distinctive. After reading it, I began to appreciate that my brain is like three pounds of pure fat, and my spinal cord and the main parts of the 11 or 22 cranial nerves is probably most of another pound of fat.

Another splash of olive oil. Some coconut oil, too. Those are the two plant fats I eat lots of.

Crucial point of distinction: it can be done without meat

Nearly every book I’ll link to, in this piece, and in most books one encounters about a low-carb high-fat consumption pattern, seems to take as a given that meat can or should be consumed, daily, or in every single meal, and the authors (maybe they’re too propagandized by the american agricultural industry) cannot bring themselves to even mention the possibility of this thing being done with zero or very low amounts of meat. Some of the books seriously advocate for the ‘carnivore diet’, which is mostly eating pure meat.

sidebar: after originally writing these words I sorted out what ‘glutamate’ was, and how interesting it is now when I notice that some cancer cells are known to be able to ferment glutamate IF glucose isn’t available.

I almost don’t eat any meat. I do sometimes eat some fish. (salmon or sardines, very occasionally. Certainly at least once a month, never close to daily)

Mushrooms are a complete protein - every essential amino acid is available via mushrooms.

The paper Edible mushrooms: A potential source of essential amino acids, glucans and minerals. Int. J. Food Sci. Technol. could be an interesting read. It was for me.

So, a few years ago, I started ensuring mushrooms are present in my diet regularly, as consistently as some people might eat meat, and I think with a similar sense of savory nourishment. I literally tripped over the agaricus bisporus mushrooms at a local park, and have since then been picking all my mushrooms from there and I eat them regularly. I’ve foraged dozens of pounds of mushrooms from the park, now.

But before foraging them from the park, I’d always have mushrooms on hand from a local grocery store, and would add them to my meal, described below.

Autophagy

The body is always taking old cells apart for parts, and rebuilding structures as needed. Some cell types (epethelial cells) regenerate/renew relatively quickly, lasting for just a few days or weeks, and others turn over slowly, lasting for months.

‘Autophagy’ is the sciency term for this. The process is determined by mitochondria. The cell doesn’t decide it’s time for itself to die, mitochondria decide it’s time for the cell to die, and basically induce a suicide for the cell. (the book, power, sex, and suicide is all about mitochondria and their rather interesting relationship to the cells they operate within and around)

healthy mitochondria are hella smart, and it’s very very nice for the body to do some autophogy. Fasting and fasting-mimicking nutrition patterns encourage autophagy. The cool thing is, it seems mitochondria are smart enough to consume to unhealthiest parts of the body. So, one can sorta replace the oldest/most-worn-out parts of oneself, if one is having lots of autophagy going on.

Augophagy is low when glucose levels are high. Atophagy is high when glucose levels are low and ketone bodies are high.

Meat is wildly over-consumed

Something that annoys me a little in the ketosis-discussing books is how the authors (or posters online) seem to all hold oddly strong beliefs about the “obvious” need for nearly daily consumption of meat!

I find this super disappointing. It seems possible that meat is not bad for you. Yet the consumption of factory-raised-and-slaughtered animal products, the scale at which it’s happening, and the legit concerns about the actual product, even if one had no ethical qualms about the animal slaughter itself… i remember when I was eating meat regularly and couldn’t imagine stopping eating it. Bacon was in my daily omelette, I didn’t think I could give it up. Then I read eating animals and that’s basically the last time I ate meat. I have had a few bites of meat here and there in the decade that’s elapsed since I read the book.

I’m certainly not a vegan.

I eat eggs, so many eggs, almost never less than three per day, and I put heavy cream in my coffee, usually, and sometimes eat cheese, and I bake with butter. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve bought meat in a grocery store and taken it home to cook, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve not eaten at least three eggs every single day, except for rare days when I’m fasting. I keep dancing around the idea of eliminating eggs from my consumption, but have not found a way yet.

I now think it probable that eating a lot of meat is unhealthy. Drinking milk seems obviously problematic, for the same reasons as meat, and maybe some extra ones as well. (animals when drinking milk in normal states are in a period of growth, so the rich hormone profile of animal milk, reasonable for babies, makes less sense for adults. Milk to me is sorta carby, too. Anything that ends in -ose is a sugar. Glucose, fructose, lactose)

So, if one takes meat and most dairy away, and if one treats grains like bread and rice as unhealthy and best avoided - is there even anything left to eat?

yes. endless varieties of vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and an abundance of olive oil.

So, that’s what I eat, nearly exclusively. For things to taste ‘good’ vs. bland (I grew up in a white peoples cooking culture - bland and unseasoned) I use lots of spices. I keep a big bag of ginger and garlic nearby - every meal gets a little of that, diced. Spicy peppers. Salt & pepper, of course, and I’ve lately been spicing the meal with garam masala, curry, tumeric, cumin, and more. I’ll splash some lemon juice and scallions over the whole thing when plating it, and the food is so good that even now, after making variations of this meal hundreds of times, it is still remarkable to me how good it tastes.

On meat & protein & ‘gaining muscle’

sometimes I’m a bit angry when I’m penning some words, if it’s not obvious.

there is something in gym culture that is distasteful to me. Seems like ‘getting big muscles’ is the presumed good and ideal outcome of nearly all exercise? At least from one POV. There’s people who add tons of protein powder to every meal. There’s things floating around that says someone “should” eat 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, or per kg of lean body mass. I’ve never counted calories and never counted grams of protein. When I do count up my regular protein consumption, it works out to way less than half the ‘recommended’ amount of protein. I rock climb, and would gladly accept a lower weight, if it didn’t come with any strength penalty, or hunger. No meat, no protein powder, and I’m doing just fine, though I must mention I don’t consider myself to be particularly good at rock climbing.

even a gram of protein per KG of lean body mass is wild, to me. No one’s body is simply adding muscle to the frame because there’s extra protein in the system.

I simply wanna name that, because I’ve been seeing a comical amount of new muscle lately with these isometric bar holds, for the first time in my life. Small amounts of muscle, small amounts of protein, small amounts of high-quality exercise-adjacent stimulus.

Calories in/Calories out

I hold the Calories In/Calories Out model, for what is implied on both the inputs side, and energy expenditure side. Literally never in my life have I looked at the calory count on a food package. literally all I look at is the quantity of carbs.

But it’s physics …

say the CI/CO people.

I also don’t know what it means to ‘burn a calorie’. Like, whatever is meant when someone says “walking burns so and so calories.” or “i ate a , so now I have to <'exercise' a certain amount>."

I think that mental model is unhelpful at best.

The body manages itself pretty well. weight gain is driven by insulin levels. If insulin is stuck in the system, cells that can store fat, will store fat. If insulin is low, the body can access energy in normal ways, including metabolizing fat that already exists in the system. If insulin is kept high, eventually ‘insulin resistance’ happens, all sorts of other troublesome effects happen.

‘Weight gain’ is extremely NOT related to ‘eating more calories than one expends’. The Case Against Sugar goes through the stories of so many different people groups who encountered industrialized food systems, even into the 1950s. Sugar/carbs causes the blood glucose levels to rise, and eventually insulin gets secreted to bring the glucose back down, but if more and more stuff is in the system resulting in insulin needing to stay up, bad things happen.

Sustained, ‘chronic’ reliance upon insulin leads straight to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is the same as insulin resistance, is the same as pre-diabetes.

Fasting will very, very quickly bring back insulin sensitivity, if it’s been absent. “exercise” cannot address the issues of elevated levels of insulin, except for a bit of movement after eating, maybe?

I use my glucose sensor, a low carb meal + a five minutes of walking sometims around seems to let the blood sugar levels stay completely flat. Even if I don’t walk around at all, after this ‘sorta weird’ meal I usually eat, there’s zero bump to blood sugar, in a way that I maybe seems surprising. It was to me, at least.

This whole thing is talking about food, and digestion. The gut is pretty cool. (I really liked Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ).

Part of oral health is keeping the mouth clean and inhospitable to bacteria while letting the mouth do its own thing.

Fasting and/or no-sugar eating seems obviously gentle on the teeth, compared to using the mouth constantly.

I stumbled across a thing called oil pulling once. I saw that coconut oil was one of the suggested oils.

I already think of coconut oil as nearly pure ketones. The story goes:

MCT (medium chain triglycerides) Oil is really expensive and fancy ‘pure liquid ketones’, supposedly.

Coconut oil has a lot of the biological precursors of those ketone-specific form of MCTs, and is antibacterial, and great for the skin, lips, body anyway.

It seems that most people who subscribe to oil pulling spit out the oil, but it cannot go into a sink because it contributes to clogged pipes.

The solution that seemed easiest to me is to pick an oil I already consume and think highly of, and simply swish it around for a bit before eating it, so that’s now what I do with coconut oil, in a way that relates to oral health.

I also found some gum with nano-hydroxyapatite, seems to help resurface the teeth, and floss, and have a home de-scaler so I can make sure plaque doesn’t build up around my permanent retainer.

So far, my oral health has been nice in a way it’s historically not been, but the biggest intervention I made was fixing my tongue tie and my mouth no longer is open when I sleep or when I’m awake, so that alone could have more of an improving effect on my oral health than all over interventions combined.

Mitochondria are cool as heck

I was one of the folks with a certain mental model of mitochondria as sorta passive ‘energy making things’, left over from some high school biology textbook.

I quite liked this book about cellular biology: Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Mitochondria as energy generation (including the aerobic oxygen+glucose pathway, the anerobic glucose fermentation pathway, and the pathway that uses ketones to generate energy, when there’s not glucose in the environment).

The ‘suicide’ part of the title of that book refers to how mitochondria decide “for the cell” when the cell is to be deconstructed for parts. From the cell’s POV, it’s an induced suicide, from the mitochondria’s POV, it’s taking apart a structure for the bare materials and re-assembling a fresh or related or different structure. In american scientific english, that is called ‘autophagy’, and healthy/happy mitochondria do a lot of selective, necessary cell removal.

I hate the title. Again, american medical establishment paternalistic talk. And yet, worth sifting through. Talks about low-sugar brain function vs. high-sugar brain function. The former is quite a bit different and improved from the latter.

I’d never conceived of a high-fat low-carb feeding pattern as a tool for ‘managing moods’ until pretty recently, but I encountered it on reddit (example search), eventually found the above book, and was glad I did.

note on fast-adjacent things

I keep noticing a pattern when medical people talk about this low-glucose state, and I think they’re overstating aspects of it. But maybe the technology wasn’t available when they wrote these books - a good continuous glucose monitor + app integration became widely available only in 2024 or however long Lingo figured out how to get $50 two-week CGM sensors on Amazon available to anyone with a credit card.

as I’ve read some of the books like finally finding an e-book copy of [Thomas Seyfried’s book]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13719723-cancer-as-a-metabolic-disease?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=B9UvTfpzvN&rank=1() that kept getting mentioned in other texts.

Cancer as a metabolic disease, libraries and had no luck getting a physical copy….

I found the PDF on thepiratebay, and started skimming around the document. I notice that I sorta find myself eating in a way that could be called ‘keto-ish’ sometimes, was curious to see what they said about it all.

For instance, they talk about caloric restriction a lot, but I don’t think that’s part of the solution at all. Turns out cancer can also or maybe ferment something besides exclusively glucose - sometimes maybe it can do glutamate too? (if your next question is the same as mine, ‘what he hell is glutamate?’ and you google ‘sources of glutamate’, you’ll say “oh that makes sense”)

If someone drops meat out of their diet, and backfills it with cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and olive oil & coconut oil, and occasional salmon & sardines (those fish in particular!), that person probably wouldn’t consider themselelves to be starving, but while keeping that pattern, their blood sugar will go to levels that some medical people think is ‘dangerously low’ (it’s not) and their body will go into pretty hefty ketosis.

I think then there’s no sugar in the system for fermentating energy systems to ferment. Supposedly cancer cells can also ferment glutamine. I didn’t know what glutamine was and how it was different than glutamate, or what their relationships to anything else was. a med student on r/medicalschoolanki had a beautiful answer.

anyway, knowing now what glutamate is, could you imagine a way to have less of it floating around, because just like glucose the body can apparently fabricate it itself? One would simply stop eating meat, if one was eating meat. Knowing that perhaps cells can ferment glutamine same as glucose, or that they can in at least some situations, was an interesting connection for me to make. I think there’s plenty of other good reasons to gnerally not eat meat, though. (except for, again, occasionally, sardines and salmon, or maybe fish overall but not very much. Certainly never pigs, dinosaur birds (chickens) or cows).

So I think a crucial mistake ppl might make when thinking they’re avoiding sugar is not avoiding the glutamate. Model an ideal nutrition source as ‘not glucose’ and ‘not glutamate’, and drop meat out of one’s diet completely, and good things might happen. all the meat-based amino acids float around the blood stream perhaps, same as sugar?

anyway…. I want to introduce ‘the meal’ and eating it once or twice-ish a day. And always eating once or twice-ish a day. If this meal is one of those regular meals, it might count as…. I donno. solves a lot of problems, in a pretty humble package, kinda. But still enough pretentiousness that it can be appreciated, and it’s delicious enough and can be done in just a few steps. A preference for spending most of the time not eating also gets fun. perhaps.

Visualizing Mitochondria

I had always thought of mitochondria as sorta passive blobs that did biochemistry to generate ATP, which was used by the body to ‘do shit’.

Turns out they are busy as hell.

A book titled Power, Sex, and Suicide really did it all for my brain when it comes to mitochondria. (The book is about mitochondria)

For instance, cells do not want to ‘die’ and strenuously resist apoptosis until the very end. It’s mitochondria that get in there, and in a rather surgical and ruthless way, sorta eviscerate the cell from the inside out, and then they leave the cell and carry on in other places

I thought mitochondria were stuck inside of cells, floating, sorta like plastic balls floating on the surface of a pool.

Turns out that isn’t the case at all.

The first 3 of these videos were the first ones I saw and really surprised me. As I’ve since tried to re-find those videos from years ago, I’ve linked a few other short timelapse videos of mitochondrial movement/dynamics

5 hr timelapse mitochondria, in like 6 seconds

30 minutes of Mitochondrial transport along microtubules, 10 second timelapse

11 second video, mitochondria moving in a cell

Mitochondrial transfer between pre-adipocytes?

mito movement (12 seconds)

Golgi and Mitochondria Dynamics in Fibroblast Cells Under a Fluorescence Microscope

Visualizing mitochondrial trafficking in neurons

Mitochondrial dynamics through cell division

A note on calories in/calories out

this model, ‘calories in calories out’, is total bullshit. so many issus with the input side of calories, and in the ‘output’ side of calories.

I AM SO SORRY I CANNOT HELP BUT LEAD WITH HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT! I’ll explain.

Unfortunately, though, I never really ever thought CICO was true, it felt intuitively wrong to me my whole life.

Even the last youtube video above, right after the timestamp it opens to, the creator says “too much nutrition”.

It’s not that! It’s not too much energy or nutrition or over-feeding, it’s too much glucose and ‘too much’ and ‘too long’.

Body composition things is OBVIOUSLY a hormone issue! It’s so screamingly obvious and assumed as true by every other related domain that it’s wild that anyone still says CICO! If that were the case, hormone therapies of all kinds would not be an option! Weight gain and loss and muscle recomposition is such a known part of horomone therapies. They’re either the entire point, or they’re the entire obvious downside.

if the body is soaked in sugar for too much of the time, insulin gets created and sent into the system in excessive quantities. Insulin has an effect on hormones of all sorts. Insulin resistance is synonymous with miss-calibrated everything else.

“working hard” is a waste compared to “moving enough that the muscles are involved in drawing glucose out of the blood, if there is 1) too much sugar in the blood, or 2) there is sugar in the digestive tract that needs to be metabolized and released into the bloodstream, _because there’s no where else for it to go.

Is it possible for the intestines to preferentially avoid digesting sugar and/or carbs? Can it be ‘spent’ in the gut biome, instead of going into the blood stream? If a dog were to eat shit post-sugary meal, would it taste sweeter than a regular shit?

the body absolutely does not need any sort of steady input of nutrition, to maintain itself in a perfectly suitable fashion.

‘calorie restricted’, ‘calorie deficit’ is the same attitude

calorie deficit is propaganda, counterproductive

to think in the concept of calorie deficit, or to try to retain it like an emotional pool noodle is harmful.

source is everything. Fat is far better as fuel than sugar, which is obvious when you see both burn in a fire. fat will puddle, bubble, it obviously has a higher heat retention capacity, catagorically different than cellulose (woody stuff, bready stuff, wet sugar).

That said, here’s some interesting videos I recently watched on mitocohndria.

(I was looking for some videos I’d seen where mitochondria were ‘tagged’ with some thing and able to be seen moving around)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBmtzT4VTU

Mitochondria generate energy inside of neurons & mitochondria prefer to consume ‘ketone bodies’

ketone bodies are made by the liver, same sorta process as the liver makes glucose. (the liver makes glucose, it stores it, and releases into the blood stream if the muscles or whatever asks for it)

ketone bodies theoretically generate like 10x molecules of ATP per input molecule than glucose molecule. (8 in, 30 out?) I don’t exactly remember. It’s the ‘krebs cycle’ or ‘cytric acid cycle’.

The krebs cycle happens inside of the physical structure of a mitochondria. That sorta grooved membrain thing. It’s a shape that maximizes internal surface area, same as the folding grooves of the brain.

mitochondrial health and ‘brain/neuron health’ are 1:1. I did not know until like a year ago that there was any correlation between ketone bodies and mental/emotional stuff. read that again

the book power sex and suicide posits that mitichondria are their own type of organizem and sorta colonized/invaded/helped regular cells, sorta an inside out version of the harmonious relationship between bacteria and plants in the “rhiozome”. (in the top layer of soil, plants deposit sun/water combined energy, it’s eaten by bacteria, bacteria create as a result certain metabolic products that is then taken up and used by the plant.)

These systems could be considered to have their own independent existences, but happily exist with each other, wherever there’s metabolizing to be done.

brain energy was an adequate read.

a huge tldr of all this is to just get a continuous blood glucose monitor, eat a high fat, low-carb, low protein meal next, and then begin successive 18 hour fasts. perhaps within one day (for me) but maybe more one will see one’s glucose levels stay pretty low, except during exercise or activity. climbing, walking, running, throwing a frisbee, walking stairs, etc.

Though if I did those things after eating a big meal, and seeing my blood sugar go up, with a little activity, it would sorta dive right back to normal. At least until a little more of the meal was digested, then it might go up again.

big part of the demand side for getting blood sugar down is ‘any process in the body requesting energy’ so if one walks long/fast enough (or, my favorite stim, walking up and down a few flights of stairs) for the body to request energy, one can see one’s blood sugar plummet, in the space of a few minutes.

It’s like wringing out a sponge, how quickly the few nalgine bottles worth of blood in our body to pick up 4 grams of glucose, it gets pulled out of the blood and the digestive tract can dump another few grams of glucose, which it’ll do smartly and with reasonable timing, if you set it up well enough for success.

✨ The Meal ✨

todo: make this its own page

I have a meal that I eat basically every day. If I eat a meal that isn’t this meal, my other meal for the day will be this meal. I eat almost exclusively twice-ish a day. Sometimes less, sometimes more, never breakfast.

TODO: Add a photo of the finished result?

Google doc of printable instructions

I like it because while I can cook it easily, I always make it in bulk and get a few meals out of a single session with the cutting board/cast iron skillet meal vibe.

I note that it is something that in some communities is a big deal, or even an impossibility.

It’s a ‘keto-friendly’ meal, functionally zero carbs or zero net carbs. This meal as eaten is both deeply satiating and will cause not a single point increase in your blood sugar. It HATE counting calories and never have and never will, and i dislike the concept of ‘macros’, but this meal is zero carb, high fat, medium protein, zero meat, some eggs.

i don’t eat meat which matters to me when I talk about keto things, because some keto communities eat wild, horrifying amounts of meat. Cows, pigs, chickens. I don’t eat those anymore. I do sometimes eat fish.

But I can easily go weeks without eating any sort of meat, not even fish, and not miss it or think about it or feel that I am in any way nutrient deficient.

I’ve cooked this meal or a version of this meal every day for at least 12 years. I’ve cooked this meal in like 18 countries, many dozens of kitchens. It’s easy to grocery shop for, flexible based on if any produce is in the refrigerator and going bad, but can also be made out of vegetables that only slowly go bad.

onions and carrots, for instance, will keep for a long time (weeks), and can be a perfect base of the meal. But it can also take spinach or any other ‘delicate’ vegetable.

I cook it because I am dumb and lazy and am sometimes using unfamiliar kitchens. I am not dumb, but some people have literally made fun of me for learning some of the things I’ve learned related to the kitchen, making fun of me for not having already known something. what the fuck.

for instance, mushrooms can be/want to be cooked ‘dry’ on a pan. No oil needed. Lots of veggies can accommodate this method.

Also, if the pan is getting hot or you want to steam the contents a bit you can add water to a hot pan while the food is cooking, and the temperature of the pan goes down, food sticks a bit less, and sometimes steam is created. I was 36, burning food to the bottom of a stainless steel pan in an unfamiliar kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to scrape burnt food off the bottom of that pan, when I learned this, and immediately found the obviousness of ‘add water to a pan’ breathtaking. I use it often when cooking, now, even in my cast iron, and love it for me.

today’s 10,000, explanation

it’s good as hell. I’ve gotten particularly good with it in the last year or so, but even the ‘basic’ version of this meal is delicious, and many others have reported as such to me.

When I do my standard, current, at-home meal, it’s mouth wateringly good. And still, I cook it because it’s the fastest way of putting heat and food together and then shoveling the results into my mouth.

People who know what they’re talking about have remarked on the speed and voracity with which I sometimes consume my food. The first time this was pointed out to me, in such a gentle and interesting way, I was instantly shocked that I’d never noticed it before. I’ve since gained lots of ‘mindfullness’ around food, or at least I can observe myself and have awareness when I’m deep into what seems to be pouring food into my body (and sometimes water) in a way that gives ‘camel’.

todo: insert photo of the pan sitting one step away from where I type these words…

I have a printable version of this ‘recipe’/instruction combination.

I could/should include perhaps a timelapse video that shows the prep. It’s relatively quick, and I consider myself skillful with a chef’s knife and enjoy the chopping of the veggies and the prep of the meal.

Because of a few decisions/tools/workflows, this meal is also for me easy to set up and easy to clean up. I can finish cooking with a cleaner workspace than what I start with, because most of the meal time is spent with the food sitting quietly & sauteeing, not needing active tending. It makes zero dirty pots and pans.

side note, the convection cook top unit I use makes it even easier to get this meal done quickly and effortlessly. It’ll maybe show up in the time lapse some day.

Google doc of printable instructions

interestingness is next to beauty, sorta. I think deliciousness is next to beauty, too, and this meal sometimes tastes delicious and interesting.

Basically, as many of the first line with one or two items from the second line for bulk:

mix as much of this as possible: garlic, ginger, tumeric, lemon juice. Salt, cumin. Mushrooms. Spiciest peppers possible, at least a little

Fill volume of cooking container with one: Broccoli, cabbage, carrots, onions,

Oil/fat: olive oil or coconut cream.

Acid: lemon.

Mix it all together, cook it up, add eggs, mix the eggs in somehow, cook it all through, serve it up. Top with green onions, squeeze a lemon slice over it if you can, and then pour a HEAVY drizzle of EVOO, maybe sriracha or something spicy. It’s a meal, satisfying as hell.

I can eat this meal once a day and hardly even detect hunger in my body between meals.

Cast Iron is crucial, and a ‘cookie turner’ spatula. This would mean there’s iron in a very healthy way.

The point isn’t iron, it’s ease and effortlessness. I can scrape my pan clean with a metal spatchula if I want, i never have to put water on it to clean.

It perhaps makes sense in the video timelapse… that I’ve not yet published. I’ve got some time lapses of chunks of this meal prep. Maybe I’ll just combine them all and link it here.

i recently started adding fresh squeezed lemon to all sorts of things. And energy generation in the body is named the citric acid cycle, so maybe the deliciousness relates to how useful it is to have in the body.

Similar as the ‘lemon in lots of things’, I started wearing socks inside of my climbing shoes, virtually 100% of the time, from the first time I tried it. I never want to stick my bare feet in a climbing shoe again and it’s unlikely I ever will. consider trying it with a sense of curiosity, if you can. I’m weird, but not for this. Thank you, person who introduced me to these things.

Garlic, as much as I can get in a meal and in my life. I found this delightful book in the library attached to the botanic gardens. I was already pro-garlic because of taste, and now I’m all the more pro-garlic.

Garlic is a ‘natural antibiotic’, but unlike most normal antibiotics, it works on both gram positive and gram negative bacteria cell wall types. penaccilin works on only one of those types of bacteria. something something all bacteria have cell walls that are either gram positive or gram negative, but it affects how they interact (or don’t interact) with traditional antibiotics.

Super cool. Again, this book that I stumbled across was great. Garlic has been used sorta by everyone, across time, to do useful things for all sorts of life-related domains. this 1996 book is a nice compendium of what is known in english about garlic, the chemical compounds within it, why they seem to do what they do

Pulse oximiter, blood oxygen level & breath holding

this could be it’s own article.

There’s an interesting little device one can get off amazon, it’s quite cheap, a fingertip pulse measuring device, it also detects blood oxygen levels.

footnote? “technically something about oxygen carrying capacity of available total as detected in the capillary network of the fingertip”

I got it around the same time that I started using a ‘breathholding training’ app. I wanted to know what my pulse was, and this was a simple way to measure.

So, I can clip this to my finger, and immediately see my pulse printed out, and the blood oxygen level.

And, turns out that when doing breath holding training, the blood oxygen level sometimes does really interesting things, and I’ve not seen other people talk about this yet.

I can watch my blood oxygen level change (or not change) as I hold my breath. Sometimes I’d be at the end of my breath, it felt like my body was screaming for me to take another breath, and my blood oxygen level would be close to the max value, 99 or 100%.

I noticed this but it didn’t really mean anything of interest to me, for months.

I can do some breath holding training, and do a ‘one rep max’ breath hold test, and always was able to do above two minutes, maybe close to three. with a little practice, I found myself easily doing three-something minutes.

Sometimes during long breath holds, when my body was still, I’d see the blood oxygen level tick downward to the low 90s or 80s. Nothing too severe.

And then a tiny realization clicked, it was based off observations of how I sometimes observed my blood oxygen level going down, and then DOWN QUITE A LOT! and then popping right back up within seconds once I started breathing again. I gained an appreciation for how quickly blood that was allowed to pick up oxygen would reach the tips of my finger, to be read by the blood oxygen level sensor.

turns out the thing that makes you want to breath is buildup of CO2, not lowering blood oxygen levels. This was always something I knew academically, but I’d not had much experience with it.

So, a few weeks ago, a new mental model of my own respiration and metabolic processes clicked into place. I’ll do deep breathing for at least 30 seconds before starting a breath hold - in my mind, I’m running blood that has some amount of CO2 in it through my lungs, and i’m draining it of CO2 faster than my body is placing CO2 back in the blood cells.

I believe my body circulates my entire 4.5 liters of blood at least once a minute, so this deep breathing moves more CO2 out of my blood than normally would be displaced if I were not doing that deep breathing.

Then, when I take a deep breath and hold it, I have much more space in my blood supply to store CO2, which is being generated, slowly, throughout the breath hold.

This means I can hold my breath much longer before the same amount of ‘pressure to breath’ builds. And, consequentially, much more of the oxygen that is in my blood gets consumed, before I take another breath.

The same day I had this realization, I did far and away the longest breath hold that I’d ever done - over four minutes. I was shocked! It’s so interesting.

I also was able to see my blood oxygen level go far lower than I ever had before. At no point did I experience any sort of cognitive effect or any sort of loss of conciousness, but I was comforably holding my breath while watching the pulse oximiter show values in the 70s, and then even into the 60s.

It always dips a few more points after I start breathing, so the lowest values I’ve ever seen are always a few seconds after I begin breathing. This time I even saw it dip down to 51% for a brief moment, and then a few breaths later it was back to 100%.

It feels like a form of training, no different than sprint workouts or heavy isometrics or climbing - I am imagining that some aspect of my respiratory or circulatory system is getting ‘tuned up’ by this practice. I find it deeply regulating and peace-promoting.

I use the ‘STAmina Apnea Trainer app’ for android. it’s free. There seems to be an iphone version too.

here’s the app

I always do the breath holding while lying in my bed or hammock, by the way. Zero interest in water, never will have any.

I also sometimes am in deeper-than-usual ketosis, when doing the breath holding training, and that almost certainly extends how long I can hold my breath. I’ve not tested it very much, but maybe i’ll update this section with more on that sometime.

‘ketone bodies’ whatever the heck those are

this is extra drafty, I’ve been curious about this all, and I’ve long ago occasionally used some ‘ketone urine test strips’ (like this on amazon, i don’t do affiliate anything fwiw)

and those are fine, whatever, but sorta hard to read, and usually I was sorta low, but way more often than I’d expected I was getting positive ketone measurements.

also, I didn’t/don’t have too much of a mental model of how much is what, what it means. blah blah blah.

Those are just a few dollars on Amazon, so just a few cents per test. But still not free.

More expensive per test, but something that was more interesting to me was a blood ketone testing kit. It’s basically a blood sugar testing kit (finger prick, then measure with a disposable stick) which I’ve used in the past, prior to my first test with the continuous blood glucose monitor. I’d never had them both at the same time. Anyway, the first batch of those tests, I remember being surprised at how often my body was in slight ketois. .2 mmol/liter or .3 or .4, and ‘nutritional ketosis’, whatever that is, is generally considered by american medical people to begin at .5 mmol/liter. I’d be at/above that value quite often, too, when doing my normal nutritional pattern around ‘the meal’, I describe elsewhere.

Anyway, that was a long time ago.

More recently though has been a breath ketone measuring device! this is what I got

It’s cost-per-use is free, and I’ve always noticed and/or wondered about value changes around exercise, fasting, pseudo-fasting, binging-on-pizza-and-ice-cream or having regular or occasional foods like that.

Sorta testing the Standard American Diet on myself sometimes, and also testing my normal/default eating pattern.

the breath meter is super easy, way easier than a BLOOD PRICK of course, generates zero waste, is just battery powered. Perfect.

But then I was like “what tf is this thing measuring”, and what is the possible relationship between the number this thing prints out, and metabolic processes inside my own body.

I’ve so far seen plenty of readings as low as 1 for myself, including times that I had thought I wouldn’t be in any form of ketosis, and values of 4-6 WAY more frequently than I would have thought.

It does read zero, as well, at reasonable times. I’ve also seen values as high as 46!!!

I’m pretty healthy, I like how I eat, and it turns out I’m in ketosis way more than I ever thought I would be, and I think it’s a big deal.

Basically, it’s easy, healthy, and I’m low-key advocating for more people to consider some of the same patterns. It’s a bit feral, unconventional, and even low-capitalism. My personal implementation of these norms are very interesting to me, and I’d have done more of this long ago if I knew some of what I know now.

breath acetone is what the breath thing measures - acetone is one of the three main ‘ketone bodies’ (whatever the heck those are) the other one is what is measured in the urine test strip, and the third is measured in the blood.

Turns out they all seem to sorta follow each other, but I don’t know how closely.

breath meter -> acetate (might be/probably ‘downstream’ of being burned for energy)

urine stick -> ACETOACETIC ACID (might be ‘upstream’ of being burned for energy)

blood stick ->

I sometimes have done all this experimentation while exercising, or various amounts of time since my last meal, or my last high-glucose meal. I now have an intuition for the answers to all these options.

I seem to usually have positive values on the breath ketone meter, even at times I thought I wouldn’t. Sometimes the values are quite high, _even when I am consuming my normal eating patterns, which doesn’t set out to accomplish any of this kind of thing.

More lists of books that have been quite interesting to me

Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer I was able to find the PDF on the peer to peer file sharing prot=ocol
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life best cell biology book I’ve read. Dense, I was able to get it via the library’s interlibrary loan system, was exceptional, mitochondria have a sorta…. adversarial relationship with the cell. Seems like mitochondria developed independent/before cells, very interesting relationship between volume of mitochondria, density of them within cells, some biological power laws that are the energy equivalent of the size/volume power laws. And the book has a great name! which serves as an outline of the concepts: the three big divisions of what mitochondria as active organelles do is: 1) generate power in impressive and diverse ways, 2) drive and control the different sorts of functions and roles the cells create, like sexual bimorphism, and 3) if mitochondria decide the cell needs to die, even if the cell does not quite want to die (it does not) the mitochondria induce the cell to kill itself. It’s no more difficult to read then the power broker/the story of robert moses

Footnotes

Demonstration Junction Repair on Downing in Denver

2025-12-09T13:00:00+00:00

author’s note: This is a story about an demonstration I filmed. I demonstrated a proof-of-concept for ‘intersection repair’.

Lots/most intersections are broken in many ways. They don’t work very well, at least some of the time, for some of the users. Like anything broken, it can be repaired. I’ve got an interesting-to-me approach to repairing a broken intersection.

Traffic cones are the main tool, and I use those cones to shape and define the spaces for the cars.

on a recent warm saturday night I stumbled across of traffic cones, spread rather widely in a local neighborhood.

Earlier in the week Silva Construction had been doing concrete work all around the area. ~~I'm not sure what they were doing, but they were scattered all about the neighborhood.~~ turns out they’re repairing broken sidewalk! I’ve wanted this to happen for so long, Silva Concrete is great! Not only did they informally sponsor this proof of concept, monday morning they showed up and used the cones to block of the concrete they were repairing. 🎉

TODO: add link to photo album of the before/after treatment of Corona

I’ve done a lot with cones before, of course. Its come to be a refined process.

There were many, many more traffic cones in the vicinity than I used. I set the cones up on the way to a local climbing gym, did a board session, checked in on them on the way home. Every cone was exactly where I placed it.

Shout out Silva Concrete, for sure, for the cones.

So, the next morning, sunday morning, I was at cheesman, and from the park, one can see down maybe six blocks of 10th ave, and I could see that even the next day, the cones remained.

TODO link to photos down 10th from cheesman

so I did the park thing, then walked from the park to corona, where I’d placed the cones the night before. I passed more cones, and dotted those into the road in spots that caused delination and a bit of attention to be attracted.

Timelapse of me placing the cones & observations

The treatment (moving the existing traffic cones from the adjacent curb to this particular pattern on the Downing & 10th junction) brought about many, many changes.

Here’s a silent video. Literally. No audio, no commentary, and almost no editing. Thus, not necessarily a lot of story-telling.

I just wanted to get a first pass up, as I make it more self-explaining I’ll update this section. Below the video I list some of the changes. The video is a 4 minute long, 4x timelapse of the junction.

Here’s a graphic of the shape I had in my mind, as I placed the cones. I didn’t have as many as I’d like to have, else the finished shape would more closely match the green shape:

Changes From Placing These Cones

Some phenomina is hard to even write about. It’s best seen with the video slider going back and forth, showing something about the path a car took on a turn or whatever.

Alas, plenty of the changes are visible in the timelapse (like the effect the cones have on the path a vehicle takes), I’ll list that and more.

here’s a list:

before: 30 foot crossings for pedestrians on all sides, having to look left and right in some cases, sorta at the same time after: max crossing is 15 feet, with possible car traffic arriving from one side only

before: regular vehicle speeds of 40 mph after: most vehicle speeds much closer to 20 mph (no speed bump or stop sign or path deviation required)

more things:

reduced width means:

reduced time spent in the crossing for pedestrians AND other vehicles.
Much less space one has to be concerned about being inside of. Sharper delineations between the spaces

Reduced junction size

A huge component of this roads and junctions thing is that to dramatically increase the junction efficiency, one has to be able to reduce the size. Huge and inefficient becomes small and efficient.

The way to get some space back is to sorta ‘scribe’ the outer edge, define it with cones. Compare these two shapes:

They may look almost the same in size, but the inner shape is like 40% smaller than the outer one.

Here’s how I see in my mind the unimproved junction shape, and then the improved junction shape:

before-size: 300 square meters. After-size: 180 sq meters¹
the sounds improved. It used to be that many vehicles were accelerating through the junction. It’s one block from a traffic light and super market exit and it looks super open and wide. With the cones, almost every vehicle coasted or at worst very gently accelerated through it.

shared space vibes

In theory, someone should not be eligible to be destroyed by a car, simply for being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. Nor should they have to wait and defer a crossing to a person that is still hundreds of yards away, which is what happens when pedestrians are waiting to cross unbroken streams of vehicular traffic.

At the 2:51 point, a person in a car stops it to let some people on foot cross. This is a big deal. No signs demanded that the right of way be given to pedestrians in the crosswalk. There wasn’t a stop sign or a speed bump. It was a chill handoff of that space.

A little more squeezing of the lanes with the cones, and more and more of the passing vehicle traffic would stop as soon as pedestrians showed up to cross.

my ideal junction treatment turns it into a ‘shared space’ (vs a car-dominated space) where the larger/motorized vehicles defer to smaller/non-motorized/leg-powered vehicles. (counting walking people as vehicles here)

the experience for turning left and right off of downing is much improved

Notice the changed shape of left and right turns

I could imagine overlaying a line representing all the possible different left and right turns - sometimes cars turn fast, taking a wide turn. Sometimes too wide, too fast. Once the cones go out, some of the least desireable possible turning paths are eliminated, and more vehicles take a slower, defined turn.

That sort of turn makes it much safer for pedestrians crossing the road at the same time.

The turning into and out of the darkness of the shadow also complicates the junction. Reducing speed and complexity (as I did) makes everything move in a much flowier way.

Rear ending/tailgating/racing past behavior is eliminated

since both sides of the junction are constrained, if a vehicle stops to make a left or right turn and is waiting for the path to be clear, the vehicle behind them cannot fit around and race past.

There’s a tremendous rear-ending danger in the original intersection design.²

If a car were turning right, for instance, and suddenly stopped, noticing a pedestrian in the space in front of it, and got rear ended, it could end up bouncing into the space the person was occupying anyway.

The sounds. so much better.

cars are loud. so freaking loud. especially when accelerating up a hill, which is what every single car going north on downing is doing. this cone treatment encouraged gentler driving. While I was standing near it, I noticed that while some vehicles still drove very fast straight through the junction, the vast majority would at least remove their foot completely from the gas and would coast through the junction.

The acoustics were very improved. And the sound of racing/tailgating/rushing is unmistakable, even from a great distance.

manifesting `Repair as a Service`

In this capitalistic hellscape we live in, I could imagine Repair as a Service, sorta like Software as a Service. (in some circles, SaaS is the stuff).

TODO: add a section about why this satisfies capitalism, and not just via general harm reduction, risk mitigation, though there are billions of dollars of industry doing just that. Maybe this improves customer access. It’s known that foot traffic makes money, this is all in line with pedestrianizing/making pedestrian friendly spaces.

I have this thing about parking that’s conceptually related. A bit more capitalistic.

if something were a service, that means it can be purchased, and this is america, so if something is available for purchase, that means it’s available at all. Currently, however, one cannot, to my knowledge, quite purchase a repaired junction, the same way one can purchase a repair to some commonly repaired physical items, like vehicles, houses, devices.

In the spirit of write it now and the iterative nature of the internet, here’s two different options plausible ‘junction repair as a service’ solutions, and everything technically works so I can get this page live.

the ‘let josh truthfully say at any point in the future “someone has hired me/is hiring me at this very moment to run a pop-up experiment right here”:’ option:

👉 purchase ‘Josh’s Junction Coning’ via Stripe. google pay/apple pay works

A three-cheers-for-capitalism option. Includes above plausibility beard, and some recorded outputs and magical calculations:

👉 purchase ‘Josh’s Junction Repair Writeup’ via Stripe.

I’m pleased to talk about any of this. Email or Whatsapp or a walk is preferred, ranked by preference, reverse sorted.

Additional Reading

Footnotes

I popped this open on google earth. 300sq meters to 180 sq meters is a 40% reduction in size. WE REDUCED THE SIZE OF A CRITICAL PIECE OF INFRASTRUCTURE BY ALMOST HALF. It’s interesting to me. the junction was never ‘maxed out’ in terms of vehicles moving through it for a time frame, so a direct count of vehicles per minute doesn’t quite make sense, but the principal of it’s efficiency being unaffected even as the space required is reduced by over a third is, I think, clear enough. Here’s much more about this vehicles per square meter per minute value ↩
and of course ‘danger still persists’ with this treatment. ‘spot fixing’ a mobility network isn’t a thing. One fixes a route, for a vehicle class, at minimum ‘legs’ is a vehicle class, and ‘the other side of the street’ is a valid route, but most trips will include at least a few junctions in sequence. This treatment is best applied to junctions in sequence, a little of the video I have shows an adjacent junction a block away I fixed. I think three fixed junctions in a row is a nice thing, so doing two in a row is getting close. To appreciate three of these in a row starts with experiencing one. ↩

On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park

2025-10-30T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

I live quite close to this park in Denver, Cheesman Park. Last year, I wrote something about accessing the Botanic Gardens from Cheesman.

A few months later I updated it, noting that I’d found mushrooms in the park and began feeding them to the fish.

I also regularly am in the park doing these barefoot hill sprint things

The koi fish obviously love the mushrooms, I’ve fed them to the fish dozens of times, now.

< todo: add a photo or video of the koi busily eating mushrooms >

As I spent more attention on the mushrooms, I got some books about mushrooms identification, from the botanic gardens library, so I could positivity identify whatever kind of mushroom this was with more confidence than the seek app + me looking at photos of things online.

Agaricus Bisporus

turns out it’s not too difficult to classify mushrooms. It’s a bit of a flow chart one works through. I learned to positively identify these mushrooms, as well as the two kinds of mushrooms responsible for 100% of fatal mushroom ingestions.

It helps to be able to easily observe the mushroom across all stages of development. I made my first spore prints.

This mushroom variety is known as ‘the common mushroom’, agaricus bisporis (wikipedia). It’s the most commonly consumed mushrooms in the world also the same as what you could buy in the grocery store.

The common mushroom! And so abundant in the park. I love common things. It’s the most commonly sold mushroom in grocery stores. I often note the mushrooms for sale, when I pass by them in a grocery store. I’v not bought a mushroom in the better part of a year.

Here’s some of what the page on wikipedia says:a

It is cultivated in more than 70 countries and is one of the most commonly and widely consumed mushrooms in the world. It has two color states while immature – white and brown – both of which have various names, with additional names for the mature state, such as chestnut, portobello, portabellini, button, cremini, and champignon de Paris.

🍄 from the park vs the grocery store

Since that moment over a year ago, I’ve fully replaced my mushroom purchasing from grocery stores with mushrooms chosen from Cheesman park, and it’s been a persistent source of interestingness, and a quality-of-life improvement across many dimensions.

I pass by the park far more frequently than I go to a grocery store, and I pass through the park on my way to other places, on my scooter, all the time, and I can, with a glance from my scooter as I ride by, check different spots I’ve seen mushrooms growing, or a quick walk about. There’s almost always many, many more findable mushrooms than I could ever pick, even on the days that I’ve picked 35 pounds of mushrooms.

Getting mushrooms from the park sort of reminds me of the experience of having a corner store that sells produce, right around the corner from wherever I’m living, and I can dash inside and get vegetables for dinner that night or the next day, any time of day and night, as I’m walking home.

This experience (the ‘corner grocery store’) is common in so many cities around the world, but is ‘banned’ in america because supremacists got their way and still do. ¹

I have been willing but unhappy to be giving money to capitalism, especially the kind of capitalism of local chain grocery stores. A corner, neighborhood grocer, I’d prefer to give my money too, but that’s not even a viable option, because of “zoning”.

with this park mushroom encounter, however, I now have something with the convenience of a veggie stand a half block away, yet it doesn’t even allow for money to be transacted, and it’s always open. As long as it’s not too wintery outside, the park has had mushrooms in it 100% of the times I’ve been there. The park is watered regularly, and that helps there be lots of mushrooms continuously.

No one is forced to run a checkout machine, no electronic devices are used to collect money. There is no concept of ‘price per pound’. I usually walk through the grass barefoot. There’s no florescent lighting. I can collect in large-enough quantities that if I wanted to go weeks between a visit to the park, I could. The largest amount I once collected was just as much as I could fit in my backpack and the two grocery bags I had with me, and it was 35 lbs of mushrooms. It was still only a small fraction of the ripe, edible mushrooms available in the park at that moment.

I’ve certainly become much more attentive to how the grass and dirt feels under my toes, the presence of moisture, the temperatures that I notice, when walking around the park, too. Less capitalism and more nature and walking barefoot in wet grass? Yes please. I am still using it for my barefoot hill sprints

Where in the park to find them

The mushrooms grow in very reasonable patterns throughout the park. Often they grow on the edges of root balls, the root balls of long-dead cedar trees, where not even a stump remains. My mental model is that a certain kind of mycelial network is metabolizing the roots, and as it metabolizes, when the water is abundant and conditions are right it sorta takes a breath, and exhales a flush of mushrooms.

They might develop for 3 days, eventually open up and drop spores, and then fade back into the grass. Any time they’re above ground, as long as they’ve not gotten stepped on or smashed or dried out, they could be good for the plucking and eating.

It can go from ‘no mushrooms are visible anywhere’ to ‘wow that is a lot of mushrooms’ overnight.

some people call the patterns in the grass, left by these underground root balls ‘fairy circles’. They’re sometimes faint, sometimes quite distinct. This is exactly where the mushrooms seem to like growing.

This single blob of mushrooms might be 3 lbs of mushrooms, maybe more:

The abundance is distinctive.

I have made mushrooms an intentional, specifically sought out part of my diet for years. Now I don’t even pay for them, and I eat even more of them than I did before.

Sometimes at the park I pick just a few handfuls of mushrooms, enough for me to add to my meals regularly for a few days. Some single mushrooms are so big that I will eat only half of it with my next meal.

Sometimes I’ve collected many more mushrooms than I could eat in just a few days, and I suspect mushrooms are unlikely to grow year-round, so I baked them down in the oven at 350 degrees for a while, then vacuum sealed them and stored them in the freezer.

I have already been surprised by how late into the year the mushrooms continue to grow and the mycelial networks continue to fruit. (It’s currently almost November, and I picked a kilo of mushrooms a few minutes ago, I’ll eat them later today, two days ago I filled a reusable grocery bag, it was like 12 lbs of mushrooms)

Mushrooms and fungal networks are cool

I’ve been a huge fan of mushrooms for many years, but it was only a few days ago that I learned after encountering this document, that mushrooms technically contain all of the essential amino acids, just some sort of amino acid that cannot be manufactured within the body.

The documentary fantastic fungi has tons of beautiful time laps photography/videography of fruiting fungal networks.

The book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures is worth snagging at a library, too.

something feels particularly right about at least a few bites of mushroom in with the egg and veggies that I eat every day.

Fat is cool, too

Seems worth mentioning that I also make sure to be eating what feels like an adequate amount of fat, in the form of olive oil and coconut oil.

I spoon a tablespoon or 2 of coconut oil into meals as I sauté them, often enough, or add coconut cream (stored in the freezer if I don’t use it all) to some dishes, and virtually always pour 10-20 grams of olive oil (a few table spoons) on every meal I have.

this piece is turning into being about more than just mushrooms, so sorry

I also would advocate for kimchi, sourkrout or kombucha. any sort of fermented food. I make my own kombucha, so at least every few days will have at least a few sips of kombucha. I imagine nice things happening in my gut when I do that. I don’t think more than a tablespoon or two is needed for a full dose of active culture of whatever is being fermented. So, i try to get at least a little fermented food with most meals. I have a friend that gets me costco kimchi containers, and i’ll make one last for a while. I will make my own kimchi someday. I love fermented food of all types, and appreciate what my gut bacteria do for me. I try to be a reasonable enough host for that collection of bacteria.

Fat is the main portion of the structure of our a brain such as ours, as well as the spinal cord. Fat also can be metabolized by the liver for energy generation stuff, same same but different as sugar can be metabolized for energy. ²

Foraged mushrooms vs capitalism

Anyway… Mushrooms now compromise a meaningful amount of my food consumption, and it’s been over a year since I’ve bought mushrooms.

I didn’t get into this with the intent of decapitalizing any my food consumption, and I note now having done so it feels satisfying. In the same way that hunting an animal might engender a sense of accomplishment, or raising plants in a garden might spark accomplishment, finding mushrooms in the park feels appealing. I had nothing to do with any part of the process besides showing up and plucking the mushroom, and there isn’t even time invested. This is vastly preferable to all forms of gardening I’ve ever encountered in my life, until now.

I dislike capitalism, and would like to see dramatically less of the human experienced affected by the intrusion of currency, money, into the human experience³

I’d love to see infinite food available for all. I don’t believe in political authority, but if there WAS a case for political authority, it would look like ‘using resources to cafe for those in need’, and providing food to anyone who wanted it checks the book. I wish no other bombs or cars were ever allowed to be created again until everyone in the USA, maybe in the world, who wanted food, had it, for free, no obligations or dehumanizations involved, and american cities were covered again with streetcars, trams, rail transport. Such is my fantasy.

Foraging Mushrooms respectfully

I dislike capitalism, and I dislike colonialism, slavery, and genocide, and all of those things are sorta opposed to healthy relationships (between us and ourselves, us and each other, us and the land people live on top of and travel around on).

Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote this article: ‘the honorable harvest’.

I’ve read many books, but never Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, also by by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’m listening to the audiobook right now, and it’s a delight.

Foraging has sometimes been a less-than-innocuous activity when it comes to issues of political power, but it’s also the activity that quite directly encourages a certain respectful relationship between people and nature. It’s a stark contrast to agriculture, which is synonymous with the State and its armies and slave labor.

For some fascinating takes on the state and the people living beyond the state, and foraging and the many other forms of how life existed outside the strictures of agriculture & the state, I suggest James C Scott. I just finished The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and found it to be exceptional. (It’s nominally an examination of state formation and un-formation in a region centering on modern-day thailand.) It deserves its own blog post. ⁴

Long-term storage

I’ve also only recently made some big improvements in how I prep the results of this foraging.

Sometimes I’ve collected far more than I can eat in a few days.

< as I type these words I have a ten pound bag of mushrooms in my fridge waiting for prep - add the photo >

Bake mushrooms whole
Pan fry whole too
Treat like steaks - crispy on the outside, seasoned, v uniform and juicy on the inside. Different energy than chopping them up, prior way I prepped all mushrooms.

< insert photo of using torch to sear outsides of the mushrooms >

They seem to bake and do even better in the fridge with this treatment, which makes sense.

When they’re growing in the earth, and maintain their shape and structure, they grow successfully, but if smushed or cut or kicked or they already dropped spores and are thus expired, some other stuff, depending on the stage of development, different sorts of failure set in. An undisturbed, normally-growing mycilial network fruiting body is a neat capsule that retains mosture and structure with a pretty distinctive outermost shell that’s a bit flexible and rigid at the same time.

So far I believe mushrooms have been spotted in the park surprisingly many months of the year. Through November for sure, and it was sometime this last spring I spotted them for the first time this season.

I have noticed that I spend less at the grocery store; I no longer buy mushrooms, which per-pound are sorta expensive, and since it’s abundant and free to me, I have shifted my regular veggie mix (a rotation of broccoli, zucchini, squash, cauliflower, cabbage, asparagus, brussel sprouts…) more towards mushrooms.

I mostly don’t eat meat⁵, and low-key I wish more did the same. I dislike enslavement and forced/coerced suffering. Chattel slavery was some shit, in the American south, that energy continues today and something in the meat industry too willingly embraces enslavement in so many directions. I stopped eating meat in 2017 after reading Eating Animals. I’ve tried to reduce the amount of enslavement and suffering my eating habits rely upon. If you are what you eat, I wonder what I am. I eat almost exclusively mushrooms, eggs, cruciferous veggies, olive oil and coconut oil.

Now that mushrooms are available abundantly, for free, three blocks from my house, well, my meat consumption continues to stay at almost 0, and my mushroom spending is 0, but my mushroom consumption has gone up, nicely.

Mushrooms and amino acids

I didn’t know until quite recently that mushrooms seem to contain all essential amino acids (and maybe the non-essential ones, too). I didn’t know that. I’ve been wanting to reduce my egg consumption, so when I heard this my ears perked up, and I’m sorta playing with reducing egg consumption. I’ve done some days where I eat only two eggs, so far so good. ⁶

How to prep & eat mushrooms, deliciously

No one likes to feel dirt or sand in their teeth, so give the mushrooms a good scrub in water. Maybe two scrubs. Trim the stem where it connected to the mycilial network, to remove the dirt embedded there. Or, scrub it all off. Or trim it, sorta making the shape of the tip of a pencil, to remove the dirt from that part of the mushroom. Rinse it with water again.

I’d been cooking and eating these mushrooms for almost a year before I ever ate one raw. The thought had never crossed my mind. Then it did, and I was immediately brought back, taste-wise, to the experience of eating salads with raw mushrooms on them. Familiar and normal. Now I eat these (after rinsing them) raw, regularly, and I don’t know why I didn’t start long ago.

They are fine raw, but finer with some olive oil and salt. Usually I’d chop and sauté them, and they go great with onions, garlic, ginger. maybe some broccoli or zucchini. once everything is soft add some eggs, and drizzle some olive oil when plating. It’s delicious.

They can be sliced up before cooking, but my most recent innovation has been to not slice them up before cooking! I’ve been pleased with the results. Sometimes I’ll slice them up after cooking, like a little fillet.

I’ve recently started cooking them whole, it’s been great:

I’ll probably add more to this post soon. I was noticing big improvements in the cooking part of the mushrooms, and lamented that I’d not even created a single page about them on this website, even though so much of my actual, day-to-day life has been affected, improved, by this encounter.

I’ve told many people about this, in person, but still have not yet encountered a single other person foraging mushrooms for their own use. I hope to someday meet someone else, or many others, doing just this.

I’ve found these mushrooms growing in other parks, too. I don’t know other parks like I know cheesman, but I’ve sometimes spotted some. Maybe explore around wherever you live. I’ll maybe update this if I find other parks with abundant quantities of mushrooms growing in them, especially if agaricus bisporus.

Foraging and pesticides

The city of denver’s website says they don’t use pesticides broadly, and when they do use them, it’s on specific trees, and they place a yellow flag saying ‘pesticides recently applied here’ next to the tree. I’ve occasionally seen the yellow flags, but infrequently.

Additional Reading

Nutritional Quality and Biological Application of Mushroom Protein as a Novel Protein Alternative
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
Yunnan people are currently obsessed with one thing: mushroom foraging in the mountains…【滇西小哥】 (I watched this video a few times when cleaning and prepping my foraged mushrooms)
Eating Animals, Jonathan Foer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Honorable Harvest (Robin Wall Kimmerer)
Anything by James C Scott

Footnotes

This thing we could call ‘american-style zoning’, or ‘euclidean zoning’, ‘separation of use zoning’, ‘segregated land use zoning’, etc. It’s a scheme where boxes drawn on a map determine quite a lot about what can be built there, and was used to devestating effect all across the greater united states. The original designation for R1 neighborhoods was in a section titled, and I am not kidding in the slightest, ‘race zoning’. It says more: r1 - wh*te, r2 - c*lored. Here’s the link to the whole thing. Here’s a deep link to the above section, and the goal was create something of a mix of enclaves, and reservation-type conditions, and to segregate a city by the fantasy of race. these people used zoning to push all economic activity to the ‘edge’ of the enclave. Everything about it is rooted in this energy to dominate others. It’s why the united states has lost the ‘cultural technology’ of the corner store, a corner store, and we’re all vastly harmed by it.

This pamphlet trying to hype the concept of zoning was written by people who loved the enslavement of others at scale. The mayor of Atlanta! I’m bummed to see so many people tirelessly working on replicating his kinky fantasy of a world separated by race, created by a violent and stupid person, small groups of likeminded people. ↩
The comparisons and contrasts between ingested sugar-based things (any food that is an -ose, like sucrose, glucose, fructose, lactose) as energy and ingested fatty things as energy is riveting. I wrote a thing about wearing a continuous glucose monitor. The experiences and observations from that monitor continue to be some of the more interesting and impactful-in-an-ongoing-way of my life. Sorta like psychedelics, or an experience of the numinous. I walked away from the experience with an increased gratitude and appreciation for what my own body did for me, when it comes to energy generation, digestion, energy storage, response to exercise, etc. managing blood sugar levels, raising it when exercising, lowering it via insulin or activity if I ate carby stuff. ↩
I sometimes entertain the idea in my mind of starting a little ‘forage mushrooms from cheesman park’ group. When it’s producing mushrooms, hundreds of pounds of mushrooms can be found in the park. Could represent meaningful money savings from some people. Many, many people could be fed. ↩
This book deserves its own book review, for now I’ll copy/paste a sentiment I agreed with, from this comment:

It covers far too much to try to sum up. I found the most thought-provoking chapters to be the three last.

Though in fact he calls one of them chapter 6 ½, because he’s just feeling his way: it’s on **‘Orality, Writing and Texts’, and talks about possible attitudes to writing that go dead against civilized assumptions. Might a people reject writing, the orthodoxy of a text, that is a foundation-stone of states, and feel they are better off with oral history?

That was fascinating, and the next chapter is ‘Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case’ on the artificiality or fictionality of tribes. He comes at this from two sides. Administrators have to order populations into tribes that weren’t there beforehand; but the peoples themselves have uses for a fictional ethnicity – several uses that Scott explores. This chapter includes the why of state mimicry, or what he calls ‘cosmological bluster’ – where tribal peoples take on the trappings of states, in ways that may be more subversive than subservient. Lastly, ‘Prophets of Renewal’, on the question of how and why (and what type of) religion has served in revolts of the marginal and the dispossessed. This is a terrific chapter, that does begin on explanations, and those might not be what you thought. (emphasis added)

↩
i do technically eat some meat. it’s been almost a decade since I’ve eaten cows, pigs, or chickens, and I wish those industries were dramatically reduced, or eliminated. Native people ate bison, i say stop growing corn and turn all the land back to native people and bison herds. Ending concentrated animal feeding operations/slaughterhouses would be so cool.

95% of my meat consumption is the occasional consumption of sardines and salmon. Even then, I eat these much less than weekly. At restaurants, I might order something with shrimp (the other 5%). Otherwise, a vegetarian dish for me.

before 2017 I ate lots of cows, pigs, chickens, then read eating animals, and stopped all meat consumption. I do eat and have always have eaten a lot of eggs, and sorta wish I ate less. Not even none, but have not yet found my way to low egg consumption. I eat at least three a day, maybe closer to 4 or 5 sometimes. I don’t drink milk, I sometimes eat cheese, certainly sometimes eat ice cream, and a little heavy cream is sometimes tasty in the coffee. I do not avoid butter. ↩
I still don’t quite know what an amino acid is. Why is there exactly 22 of them for human animals? can existing amino acids be reused or recycled? My mental model was always that my body can mostly fabricate the amino acids it needs, and the stuff it cannot, it’ll scavenge it from the environment or the self (reusing, recycling). My mental model of a cell is not that it ever spontaneously falls apart and washes away, but that the structural elements can be taken apart and re-used. Like taking down a brick wall, moving the bricks, and re-building the wall. I also happen to view eggs as a source of everything the body could need, so if I needed external sources of compounds or molecules, I’d get it in eggs. I don’t begrudge my body at all if it decided to take down some tissue to reuse the components elsewhere. autophagy is cool, I theorize that I might get more of it than some people, because my protein consumption is not so high, + the occasional intermittent fasting vibe. ↩

Movies I went out of my way to watch

2025-10-22T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

I’ve long liked to accrue certain lists of things I like within certain categories. to list appreciable books invites a similar list for movies and movie-like things.

It feels strange to list all of these movies like this, in some ways, especially the first two documentaries, juxtaposed against some of the other recommendations I have around here.

Some of these shows I found or watched on Netflix, or Jeff Bezos’ internet. Some I searched the pirate bay, and found them there. Example: https://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=homebodies+1974&cat=0. I’m using Folx as my torrent manager most recently, and NordVPN.

Two documentaries

I just finished an incredible documentary. One of the more substantial I’ve ever seen. By a distinctively-named Joshua Oppenheimer.

Full warning, it’s about recent acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing, a coordinated campaign of mass killing, in Indonesia.

The Act of Killing

The first is about recent, recent events in Indonesia. The Act of Killing, 2012, IMDB. It’s worth skimming the wikipedia page

Useful additional contextual reading could be the book The Jakarta Method, and How to Hide An Empire ¹

The Look of Silence

Oppenheimer did another documentary, after that one, with a similar theme. The Look of Silence, 2014

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries repeatedly land in unexpected ways. he shows interviews of the people who carried out the killing campaigns in Indonesia, and movies they direct about what they did. They speak very openly, and approvingly, of their own actions.

The last ten minutes of The Look of Silence were distinctive. ²

Scooter-themed

Of course I will find something arbitrarily more interesting than otherwise if it involves a Vespa-style scooter, in any way. I like scooters, of course.

I once looked through a few lists of movies having scooters in them, and have since watched at least a few from the list. That’s how I encountered some of the following.

Super Cub

Super Cub is about that super classic motorcycle-style vehicle that is very similar to a scooter. It’s a peaceful show (sorta gives Studio Ghibli at times) about a kid who gets a moped and the unfolding of adventures around it. I found it on Crunchyroll. Here’s a youtube video about the series.

The Interpreter

From the same list (‘all movies that feature scooters in any way’), I encountered The Interpreter, 2005, and quite liked it. It ended up having satisfying and subversive messages throughout, in my opinion. I have a page of notes I took, as I watched it, I might add here or in it’s own post.

The protagonist’s mode of transportation is a scooter, which is how it got on the list of movies I considered watching. I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I expected!

The person’s use of the scooter is unrealistic in only one way - at one point there is a vehicular chase, and the people in the car are able to keep up with the person on the scooter. I kept wishing the scooter user would pass through a gap too narrow for the car and ‘solved’ the problem that way, instead of failing to utilize it’s primary beneficial attribute.

I liked many other parts of the movie, too.

Amalie

wikipedia

2001 French-language romantic comedy film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

absolutely delightful in 100 ways. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Totally unexpected. I was moved, watching it. The description only touches on a portion of what is delightful about it. It’s about love, indeed.

Robert-Moses-themed movies

I still maintain Robert Moses as a delightful conceptual compression for ‘why are things the way they are’ (I.E, why do the greater united states not have any functioning inter/intra-city rail system? why are highways virtually always approved with dollars and permissions and signed contracts and rights of way, seemingly of their own volition? Why is the american urban transit system devoid of the people that built the tram systems of the 1920s?)

Robert moses ran those kinds of people out of the industry. Not only did he employ thousands of engineers, and would fire anyone who advocated for rail transit solutions, but he would instruct the people he issued contracts to, to not hire those people either.

The theme here is movies directly featuring Moses and/or his slum clearance/urban renewal/ethnic cleansing-via-displacement programs.

Often enough reading about it feels very academic, talking about him as an urban planner. He’s so worth discussing because his effect on the world was not academic at all.

I discuss Robert Moses quite a bit more here

Motherless Brooklyn, 2019, Edward Norton

Motherless Brooklyn, 2019 film written, directed, produced by edward norton

a bunch of well known actors, including the person playing robert moses himself.

I wish I could cut the scene that is lifted directly from the power broker. Robert Moses (called Moses Randolph, in this movie) is in a very distinctive way bullying the mayor into giving him another board seat, for instance.

It’s all about Robert Moses, and the way he was destroying a neighborhood and community in pursuit of whatever it was he was pursuing.

Told in a film-noir murder-mystery style. I’ve not (yet) read the book it’s based on (the book titled motherless brooklyn, but I have read the other book it’s obviously based on, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York City)

“I Won’t Go”

a 1960s-era 25 minute comedy show, titled “I Won’t Go”, available on youtube from the 1960s, depicting a 1950s-era event - the destruction of housing in order to make way for a piece of a highway, an approach to the George Washington Bridge.

I cannot help but think of the land of Palestine, and the many different forms of settler colonialism/occupation pushed into that area. The kinds of justifications used for this sort of action, all around the world. the many similar themes (bulldozers, the different authorities and permits and men with guns)

about an entire municipality and police force evicting an old lady from her house, and her various ways of trying to remain in her own house.

Episode ends with her pointing out to everyone where her house used to be, under what was then turned into an approach road for one of Robert Moses’ bridges.

Homebodies, 1974 satirical comedy horror

Homebodies, 1974 satirical comedy horror film

The film centers on a group of elderly residents in a Cincinnati tenement building who resort to murder when their building is condemned in the wake of urban redevelopment. (wikipedia)

It is, in short, a close up and personal, look at what it was like for the residents of a single building, as they were being made to be without housing. Please note how similar the scenes in that movie are, and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the palestinian people. The buildings, the torn up streets.

It’s a lovely film. To find it online, something like this might work. Or Jeff Bezos’s internet, i believe.

Lots of bulldozers, urban renewal, wrecking balls, destruction of neighborhoods for highways and luxury apartments. This movie is entirely centered in robert moses’ world.

So many poignant scenes. A cool depiction of a certain use of power, defensive power, perhaps.

No particular theme

Maybe anime?

Delicious in Dungeon

A delightful show, prominently featuring cooking, food prep, foraging, creative problem solving, and lots of other nice things. It keeps delivering delight.

Suzume

Suzume is a delightful film in 100 different ways. I’ve seen it at least three or four times, probably will watch it at least three or four more times.

The Way of the House Husband

wikipedia, also delightful.

Synopsis:

Tatsu, an infamous and feared yakuza boss nicknamed “the Immortal Dragon”, retires from crime to become a househusband so that he can support Miku, his kyariaūman wife. The episodic series depicts a variety of comedic scenarios, typically wherein Tatsu’s banal domestic work as a househusband is juxtaposed against his intimidating personality and appearance, and his frequent run-ins with former yakuza associates and rivals.

It’s delightful, at least the first season or two. I feel like I remember some of the later episodes of the latest season sometimes trailing off, but overall an incredible and delightful show. Subversive in delightful ways!

Charlie Wilson’s War

The story of a person named Charlie, and the war he wanted and got.

Charlie Wilson’s War on IMDB.

Based on the book by the same title.

Similar theme be said to emerge with Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. I believe a movie or a show was released, based on the book, but I’ve not seen it.

Anything by Chalmers Johnson is thematically similar, like Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

America’s/american attitude towards the rest of the world is similar to ‘its/their’ attitude towards native people (genocide, displacement, reservation-ization, not unlike Palestine) and the enslaved people that found themselves existing within ‘its’ borders, among “them”.

War, death, enslavement. What a disaster to have unfolded on this continent. I wish it had never been like this.

Additional Reading

Footnotes

I view all acts of mass killings as some enactment of supremacy. I dislike the concept of refinements in the USA of some sorts of supremacy as ‘white supremacy’. The phrase ‘white’ cedes too much to the supremacists. Supremacists of all flavors commit acts of dehumanization, of all flavors, against all/most/enough people they encounter, and themselves, of course.

I’ve always been interested in how and why (and THAT) things go wrong.

Have you yet crossed paths with the Hutu massacre of the people of Tutsi heritage/ethnicity/class? The 1991 genocide in rwanda? in a small number of days, many people were murdered, often-enough by machete. It’s close enough to the distinctively american tradition of night riding. ↩
I’d first written horrifying, in a slow, unfolding way. The subject, who murdered a lot of people and then made a documentary about it, determined that because he played a role in a movie, being pretend-tortured and pretend killed, he had appreciation for the experiences of his victims, and thus was forgiven for his actions!!! Maybe I’m wrong. You watch it and tell me if you get something else. ↩

Words and Phrases I Find Myself Using and Avoiding, with Kid

2025-09-18T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

As is common for how I write these posts, this began as a few pages of paper notes, collected across weeks and months.

This is a list of words and phrases and sentiments I find myself using around Eden, and a list of some words and sentiments I never use around Eden.

I noticed, for instance, that I don’t say ‘nice work’ or ‘good job’, and many, many other people DO say those things in the face of many aspects of any sort of accomplishment.

I’m much more likely to say something like:

“that looked cool”
“that seemed like it was tricky”
“whoaa!!!!”
“was that interesting to you/did you find that to be difficult?”
“i see you!/I saw that!”

I intentionally don’t say good job or nice work.

When explaining it to someone else, I’ll say something like:

Capitalism already runs the world in so many ways, I prefer to not let it further intrude into such special emotional space as ‘delight’ and ‘interestingness’ by saying a child is ‘doing a job’ or ‘doing work’ when they’re experiencing some unrelated aspect of the human experience.

Often enough I thought of these in pairs. Something I do say has a corresponding common phrase that I do not say.

Here those notes, in the order in which I wrote them:

Page 1, things I do and do not say [to kids]

I don’t issue commands. I try to not interrupt. I don’t say:

“good job”, “nice work”

I say:

that looked interesting!

was that tricky to you?

I try to not center it being about me validating her. Her validating herself, for sure. And sometimes even more, making the comment be more about taste, interestingness, awareness.

how I compliment

(the choice you made/thing you exhibited) seems:

reflective of a refined awareness or sensitive taste.

inherently interesting

funny

laudible

things I say

mmm
hmm
oh, that is interesting
oh, that is interesting
hmm, [thing they did] looked tricky.
was that tricky? (balancing on rocks, one foot, jumping, catching something, throwing something, riding a strider bike in a certain way.)
I usually say ‘tricky’ instead of what might be called ‘difficult’ ¹
was that interesting to you?
you looked so smooth and controlled doing {something they just did}
oh? what do you like that it/that/them?
what do you notice about it/that/them?
that took such balance!
you used such strength!
you kept at that for a long time
I feel that way too sometimes
you keep yourself safe!
thank you for helping keep yourself safe! ²

paying attention to tripping hazards, wearing a helmet when on the bike, not bumping into something or falling off something, ensuring there’s not food in the mouth when jumping or rolling around on the floor

thank you for helping me help you be safe!
you help you stay safe (listening for cars when we’re out and about on foot/jogger, holding railings when going down stairs, reminding me to bring shoes for her to ride her strider bike later, holding my hand/staying close when crossing roads or slippery/slip/fall-prone surfaces)

Say the following things when they are true, and find ways to make these things true when hanging out with kids.

that is a great idea
I’m pleased to help
thank you for letting me know that
I wish we/you could do that
maybe, some day, exactly that thing will happen!
I’d love to do something like that with you some day (riding horses, eating dumplings, many things inspired by what she sees others do, IRL or movies)

[another page of notes]

I do not say

because, because I said so
compliance countdowns. (“one… two… three…”)
say ‘please’, say ‘thank you’
any form of language or grammar correction. ³
be careful, stop, come here ⁴

I say instead

thanks for letting me know?
how is this? (food, the size the food has been cut to, temperature of water, the selection of an item of clothing)
good idea
you’ve got great taste
I easily use labels for things that work for her. When she says ‘lets go to cheese park’, I know exactly what she’s saying, and I call it cheese park. I don’t say ‘do you mean cheesman?’ or ‘I think you mean cheesman’. I use my own language skills to help reach towards whatever it is she’s trying to express, and then often-enough confirm with her that I’m understanding what she said.

I solicit & treat with warmth:

expressions of interest
curiosity, observations, introspection (she once said, when 3 years old ‘i used to not have so many words, but now I have so many words’. She was referring to things as far back as when she was 2, remembering when it was harder to communicate with me/other adults)
guidance & instruction (‘i need water’, ‘i need the bathroom’, ‘let me up’, ‘put me down’)

I might comment when I see a skill or interesting decision. I think kids experience beauty via interestingness. ⁵ So, in the same way some people might look for or note beauty (sunsets, people, a tree) I look for and note interestingness.

“what skill you have”
“I see you moving so fast, jumping over things, spinning, balancing. wow.”
“wow that looked tricky”
not ‘good job’, but ‘hmm, i see so much fastness, quick turning, smooth movement. You seem so focused and graceful.’

Another page of notes:

Not exactly phrases, but…

I speak well of, and celebrate, my own body/skillfulness, all the time. I do not criticize other people’s bodies or skills.

I dislike being around people who often speak of themselves in critical ways. It’s less common to hear people speak positively about themselves.

I grew up around lots of AFAB people criticizing their own appearance and bodies. ⁶ This is America, that energy is tragically strong, obviously, in many different manifestations. A way that I move to counteract this energy is that I allow Eden to hear how I express appreciation for what my body lets me do (climb, balance, jump, play, move myself and other things around, how it keeps me cool in the heat and warm in the cold) and I express appreciation and gentleness towards it when I feel sore or tired.

I’ll also say things like “I like how I look in this hat” or “I like the look of these pants” or “I like how I look today.”

Wow, my body carried me so far today on my feet, it is quite tired. we walked miles! how cool that my feet and legs can do that.

I speak well of my own skills. Not bragging, simply no false modesty. For instance, sometimes I crash to the ground under a tension board, pop to my feet, and state to myself (or anyone else) with complete seriousness:

That was some damned good rock climbing there.

Or I send something, and I say the exact same thing, with as much seriousness. I often enough direct the same sentiment at others, when I witness it.

why? bc sometimes I do some damned good rock climbing, by my book. If I saw someone else do some of those moves, and they thought well of themselves, I’d never dream of diminishing their accomplishment. So I don’t diminish my own. I’m skillful at climbing, usually plenty of times in a gym session I’ll do a move in such a way that I think “nice, that was pretty good”.

I also have great respect for quality efforts, without any particular results. Trying a hard move 8 times in a row, and I didn’t really get it any of the times? And each try felt full effort, or some subtle body positioning thing was gained? nice.

How the ‘why’ questions sometimes go

Eden, at three years old, asks why-based questions, often enough. If she’s asking about something, she’s likely thinking about it, so I’ll give her the floor:

She asks a question, I might respond with:

hmm, that’s an interesting question. why do you think that might be?

…I listen to her thoughts…

ah, yes. you’re saying that maybe [rephrase what she said]?

yeah, that could be it. ⁷

Food things with kid

a collection of norms I’ve noticed with Eden, including food norms from when she was first beginning to eat solids, which started as simply augmenting the nutrition she was getting from her mom. Because of the norms of elimination communication, it was natural to observe her expressions of hunger and thirst. As natural as observing the patterns of elimination.

food is/was always given, either what parents were making for themselves, and/or whatever she could communicate to us as wanting.

Long before she could use words, she could say more, no, and yes, (in that order) with sign language. So, we could present options one at a time, and she could say “no, no, no, more” and get exactly the food that she wanted (the 4th thing in the list), and we could easily sort whatever it was that was needed.

if it’s around, in the house, it’s available to eat.
no rigid eating times. I, Josh, do not eat breakfast, obviously kids usually eat food in the mornings; I get her food when she expresses an interest. Sometimes it’s upon waking up, sometimes not. Sometimes it’s for a traditional breakfasty thing, sometimes it’s not.
some of the unconventional favorite foods that Eden often requests: broccoli, mushrooms, brussle sprouts, asparagus, ‘mustard eggs’, sardines, salmon, kimchi, sriracha, pickles (not olives), almonds. She likes dark chocolate, vanilla ice cream, casadillas of many varieties. ⁸

a little helper lifesaver mat, original size is what I have, and it’s great. Waterproof and very absorbent. helpful for meals, and a nighttime sleeping mat for her, for any night time urination.

Misc

Eden very confidently ensures that her mouth is empty of food or gum before jumping on/off of things, or flipping upside down. Always spits gum out, if any is in the mouth.
She is intentional about putting her hands out and trying to not hit her head or face when she falls.
happily puts on shoes and a helmet when riding her strider bike. (I love helmets. For me, and anyone else)

It’s easy to embody a collaborative and peaceful energy with her.

Additional Reading

Footnotes

I could write a whole blog post about tricky things vs difficult things. Often a difficult thing has a bunch of unknown/hard-to-see patterns to it. But once the pattern is learned, it’s hard to unsee it. Easy example, in the same way that someone can use their hips to generate power inside of a punch, one can use their hips to generate power when throwing a frisbee. Someone who doesn’t know/has never experienced using their hips and ‘hip rotation’ to add power to their limb (be it for throwing an empty hand or a hand holding something) might find some of those throws to be (correctly) quite difficult, regardless of how they power them. Someone who can move power from hips to frisbee will find it sometimes effortless. I always describe these things as tricky. It’s tricky to do, but many things are, and a little practice could make a big difference. ↩
catching herself with her hands when she falls, noticing tripping hazards, being thoughtful and cautious around roads, stairs, when climbing up and down things, noticing things. Emptying her mouth of food before rolling around on the ground or jumping up and down. putting cushions down to soften potential falls. many different potential decisions when riding her bike. This is just a few things from a 3-year-olds perspective ↩
My estranged mother is/was a self-proclaimed ‘grammar nazi’, in both english and spanish. Have you encountered the sentiment, ‘Every joke works because there is some truth to it.’ 😬 ‘Correcting’ someone every time they try to express something, even though you knew what they meant, can become very cruel, and can be used to build a wall between oppressor and victim. This is an extension of: high-authoritarian language, a form of social control, and is common enough in how colonialists replicated themselves onto/into their own/other people’s children. Think the horrible catholic schools that demand endless perfect formulaic compliance from the students, used to break up the communities of native peoples. ↩
I said before, I do not issue commands. I think it’s a big deal, I could give it many more words than just this. ↩
Here’s a coherent case for why many things (more than just people) find humor, novelty, interestingness to be delightful, adjacent to beauty. Driven by Compression Progress ↩
I consider this collection of dispositions and decisions ‘looks policing’. If someone says positive things about your appearance when, and only when, someone else puts on makeup and does their hair a certain way and wears certain clothing, that’s a form of ‘training via neglect’, but it’s identically as dehumanizing as punishing someone for non-compliance. to ‘reward’ behaviors as a strategy is simply encouraging compliance with whatever norm is being accorded to. The thing called ‘evangelicalism purity culture’ relies upon this sentiment. Having survived long enough/well enough to exit the cult I was raised in (evangelical purity culture) I now assess purity culture as rape culture. ↩
there’s a fundamental difference between ‘can something be true’ and ‘must something be true’.

I’m pretty imaginative, so I don’t need expressions to be particularly literal, in order to find lots of potential truth in it. Poetic expressions can be just as true (or even more true) than any other form of expression. Kids speak in poetic expressions more than most adults I know. Eden never encounters a squelching, punishing, shaming energy from me in response to her expressions. She’s not always poetic, but I take her words seriously because they’re as likely to contain something true and reasonable as anyone else’s expression. I know many adults that dismiss/diminish the words of young people, casually, out of hand, because the person is young. I dislike that energy. ↩
I generally can make pretty delicious food, eden loves to eat it with me. I customize things for her, but I don’t think she has a ‘childish’ pallet - she eats spicy things, sometimes, and ↩

A Junction Efficiency Metric: Vehicles Per Square Meter Per Minute

2025-09-13T13:00:00+00:00

still sorta drafty, but also its entirely possible the point is easily apprehended, and I’m way over-explaining

Introduction

Elsewhere, I’ve been referring to a ‘vehicles per square meter per minute’ calculation, when talking about junctions on mobility networks. The first place was this substack piece, A Pattern of Repair: The Traffic Bean, then again in depth in The Traffic Bean: An Idea Applied to 17th & Monaco.

Overall I’m arguing that the traffic bean concept is one or two orders of magnitude more efficient than a traditional american-style light-mediated junction. Those are big claims. This metric (vehicles per square meter per minute) is part of the math part of these claims.

Again, later, I did a demonstration on Downing, and addressed how by placing some cones, I got the junction size down by almost half, and the situation for everyone was dramatically safer/smoother.

Here’s a bit of an example of what we’re about to discuss: It’s possible that this single graphic perfectly encapsulates everything I’m trying to share in the following thousands of words:

See how those two shapes have different dimensions? and also specific, knowable dimensions? Now add the concept of ‘counting numbers of vehicles that can pass through the space in a given time’ and we have everything we need for a junction efficiency metric.

I’ve noticed wishing for better ways to calculate some of the stunning differences in efficiency of certain road junctions.

I’ve put this together partially by cutting the relevant pieces of other posts, and aggregating it here.

Having a metric like this allows someone to say something like:

configuration A gave 1 vehicle per 20 square meters per minute throughput. Configuration B gave 3 vehicles per 20 square meters per minute, and was preferable in many other ways, so we’re going with configuration B.

or:

the current junction moves .5 vehicles per 10 square meters per minute

It allows two different junctions, of different sizes, to be compared. If one junction moves 30 cars per minute, and a different design moves 45 cars per minute, which one is better? If the 2nd junction is twice the square meters of the first one, it’s less efficient per square meter, even though it moves more vehicles.

How To Calculate Vehicles per Square Meter per Minute

every junction moves vehicles, and can move a certain number of vehicles through it, in a certain time, and that junction has a certain shape/area.

1. determine the size of the junction

I think this is the easy part. Crack open Google Earth, and draw boxes around junctions. I’ve got a bunch of examples of other junctions here:

https://zoningverydifferentthanours.substack.com/p/traffic-congestion-as-solvable-part-510

There’s a few different ways a junction could be shaped. Everything is full of tradeoffs!

Consider reading that piece (or the entire series) as context for this junction efficiency metric.

It lets one say:

such-and-such junction is 290 square feet/26 sq meters, and such-and-such number of cars moved through it in five minutes. (3-5 minutes is probably the minimum time you’d want to do counts on a junction to get a per-minute time. One probably doesn’t need to count for a full hour to get an accurate time)

If a junction was 600 square meters, and in a 5 minute time at rough hour counted it as moving 150 cars, we could calculate it’s ‘vehicles per square meter per minute’ value. in this case, it would be:

v/m²/min = 
150 vehicles / 600 sq meters × 5 minutes = 
150 / 3000 = 0.05 

thus, it could be expressed as:

.05 vehicles per sq meter per minute

or could be expressed in square meters per minute per vehicle:

1 vehicle per 20 m² per minute

Who knows yet what the actual values are we might see for a junction.

The expression seems reasonable enough, aids in reasoning about different junctions or plans. I think it might make more intuitive sense once we start looking at certain junctions.

2. do some vehicle counts (example from the 17th & Monaco junction)

What do you think the value might be for the junction in question, in terms of vehicles per square meter per minute?

How many square meters do you think the junction is?

These are the two questions I posed in the above drone video. Without actually doing the counts or looking yet at google earth, my predictions are:

the junction size is probably about 40 meters in both directions/on two sides, which is 1600 square meters

as far as throughput:

The vehicles in 5 minutes is probably ~150.

Thus, 150 vehicles / 1600 square meters / 5 minutes would be how many vehicles per square meter per minute?

≈ 0.01875 vehicles per square meter per minute

gonna round that to .02, which is two percent of a vehicle per square meter per minute!

Or flipped:

1 vehicle per ~53.3 m² per minute

rounding it to 1 vehicle per 54 square meters per minute. Or 1 vehicle per 580 square feet per minute

I contend that 1 vehicle per square meter per minute (1 vehicle per 10 square feet per minute) is a better reasonable expectation for an efficient, performant junction. I’ll accept getting half-way there as a mid-point. :)

this 1 of a vehicle per square meter per minute goal would be like two orders of magnitude higher than it currently is. that’s a ludicrous improvement, i say impossible in the USA, but i’ll settle for half of that improvement. 1 half of a vehicle per square meter per minute, or 1 vehicle per two square meters per minute. This is, I think, realistic. A typical sedan is 90 square feet. 1 square meter is 11 feet. so, a normal vehicle is about 10 square meters. or 10% per square meter per minute.

This isn’t the first intersection I’ve done this evaluation for, I’m developing an ability to estimate, the last time I did the math on Colfax & Franklin, the final figure was atrocious. Like 2% of a vehicle per meter per minute. :(

I’m going to watch the video again and count the total vehicles for a five minute period.

2.1 the counts, examples & time lapse video

The video is running at a 3x timelapse, in a continuous fashion, so every vehicle can be counted. It was taken at the peak of a morning rush hour. On my scooter I’m unimpeded by traffic, so it’s effortless for me to pop out to somewhere, even when traffic is maxed out.

five minutes is 300 seconds, and since the video is a 3x time lapse, that means I’m going to count the total number of vehicles that pass through the marked polygon in 100 ‘video seconds’:

Before we start counting, lets determine exactly how large the junction is:

Lets see the square foot value for both of those polygons. We’ll do the math all the way through for both, of course.

Above is the view of this junction in google earth. Next I’ll use the measuring tool to open a polygon drawing menu. The image below is what this looks like:

So the ‘larger’ polygon is 1691 square meters.

Lets look at the smaller option:

Simple enough, the smaller polygon is 1230 square meters.

I’ll pause here for now, but the next step will be to measure the vehicles entering that shape.

I’ll use the video I mentioned before, starting from when the intersection comes into view at the 15 second mark and continuing to the 115 second/1:55 mark, which is an equivalent of 5 minutes of real-time car counting.

How I do the counts

Feel free to check my math or methodology.

I’m sorta counting by light cycle. Pausing and replaying sections as needed, counting all the vehicles in that particular part of the light cycle.

13 cars in initial light cycle, as the junction pans into view
38 cars on the southbound leg
9 cars on the northbound leg, ‘second blob’ after the start of the counting.
11 more on the next cycle going east
9 vehicles on the westbound cycle
13 more vehicles on the east-bound cycle, some turning south on monaco, some going west on 17th, some ending up north-bound monaco.

I’m at the 59 second mark on the video, that’s about half-way through the five clock minute sample. We’ve got 93 cars that I’ve counted going through the intersection at this point. I’m absolutely going to count twice.

I’ve also paused to serve myself some food. Dinner’s ready. […]

32 more cars on the next southbound monaco light cycle
14 cars on the same northbound monaco light cycle (approx 59 seconds to 1:23 in the video)
9 more cars on the westbound cycle
8 cars on the matching eastbound cycle

ooh, the video pans away for a few seconds, so need to pause the vehicle counting

pans back into sight at 1:39, there was 5 seconds of missed light cycle time (15 real-time seconds. I’ll extend the ‘end point’ that we time to by 5 seconds. We’re now going to the two minute mark)

27 cars in the south bound monaco cycle, that’s visible
11 cars north bound

almost at time

2 more eastbound 17th
7 more westbound.

We’re at time, lets count it up:

110 more vehicles, in this second half of counting.

There was 93 in the first half, so 203 vehicles passed through this junction in that five minute time span. “about 203” is true, might be 195, could I have over-counted? Or 208, maybe I under-counted. And maybe under some certain situations, like a bit more traffic from one direction, more cars would have gone through the junction because there WAS some time it was green and no one was using it.

oh, what a sidebar, the amount of time a junction direction is usable but empty, or the time there are people waiting to use the junction, AND the junction is completely empty, as a percentage of the time it’s in operation.

The junction was completely empty while there were vehicles waiting to enter 28% of the time

or something like that.

So, like we’re discussing, how many vehicles in 5 minutes? 203 vehicles in five minutes

Let’s plug these values into the formula:

203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters

0.0240 vehicles per square meter per minute

Or flipped:

1 vehicle per 41 m² per minute

41 square meters is about the size of:

A small studio apartment (6.4 m x 6.4 m)
Half of a tennis court
A single parking space (with buffer) plus some sidewalk

Half of a tennis court to move a single vehicle in a minute? Seems ‘obviously inefficient’ to me.

The way to make it more efficient, at first pass, would be to simply find a smaller area for the junctino. A square piece of asphalt controlled by lights does the job, sort of, but so too would a much smaller, circular junction with access/departure points for all directions of travel as needed.

earlier I said, I contend that 1 vehicle per square meter per minute is a reasonable accomplishment. How might we get closer? The first pass would be to improve the number of vehicles that can use the junction, in a few ways, and reduce by a significant percentage the amount of space directly allocated to the junction.

If we could get 30% more vehicles through it, and it was half the size, we’d have accomplished technically a stunning increase in efficiency.

A first pass would be to reduce the junction size. Ironically, to reduce the size (and allow the continuous flow type design) would probably also increase the number of vehicles that can fit through the junction, but the number doesn’t have to budge for this to still be a gain in efficiency. If the junction was smaller, and the volume of vehicles stayed the same, the efficiency would obviously go up, relative to the reduction in junction size.

For instance, compare the following:

203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters
203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 550 square meters

203 / 5 * 1690? 203 / 5 * 550

203 / 8450 = 0.024 203 / 2750 = 0.054

40.6 vehicles/minute 1690 sq meters = 0.02 vehicles per square meter per minute 40.6 vehicles/minute 550 sq meters = 0.072 vehicles per square meter per minute

That second value would be 3x the efficiency: 0.23704142

animation of what 3x efficiency could look

3x the efficiency could be achieved purely by making the junction much smaller - 500 square meters vs 1600 square meters.

Here’s a way this could be visualized. Do you see a the way that this exhibits better efficiency? This is only one possible way the difference can be viewed, obviously. This isn’t how junctions work exactly, but it perfectly shows one of the dimensions of efficiency improvements.

Intersection Efficiency Comparison

If you had limited space and needed junctions in three different places, and nothing else about the space could be used for anything BUT moving these vehicles, which would you want more of?

Both intersections process 203 vehicles in 5 minutes

My desire with the traffic bean isn’t even necessarily to move more cars through - it’s to reduce certain forms of pollution, difficulty, distress, waste, excesses.

I think of the potential harm to everyone of a crashing car as a form of pollution.

Conversation with the people who live in that house indicate that everyone has become extremely aware of all sounds/implications of passing vehicles.

One notes intrusive thoughts when one hears the sound of a whining, high-speed engine, wondering if it’ll take the turn or crash into a building. click here to read about how this plan handles the wide range of potential inbound speeds

Different ways the efficiency could be expressed

≈ 0.081 vehicles per square meter per minute

Or flipped:

1 vehicle per ~12 m² per minute

Part of the reason the traffic bean would be so much more effective than a light-controlled junction is there is no need for the junction to ever be completely empty, while there is anyone queued up to use it.

So, a traffic bean allows anyone to go if there is room for them to proceed, no waiting around for a light to change.

The space needed would be JUST a single lane in a large enough circle/bean shape to wrap around the center island, which would be be ‘hollow’, the inner space being returned to non-car uses.

It being hollow like this would allow the junction size to be considered even smaller. Instead of a fully enclosed volume of space being allocated to the junction, JUST a unified connecting travel path the width of a medium-sized car lane running in a circle.

The inside and outside would be unavailable to cars, so the junction square footage could be so much smaller.

There’s some image mock-ups below.

I’m thinking lots of space could be carved out, on the inside and outside of the ‘bean’ thing, which is how I’m getting to such a low square meter value:

vehicles
minutes
square meters

An audacious goal

Lets see if a workable junction of that size could be achieved. Can we replace this 1600 sq meter junction with a 400 sq meter junction that moves even more cars per minute?

If so, it would give us:

0.13 vehicles per square meter per minute

Or flipped:

1 vehicle per ~7.7 m² per minute

Which might be good enough for now. That gets us the 10x improvement I want.

It’s such a ludicrous improvement, that even if it came with zero other benefits, it would be worth trying, but in reality this traffic bean thing comes with TONS of other benefits.

An order-of-magnitude-improvement on efficiency, larger potential throughput, and reductions in all forms of emissions (noise, tailpipe, tire rubber microplastic, brake dust). (this is the result of the slow, non-rushed procession of vehicles through the junction, please refer to the poynton videos I have elsewhere on the page)

Achieving a 400 square meter junction

to get this junction, we’d want something bean shaped, with the inner shape hollowed out, like a doughnut. This frees up lots of square meters.

The following shape is 147 sq meters:

So, this inside space can be subtracted from the outer space. Lets jot down a shape that could work for the outside.

It needs to be only a single lane wide, with entry/exit points wherever needed.

How would you feel about this shape? its 360 sq meters, which of course includes the 147 sq meters we’re gonna count as ‘for the people’ and not as space for cars:

its 360 sq meters.

so, less the inner area that doesn’t need to be counted,

360 sq meters (outside shape) - 147 square meters (inside shape) = 213 square meters

I had proposed that this junction could be 400 square meters, and we’ve used only a little more than half. I don’t think it will take 200 square meters to provide the access points for vehicles. the main shape could be clear now, I think, thus ‘the vibe of what I speak’.

Lots of the remaining space would need to be ‘shaped down’ with traffic cones, until the right shape was found. Here’s a very crude example:

The red inner lines are 11 feet long, which is certainly not a wide lane, but isn’t super narrow, either. The dimensions here are pretty comfortable, even for commercial vehicles, I think. A normal sedan is almost 6 feet wide (and 14 feet long) A cement truck is 9.5 feet wide, including the mirrors, or 8.5 feet not including mirrors.

The above was my super wonky first mockup. Can you see what I’m aiming for, even as it’s obviously not the exact right shape?

The junction has sorta widely-separated inputs and outputs, so this is a sorta extreme example of the paths that would be ‘carved out’ of the existing junction space.

Additional Reading

Footnotes

A love letter to Studio Ghibli

2025-08-27T13:00:00+00:00

I’ve had a bunch of notes floating around related to Studio Ghibli, a production studio started by Hayao Miyazaki.

If you like movies, or have kids, and have not yet encountered Studio Ghibli, you’re welcome. I first encountered Studio Ghibli in 2020. Their first film was released in 1984, there’s now 22 films they’ve made. I’ve seen nearly all of them.

Studio Ghibli

first written sometime in 2024

I brought this over from a page of recommended books.

I didn’t even hear of Studio Ghibli until I was quite old, and am now happily working on watching the entire 25 piece anthology. I’ve seen more than half.

As you might imagine, there’s lots kids love about these pieces.

A little history

Studio Ghibli is a production studio that made/makes animated movies, starting in 1984, based in Japan. It’s refreshingly non-western. Haio Miyazaki was the founder/director. I’ve ahem managed to find a collection of all the works with the original japanese audio and english subtitles. For movies I’ll watch and rewatch with Eden, I’ve usually ended up torrenting the movie so I can have the file, easily accessible, no streaming service required.

Noteworthy starting points could be Kiki’s Delivery Service, Pom Poko, My Neighbor Totoro, Tale of Princess Kaguya.

I, personally, usually prefer them in the original japanese, with english subtitles.

But I’ve now mostly see them with english language tracks, with eden.

Amazon Prime has one version of Totoro, as my toddler-aged kid calls it, and the wayback machine/archive.org has an older english dub for free. I bought the Amazon one, and ended up torrenting the same file, just to save bandwidth on the many times we’ve seen the movie.

I’m exploring finding good english dubs for the best ones, turns out there are plenty of good-enough ones. Some I’ve paid for, some I’ve found for free, sometimes both. There’s at least one Studio Ghibli that doesn’t have any spoken words, so the audio is available in every language. It is a bit slow, and when Eden and I watched it, we skipped through most of it, and it didn’t get slotted for a re-watch like Kiki’s Delivery Service or Howl’s Moving Castle.

HBO Max has a lot of studio ghibli. I agree with Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, thus after suffering through HBO max and forced english dubs and UI changes for a while, I ‘gave up’ and torrented at least some of the entire collection, so I can have fine-grained control over subtitles and audio tracks via vlc, and didn’t have to navigate crappy smart TV menus again.

I usually look up the movie on Wikipedia before I watch it, to help contextualize/orient myself to time/place/context in which the movie was created.

Here’s a piece from the BBC that gives a brief introduction to every Ghibli piece.

Kiki’s Delivery Service

I jotted down some notes about this movie last time I watched it with my kid, she was ~3.5 years old when we first watched this together.

Here’s the trailer:

It’s available via the pirate bay, or sometimes various streaming services. I’ve been able to now get good copies of all the Ghibli films Eden likes to see.

Eden loves this movie, and so do I. One of my favorite aspects of the movie is that the depictions of cities is stunning, beautiful.

it contains moving motifs about a coming-of-age young person
the part with birds, Eden and I skip, and the dirigible part at the end. It’s a bit intense, and she reminds me (when we’re starting the movie) that we’ll skip those parts.

it’s about a very independent, earnest kid being treated well-enough, helped, cared for, by the people around her.

no one betrays, tries to kill, or fabricates an evil, violent creature to attack someone’s family. (looking at you, Frozen)

the aunt person (the painter in the woods) is so useful in the story.
so few engines are heard in the entire movie. Normalized alternative modes of transport: walking, using a broomstick (which functions like a sky scooter?), or creative leg-powered vehicles, electric street cars.

no normalization of abuse or power dynamic exploitation (looking at you, Frozen.)
no tanks, war planes, bombs, guns, police (mostly, and the main interaction with a police officer involves him getting tricked), military, teachers, school conflict, bedtimes.

look at the cobblestone streets!

Look at the streetcars!

I get sometimes viscerally angry that something like this is possible, but American zoning/urban renewal/ethnic cleansing programs have caused cities to look like the normal american city - wide roads, parking lots everywhere, endless strip malls, soullesness, death. That many kids movies normalizes this form of urban design is sad.

it’s about a young girl starting and running a business, not at all interested or obsessed w/love interests. It aces the Bechdel test, in like ten different ways, in contrast to literally every movie made by Disney

I’ve written about the outsides of the buildings, the beautiful streets and buildings, but of course Studio Ghibli delivers beautiful interiors as well:

Here’s how Denver looks. I find it alternatively sad and angering that anyone expects anyone else to take shit like this seriously. American cities, under the guidance of supremacists/decendents of european americans, are car gutters and parking lots:

Do you know what used to exist, before these parking lots?

The above satellite view of Denver depicts American-style ethnic cleansing. Americans would rather slaughter/destroy/exterminate an environment than allow that some other way of being is permissible.

Reference Agent Orange in Vietnam The bombing of Black Wallstreet in Tulsa, Oklahoma R1 and R2 ‘race zoning’ designations.¹ The state-sponsored extermination of the American Bison to ‘force the Indian onto the reservation’. ² the current, ongoing genocide of the people living in Palestine.

Here’s what could be:

Ponyo

Delightful. Wikipedia entry for Ponyo (2008). The literal title is Ponyo on the Cliff.

The english dubs are great, I thought, and there is only one english dub floating around out there. My evaluation of at least one toddler’s experience of the movie (on the first, second, n-th experience) is that she very much likes it, and it engages a lot of her imagination and enjoyment, at least in the ways we’ve experienced it.

My Neighbor Totoro

My Neighbor Totoro (wikipedia)

I think my daughter watched it first at ~2.5 years old, sat enraptured almost the whole way, we spoke about it extensively after.

The file I torrented only included the original audio, which isn’t helpful for an english-speaking toddler, even though she’s gotten along pretty well in japanese-language movies, or with me voicing via subtitles a bit.

I think the best english audio is what I’ve found on Amazon prime - $4 to rent, $16 to buy:

https://www.amazon.com/My-Neighbor-Totoro-English-Language/dp/B08123SMCH

I also found a different english dub online for free, but really dislike the voices, and find it unwatchable:

https://archive.org/details/totoro-fox-dub

The latter voices the toddler in diminishing, stereotyped ways, and the dad’s voice feels equally mis-fitting to the context, while the amazon dub feels ‘right’.

OK, here’s how I got the file with the right audio, so I can just cmd+space (open alfred) [space]my n[tab][return] file-search query my n focus first result, default open file in vlc.

Eden learned this routine with the Grinch (she really liked the 2018 version, as did I, watched it many times, knows it takes no time at all to get playing. I really like the theme song, and it has lots of clever moments that )

the search I ran to get the options: https://thepiratebay3.co/s/?q=my+neighbor+totoro

what I ended up downloading:

My Neighbor Totoro - Streamline - FOX English Dub.mp4 (update nvm, wrong dub, don’t love this one)

Howl’s Moving Castle

Howl’s Moving Castle, released in 2004, is nice. Strong anti-war themes, reflect’s Miyazaki’s opposition to the American Empire attacking Iraq in 2003. Wikipedia.

I’d like to read the novel it’s based on some day.

Can be watched for free with english dubs (and downloaded) here on the Internet Archive

Additional Reading

Footnotes

Some of you know about residence zoning designations in the USA. Or, at least, that’s what I thought the R1, single family homes, r2, multi family homes designation meant.

Residence zones imply, definitionally, commercial and industrial designations as well. Unfortunately ‘residence zoning’ was not the original intent of r1/r2 zoning. The person that first wrote up these designations did it in 1922, and wrote ‘race zoning: r1 - white, r2 - col*red, r3 - undecided’, and those designations persist in every. single. american. city. today. some cities have ‘improved’ the concept to ‘use zones’, ‘form zone overlays’, and/or ‘form types’. This all was first popularized The Atlanta Zone Plan, I did a fairly detailed write-up/re-print/signal-boost, as it seemed/seems like a crucial piece of history, from a forensic/action perspective.

Any zoning expert in America who knows this history of american zoning (one doesn’t imply the other) knows that american zoning became law in Euclid v. Ambler, 1926.

Here’s a PDF of the supreme court ruling, from the Library of Congress. Here’s some quotes:

On November 13, 1922, an ordinance was adopted by the Village Council, establishing a comprehensive zoning plan for regulating and restricting the location of trades, industries, apartment houses, two-family houses, single family houses, etc., the lot area to be built upon, the size and height of buildings, etc. The entire area of the village is divided by the ordinance into six classes of use districts, denominated U-1 to U-6, inclusive; three classes of height districts, denominated H-1 to H-3, inclusive; and four classes of area districts, denominated A-1 to A-4, inclusive.

This is a direct reference to that 1922 ‘atlanta zone plan’. here is a link to that exact text from the Atlanta Zone Plan. Read in the mayor of Atlanta’s own words his desires for residence districts and race zoning!!! That document got encoded, as is, into law.

Note that the discussion of ‘apartment houses’ is a dogwhistle for “those kind of people” or “non-white people”. From page 30 of Euclid v. Ambler, 1926 (library of congress/supreme court ruling) PDF:

With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bring- ing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities,-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed.

↩
this paper, THE FRONTIER ARMY AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BUFFALO:1865-1883 a good starting point for the tactic that european american descendants/colonialists used to destroy the plains indians. These kinds of people were given awards, lauded, and their ways of being were copied/pasted across this land:

both civil and military officials concerned with the Indian problem applauded the slaughter, for they correctly perceived it a crucial factor that would force the Indian onto the reservation.

Phil Sheridan had finally gained control of the Shenandoah Valley,the Journal recalled, by laying “waste the grain fields – the supply of food and forage to the enemy –and it was like robbing the Indian of his buffalo.”As long as the buffalo roamed in great herds the plains tribes would spurn the reservations.

Hence, according to the Journal,”to campaign against the buffalo would be, if successful, not only to destroy the enemy’s supplies, but to put the whole casus belli out of existence by annihilation.

↩

Masks, Breathing, Helmets, Environmental Exposure, Risk Reductions

2025-08-14T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

still sorta drafty

I find that at some level, nearly everyone I know will take actions to protect their head from the environment. A warm hat in the cold, something for shade in the sun. Sunglasses, perhaps, or safety glasses sometimes. Ear plugs here and there. Maybe a mask if they’re sick or in a really noxious environment.

Hello, its me.

Here’s a collection of thoughts, all of which relate to the theme of ‘protecting the part of the body we might call our head’

(is a mask head protection or lung protection? etc)

I wrote a thing a time ago about peeing, and this post might be thought of as a similar grouping. Either everything for me, having to do with head protection & adjacent topics or why I wear one mask or another so much

~~But~~

And breathing is a big part of the masking thing. So it’s hard to draw the boundary exactly around what I’m writing about. Maybe after I finish writing I’ll re-do this section and it’ll be clear what unites the the set of topics we’re about to encounter.

I recently wrote /on-risk, basically was two stories about risk that inform my decision-making. Whi

This post got drafted the same time I was writing about risk & lynn hill’s near-fatal incident regarding a not-tied bowline & no safety check. In it, I briefly touch on the non-climbing related, safety-critical process of ‘ensuring the buckle of a helmet strap is closed’, as the most available-to-my-brain example of that ‘in some situations, once you start tying a knot, finish it’ principal applied elsewhere.

That helmet-related aside turned into a paragraph, then into a big footnote, then I decided to pull the whole conversation into it’s own piece, and this is what you’re reading now.

Helmets

I love helmets. I don’t like head injuries. I find my full-face motorcycle helmet damned useful because it makes everything more peaceful - quieter, less windy, warmer, etc. My current helmet even has a shaded lense that I can flip down by pushing a lever on the helmet, so I can close the clear outer visor and have an inner shade layer, if I want.

I wear a climbing helmet as well, 100% of the time I’m outside, climbing or belaying. I so like my full-face helmet that when I wear a climbing-style helmet, it feels barely good enough. No visor? Nothing covering the sides of my face or my chin? Psh, does it even count as a helmet?

I’ll say more about helmets someday, for sure. I’m just… a big fan of helmets. [^helmets]

Earplugs

Uuuugh what can I say about ear plugs? I wear them a lot.

Virtually all the time I’m on my scooter, and often enough after I get off the scooter, I’ll leave them in.

Especially any place that has music, or loud noises. I have tried and really like the Loop reusable ear plugs, but I mostly just use (and reuse) the orange disposable foam earplugs.

I have a small bag I keep full in my sling bag/fanny pack, thus they’re always available. I wear them if I’m walking alongside roads with loud traffic, or concerts, or any sort of american indoor restaurant. Anywhere that someone has to raise their voice to be heard, I’m wearing earplugs.

I sometimes sleep in the orange foam ones, but since I got the Loop earplugs, I’ve found myself much preferring those for sleep. They exert less pressure against the insides of my head, and though they don’t block quite as much noise as the foam ones, they block plenty of what I need blocked for sleeping. Most (all?) of the noise I happen to encounter by default when sleeping is vehicle noise.

There’s correlations between things like ‘hearing loss and dementia’, but also loud environments & depression, & regardless of all that, I find loud environments unpleasant! If I’m just walking around or near loud cars, or in any sort of loud environment, I’ll put in earplugs.

I have very comfortable ear plugs that are less silencing than the foam ones, that I sometimes wear when I sleep, because I can hear vehicle traffic from where I sleep, unfortunately. I carry a small fabric bag of disposable orange earplugs in my ‘sling bag’/fanny pack/’purse’, so I always, always have earplugs available to me.

So, not only do I wear ear plugs regularly enough when not on my scooter, I certainly wear them when I am on my scooter.

Nuisance Level Organic Vapor Relief Particulate Respirator (😷)

I have noticed sometimes someone asks:

Why are you wearing a mask?

when they see me with a particulate respirator. (“mask”)

I put it on just before putting on my helmet, and it’s sorta visible inside the helmet in some situations, and it’s of course visible as I take off my helmet, again.

Sometimes there’s a certain energy with the question. it’s a different energy than the “what is that device attached to the side of your helmet” or “what’s the miles-per-gallon of that?” ‘¹

There are so many things I like about wearing a mask, I’ll explain them below, but I note feeling that some of the reasons that float to my mind are more available to me when I am not feeling like someone’s coming at me with preemptively defensive energy.

I recently encountered a question about masking on my scooter. I’ll probably now start answering with “why wouldn’t I wear a mask?” and leave it at that.

In the past, I’ve given an answer like:

I used to ride a moped around without a mask, I used just a wool buff. Essential in the cold, obviously, and nice to have the extra protection against sun even when it’s not cold.

Then I ended up reading something that clicked as ‘oh, that makes sense’ as soon as I read it. Something like:

exposure to vehicle emissions correlates to an increase in symptoms of depression².

ya know? ✌️

that’s the answer I give if I’m feeling a bit defensive, or I feel like they are getting defensive with me. ward them off with vulnerability!

But if there isn’t defensive energy, here’s a bunch of the other reasons I love to wear a Particulate Respirator 8247, R95, NIOSH APPROVED, Nuisance Level Organic Vapor Relief:

I do not like to smell vehicle exhaust, and because of how scooters work, roads work, and how I ride my scooter, I sometimes am passing fairly close to the exhausts of vehicles, and even if not trailing a vehicle (and it’s plume of tailpipe and tire rubber emissions, all the time, or brake dust if it’s braking) sometimes big heavy vehicles under load pass by perpendicular to my path. Again, I sorta imagine a plume or a cone of emissions following the vehicle, sorta like a shockwave following an airplane exceeding the speed of sound. These masks, when worn correctly, cause me to not smell the exhaust nearly as much. I take that to mean there’s a commensurate decrease in the particulate count I ingest from the air if I happen to take a breath in the vicinity of that vehicle.
A mask provides great sun protection, thus I wear a mask even if I know I’m not going to be around any other moving vehicles (like 6am). I put on sunscreen every day, and do everything else I can to minimize sun exposure. A full-face motorcycle helmet covers lots of my face, and lots of potential directions sun/heat has to bounce onto my skin are thus completely blocked. Covers the top of the nose down to the chin, and the cheecks.
A mask adds a lot of warmth and wind reduction, pairs well with my full-face helmet. I always view comfort and safety as closely related. Staying comfortably warm is crucial, so in the winter my combination is a mask + a wool buff, and that inside my full-face helmet usually does well enough.
The mask helps me sorta pre treat the air I’m breathing. Do you know/can you recall the winter-time sensation of how air can become quite painful to breath, if it’s sufficiently cold and/or you’re breathing sufficiently hard? And how the opposite of that is shallow, smooth breaths of warmed air? If you can have a breath of air close to your face sorta trapped in a scarf, that bit of the air is not painful, or is less painful to breath, than the air that’s not yet been warmed up. The mask creates a little bubble of air that stays warm, humid, and presumably a bit cleaner than the air outside the bubble, especially if you’re in the middle of an intersection and changing light cycles and groups of accelerating vehicles.
In the winter, a mask reduces a bit the condensation with my breath and incrementally seems to lower the issues of a frosting-over visor.

The real win is to not have to deal with traffic at all, or unwanted vehicular trips at all, and sometimes that’s been the case for my life, and sometimes not. So this is how I protect my lungs when I ride around Denver.

So much for masking.

My masking norms around illness/sickness

I keep a fabric mask in my ‘sling bag’/purse thing, and I wear it 100% of the time if I ever feel sick, or am exhibiting symptoms of any sort of sickness. It goes straight into the wash after I wear it.

Maybe it’s allergies, maybe I’m getting truly ill, so as soon as I feel nasal/respiratory/flu/stomach anything, I’m likely to be masked 100% of the time when I’m inside. It would be awkward to feel ill, not be masked, the next day feel way worse, find out it’s something severe, and only then start wearing a mask. 😬

I already wear a mask 100% of the time I’m on my scooter, wearing one other parts of the time is hardly distinctive to me.

I’ll also more likely be wearing a mask out and about if I’ve been around a known-sick person, like sometimes when my kid is sick, or if I’m about to be around an immuno-compromised person, or if I’m around sick people. (So, sometimes, just a big-enough/dense-enough crowd is enough for me to put a mask on. or being at a hospital, even if I am not sick at all)

It provides sun protection, too, and my nose is particularly prone to getting sunburned, so having ‘mechanical’ sun protection via a fabric mask is great.

My mask also has flowers on it, I like flower-themed things, I don’t hate it like I’ve sometimes hated really severe-looking masks.

That made sense. Especially because it might not be just the increase in ingested vehicle consumables (brake pade dust, aerosalized tire rubber, tailpipe emissions), but because to be close to the sheer physical and emotional weight carried in the structures generating all that pollution is to have your own physical form pretty aggressively exposed. To be somewhere where the pollution is high is to experience a known-harsh environment that would be depressing/ensaddening even if there was no pollution to be ingested.

Also, to be exposed to more vehicle miles traveled is then, thus, to be exposed to more of the ensaddening conditions of what causes/correllates with vehicle emissions is to be exposed to a bit more ensaddening things, AND one gets low-level dosed with noxious stuff along the way.

So, I see the state of ‘not exhibiting anything/enough of the things that some people say rounds to depression’ is achievable, certainly something that everyone is equally entitled to, and is made a bit harder or a bit less available as any portion of your life takes one into heavily polluted, dangerous places.

Or, put another way:

If you feel at all depressed, and are ever exposed to vehicle emissions, here’s some ways that might help you reduce your exposure, because of some precautionary principal

Masks & Scootering

Sometimes I get asked why I wear a mask when riding my scooter around. I wear what looks like a heavy duty kn-95 type thing when on my scooter, I buy them by the 25 pack and wear them for a while. Maybe I could/should swap them out more frequently than I do, whatever. Better than nothing, and, again, it’s only part of the strategy for reducing how much vehicle pollution I ingest.

I like it for two primary reasons:

skin/sun protection (year round) and especially for the heat retention in the winter.
Part of a strategy of avoiding ingestion of the most prevelant categories of vehicle emissions

Did you know exposure to vehicle pollution correlates with increased signs of depression?

Josh, of course breathing the tailpipe emissions from combustion engines is bad!

Vehicles generate tremendous pollution & emissions

This is a quick overview for why I always wear a 3M Particulate Respirator R95, Nuisance Level Organic Vapor Relief when out and about on my scooter.

Vehicles emit a variety of forms of pollution:

Tailpipe emissions (duh)
Brake pad metal dust
Tire rubber microplastics
Noise (engine noise. Tire/rubber rolling noise. The noise of the wind/pusshing through the air)
Light (both sunlight glaring off the car, and wildly obnoxious, hostile, aggressive headlights)
Psychological intimidation
the constant psychological threat of total destruction of whatever the vehicle might encounter, if it either deviates from the intended path, or doesn’t stop quickly enough in any particular way.

electric cars are no better. They generate less/no tailpipe emissions, but tire rubber microplastics go up, and the space consumption & danger to others is the same as any other car.

Reducing the volume of polluted air I might encounter

I assess that my lungs are kept relatively cleaner by me riding a scooter rather than riding a bike - I work hard on a bike, so I do lots of heavy respiration, and I’m moving slower/spending more time adjacent to the sources of pollution.

If I were biking alongside high-pollution corridors, I’d be spending extra time breathing extra heavily, without a full-face helmet or a high-quality respirator.

I don’t know how much extra air pollution I’d be exposed to, but it would be a lot. On my scooter I move quickly through polluted areas, I have the visor down and I have the quality mask, and because I’m not powering the vehicle with metabolic output, my breathing can be slow, relaxed. It allows me to hold my breath when anywhere close to engine exhaust.

Breath holding, especially when close to accelerating engines

I have pretty good lung capacity. To enjoy/expand my own lung capacity, I combine light ‘training’ with good timing, to further reduce exposure to air pollution.

I’ll hold my breath anytime I’m near engines/tailpipes emitting anything. When my current breath is ‘up’, I’ll smoothly exhale, take another deep breath, and then hold it again.

Sometimes I hold a full breath, sometimes it’s a half-breath. I don’t do anything stressful, but it means I might take only a single breath in 60-90 seconds of scootering, timed to not ingest new air until I’m not overly close to a polluting vehicle. And I 100% nasal breath.³

I have experienced enough of ‘the sads’ over the last few years that any incremental reduction of exposure to depression-exacerbating vehicle pollution feels like the right move.

Josh, you seem overly concerned about air pollution

Vehicle tires are consumable, right? Smallish sedan tires are 20 lbs. Heavier pickup trucks (ick) are 45-100 lbs. A few pounds of rubber is aerosolized and ejected into the environment when tires are used up.

Tire rubber emissions obviously go up when the vehicle is braking or accelerating. The rubber is being pulled harder, so the emissions spike. Same with noise and tailpipes.

this is why the Standard American Design for junctions (SAD junctions) are doubly egregious. The stopping and starting created by light-mediated and stop-sign mediated junctions is like a 10x increase in emissions, vs. something like the traffic bean which encourages slow, smooth, interleaved flow without stopping or the acceleration of a traffic light.

4 tires on 10 million cars, losing 2 pounds per tire about every two years……..that’s like 80,000,000 pounds of rubber that seemingly just disappears into thin air! source

Additional Reading

Exposure to traffic-related air pollution is associated with increased mental health service-use among people recently diagnosed with psychotic and mood disorders such as schizophrenia and depression. (r/science)
3M Particulate Respirator 8247, Pack of 20, R95, NIOSH APPROVED, Nuisance Level Organic Vapor Relief. Once you try a nice mask like this, it might be hard to go back. Once I started getting choosy about masks, I started wearing them a lot. I appreciate that to smell a vehicle or be downwind of it while it’s changing its speed via brakes and thus increased rolling friction on the ground, or its changing its speed via the engine, and thus increasing the particulate shedding rate and tailpipe emissions, is to be sorta ‘bathed’ in a plume of emisssions.

Footnotes

The thing on my helmet: It’s a cardo audio system - I can listen to google maps and/or a podcast or music, and I’ve even done phone calls with it while riding, but my voice is kinda hard to hear at medium to high speeds, so I don’t use it a lot. And it does 90 or 100 miles per gallon. (~40 km per liter) ↩
vehicles emit not just the tailpipe emissions, but tire rubber microplastics and brake dust floating in the air. most environmental plastic contaminant is rubber that’s simply rubbed off of tires. We all ingest so much of it. Vehicles also emit light (sun reflections during the day, horrific light pollution at night), they emit noise, engine noise, tire rolling noise, and wind noise.

They also emit space consumption, the ‘at rest’ 140 square feet a vehicle consumes, plus the access to the at-rest spot if they’re in a parking space. A parking space is considered to be the space plus half of the adjacent access lane. might be 325 sq feet, total.

A vehicle in motion emits consumed space to the tune of 400 sq feet per second at 10 mph, or 640 sq feet per second at 20 mph, etc. more details and visuals here. at 60 mph, a vehicle emits consumed space at a rate of 3190 sq foot per second!!! ↩
The nasal breathing thing for me was round-about. The first part was when I got my tongue tie fixed. The myofunctional therapy I did in prep for the procedure talked regularly about mouth position, tongue position. Nasal breathing. It matters. About the same time I also read Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. So I breath through my nose now 100% of the time, except extremely high output aerobic activities, and even then I resist the mouth breathing as long as I can, and as soon as the need for air goes down again to where I can breath through my nose, I do so. I do short sprints, and keep the nasal breathing, and most of my rock climbing happens with nasal breathing. ↩

Taiwanese & Balinese Scooter Norms

2025-08-14T13:00:00+00:00

Sometimes I’ve told people “I ride with Asian scooter norms.” or “I ride with Taiwanese and Balinese scooter norms”. Here’s what I mean by this statement.

a ‘norm’ is ‘something common, accepted, sometimes codified in law, but certainly accepted as ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’ or ‘ethical’.

There’s a distinctive vibe on scooters in Bali, and since I’ve spent a bunch of time there (partially because of their lovely scooter norms!) I brought with me lots of habits and skills from Bali, and some of the scooter-specific social/technological innovations common in Taiwan.

Since I ride in the USA in ways affected by what’s common in Bali. I also do some ‘mental imports’ of norms from Taiwan in some specific ways.

Interesting scooter movement patterns noticed in Taiwan

Lets discuss some norms common to Taiwan, first.

I once had a 24 hour layover there, and it wasn’t my first time in the city, so I already knew I was looking forward to exploring it.

The first time I’d been to Taiwan, I’d only a few times ridden a 50cc scooter in Greece on a few days long climbing trip. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, it sorta soured me on scooters, overall. The vehicle was loud and rattly and barely got even just me up hills, let alone me and a passenger and gear. Years later, I learned, in an experiential way, that a 125cc scooter can be a very different experience, much improved. I then ended up with a 170cc scooter, and loved it, I still have it, have ridden it everywhere.

So, this time in Taipei, I had the motorcycle endorsement, and a new/updated international drivers license, and I had plenty of experience on my scooter in the USA, I’d ridden my 170cc scooter to Canada and back from Denver.

I’d brought my gloves, my mask, ear plugs, various things to make the riding comfortable, as I planned on making regular use of rental scooters. the place I stayed was next door to a scooter rental place, it was cheap, and I love riding scooters around, and found everything about it interesting. For instance, it’s nearly impossible to rent a scooter, or even a motorcycle, in the USA. bummer.

here’s a link to a map that shows my exact trip around for the day. Some of the line is the fast train from the airport..

Here’s an image of what opens on the map, if you click the above link:

Taiwan has exceptional scooter norms, and most of the people moving around are on scooters.

Most of the space is still given to/taken up by the small number of people in very large cars, but, unlike the norms of the greater united states, the cities were never quite torn up (‘urban renewal’) with car colonialization quite the same.

Taiwan’s mobility network is still over-affected by American road norms, of course.

The Scooter Box

A common feature in some junctions, especially junctions of a certain size, is a box painted on the ground ahead of where the cars and large vehicles stop, where all the scooter riders collect.

Click this link to open a google street view image of a junction in Taipei. See the scooters in the painted scooter box?

There is a scooter logo painted inside the box, it’s a ubiquitous feature of the environment. It makes things better for everyone in so many ways.

Scooters filter to this box through stopped traffic, and then they can go in a blob when they light changes. (which changes a second early for scooters vs. regular cars)

I treat american intersections similarly, the (usually empty) crosswalk space functions for me as ‘the scooter box’.

If there are people in the crosswalk, I’ll still go to the front, I’ll just stay out of the crosswalk until it’s empty.

The ‘box turn’ strategy for making certain left turns

To go left on certain roads, in Taiwan, one first goes right. Or proceeds around the junction with the shape of a box, but different than the above ‘scooter box’.

Regardless, I use the concept when crossing American junctions, especially anything that seems like an arterial. Left turns on arterials, in particular, are very difficult/dangerous, or at least can be, and this box turn is a reliable problem solving strategy.

Here’s a bunch of youtube videos explaining this concept: taiwan left turn, youtube.

This video is particularly nice, the embed starts at the 43 second mark:

Here’s my written explanation:

for certain junctions of certain geometries/dynamics, to go left, one first goes right. the junction is usually marked with a sign, which means ‘it is not expected that you collect on the left to go left, but on the right’. As one enters the junction, one pulls their scooter to a sometimes painted box, at the front-most part of the column of traffic waiting to proceed straight. When the light changes for them, they go straight, so do you, and it’s as if you’d gone left through the junction.

Another way of phrasing it:

where there is no access to a a protected left turn, to prevent otherwise having to wait in a risky spot, darting through gaps in traffic (something so common with american intersections).

one pulls to the front of the line of traffic waiting at the light to proceed straight. When it’s their turn, you go with them.

It’s very unenjoyable to feel ‘pinned’ between fast traffic driving straight at you, as you’re waiting for a gap in one or two lanes, to go left, while having fast traffic passing by on the right side, continuing, because they are not going left.

this is all solved by the traffic bean, by the way. Making every junction sorta roundabout-ish, with the right curve geometries to get a first-in-first out vehicle flow. The junctions can be made smaller, and can serve more vehicles at a smoother, more interleaved rate. my fantasy is to be able to say ‘coming soon to a junction near you’, plausibly. ¹

Here’s what that alternative, a quick right turn to obtain a left turn, looks like:

Painted on the ground, ahead of even the aforementioned scooter box, even closer to the junction, there is another square, it’s the collection point for scooters wanting to make a left turn.

Thus, one first makes a right turn and stop at the very front of the traffic waiting for the light to change (in this box painted on the ground).

Then, they wait the rest of the light cycle, out of the flow of traffic

When the light changes and turns green for them, they now get to go through the junction with all the other scooter riders, just as protected as could be.

I use this strategy to make left turns sometimes on my scooter in the states.

There’s lots of signage for this in Taiwan, and after experiencing the first one, it was easy, peaceful, safe.

I found riding my scooter around Taipei to be quite peaceful and safe.

The Pre-green

Because all scooters collect at the scooter box, they have better views to the cross streets, and are smaller and do best moving as clumps anyway.

The light counts down, and in some different ways will turn green for scooters before it turns green for cars. (in the videos from the box turn/left turn section, a few different green light countdowns are visible)

I call it ‘taking the pre-green’, and is something I do in America, often enough. Some junctions will turn green for pedestrians crossing a second or two before turning green for cars.

I’ll treat the pedestrian walk as a green light for me on my scooter, if I want. I never assume that cross traffic is stopping because of a light, by the way, I watch vehicles pointed at me/where I want to be very carefully.

but wait there is more

So, I’ll take the honest pre-green, too. It still looks red in some ways, in some directions, and I’ve met some timer in my head and I go.

I know when the light is going to change, especially because I’m so far to the front of the intersection I can easily see the light for the other direction of traffic. I know when it goes yellow, red, and I can stare straight down the line of traffic. Some of the junctions I’ve gone through thousands of times.

I can tell (and indeed always note) if there is a vehicle, and if there is a vehicle, I note if the speed is changing or the same, what it is, where, and so much more. intricacies of where the driver’s head is pointed (even if it’s not relevant to me), or I might note whatever path they’re taking across whatever stretch of asphalt they’re on. If they seem attentive or not.

Anyway, if there is no car especially, I’ll ‘take the pre-green’ and will advance through the junction before the light turns green for the larger vehicles, as is common in Taiwan.

I have a well-calibrated and sensitive process I use to go through junctions, safely. I have itchy brake fingers, I rarely rush. When I’m alone and on familiar paths, and it’s early in the morning perhaps, like 6:30a, I sometimes ride with a different energy than if I have a passenger, or a load of groceries, or it’s at night or it’s rush hour instead.

Honestly, I’d rather not be perceived, so to anyone who’s ever seen me on my scooter and felt personally affronted (this has happened at least a few times), to you I’d say:

Honestly, I wish I wasn’t there, then, for you to have to have seen me either. And if I were there, I wish you didn’t even notice me. Better luck next time, to both of us. Can I tell you a little about robert moses? He’s sorta why the roads are the way they are, and the way that ‘enforcement’ works on them the way that it does.

So, from Taipei I bring the concept of the bike box to the USA. As well as the ‘left turn via bike box’ strategy.

This contributes to my own safety, as a few common ways of getting injured on a vehicle like a scooter is getting rear ended by someone not seeing you, as they’re stopping. I never stop behind a stopped car, and rarely in front of moving cars, I’m thus ineligible for this sort of accident.

Masking Norms

It’s odd to me in the USA that wearing masks when on/near roads isn’t more common. It’s ubiquitous in Asia, and I now wear a mask 100% of the time I’m on my scooter. It’s like earplugs, to me. Ubiquitous, I store at least one mask in my scooter seat at all times, next to my rain layer. Here’s a long thing about my head/lung/skin protection norms.

Balinese innovations around scooter movements

Bali is a pretty mountainous place, so lots of the cleverness of Bali’s mobility network is in the narrow, winding paths. Entire parking garages can be fit in a space smaller than two american parking spaces.

This section could be 30 points long. Maybe it’ll grow with time. I have lots of video footage from Bali, I’ll add it here eventually.

The ‘green for scooters first’ light cycle

Often enough on the occasional light-mediated road junctions in Bali, one notices that the red lights blink red/white a few times before before they turn green. Sometimes similar to things visible in Taiwan, sometimes different.

When the light starts blinking red/white (sorta a 3-2-1 countdown to the green light), the scooters can go, then when the light turns green, the large vehicles can go.

in the USA, when I am on my scooter, I might treat intersections as if they’re equipped with the same feature.

Because I am so close to the front of the intersection (see prior point, choosing to hang out in the bike-box/cross-walk) I can easily see long distances in both directions, and I always know exactly when the light will change, thus can choose to give myself pre-emptive green. ²

Making excellent usage of small spaces, parking edition

Bali sees endless creativity with what can be packed on a scooter, where scooters can be ridden/fit, like gates and doors and ramps, and how they can be parked. (sorta anywhere)

Scooters are small, can be easily moved, even if just a few inches, when parked and locked. Any event or venue or store or compound had functionally infinite parking, on site, mere steps from the destination. As parking would fill up, either parking attendents or newly arriving-by-scooter-visitors would jostle the parked scooters around a bit to park them more densely, and then would park their own vehicle. It was common to leave scooters without the locked steering column, and then the moving them around was even easier. Very convenient with parades. People walking ahead of the parade or street festival would just move around/clump together the parked vehicles, moving them as little as a few inches, once or twice as far as 20 feet up the curb. Similar to in Thailand if double-parking, or parking someone in, it’s convention to leave the vehicle in neutral so it can be rolled out of the way.

These are all nice norms!

If someone is making scooters orderly and trying to pack them densely, hundreds of scooters can be fit, easily, in a space that could be walked across in just a few steps.

Thus, lots of parking was on the other side of a narrow gate, or a narrow path, and to pass through these small spaces was to feel very aware of having been transported from one place to another. Balinese doors and gates deserves its own blog post.

I park my scooter at my house inside of a gated, locked, courtyard area. Under a roof, protected from rain and snow and sun, and with a cover on it. It’s nearly invisible in several ways, and it is the most convenient parking spot on site. I always have the best parking, because my eye is well-refined, at finding creative parking spots.

Scooters flowing around

I’m now used to evaluating american road networks as I evaluated Bali’s road networks - if cars are stopped, one goes around them, in a peaceful way. It’s easy and normal to give deference to whatever user of the space can be identified as most vulnerable. Pedestrians get priority over everyone, then scooters, then cars.

In bali, paint is rarely placed on roads. road markings don’t often exist. Either center lines, shoulders, and much more. And where they do exist, they’re still much more of a guideline than is normal in the greater united states.

Here’s a slice of what Balinese scooting norms looks like, on their most intensive highway. This is, truly, the largest highway on the island.³

I’m trying to convey a sense of “every place has a distinctive way of doing something, some other places do things differently, sometimes its better”.

I’ll find videos of some of the smaller roads, the ones that I usually encountered. I rode my scooter on the highway very rarely when I was there.

American Legal Norms

Often-enough I record myself riding my scooter around and I sometimes want to discuss how I go through junctions. I go through most junctions in a similar-enough way.

I note wanting to reference this page and some of these norms. Additionally, in some places, 50 cc scooters are legal equivalents with a regular pedal-powered bicycle. So, in a stretch, a scooter can do what a bike can do. That mine happens to have a larger-than-50-cc-engine in it is… true.

Bikes are ‘allowed’ to treat stop signs as yields. Rolling stop + idaho stop or something. Red lights are ‘allowed’ to be treated as stop signs. I have a firm stance on jaywalking anyway. I can move my scooter at the same speed, agility, and ‘footprint’ that I can move myself on my own two feet, so sometimes I treat it exactly as I would me on my own feet. Just better carrying capacity, and easier to move around with.

An uncontrolled vs. controlled junction

So, I discussed navigating a ‘controlled’ junction (those are anything where the path is affected by a stop sign or traffic light), and now lets discuss ‘navigating’ a ‘uncontrolled’ junction

if you’re driving through a four-way junction, and cross-traffic has a stop sign and you do not, that is an ‘uncontrolled’ junction, in at least one, probably two, probably many more than two, ways.

Another form of ‘uncontrolled junction’ is every time an alley and a street intersect.

So street-street junctions can be uncontrolled, alley/street junctions. There’s more. They’re sorta like bollards. Once you know what they are/how to identify them, you might notice them everywhere.

Imagine a sign hung, that says ‘cross-traffic does not stop’. That sorta implies that the junction is uncontrolled, so you must wait until circumstances support your crossing.

(a traffic bean brings all inbound speeds to ~10 mph and makes it so all traffic comes exclusively from the left, at 10 mph, thus one doesn’t need to worry about ‘cross traffic does not stop’ signs/dynamics. It can be made large, sorta like a traffic ‘ribbon’, if necessary, or really small)

how I go through uncontrolled junctions

Because an uncontrolled junction is a matter of timing, passing through it can be a rare and special opportunity, especially for people in cars. Their mobility is less, the pressure they feel from lights and stop signs and other cars is much, much more than I feel. If I see a car with any sorta of ‘darting’ energy, or heavy on the gas, late on the brake, I stay well clear of them and anywhere they could bounce, if they hit someone else.

if I see a person approaching from the left or right, as I’m passing straight, I’ll assume they don’t see me until I have reason to think they do. I might come to a FULL STOP and let them go through first. Why would I not? Because I believe in a fantasy of a thing called ‘right of way’? would never be me.

I also check junctions for people crossing them by foot. I also am aware of, and stay out of, ‘the dooring zone’

The dooring zone

when passing a car or a line of cars, parallel parked, imagine any of them (or all of them) opened the drivers side door all the way.

Any part of the lane that would be reachable by the door (so, an aweful lot of bike lanes, of course) is called ‘the door zone’.

My vehicle is not a bike, no one expects me to ride in the dooring zone, least of all me. But I’m intensely aware of it when on my scooter.

That said, I might squish into the right side of a lane, to ease by some vehicle that is proceeding the other direction, or I won’t, or both.

I go through all junctions sorta in a roundabout shape. Depending on speeds and cross streets, sometimes as I roll up on a junction, to reduce my exposure to complexity, I’ll plan on taking a right turn, instead of going straight. That eliminates from concern all traffic coming from the right, and I only have to ensure that the lane from the left is clear.

I can do that, in a variety of ways, and based on the shapes of the junctions, vehicles parked around it, I can ‘clear’ with my eyes the left lane out a certain number of feet.

Anywhere from 30 feet/3 meters (a pretty small bit of visibility, I wouldn’t go into a junction until I had a lot more than 30 feet of visibility) to 300 feet/100 meters or sometimes far beyond.

So, I can plan on going right, and then sometimes I might make a u-turn, and then as I approach the junction from the opposite side, I might proceed straight (a j-turn, mentioned above) or make another right turn, which puts me as on the opposite side of the junction, going in the same direction as when I started it.

Sometimes I make eye contact with other people, who’ve obviously watched the whole thing.

For example, imagine the POV of a commercial vehicle driver, at the front of a line of traffic, waiting at a red light, who can see me approaching from many stopped cars away on the opposite side. I ride to the front of the line of traffic, make a casual right turn… then pop a quick u-turn after finding a good gap, making another right turn. Many a nod of appreciation has been given.

Sometimes it’s a quick right turn-u-turn-right turn, or, if it’s ‘really fast’ it follows the shape of a traffic circle or a traffic bean, through the junction.

At night, sometimes it’s much easier to see cars from much farther away, because most vehicles (certainly not all!) have headlights illuminated.

On Headlights

This can be annoying, as the recent proliferation of LED-type headlights is abhorrent, and can make visibility, especially with oncoming traffic and their headlights pointed right at you, very challenging.

They blind one with the light, and cast deep shadows, making one’s ability to perceive intricacies of the surface one is riding over more challenging.

At full, deep night, with no moon light or street lights, I might ride at not above 40 or 45 miles per hour, even on big roads where people in cars often go much faster. but even at that fast speed (not fast to motorcycles, very fast to someone like me used to mostly bicycle riding, before this) I can easily stop the vehicle well within the cone of light cast by my high beams. Momentum (thus breaking distance) increases geometrically with speed. I vastly prefer to be on a road alone, with no one behind me, following me, and no one driving directly at me from the opposite direction, going the other direction.

On noise

I don’t like to spook animals, or people, and I usually am quiet enough that I see people long before they notice me. There’s plenty of visual queues people give off when they notice me, be they walking or driving. It’s pretty clear in some situations if they have or have not noticed me, and I respond accordingly.

This is part of why I dislike heavy window tint on vehicles. It makes it much, much harder to see anything about the vehicle operator. I know that’s the point, in some ways. Because of my helmet being an extension of my head, to the degree anyone cares, it’s laughably easy to see where my head is pointed, and sometimes easy eye contact can be made. Body language can be so expressive.

And that’s just a person walking. If they’re in a car, I guarantee notice them before they notice me. I counted how often I check my rear view mirrors, recently, just so I know if there is anyone behind me, per block, and the answer was never less than three times.

(another reason to use a ‘scooter box’ is that one of the main multi-vehicle car crash types involving two-wheeled vehicles is the driver of the car behind them not noticing that they’re stopped behind a car in front of them. Their eye never notices the stopped motorcyclist, and they just run the car right into them, from behind.)

Because I almost never stop behind vehicles (and I check intensively the behaviors of the drivers of vehicles behind me, if I do), this entire accident class is unavailable for me to experience.

Contrasting a gentle style of movement with American-style rights-of-way/entitlements

When driving on the roads of the greater united states, or walking or biking or scooting or whatever, it’s extremely common to encounter entitled behavior.

Even if you do not operate in an entitled way, it’s common to see someone else. Vehicles not slowing down for pedestrians passing ahead of them is a form of entitlement, for instance.

The concept of ‘right of way’ is a form of created-from-nothing entitlement. (It’s necessary to create the concept of jaywalking).

Bali’s road networks and the people who use them don’t have these american-style entitlements, and where there isn’t entitlements, there can grow things like expectations. There are very few roads with center lines painted on them, for instance, and sometimes the roads are too narrow for vehicles to pass in opposite directions at speed. No sweat, it’s easy! When encountering a vehicle going the other way, the drivers coordinate pulling around each other, letting a tire run off the asphalt and onto packed dirt, and then back.

There’s much less tailgating. not none! but there’s something distinct about american road networks. I sometimes get annoyed, feels like I have to defend that sentiment, then I ask about the driving experience of the other person, and it’s limited. how do I proceed?

Loud engines/racing engines as entitlement and supportive of Bad Things

loud engines are very popular in the USA. I view loud engines, or loud exhausts (including nearly every motorcycle) as supporting rape culture! deep breath.

Loud engines normalize the indiscriminate (or highly discriminate) harassment of others. It can be targeted, like revving an engine “at” a person as the vehicle operator passes by on the street, or it can be non-targeted, and “just” everyone with the misfortune of hearing the engine is affected.

I cannot endure the company of someone who even possesses a vehicle like this. I hate this aspect of car culture. Loud engines normalize harassment, dedignifying behavior, ruthless centering of the self, it’s the same kinds of entitlements necessary for rape culture, thus, I call it rape culture.

I can tell when someone who’s walking in a quiet place becomes aware of the sound of the engine on my scooter. Even at medium acceleration, it’s not very loud. When I’m trying to be quiet, I’m almost completely silent. And at max volume, it’s still not very loud and it’s certainly not harsh. I also ride in a smooth way, I don’t inflict audible assault on the people I ride pass.

If someone elects to make a lot of noise with their vehicle, I log that as a form of entitlement.

Other forms of entitlements common on the mobility networks of the greater united states

Heavy window tints, hiding the driver’s head and making it impossible for someone else to make eye contact, or to see where the driver’s head is pointed (pretty useful when seeing if the driver is maybe about to pull out in front of you)

Really bright LED headlights that blind everyone that the headlights land upon, especially if they’re way beyond the line of sight for the driver.

Tailgating. it’s no different than standing really close behind someone in a line, breathing in their ear.

Being heavy on the gas and brake, or driving in a way that risks anyone else’s safety.

I find scooting all over the world, and even in the USA to be relaxing and peaceful, often enough. More than a bicycle, for some reasons. More than a motorcycle, for some reasons. More than a car, for some reasons. More than my feet, for some reasons.

I’d like to have some videos where I try to parse or explain some of how I move through junctions or road segments safely, but recording the video, audio, editing it all together, has thus far not really happened. I tried something like that here, and don’t love it.

Footnotes

I told someone (sorta a gang member, I was very directly hustling on this traffic bean concept) ‘some people would certainly love the innuendo capacity of this traffic bean concept.’ and he laughed and said the more innuendo the better. So, if you are reading this, you are welcome. ↩
I also sometimes evaluate my scooter as close-enough to a bicycle, and a bicycle is basically being on foot. I do not participate in concept of ‘jaywalking’, thus I use space in ways that I want to, crossing streets however I want. In a fair world, people in cars would feel responsible to not crush people or things outside the vehicle, and thus would not feel/act entitled to space in a way that threatens others. ↩
It’s inclusive of some things common in other parts of asia, exclusive of some things. Very distinctive. I rode many, many km in Bali and found it to be comfortable. Almost never did my speeds go anywhere close to what is common on American road networks.

In bali, every function of society could be done easily by scooter. Food delivery, taxi, water delivery, construction materials, and more. Entire square km were fully serviceable by a road that was, the entire length, quite narrow, well-suited to scooter tires and nothing larger. some so narrow that a single scooter was only centimeters from places one didn’t want to go: a narrow walled alley, an embankment of some sort. One paid attention! Most roads were not harrowing at all, some were certainly harrowing. ↩

Framing, and Frame Control

2025-07-25T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

I’ve long wanted to have a definitive place where I can explain why I keep thinking of/referencing this thing I call, others call, ‘frame control’.

Here’s a good-enough concise definition:

Frame control: the act of insisting that only one way of seeing something is valid, and using emotional leverage to force others to adopt it.

Its often-enough a tactic of control, especially when it’s a pattern, especially if there’s a power dynamic involved. (Parents ‘controlling the frame’ of their kids reality is how most people first experience frame control in their life.)

The first time I encountered the phrase ‘frame control’ was in this excellent article:

👉 https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/

We all hold various frames on all sorts of issues. A ‘frame’ is the collection of important-to-the-perceiver components of the situation. Someone who’s a heavily religious european american descendant living in the greater united states will often hold the frame of ‘the bible says…’.

Someone else (or the same person) might at other times hold the frame of ‘this particular person says’ or ‘research says…’ or ‘a particular authority says…’

Having a frame and using it isn’t the same as controlling the frame. Two people could have two different perspectives on the same issue, two different frames, and there is not necessarily any conflict.

The issues begin if one of the person is clinging tightly to their frame, and either refusing to move out of it, or refusing to grant the validity of a different frame. They’re controlling which frame is giving space.

It’s a form of invalidating someone else. Invalidating or dismissing someone else’s POV, especially in situations where there’s a power dynamic or it’s a family situation, is a short step away from emotional abuse and neglect.

If it’s a peer situation and happens repeatedly, it’s pretty bad. If it’s a parent doing this to a child, it is horrible to the victim and the dynamic.

Some people unintentionally ‘use’ frame control to try to achieve a certain outcome on a certain topic. It’s ‘just’ slightly coercive conversation, at it’s lightest, maybe.

My religious-authoritarian/supremacist parents are great prototypical examples of the emotional/verbal abuse and neglect potential of frame control, in their own distinctive ways. My dad gets hostile if asked to step out of the frame of supremacist/patriarchal american pro-slavery evangelicalism. my mom gets ‘forgetful’, and gives a blank face in response to anything not directly connected to her rigid thoughts of evangelicals, religious authoritarianism, performative femininity, and role compliance.

Someone like Donald uses frame control to deftly verbally box and bully the victim into some intellectual position, constraining them emotionally as directly as leg shackles constrain someone’s physical movement.

My childhood experience of my own father figure was similar enough to the experience of the author in the frame control piece link. I long ago stopped interacting with him, and a few times recently happened to use words to communicate with him, and could ‘clock’ the tactics so directly and easily this time.

I nearly laughed in his face when he tried to usurp something I said by claiming a different frame. I could have gladly gone into the frame with him, for the record, but since he wasn’t using words in a mutual or collaborative way, but to overpower me and to make me shut up, I of course didn’t give in to the attempted manipulation. I interrupted him and continued the point I was making. He then accused me of disrespect and tried to end the phone call.

The conversations was short, but productive. I was telling him that despite what he thinks his sky daddy says, he has no permission to beat my own child or make threats of assaulting children in her company. I was also disabusing him of any possible notions he may have been clinging to around the status of our relationship. I evaluate him as an open abuser of children, and feel disgust for the kinds of actions he has exhibited, and continues to exhibit. This is probably the only time in my life I verbally stood up for myself to him, and he acted so affronted by it, we may never speak again. Which is fine! As I told him, I don’t care to have in my life people who think chattel slavery was good, regardless/especially if that person claims/claimed me as their property/family.

So, in that conversation, as a 36 year old, I didn’t get hurt by this man, per se. (The part of me that remembers holding hope for affection or love from a parent was disappointed, but noted the familiarity of the emotional experience). I cannot say the same for the 5, 8, 12, 16, 22, 30 year old old versions of me who spent hours, days, years in the presence of someone like this, getting brushed aside and dismissed and demeaned in certain patterened ways.

Signs of not controlling the frame

The ‘not frame control’ response to frame control piece would be a conversational style informed by something like:

frame “choosing and using”, instead of frame controlling
frame ‘following’
frame ‘checking’
conversational mutuality
“i can see that point”/”i can see what you’re saying”/”i dont yet understand what you’re saying, say more about {whatever}”

i keep noticing when I talk with supremacists, I can make a concession and ‘put on’ their frame. Unfortunately they act entitled to this labor. Regardless, I can then usually express something I want to express from the POV of their frame, but since/if it’s non-conforming, I get shunned.

For example, I can discuss Jesus with them, because they claim to care a lot about him. But american evangelicalism doesn’t actually care at all about the interesting things about Jesus. (‘Would jesus have owned slaves in the american south?’ is a reasonable question. but evangelicalism was the tool supremacists used to justify chattel slavery, so the question cannot be asked. When I first encountered the story it reframed how I experienced certain objections. I could never un-see it. ¹

Sometimes one issue is seen as ‘complex’ inside of one frame, but might seem different or even simple, in useful ways seen through a different frame. ²

To me, once I learned to dual wield ‘the concept of frame control is real’ and ‘there are many possible frames’, I became a bit pushier in conversation, less enjoyable to discuss things with, from the POV of people who want to control the frame.

I don’t necessarily think they’re ‘intending’ on being controlling and coercive when they are doing frame-control type things. It’s experienced inevitable, but really it’s habitual. A part of them is trying to keep things familiar and safe, and parroting thought-stopping clichés is certainly a familiar tactic, compared to having a novel, surprising, uncertain conversation about a delicate topic.

Why frame control is hurtful

in theory, people exchange words to share and learn useful things about each other.

In talking to my evangelical father about why hitting kids is wrong, he says “well the bible says ….” and he gets pouty and mean when I reference any alternative framing of the situation. I interpret it as ‘I want to hit children, and I use {a particular reason} to allow myself to do this.’

He’s not sharing a point of view that makes sense to him with a willingness to explore my point of view - he’s using frame control, and trying to force me to either stay in ‘his’ frame, where he feels safer, or he wants me to stop talking about it.

He dismisses physically assaulting me by saying “it was just a few swats on the butt”. That he would probably feel a reasonable, displeased way if I gave him ‘just a few swats on the butt’ seems unavailable to him.

He’s grasping for frame control, and got quite disregulated when I didn’t follow along like he was used to child-me following along. Or, of course, when child me didn’t follow along, him/his wife labeled me as ‘rebellious’ as they ganged up on me. Imagine needing another adult to comfort you after you both assaulted the kid. weird.

He/supremacists interpret/need to experience ‘stepping outside of the frame’ as ‘disrespect’, and use that as an excuse to end the conversation. (my POV is he needed to end the conversation because nothing he was saying was ‘working’ at restoring his sense of emotional superiority/control, and fabricated the justification of disrespect to accomplish ending the call)

At that point it seemed likely that a collaborative outcome wasn’t in the cards, so even if I willingly adopted his frame, I expected that he would keep trying to verbally/emotionally beat me into submission, using ever more narrow slices of his frame to do whatever it is verbally abusive people are doing with their words.

Once one is willing to look at the shape of a conversation to see if it feels like the other person is being collaborative, or aiming to evade and dominate, it becomes very uninteresting to be in the latter kind of conversation.

The frame controller is trying to prevent new information from impacting their way of viewing things, and they’re willing to try to destroy the sense of self of the other person in the conversation, to accomplish their selfish goals.

examples of frame control

Bleh. Feels too fraught to try to itemize all the different examples. It’s less about whatever the frame is, and more about the other person being willing to bully you into their frame, or bully you out of your frame.

Once someone is controlling the frame, continuing the conversation is pointless. Maybe, theoretically, at a point in the future it could be tried again (probably not) but it’s certainly pointless in the moment. Each of my parents, now, as I had conversations with them as an adult, it was laughably overwhelming, their need to keep certain frames in the conversation. I could feel the panic in both of them. It was very strange, the first time in my life, noticing that my emotional energy was causing them both to panic. I wonder if that was the case even when I was a kid. Plausible. Lots of abusive people fabricate fearing the person they abuse. A little dehumanization, a little disconnection, huzzah!

On Verbal Abuse vs. Emotional Abuse

I’ve noticed interactions (my own memories of ‘conversations’ with my verbally/emotionally abusive parents) where the first thing that sorta ‘jumps out’ might be the tactics of verbal abuse.

It’s coercion with words. But words are ‘just’ manifestations of inner emotional state, so verbal abuse is to me indistinguishable from emotional abuse. Also, both of my parents would seemlessly transition from using words as threats, to using anything else they could construe as threats (physical assault, threats of punishment, deprivation) to coerce me into whatever they wanted. So, if there’s no boundaries between, say, words and hitting, why should I receive their coercive words more gently than if they were physically assaulting me? Emotional coercion always precedes physical coercion.

My mom wrote a story from my childhood, trying to ‘convince’ 3 or 4 year old me to put toys away, or take a bath, and child me kept saying “why?” “why?”. In the story she wrote with her own hand and then printed copies of and gave to each of her kids she said

I [miriam] got tired of answering all the questions, so I just skipped to the end. I said ‘Josh, if you don’t put your toys away and take a bath, I will beat you.” “OKAY”, josh said contentedly as he put his toys away and went and took a bath.

I grant that I’ve always had more respect for people when they verbalize their willingness to coerce directly, instead of hiding it behind manipulation. “go take a bath because if you don’t I’ll beat you” is much more direct than “go take a bath because it’s good for you” and lying about your willingness to beat someone else. Miriam doesn’t like to say the unstated very often: “you should do such and such, because if you do not _I will hate you/treat you as an object of hatred.”

Someone can use words in grievous ways, to tear down someone’s sense of self.

Phrases like “you don’t know what you’re talking about” or “that didn’t happen” or “don’t say such a thing” or “you’re too sensitive” are all words that frame the person saying the phrases as above/better than/wiser than the person they are talking to. It’s a little propaganda, trying to make someone else trust their own point of view less. They’re words that can only be uttered by someone who believes that a hierarchy exists, and they’re at the top of it/not at the bottom of it.

If you flipped onto them the same language they’re giving you, the way they go through the roof indicates that the language is unfair. If kid me had ever told my dad he was ‘too sensitive’, he’d assault me for disobedience. That sort of minimization is acceptable only by the person who seems on the ‘up’ side of the power dynamic.

Verbal coerciveness is just the easiest-to-the-abusive-person tactic to achieve their goals. It connects to entitlement (a right to emotional comfort) and rigidity (“who are you to expect me to change anything about myself because of your existence?”)

Verbal abuse and emotional abuse are, in my mind, basically the same thing. Words said and unsaid convey the underlying emotional state. Words given with a harsh tone and rolled eyes are so much more than just the words. It’s a whole emotional thing.

Parents use emotional abuse (and emotional neglect) to achieve whatever they want from their kids all the time. That’s why the following book is so powerful as a parenting book. The frame of ‘power over’ vs ‘mutual power’ is everything.

The Verbally Abusive Relationship “coercive frame control” is another lense of certain tactics of verbal (or really emotional) abuse. If an abuser can achieve their desires to exert power over the other via words, or really, emotions, that might be the most efficient/most learned form of abuse. I noticed lots of connections to my own parents, when I read this book. Their default mode of interacting with their kids, at least when it mattered, was to verbally abuse the kids.
Frame Control, by Aella, on knowingless.com canon. The inspiration for this whole piece.
Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive This book is the ‘alternative’ to moving with coercion, entitlement, neglect, and abuse towards others.
The Most Dangerous Superstition Here’s a page of quotes from the book. If ‘authority’ doesn’t exist, one’s interpersonal dealings might switch up a bit. It’s not technically a parenting or relationship book, but I found it helpful in both domains.

Finding novel frames

Sometimes I wonder if someone’s use of frame control is rooted in poor imagination. Maybe they think you’ll do to them what they would do to someone else, and they’re willing to coerce and use violence, so they think you are willing to coerce and use violence.

If they had that view, their attacks, their scrabbling for verbal control would feel to them like preemptive defense against you hurting them.

It’s sorta small, sad, to see this being done by adults with decades of life under their belt. It’s more reasonable to me when I imagine them experiencing certain childhood events.

If they never had the experience of interacting with someone who didn’t exploit a power dynamic, they would have an impoverished imagination around sharing conversational power with others. They might not have a felt sense at all that anything good could come from it.

So, to that end, here’s two (very different) books that round to ‘dramatically increasing one’s imagination for alternative frames’:

Legal Systems Very Different From Ours a compendium of many different legal systems that were or are in use around the world. The chapter on pirate law is very interesting. The book is available on the author’s website for free.
Worth the Candle A long, free book in a world that is based on one person’s different dungeons and dragons maps. Very imagination-sparking, in terms of playing along with, rolling with, a number of different frames.

But never-not-once has a supremacist (and anyone else using frame control as a tactic) expressed a willingness to try out, or even recognize, that there might be a different ‘frame’ on the same issue, and globally useful/good/agreeable actions will probably pass mustard in all frames. Non-frame-control allows for reasoning-by-analogy in instructive ways. ↩
I am less accepting of the claim ‘it is too complicated’, as I now appreciate how often this was used as a reason supremacists used to avoid having to consider their slaves freeable. Cognitive defenses layer and layer. consider again the story of chattel slavery in the american south. To evangelicals of the day, slavery was so complex an issue it befuddled all thinkers! And yet, from the perspective of the enslaved people, it was a problem anyone as mature as child could solve. ‘for starters and obviously, stop with the beatings, the chains, the threats.’ ↩

Trustworthy Belays and Soft Catches

2025-07-21T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

What makes a skilled sport climbing belay?

How would one build trust in a belayer that gives a skilled-enough sport climbing belay?

This piece covers:

the pinch-and-pump method for feeding ‘clipping slack’
managing the pile of slack before it feeds into the belay device
How I use sandbags to balance weight gaps between me and a heavier climber.
My routine for efficiently practicing falling and building trust in the belay.

When I trust the belay, I climb harder, and with a bit more fun and peacefulness.

These are the skills and habits I use to build that trust in an efficient, progressive way. First, with myself and for myself, and secondly with my climbing partners.

belaying

I love to sport climb, and am attuned to how safe I feel while climbing and belaying.

I’ve assembled some of the specific ways I find myself making adaptations to feel safe while belaying. I really want my climber to be safe, which means ‘have comfortable, soft catches, minimizing impact forces, not hitting walls or ledges or roofs, not having extra slack out, not short roping’

Those are just the things I can manage while belaying. The climber does lots of decision-making too, and one’s relative exposure to risk changes moment-to-moment while climbing, obviously. For example, when trad climbing, one’s safety does change, moment by moment, related to the location and relative quality of the last piece of protection, regardless of what the belayer does.

A large point/part of trad climbing is managing that risk. ¹

I am opinionated about the belays I give, and I note also being opinionated about the belays that I get, at times. ²

I dislike to shortrope others, even though I totally do sometimes. I also don’t like to have lots of extra slack in the system, usually. I could ‘solve’ the shortrope by letting slack hang out in the system, but that often doesn’t make me feel more comfortable as the belayer, at least as comfortable as some other options. I notice eventually feeling less trust and confidence in my own climbing, if I grow fears around getting shortroped, or certain falls, and I enjoy the vibe of easy clipping & comfy catches as the climber, so I give this to my climbing partners.

what kind of things do you notice in your own climbing?

I’ll find myself avoiding situations where I want to clip quickly, because there’s plenty of times that a sufficiently aggressive short rope would cause me to drop the rope, or otherwise jostling the system. Usually not a big deal, but as I get closer to maxing out on difficulty it matters more. I don’t technically mind big falls, but I dislike falling as a result of a short rope. ³

Video walk-throughs

Can you already tell that written words are not the perfect format for the conversation?

So, I started gathering video of my own belaying, and making commentary on it, trying to draw attention to some key parts.

It’s most obvious, a skillful belay, when the belay is challenging. Big weight differences, fast clips, etc. So, to accomplish safety in these situations, I think I have thoughts about three specific interventions:

the pinch and pump
slack management
Sandbags

I’ve got a few different videos I made, to try to capture the vibe. I just put them all back-to-back as a single youtube video:

we’ll go one at a time

The pinch and pump

First, the pinch & pump. it helps me manage slack between me and the climber, even with the limited mobility of the sandbag. At first I’d linked straight to the videos on tiktok, now they’re all embedded on this page, in case your browser supports the video embeds.

Notice the slack management moves throughout these videos, too:

@boardsfast this is sorta odd to get footage and edit and discuss, and I would love to get it in front of 100 lead belayers and get their discussion on it. #climbingtok #climb #rockclimb ♬ original sound - boardsfast

Here’s another 45 second video about the pinch-and-pump:

@boardsfast this whole narrative arc of my life around belaying and lead belaying and lead climbing. #sportclimbing #climbing #greenscreenvideo ♬ original sound - boardsfast

I think the main piece of all this is slack management + the pinch and pump. The rope could be, should be, always running smoothly from the pile into the device, and if this is true (and maybe even if it’s not) the pinch and pump is a key tool.

it allows one to feed a full handful of slack, and then keep feeding slack out, incrementally, without either hand needing to return to the belay device. It’s timing-based, as the climber pulls slack, the belayer uses their advancing of the rope to feed more slack. It’s a coordinated motion between pinching the rope with the left hand and pumping the right hand down and back up, to generate another foot of slack or so. This can be repeated as needed, if the climber needs more slack.

Most of these are short videos - less than 60 seconds.

I always hold the grigri, and the device when I’m feeding is tilted in a way where rope feeds effortlessly through the device. If there’s any friction of inhibition in the feeding, the device might not be tilted in the right way, or the hand holding it is putting friction on the rope somewhere. If the feed isn’t effortless or close to it, this thing won’t work.

@boardsfast belay beta ideas. been noodling lots on giving good belays. there's some subtlety to it, imo I have tools that make it easy to be quickly responsive to whatever is going on with the climber. #climbing #belaying #leadbelay #climb #sportclimbing #ropes ♬ original sound - boardsfast

This one has some slow-motion sections:

@boardsfast more on belaying trying to draw attention to some subtle things I like to be relaxed when I belay, I like my climber to be relaxed. this is how I get there. #climb #climbing #belay #belaying #sportclimbing #leadclimbing ♬ original sound - boardsfast

These were all different attempts at highlighting the same thing, so there’s certainly redundancy.

@boardsfast lead belay beta do you lead belay? if so, what do you think? there's 2 other things maybe that are related. something about holding the grigri in a certain way/hand position, and something about always having a few feet of flaked rope in front of you, so it can move thru the grigri without twists or needing to be pulled #climbing #belaying #ropes #sportclimbing ♬ original sound - boardsfast

Focus on the pinch-and-pump:

@boardsfast this is sorta odd to get footage and edit and discuss, and I would love to get it in front of 100 lead belayers and get their discussion on it. #climbingtok #climb #rockclimb ♬ original sound - boardsfast

More focus on the pinch and pump:

@boardsfast #climbing #leadclimbing #climbingtok #sportclimbing #ropes ♬ original sound - boardsfast

Slack Management

Slack management - I do two different motions with my hands, to keep slack always ‘free’ ahead of the pile. I like to “flake” a few handfuls of the rope off the top of the pile regularly, while the climber is climbing.

In all the above videos, at times you can see me pulling slack over to where I’m standing, using one hand or two. Usually a little momentum.

Even when using both hands to manage slack, my device hand does very little, i might hook the rope over a single finger to hold the rope as the other hand pulls handfuls of slack through the right hand. If you look closely-enough in some of the videos I posted, you’ll see it clearly.

Sandbags

next, sandbags: I spent a long time sorta never using sandbags, except maybe with really large weight differences. I weigh 145 lbs, and noticed how my own stress while belaying would certainly creep up if the climber weighed 175 lbs, and i really didn’t like belaying 200 lb people - that would be a 30 lb weight difference and 55 lbs.

It is pretty reasonable and clear when a heavy climber acts like someone who doesn’t like to fall. Climbing well within their limit, using lots of takes, etc. Regularly enough, when I put on a sandbag and coax a fall or two from the climber, when they notice how comfortable and right-sized the fall is, they express pleased surprise, and begin to go a little harder. I think most climbers who outweigh their regular climbing partners by 30+ lbs and there isn’t a sandbag in place adapt a little chronic hyper-vigilance to falling, and it saps some of the fun and smoothness from the climbing experience.

So, now, if the climber outweighs me by anywhere close to 30+ lbs, I’ll add a 25 lbs weight bag that the gym has floating around. (or the 40lb bag). It lets me move around and still give a soft catch, and makes me heavy enough that I don’t accidentally get pulled with too much force into the wall.

Getting pulled with too much force into the wall can be really unpleasant, injurious, chaotic, and then the whole belay is spent with a slight level of background anxiety, even if there are no falls or no unpleasent falls.

As I got better adjusting the length of the leash, deciding where to keep the sandbag relative to me, how to hold it with my feet as I fall - it’s gotten increasingly comfortable. The above videos often-enough feature

To use a sandbag means being a little less mobile, so it increases the need for quick, efficient feeding of slack. The pinch-and-pump does extra work, because I’m going to be stepping around less.

It’s nice being able to walk up to any wall, any belay, any climbing partner, be they 100 lbs or 200 lbs, and know I can give a perfect belay - no extra slack in the system, soft catches, no short ropes. I carry an peaceful, composed emotional energy with me into the belay, and I give some of the same energy to the climber.

Getting falling practice

So much for skills building. Lets get some practice! I love a good belay, and can help anyone else improve their belay. I regularly climb with different partners, and have noticed that my ability to trust someone’s belay needs to be built on reasonable experiences. I cannot will myself into acting like I trust a belayer more than I actually do, and while everyone can start at a baseline of ‘I assume you’re competent’, it’s nice to get a few experiences under my belt contributing to additional trust.

It’s a lot to ask your nervous system to treat a belay partner as ‘fully safe in every situation, including exciting edge-case falls’ without getting some reps, practice, some experience where the fall was good, the catch was skillful-enough, etc etc.

Plenty of belayers climb regularly with climbers who don’t fall a lot, and they as climbers maybe also don’t fall a lot, so it’s possible that one finds themselves with a skilled belayer, perhaps even decades of climbing experience, but the belayer doesn’t have recent practice of catching a you-sized climber.

And, regardless of the belayer’s recent experience, if it’s not with you, your own system doesn’t yet recognize them as trustworthy.

I often-enough am climbing right on the edge of my competence and strength, so even with all the tools in my toolkit, I often-enough find myself very suddenly airborn. I’ve heard from many belayers, immediately after I’ve fallen, something like ‘I had no idea you were about to fall, you were looking so composed up there!”

To which I say:

Yes, I usually climb in a composed way, but it’s because if I climbed any other way I would have fallen off even lower on the wall.

So, I can fall at any moment, without warning. I also sometimes decide I don’t like the sequence I’ve started, and like a puppet getting the strings cut, I’ll abort the attempt by simply letting go. No warning. I expect good-enough, soft-enough catches even then.

If I get a hard catch, and keep getting hard catches, something in me clocks the belayer as ‘uncaring’, and its hard for me to find a comfortable groove with climbing.

getting “free” fall/catch experiences

So, how to get good catches? It feels pretty strong, overwhelming, to say

I’m going to climb now, surprise you with falls, and extrapolate a bunch of things about my safety based on what happens.

Also, I don’t need anyone to be at any particular skill level! What this section of this long article covers is how to queue up a few shared experiences to nudge things in a helpful direction.

I never clip the chains

My first easy, safe fall, that lets me calibrate to a belayer, or more importantly, lets them calibrate to me, is my ‘norm’ of always ‘taking the whip’.

When I get to the top of an indoor route, nearly every time I get to the top of a wall, instead of clipping the shuts/chains, I’d ‘take the whip’ and step off from the top.

It’s so routine I don’t tell my regular climbing partners - it’s just expected. When I climb with a new belayer, I inform them to anticipate a ‘victory whip’. Sometimes I might make eye contact or give a little thumbs up right before I step off the wall.

Ask the belayer to use a signal to announce two falls while I climb

here’s the upgrade I only recently sorted out.

sometimes, I want, need, a little more practice and experience. If the catches are good, this extra practice helps me feel an embodied confidence in the belayer. One fall per route, from the top, is not usually a fast enough rate of experience to help me. Especially because the first catch of the session/climbing-belaying dynamic can be stressful, its easy to mis-time it, and it could end up being something besides well-timed.

I was noticing (with frustration) this lack in my climbing sessions. I couldn’t find myself comfortable while climbing. On indoor routes I can easily climb some 5.12s without a possibility of falling, so I was having trouble feeling taken seriously that I was having trouble feeling confident on lead.

I looked confident, but my inner experience was one of pretty constant awareness of ‘it is on me to not fall’. Not fun. I might try hard routes, but with half-effort, half-commitment. As soon as I felt uncomfortable about an upcoming sequence, or uncertain of the clipping position, I’d take a risk-mitigating exit, and maybe take an easy fall, instead of commiting to a sequence where I might fall, in a more compromised position.

So, here’s what I now do.

The first climb of the day, the warm-up, I’ll ask for the belayer’s help. I’ll say:

On the warmup, I want to get some extra milage. I’d like you to call to me, twice, to announce a fall. Once I’m past the third bolt, say my middle name or whistle at me, and I’ll step off the wall. Wherever the fall ends, i’ll resume climbing from there, and thats how I get extra milage. Cool?

if I’ve already begun clipping when you say it, I’ll finish the clip. Also, sometimes it’s hard to hear, so you might say something, expect me to fall, and i’ll just keep climbing. Please repeat yourself, a bit louder, but don’t short rope me because you called a fall.

next, then, above the third bolt, i’ll hear ‘douglas’ or a whistle float up the wall. I know that they are ready for me to fall (and sometimes they’re extra anxious about it, compared to if they didn’t think I was about to fall), and so i’ll let go.

The catch might be great, it might leave a little to be desired. This is why I ask for two falls on the route.

Wherever I end on the wall after the fall, i pull back on and quickly re-climb the section. It’s perfect for the warmup, getting extra moves. Helps me find ‘the groove’ of flowy, loose, comfortable climbing, re-climbing 15 foot sections of a climb on a mini TR. (i’ll get a video/time-lapse of this at some point)

A second time, when I’m higher, i’ll hear ‘douglas’ (or a whistle) float up the wall, and I’ll let go a second time. I usually notice even between the first and second fall, I feel better with the belay.

If the second catch is good, thrilling. If it’s still a hard catch, i might discuss it with the belayer when I get down to the ground.

Regardless, it’s almost always better than the first catch, which is ‘just’ a calibrating fall anyway. Regardless of the weight difference, all good belays involve some timing pieces, and it’s nice to get a few practice rounds.

Giving good catches isn’t a moral issue, simply depends on some attunement and a few rounds of exploratory

Finally, I still don’t clip the chains and step off at the top of the wall, even after the two belayer-announced falls. now, when I get back on the ground, me and the belayer have three more catches shared with the belayer, and we’ll discuss. I also often repeat routes on TR, so I might get back to the ground, and then do one more lap up the wall, on TR to the last bolt, then I’ll take one more whip at the chains.

In so many cases, maybe every case, this process has let me feel a lot more comfortable with the belay.

The belayer gets used to the idea that ‘to belay josh is to catch a lot of falls’ and the belay is often brought in a nice direction.

In Conclusion

Thus, with everything on this page, you can see how I think hard about the belays I give, and how I think hard about safely getting good-enough/perfect catches/belays from others.

Less short ropes, soft catches, less stress, more trust. This system doesn’t work every time, but it’s how I handle this complex, safety-critical component of climbing. I love love love to climb, I love to feel comfortable while sport climbing, and I’d like to be taken seriously as an evaluator of my own experience.

Footnotes

this might be why i don’t really trad climb. ↩
I just wrote something about safety checks, and why I’m fastidious about one particular safety check, one particular norm; that’s an example of a way I try to nudge the ecosystem of my life towards safety, in some specific ways.

I view our lives (each of them, individually, yours, mine, and in some collective way) as a complex system. Every time something fails, or an accident happens, I see it through the principals of how complex systems fail ↩
Big falls are usually best caught while the belayer is taking in a handful of slack. If I got short-roped into falling, and the belayer didn’t remove the slack as I fell, and gave me a hard catch, there’s a possibility of there being ‘too much’ impact force on the whole system for me to be thrilled. I know someone who shattered two ankles on a large-ish indoor fall - onto a volume - as a result of this sort of dynamic happening. Again, complex systems, etc etc. ↩

On Risk: The two stories I tell

2025-07-17T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

I have two stories that I notice myself telling others, repeating them. I like to write down things I repeat often (or at all).

The first story is about someone named Lynn Hill, and a time everyone thought she was attached to a rope.

The second story is about some common themes among a certain class of accident, “avalanche accidents/fatalities”.

I link emotional safety and physical safety, closely, in my mind.

These two stories neatly encapsulate some of the reasons, and come up repeatedly for me, often enough.

Lynn Hill, an interrupted safety-critical process, and safety checks.

When I climb, I now always do a safety check.¹ Sometimes, this story comes up, especially if climbing with a new partner. I’ve said things like:

Have you heard that story about Lynn Hill? ² A time she fell 70 feet from the top of a warmup? Would have been fatal but landed in a tree and survived.

The time it takes to read this blog post is 100x longer than it takes for me to perform the actual safety check. The words I use is almost exactly something like: “i like the knot. two points. locks, locked” ³

Takes no time, barely a distraction from other ongoing conversation, if any.

This can all be accomplished in two or three seconds.

So, here’s the longer story I tell, about why I do this safety check every time, and how I introduce the story to others. It’s an interesting story ⁴

Lynn Hill was she was tying in with a bowline at an outdoor crag on a colder day, and was wearing a puffy jacket.

Something distracted her between when she started the bowline, and finished it. her jacket covered the belay loop, so it wasn’t visible/apparent to her or her belayer that she wasn’t tied in. if she wasn’t wearing the jacket, presumably it would have been obvious she wasn’t tied in.

She climbed the warmup, the rope stayed looped through her harness despite there being no knot. She leaned back for the lower, and fell from the top of the climb!!!

but for a strange, random, very convenient tree that caught her 70 foot fall, she would have been killed.

what a story. how horrifying it must have been to witness, to hear.

Something very familiar to people who climb is the sensation of sitting back in the rope at the top of a climb for a lower. Imagining the sensation of sudden weightlessness and falling when one expected snug tension… truly, obviously, the stuff of nightmares. I’ve had falling nightmares where I’ve dreamed of falling a long way. Oof.

I happen to tie in with a ‘double’ bowline + a ‘safety knot’ or a barrel knot. double overhand. Whatever. I use the bowline because I find figure 8’s very difficult to untie after I fall , and I sometimes, usually, often-enough fall a lot, and the knot can get extremely tight.

So, I now do a quick safety check every time i climb, and I ‘get’ one, or take one, from my belayer, even if they didn’t plan on doing it. I verify the correctness of their setup with my eyes and ears.

When I’m the belayer, I’ll say “I like the knot” and then I click the grigri cam a few times by pulling on the climber’s side of the rope coming out of the device, and I click the carabiner a few times to show it’s locked, to hear that it’s locked. If both parties expect it, it can take three seconds, can be done as the climber is walking to the wall, or, if I forgot (rare, but happens) i’ll do it while they’re on the wall, on the first few feet of the climb. I consider the sounds of the safety check to be part of the verification process, thus it can work for the climber even if they’re facing away from me, beginning the climb, listening but not seeing.

I observe that this process increases physical safety, telegraphs a certain completeness and attentiveness to things that are undeniably important.

If I’m with a new climbing partner, it promotes peace within myself if I see their easy participation in the safety checks. I’ve been told directly a few times that someone else’s confidence in my belay is incrementally improved by experiencing the safety check, even if they know nothing else about my belay, and it’s the first time I’ve belayed them.

There’s two take-aways from the story:

When performing a safety-critical process plan to not stop

Be non-responsive to ‘distractions’, like someone handing something. If you ask someone to hand you something, and they happen to hand it to you while you’re tying your knot, it’s sorta jarring to not take it out of their hands, or maybe they’ll toss it to you.

I’ll say ‘ah, one moment’, and will keep tying the knot, even if they have the thing extended to me and are waiting for me to take it. (a chalk bag, water bottle, shoes, quick draws, whatever.) Obviously they can put it down on the ground or whatever, if you wanted to spend 60 seconds dealing with a knot, you’re fully entitled to taking the time.

So, even if it feels a little rude, I won’t stop tying in, once I start. OR! I might pull the whole thing out of my harness, ending the attempt at the knot, putting the rope down away from my body, before I use my hands for anything else. But I think I mostly low-key ignore the thing I label as a distraction.

Another frequent domain for this ‘don’t interrupt a safety critical process’ is putting on my full-face motorcycle helmet and closing the chin strap. - the helmet doesn’t count as ‘on’ if the chin strap is not closed, it would pop right off the head in a fall.

do a safety check every time

100% of the time I’m attached to a rope, I do a safety check. That means pulling on the rope to ‘prove’ the correctness of the knot, gri-gri. I prefer my partner to do the safety check with me, but if they don’t, I’ll still do my safety check, out loud, to both of us.

This tiny change makes me and every person I climb with for the rest of my life impervious to this particular class of error. Not bad, eh?

The other story is about avalanches, and… I cannot find the paper right now.

There’s a paper I read once that talked about how in nearly every instance of an avalanche fatality, someone in the group expressed a concern about some aspect of the trip. something about the gear, the conditions, the weather, capacity, etc.

And in these cases, someone else in the group sorta over-rules the concern, pushing the group forward towards completion of the objective. Then there’s an avalanche, and an unsuccessful/insufficient recovery of the person(s) caught up in the avalanche.

why would someone push through concerns?

A memorable instance of this phenomena was:

a tech company CEO was out on a back country trip with at least one person responsible for investments in that company. Tech CEOs are supposed to project airs of confidence, pushing forward, always achieving the goal. Conditions were marginal for the trip. Do you think the tech CEO would say to the investor “well, this could be fine, but I’m a little concerned that because the freeze/thaw cycles over the last few days, the slopes are more unstable than I’m comfortable with, so let’s not actually go out today.”

They both might tell the story that “if CEO is hesitant to make moves with avalanche risk, maybe CEO is also hesitant to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars he’s receiving in investment money in a sufficiently aggressive way.”

So… CEO presses onward, and at least one person died that day.

From outside online, here’s an instructor talking about the risk assessment he made that particular year:

“I’ve backed off more lines this year than I have in a long time,” he said. “You know, there is no shame in just walking away from something and saying, ‘This isn’t worth it.’”

[…]

The next morning, Dave Marshall, a member of Kobrock’s group, started having an eerie feeling about the day. His son, Pete, was in the other group, and Dave worried about the safety of their route. And George, who normally would go skiing or do chores while the class was in the field, was asked by Kobrock, just before she left with her students to dig snow pits, if he would hang around the lodge with a radio as a safety measure—something he’d never been asked to do in more than two decades of hosting avalanche courses at the lodge.

[…]

Basic safety protocol dictates skiing avalanche terrain one person at a time—that way only one person is exposed to a potential slide. Lovell explained that he would ski first, to establish a boundary on the right. He then instructed each student to drop in after the prior skier had descended the upper part of the slope, hastening the group’s progress but also placing multiple people on the run at once. One of the students, Andrew Reed, nervously locked eyes with the lone woman in the group.

PEOPLE’S RISK RADARS WERE PINGING OFF THE CHARTS!!!!

It wasn’t this particular outside online article that highlighted the phenomena I’m trying to name in this blog post, but it covers close enough conceptual territory.

I wonder if it was in one of the american alpine club’s accident journals that I found the story, like: https://americanalpineclub.myshopify.com/collections/aac-publications/products/2020-accidents-in-north-american-climbing The annual accident journal is the main reason I’m a member of the AAC.

The group dynamics of this phenomena are interesting.

usually, the person raising the concern ‘less experienced’ relative to others in the group, and the person over-riding them is among the more experienced part of the group.

Eventually, avalanche, and someone dies, or a situation that shouldn’t have been fatal is fatal, for whatever reason. Avalanches are non-fatal if the person caught in it can be located and rescued quickly enough, too. An avalanche fatality generally requires errors around both estimating the conditions, and not performing a rescue quickly enough.

I remember the take-away from this story is

often someone expressing doubt or fear or uncertainty is clued into a real issue, and at minimum their concerns ought not be suppressed, but perhaps drawn out and greeted with warmth.

Also, errors usually compound.⁵

It’s not one thing that goes really wrong, but it’s one minor thing that goes wrong, that perfectly aligns with something else that also goes wrong. Rushing can be a big part of mistakes and errors. And moving quickly can be a part of staying safe.

Plenty of issues crop up when someone notices inadequate gear, insulating layers, rescue equipment, batteries for a headlamp, whatever. If, even with inadequate gear, the trip continues, now a single other point of failure could become a big deal. A sprained ankle becomes an unexpected over-night, which wouldn’t be an issue unless someone forgot their insulating layer, and now hypothermia is a big issue. Does one continue or remain stationary?

Thus, the big take away for me, from this story:

If someone else voices a concern in a group, and I hear it, I give it attention

This is my norm, now. I know group dynamics, it’s hard sometimes to speak up, so if I ever hear someone else speaking up, I think of this whole avalanche dynamic and respond warmly, regardless of my relative skill or power within the group.

ooh, what was that thing you mentioned? hm, that does seem relevant. good that you brought it up….

If I am in a group, and I feel concern, I’m more likely to voice it

So, of course, I can respond warmly to others’s voicing their concerns, and I can respond warmly to me voicing concerns! I wrote recently about not neglecting the role of the Witness and that’s in line with this concept - one can Witness oneself, or one’s own recognition of discomfort or risk, and feel bolstered in voicing the risk to others.

I also easily recall the gist of the 18 principles of failure from how complex systems fail. I dislike when I see other people taking actions that seem to increase their exposure to real risks, and because of all of this (gestures at this collection of writings) I feel pretty comfortable validating my own risk assessments.

I’ve some clear memories of times other people have tried to stamp down my risk assessments, and in every case, I remember thinking differently about that person, updating my assessment of them based on their responses to my mention of concern or risk.

For example, I continue to be cognizant that driving in America is the riskiest activity to everyone ⁶ not just the people who drive, the/a top cause of death and injury (or the number 2 cause of death and injury) for basically all people between newborns and old age. Since I have accurate/low opinions of american traffic engineering, I do not evaluate road networks as ‘safe/safe-enough by default’.⁷

I am sometimes rigid around these things

I note that others have sometimes experienced me as rigid or entitled when moving in some of these domains, and others, with me. I don’t always love it, and I don’t particularly enjoy experiencing myself in these ways either. So, I’ll always affirm someone’s experience. At least sometimes now I try to name it when I notice it in myself.

I don’t, and will never do back country skiing or anything like that, so avalanche concerns are not germane to me. The story, though, the principles, the theme of ‘someones sensitivity to risk ought to be treated in non-dismissive ways’ lives deep in my bones, and a few different people have encountered pretty pushy versions of me when I feel dismissed with some specific safety concerns.

I grow more demanding, maybe pushy, maybe manipulative, and sometimes even coercive if it feels like the way I brought something up is made more important than the thing I’m trying to name, and the thing I’m trying to name ends up dismissed.

I’ve memories of dismissiveness and disattunement at least from crappy childhood caretakers, and when I encounter anything that smells similar as an adult, it’s easy for me to remember the sensations of powerlessness, disconnection, and even shame, that resulted from experiences with those people. (various responses/non-responses can easily telegraph something that rounds to ‘misplaced guilt’, shame, etc).

I don’t like that for adult me, so I try to not re-experience it. and it feels uncomfortably close to a ‘power move’, or something coercive, to move with entitlement to someone fitting your preference for communication before you extend a willingness to hear them.

I note the situations where there is mutuality around the safety issue, whatever it is, the conversation has a gentle, coherent, synchronized feel to it. Dismissivness or disconnection has a harsher, non-concordant feel to it.

When my kid and I overhear tense voices, or anger, or whatever, sometimes in a movie or a show, sometimes in real life, we’ll often discuss what we notice in it.

I sometimes take the assessment that “I deserve to be heard as carefully/respectfully as anyone else deserves to be heard.”

For instance, lets say that in a decade, my kid is in a group and has a safety concern. How much do they deserve to be taken seriously?

However much they presumably deserve it then, I can affirm that I deserve to be taken at least as seriously now. even without knowing other parts of a presumed larger story, anyone obviously deserves to use their voice to advocate for safety, or if they’re not feeling it, they should feel equipped to opt out of the situation. If someone isn’t comfortable with avalanche risk, can they turn around and go home alone? If so, they’ve got a good BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). “oh, you’re going to continue even though it’s risky? I don’t love that for me, so I’m turning around here. I’ll have a nice time taking myself back, see you there! 👋”

On entitlement & deserving

To feel deserving of something is by definition entitlement. When someone is/thinks they are/feels entitled to something, often enough they’ll be coercive to achieve or retain those things they feel entitled to. It seems reasonable to say that sometimes entitlements are fair (one’s entitlement to their bodily autonomy) and some entitlements are deeply, deeply unfair.

Thus, entitlement is a risky thing.

Much coercion, maybe most, seems rooted in entitlement.

when it’s not rooted in entitlement, some coercion might be rooted in disattunement. Someone can be coercive, and maybe not entitled, but disattuned, and might thus not even notice the coercion. I usually think of entitlement as leading to disconnection, but I could find a believable story about maybe it’s disconnection/disattunement that is the setup for entitlement.

On the ‘severe’ side, settler colonialism and genocide emerges from entitlement and disconnection. :(

Maybe the way to debug fair from unfair entitlement is “How might the involved parties feel if the roles were flipped? How do the entitlements fit that updated situation?”

Safety & Rigidity

So, good safety processes matter. When something’s ‘off’, it is often something someone can perceive, thus risk assessments are, can be, helpful input, and healthy systems can metabolize risk assessments.

When risk assessments get squelched, it sometimes is rooted in someone moving with entitlement (the entitlement to shut down the concern). But really, the entitlement belongs to the person voicing the risk.

I mention the entitlement part because when we’re inflexible, we’re often moving with entitlement, and I notice that when I am inflexible, at least in some ways, i’m moving with entitlement directly related to these two stories.

So, I note inclined to rigidity when my risk assessment is seemingly (coercively) denied, dismissed, by someone else, which lands on me as if it’s rooted in entitlement. If there wasn’t entitlement, there wouldn’t be rigid dismissiveness, and there’d be less/no need for my own counter-rigidity.

Thus, even rigidity could be, should be, part of the risk assessment. Or “I feel rigidity, is there more risk somewhere? Is there rigidity?”

There are two stories about risk.

One practical climbing risk mitigation tactic: safety checks & being actually attached to the end of the rope you think you’re attached to.

Since I’ll never do back country anything, I don’t benefit from the other story of avalanche risk mitigation. The principle seems useful, though. voicing risk, the response, dismissal, and maybe bad things happen

Maybe it’s because of the possible severity of the ‘bad things’, that dismissiveness sometimes lands as coercive in some way.

my current mental model of coercion has it often-enough attached to entitlements, and since I’ve found myself being sometimes coercive, certainly sometimes rigid and pushy on these things, I wanted to try to paint a path of possible coherence, because sometimes I do feel entitled to things, and I don’t think it’s wrong. You are entitled to plenty of things, too!

Is not coerciveness in defense of a fair entitlement reasonable? so if coerciveness arises somewhere, I want very quickly to debug the broken entitlements.

Often enough, half of the debugging is found simply in the naming of the entitlements. one can start the debugging process without knowing the conclusion, because of this. perhaps.

Additional Readings

If curious, these have all been sources of interestingness around these topics:

Psychological Safety & Meaningfulness
Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree I really like the framing - there’s a ‘failure to disagree’ between two experts that lots of people were like “ooooh their theories are in opposition to each other!”. So they got together and said “we emphasize two different aspects of the same thing. We’ve had a failure to disagree.” and I like the framing. Collaborative communication could regularly enough turn up something like “failures to disagree”. Right-spotting vs. wrong-spotting. “Can I find this thing to be reasonable” vs “must I find this thing to be reasonable?”
Liberating Structures says about itself: “Five conventional structures guide the way we organize routine interactions and how groups work together: presentations, managed discussions, open discussions, status reports and brainstorm sessions. Liberating Structures add 33 more options to the big five conventional approaches.”

Footnotes

A year or two ago, I was climbing with a friend I’d climbed with many times before, but it had been like a year since we’d climbed together. I noticed (and appreciated) the obvious, clear safety check they did before we started, and it was obviously conducive to feeling more physical & emotional safety while climbing. I thought “why is this not part of every time I climb?” and now it is. Prior to that point, I was less intentional about safety checks, being more casual in the gym, and maybe more intentional when outside. I’d still do one mentally on myself and my partner before the climbing began, but I was less intentional. Now I’m pretty consistent about safety checks in all situations. ↩
Lynn Hill is a wildly accomplished climber, I’d say fairly well known in the climbing community, certainly not everyone knows of her, but her name/face is very recognizable, she’s a big deal, an authority and expert practitioner. ↩
the full check, it’s lots more than just the words:

[while looking at the knot, maybe giving a slight tug on the rope to improve visibility of the knot or tie-in points]:

I like the knot. it’s through two points.

[pull on the climber side of the gri gri, so the clicking of the locking mechanism is clearly heard]:

locks.

[squeeze the carabiner gate, mine happens to give a metallic clicking sound when locked]:

locked.

↩
In prep for writing this, I was trying to find the canonical source, in Lynn Hill’s words, rather than my faded memory.

Turns out my memory had it all correct, except I didn’t know Lynn was using a bowline (the same knot I use to tie in). I’d thought it was a figure 8.

The first reference I found says it was a figure 8, didn’t tie it all the way: https://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201213850/, which turns out to be wrong!

I looked around on google for a better reference. I found https://gripped.com/profiles/lynn-hill-talks-about-her-70-foot-ground-fall/, but the article ends before discussing the knot thing. The youtube video has a short section on it. Google got me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5149133, which pointed out that it wasn’t a figure 8, it was a bowline!

then, finally, I found Lynn Hill’s own words about the event, in her book: https://books.google.com/books?id=-vp31fS0OvoC&lpg=PA4&dq=bowline%20lynn%20hill&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false

she says she started a bowline and never finished it.

Because of how the bowline is tied, until it’s finished, it’s ‘just’ two bends in the rope. There’s no knot. the exact same as no knot, and the rope just passed through the two tie in points with nothing else done to it. It’s not remotely similar to a partially-tied figure 8. ↩
Or, errors should be assumed to happen regularly enough anyway, so for a catastrophe to occur, it necessarily is composed of several errors. Safe-enough systems accommodate errors, in many ways. how complex systems fail is a short, two-page list of 18 principles, like: Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems., Complex systems are heavily and successfully defended against failure, Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough., Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure., Change introduces new forms of failure., Failure free operations require experience with failure. ↩
Bleh. So much of the modern existence is loosely or directly coupled to four-wheeled vehicle moving/storage networks, regardless of your form of transportation. Sorta cannot opt out of car-dependent ways of being, even in a place like NYC, because a street stuffed with cars is always in the vicinity. It’s a walkable place, most people don’t own cars, but their day-to-day existence is still dominated by the vehicle. I don’t like the risk I feel from other people/their cars when I am out and about, by foot or scooter. I cannot really opt out of the vehicle class. I don’t like that my friends have to use cars (clunky) or bicycles (inadequate bike-friendly/safe routes around the city). Being on a bike at night crossing denver is dangerous, unambiguously so, often enough. Not the full trip, but certainly some of it, thus enough of it. ↩
american/american-style road networks create, as a result of their normal operation, astonishingly dangerous conditions for all people all the time. Killed by a Traffic Engineer is a place to start the reading, if one wants. I wrote a thing about bollards once, railing against the systems that cause people walking along roads to be ineligible for structural protection from the people driving just inches away from them, on those roads. It’s like a willful blindness to the concept of statistical inevitabilities, or distributions of probabilities. It’s like a religion. I don’t like religions. the traffic bean conveniently solves most of the dangers/delays associated with road junctions. ↩

A Pattern of Repair: The Traffic Bean

2025-07-08T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

note: the above reading time is counting towards the word count all the javascript animating this animation, the actual reading time at 250wpm is 25 minutes

This whole resource is a collection of threads about this thing called ‘the traffic bean’ and a particularly gnarly junction near me. I live in 16th, this junction is one block north of me and a few miles east of me, 17th & Monaco.

The ‘traffic bean’ is what I’m calling this ‘shared space roundabout’ installed in Poynton, UK. Here’s an explanation of it:

It’s important to know how a junction might look in normal conditions, so here’s a few minutes of continuous timelapse I sourced from a kind person on Reddit, July, 2025:

I first articulated the idea of a ‘traffic bean’ here on my substack, applying it to Colfax & Franklin & Park, mostly.

The ‘traffic bean’ concept is based off of Poynton, UK’s rebuild of a shared-space traffic bean concept

Here’s two still images that convey the vibe.

First, notice the shape I’ve drawn over the junction mockup. This mockup is for work that was planned (and has now been finished, as of 2013) in Poynton, UK:

As a reminder, here’s what beans may be shaped like:

So, an ‘irregular circle’ could be considered a bean. Thus, a ‘traffic bean’ shares some conceptual overlap with a traffic circle.

I’m also suggesting a deviation from what Poynton, UK does - in Poynton, the entire center area of the junction is allocated to cars, so they can drive straight through if they want - I’m suggesting that the ‘circle’ shape be maintained, with the center of the circle kept open for people, not cars.

here’s one of my own recent videos about junction efficiency:

17th & Monaco Traffic Bean

Here’s sorta what I’m thinking. The shape would be initially provided by orange traffic cones, until the right shape and curves are found. Cones allow permeability by people walking and biking, so lots of the space would be ‘reclaimed’ for non-car uses

Here’s some footage of the intersection - I’d not even really thought of the application of the traffic bean concept to this junction until long after seeing it the first time. I originally went out there after reading this article, found it in a very relatable subreddit, r/fuckcars

Popped down to see how the owner of the house would feel about adding some bollards. My initial thought was to get some heavy boulders/bollards¹ placed in the obvious spots. Might still do that! But beyond the boulders, the entire junction really could be, should be, rendered safe. If there was a car in the way or a person, the next vehicle might still crash into the house, but it would also hurt the other people who had nothing to do with the overly fast vehicle.

So, a traffic bean, especially mixed with some bollard-type rocks in the median between Monaco northbound/southbound, and a few more in the front yard of the property in question.

Here’s some from tiktok, me showing how the traffic bean could/would function, using the convenience of my scooter.

This would be the same experience a larger vehicle would have, too, except likely even less stopping and waiting for passing traffic.

insta360 footage, on my scooter, treating the center island as a traffic bean (tiktok) (a direct link)

below is an embed from tiktok, that depending on your device’s browser’s settings, may or may not render:

@boardsfast

On MUTCD Compliance

The Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (pdf from dot.gov) is a chunky 900+ pages. I don’t have a paper version. Do you?

This traffic bean project is designed as a low-cost, reversible pilot demonstration, informed by MUTCD guidance and implemented under engineering judgment, to test improved traffic flow and pedestrian and vehicular operator/passenger safety. This pilot aligns with the MUTCD’s stated goals of improving the safe and efficient movement of people and goods — particularly vulnerable road users — through clearly communicated, low-speed, high-attention intersections. (see section below on relative values of vehicles per square meter per minute throughput)

There’s two key provisions we’re going to implement, from this document, to be in accordance with the guidelines of this document:

‘New Traffic Pattern Ahead’ sign

The first piece of signage is, of course, an indication to drivers that things are about to be different. There will be ways of helping them pay attention beyond just this sign, but we’ll use a NEW TRAFFIC PATTERN AHEAD MUTCD W23-2: for each vehicular point of access. It’ll look something like:

Exercising judgement, engineering study

After 36 pages of Table Of Contents, on page 3 of the MUTCD 11th ed, there’s a line:

Section 1A.04 Use of the MUTCD, paragraph 2:

Standard: 02 Where the content of this Manual requires a decision for implementation, such decisions shall be made by an engineer, or an individual under the supervision of an engineer, who has the appropriate levels of experience and expertise to make the traffic control device decision. Those decisions shall be made using engineering judgment or engineering study, as required by the MUTCD provision.

in the original:

poynton, UK’s answer to the same question.

In the video about Poynton, there’s a few sentances given to compliance with the UK equivalent of AASHTO or MUTCD, I believe the principal holds, discussed at the 9 minute 35 second mark of the video, which should be queued up in the below clip:

17th & Monaco: Updates after the meeting with various city offices Tuesday, early July (the 8th)

The junction needs to be fixed, obviously, but not with punishment or enforcement energy. The Denver Police Department’s staffing levels for speeding/speed monitoring is down quite a bit, according to my conversation with the police officer at the meeting, and even if it wasn’t, relying on police and the implicit threat within them to change driver behavior is not interesting. He reported being pleased at the idea of no longer having to respond to accidents, fatal or otherwise, at 17th and Monaco.

People move around based on the environment. When is the last time you walked or drove directly into a tree? That you didn’t walk into a tree isn’t because of enforcement, but because something about the treeishness of the tree caused every part of your brain to consider that space unavailable and uninteresting to you.

The same principal can be brought into ‘traffic engineering’ or ‘mobility network design’.

I don’t presume that every square meter of asphalt is 1) the same as every other square meter of asphalt, or 2) belongs to cars.

Roads are a key part of a mobility network. Mobility networks exist to move people/vehicles around.

Here’s how I evaluate mobility networks:

`Junction Efficiency` modeling: Vehicles Per Square Meter Per Minute

One could imagine a metric for evaluating junction efficiency, for comparing different junctions, or junction designs against each other and themselves.

I ended up moving most of this conversation to a dedicated post:

👉 A Junction Efficiency Metric: Vehicles Per Square Meter Per Minute

five minutes is 300 seconds, and since the video is a 3x time lapse, that means I’m going to count the total number of vehicles that pass through the marked polygon in 100 ‘video seconds’:

Before we start counting, lets determine exactly how large the junction is:

Lets see the square foot value for both of those polygons. We’ll do the math all the way through for both, of course.

Above is the view of this junction in google earth. Next I’ll use the measuring tool to open a polygon drawing menu. The image below is what this looks like:

So the ‘larger’ polygon is 1691 square meters.

Lets look at the smaller option:

Simple enough, the smaller polygon is 1230 square meters.

I’ll pause here for now, but the next step will be to measure the vehicles entering that shape.

How I do the counts

Feel free to check my math or methodology.

[I moved a bunch of text from here to the dedicated vehicles per square meter per minute post]

So, like we’re discussing, how many vehicles in 5 minutes? 203 vehicles in five minutes

Let’s plug these values into the formula:

203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters

0.0240 vehicles per square meter per minute

Or flipped:

1 vehicle per 41 m² per minute

41 square meters is about the size of:

A small studio apartment (6.4 m x 6.4 m)
Half of a tennis court
A single parking space (with buffer) plus some sidewalk

Half of a tennis court to move a single vehicle in a minute? Seems ‘obviously inefficient’ to me.

how to make it better

The way to make it more efficient, at first pass, would be to simply find a smaller area for the junction.

For instance, compare the following:

203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 1690 square meters
203 vehicles | 5 minutes | 550 square meters

the second junction, at 1/3rd the size, could be construed to have a 3x efficiency. (7% of a vehicle per square meter per minute instead of 2%).

animation of what 3x efficiency could look

3x the efficiency could be achieved purely by making the junction much smaller - 500 square meters vs 1600 square meters.

Intersection Efficiency Comparison

If you had limited space and needed junctions in three different places, and nothing else about the space could be used for anything BUT moving these vehicles, which would you want more of?

Both intersections process 203 vehicles in 5 minutes

My desire with the traffic bean isn’t even necessarily to move more cars through - it’s to reduce certain forms of pollution, difficulty, distress, waste, excesses. One of the ways it does this is by reducing the physical space allocated to the junction.

[lots more of this conversation got moved to the vehicles per square meter per minute piece]

Achieving a 400 square meter junction

to get this junction, we’d want something bean shaped, with the inner shape hollowed out, like a doughnut. This frees up lots of square meters.

A bunch of space saving comes from the ‘hollow’ inner space of the traffic bean. We’ll determine an inner shape that will get subtracted from the outer shape.

The following shape is 147 sq meters:

So, this inside space can be subtracted from the outer space. Lets jot down a shape that could work for the outside.

It needs to be only a single lane wide, with entry/exit points wherever needed.

How would you feel about this shape? its 360 sq meters, which of course includes the 147 sq meters we’re gonna count as ‘for the people’ and not as space for cars:

its 360 sq meters.

so, less the inner area that doesn’t need to be counted,

360 sq meters (outside shape) - 147 square meters (inside shape) = 213 square meters

Lots of the remaining space would need to be ‘shaped down’ with traffic cones, until the right shape was found. Here’s a very crude example:

The above was my super wonky first mockup. Can you see what I’m aiming for, even as it’s obviously not the exact right shape?

The junction has sorta widely-separated inputs and outputs, so this is a sorta extreme example of the paths that would be ‘carved out’ of the existing junction space.

A note about the shapes

What I’d suggest is that these shapes, the shapes of the lines, boundaries for cars, be ‘drawn’ or profiled, initially with the humble orange traffic cone.

Traffic cones are no barrier to anyone but cars, so ias people are walking or biking through the area, they could easily cross perpendicular to the vehicle traffic, barrier free.

The cars would stick to the paths, everyone else would move however they wanted.

As is visible in this timelapse video from Poynton, pedestrians easily, safely cross the paths of cars. This is the exact same vibe I’d be aiming to replicate, and it would be easily ensured by putting ‘gate-like’ patterns of cones down, for the cars and pedestrians each, wherever there’s anticipated points of crossings.

check out my series on coning to see videos, footage of other places I’ve placed traffic cones. It’s very easy to get the kinds of behavior one wants from drivers with traffic cones.

Some signage on the inbound lanes would say ‘shared space’ or something, and there would begin to be affordances to the space of the junction being a ‘shared space’.

Same as Poynton, there would be signage that says ‘shared space’ and curves such that vehicles move slowly enough. there could be an arbitrary design speed (13 mph?) that is achieved by people at the fastest part of the junction, and one would simply shape the curve to achieve that speed. ²

I have a video elsewhere on this page of me driving around and around and around the traffic circle, sorta profiling the shape of this bean. I was moving slowly, a car could have moved as fast as me. That shows how quickly a junction like this could ‘clear’ a vehicle, no stopping required. Much closer to 1 vehicle per meter per minute.

Here’s the video:

@boardsfast

Some Mockups to convey the vibe

Here’s an image with some modifications provided by chatgpt. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s interesting. Here’s the crude images I gave the model, I provided the following annotated screenshots:

And it delivered pretty neat images! Not necessarily ‘syntactically correct’ from a vehicular flow perspective, but I believe some of the vibe is being conveyed.

I note the first image I fed it of mine also isn’t quite syntactically correct.

Like I said, these are not ‘syntactically correct’, but I notice on the source images, I didn’t bother to provide possibly relevant detail for some of it. Let’s create an accurate sketchup, and see if ChatGPT can generate a correct result. I’ve never tried this exact thing with chatgpt before. Only recently did I do my first image modification with it!

Here’s the next source image. I’m calling it “syntactically correct” in that this particular shape would solve the problem of the intersection:

The prompt I’m giving chatgpt:

This image I’m giving you now I’m calling ‘syntactically correct’, in that it actually works to solve the intersection, based on the current configuration. Could you draw the shapes of the green lines in traffic cones?

I note that there would be, then, two ‘islands’ of cones, to keep up with what I’ve drawn out. A long narrow one on the top right, and a sorta triangular one on the bottom left.

The width of the travel lanes could be about 11 feet.

Here’s the result. Again, pretty good!

Anyway, with the above image(s), and some cones, I think nearly anyone could now correct this junction.

A correct-enough mockup

Here’s the last mockup I gave - it’s ‘even more correct’ than before. I actually sorta like this design:

and chat gpt gives me a pretty correct image. Based off these last two, I think it’s clear what I’m suggesting:

How to deal with “incorrect speeds”?

Some people will not have a correct entry speed, given the POV of these screenshots. If everyone was entering the frame at 10 mph, maybe it would be perfect, but the whole thing that kicked off a conversation about this junction was that at least a few times a day, someone is going 90 mph + (and all other forms of excessive speeds) on the road entering the bottom left on the images. It’s vehicles entering from the left, a long straight road that sorta begs people to go fast, if they’re at all inclined. ³

The way to bring speeds down is to gently begin to ‘shape’ the flow, with traffic cones. Starting by cones on the outsides of the lanes, then whenever it’s decided to make it a single lane, do so. (At least a block away). One’s it’s a single lane, add some curves or ‘horizontal deflection’ until satisfied.

Watch the way people drive through the space, and iterate until it’s nice.

I refer you to my piece on coning. Lots of examples of people’s speeds becoming very reasonable JUST by making something like a ‘gate’ out of a few cones bunched up across a relatively modest distance. Maybe do a gate, then another gate, then a little bend, so from the POV of the beginning, the sight line doesn’t go all the way through.

And there we go! Wherever there’s potential of excessive inbound speeds (which would probably be all inbound streets) make sure they’re shaped to a single lane and about 18 mph with some curves. ⁴

What if even those curves don’t work?

Great question! Sometimes just because a vehicle has to go below a certain speed to navigate a certain curve doesn’t mean any particular vehicle will go the correct speed. What’s stopping a car from crashing through all the cones, and making a mess of everything, even at like 80 mph?

Again, in this article about the specific house that’s gotten crashed into 5 times in 16 months, sustaining hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage and near deaths of the family more than once. ⁵

TODO: add link to video of car driving down long rows of flex posts

We all know that nothing about the best laid out plans, or cones, “guarantees compliance”. You know what does help with compliance? Not cops, not speed radars.

Bollards. And curves.

Bollards “help” so much with “compliance”. here’s my original love letter to bollards

For now, I’ll re-use an image that shows what we love about bollards:

So, this is how one achieve’s speed management. It’s a familiar strategy, once you know to look for it. Let’s say we have cones laid out along the green lines. We’d put bollards behind them in certain spots on the curve:

And just like this, the inbound traffic from 17th would be rendered safe!

This could be repeated for Monaco, and the other inbound direction of 17th. I’d suggest it would need to be implemented as the ‘transition zone’ into this ‘shared streets’ paradigm.

There would need to be ‘new traffic pattern ahead’ sign to make everything MUTCD compliant.

Once that sign is placed, everything goes. It’s pretty cheap online, and Trinity Traffic Control probably already has several of the 36” versions floating around. Here’s an online version of what I’m discussing: Dicke® NEW TRAFFIC PATTERN AHEAD Roll Up Traffic Sign, MUTCD W23-2, Orange, 36” Super Bright Reflective Vinyl

The bollards could start as simple as low piles of bricks, or a bucket with gravel or concrete inside and a two-foot post sticking out the top. It can be destructible, and not stop a car, for now. As long as it makes noise and scratches up whatever hits it means it’s good enough for now. Later they could effortlessly be upgraded to something else. I really like bell bollards, because they work in clever ways. They don’t stop a vehicle directly, they just lift up the vehicle so a tire doesn’t touch the ground anymore. Has the same effect. I really don’t want to see anyone hit something at a fatal speed, so there’s lots of ways to signal this sort of treatment, and gently bring someone’s speed to a reasonable level.

For instance, sometimes it’s not excessive speed, it’s inadequate traction - when there’s snow or a particularly slippery storm, all of these interventions still need to work.

I contend that they do. Even in inclement conditions, and especially in inclement conditions.

Calculating `vehicles per square meter per minute` of Poynton, UK shared space ‘traffic bean’

I had the idea of asking in a UK-specific subreddit for someone to graciously help me out by getting a few minutes of continuous video footage of the Poynton, UK traffic bean in operation.

And the internet delivered! A kind reddit user made 2 different videos, 3 minutes each, of the junction.

They also provided a link to resources about the junction, and said:

Basically prior to this traffic was heavy, the village was struggling with shops closing and Poynton wasn’t a destination. Following this deliberate shared space design space is shared between cars, bikes and most importantly pedestrians.

It’s a deliberate removal of all road signs, lanes etc which feels crazy at first but works really well. Drivers are on high alert, safety is improved and it’s allowed Poynton to open up nice cafe bars, restaurants etc with pavement seating etc and the semi pedestrianisation of the area, which is now thriving.

Let’s do some math.

Poynton, UK Junction size in square meters

This is easy to determine. Open up Poynton, UK in Google Earth:

We’ll call it 990 square meters:

Now, how many vehicles per minute?

I’ll post a time lapse of the two clips I reviewed.

70 vehicles in the first clip, but there wasn’t traffic from all directions with pressure - there was consistent traffic from a single direction, it’s possible more vehicles would fit. Either way, in the video, it’s obviously a generally peaceful flow. not a single vehicle is going fast.

I counted 84 vehicles in the second 3 minute clip. We’ll do some math with these figures:

70 vehicles/990 square meters/3 minutes

and

84 vehicles/990 square meters/3 minutes

Thus, the finished values. The first timelapse:

vehicles
m²
minutes

70 990 × 3 = 702970 ≈ 0.0236

990×370 = 297070 ≈ 0.0236

✅ ≈ 0.0236 vehicles per m² per minute

The second clip:

vehicles

m²

minutes

84990×3=842970≈0.0283 990×384=297084≈0.0283

✅ ≈ 0.0283 vehicles per m² per minute

Compared to 17th & humboldt:

203 vehicles 5 minutes 1690 square meters

0.0240 vehicles per square meter per minute

So, this junction that’s a lot smaller, and has a vastly different design, is at LEAST as efficient as the intersection design we’re replacing.

The Poynton, UK junction itself 3x time lapse

Here’s the videos I received from the kind person on Reddit, these videos were recorded July 12, 2025:

It’s a 3x time lapse, so has the same time/pacing as the video above of 17th & Humboldt.

Maybe I’ll put them side by side in a future video. Poynton is quiet and safe, while 17th & Monaco is loud, unsafe, inefficient. If we were to calculate some of the harms of 17th & Monaco, we could list many. Beyond the issue of 5 crashes in 16 months, too.

Frequently Asked Questions

What about the 17th Ave Road Diet?

I agree, it’s a great idea. There’s at least two ways it could be done. First pass would be to drop eastbound and westbound traffic on 17th to one lane each way (with cones). It could stay one lane each way, exactly as currently configured, OR something else.

Here’s some visuals, pardon me for the ways they’re unclear. I suggest right-clicking/long-pressing on the images and opening them in a new tab - that’ll be the better resolution image

Again, this could all be done iteratively. Also, rather than really ‘closing’ any roads to cars, I would want to add mid-block modal filters occasionally, just to stop cut-through traffic. The result is still similar to ‘giving the space over to non-car traffic’, but still allows vehicles access to the space. Doesn’t make it harder for homeowners to access the space, etc.

Here’s another depiction of this approach. The whole block ‘behind’ a modal filter would be strongly protected by it, it would be quiet and peaceful.

That’s a great idea! I have an eye out on a way to cheaply, iteratively, pedestrianize the whole thing length of the north (or south) side of 17th, while again ensuring lower max speeds of vehicles and improved junction efficiency at every junction. Reducing all of the potential points of conflict between people on foot, people in cars, people on bikes, at night, in the snow, etc, is all top of mind.

If the lowest-effort, quickest path for vehicles is on the south side of 17th, no reason the north could get car-shaped modal filters every block or two:

I’d suggest building modal filters out of traffic cones for starters. I don’t know what pops to mind when I say ‘modal filter’ or ‘car-sized modal filter’ or ‘car-shaped modal filter’.

Here’s a picture I found on the internet of a car-sized modal filter. It’s a filter that ‘filters out’ (same as an air filter ‘filters out’ particulate in the air) a mode of travel.

Here’s an example of what I could mean by ‘car-shaped modal filter’:

This might seem more involved, I’m saying not necessarily that we should start with this, simply that a plan like this shows consideration for pedestrianized spaces and the safety of non-car mobility network users.

Costs to implement?

I think extremely low cost.

The main thing is dropping off traffic cones and turning off/bagging traffic signals/signs.

I’d do the actual implementation, because the final decision-making needs to be made on the ground, watching vehicles flow towards/around the curves.

It cannot be written up and completely handed off to a contractor, though I’d gladly work with them to get it all placed. Cones are heavy, I, personally, don’t want to place every one of them completely alone. I’ve done it, I’m willing, though.

I think that because the initial implementation is so temporary, so movable, and once installed can be incrementally upgraded to something more permanent, freeing up the temporary parts (cones) to be re-used elsewhere. Clever re-use of materials available on-site could be done.

What about Pedestrian Prioritization

all the space that is going to be won back from cars with traffic cones will be handed over to pedestrians.

The target vehicle speed when in the junction will be ~10mph, which is slow, and allows drivers to easily stop and allow pedestrians through, whenever a pedestrian shows up ready to cross a junction.

It’ll be much safer and easier than the options for pedestrians in the current junction. In this video from Poynton, UK, one can see how the pedestrians and cars hand off priority. I’d seek to re-create the exact same vibe.

I visualized in this piece that vehicles consume a certain amount of space per second when moving. (and stationary, technically)

This principal is utilized in creating the pedestrian prioritation of the whole thing. jump to the summary of the whole thing here

if it would be helpful, I could do some calculations on something like ‘new square meters of pedestrianized space’. Taking a two lane space to a one-lane-for-cars space (and the other lane for non-car people) is the same as taking a zero-lane-for-non-car-people space and turning it into a ‘one lane for non-car people’ space.

What about Fire Department Access

I’ve got buy-in ⁶ from the fire department already, and we’ll of course make sure the fire department vehicles can navigate everything created. In some ways I expect the experience will be easier for the fire department than the current junction configuration.

AND! the current junction generates fire department calls for devastating car accidents, regularly, and just a single accident cost the home owner like $440k in repairs. The current system isn’t awesome, and this thing might work.

Additional Reading

I am proposing that the entire first pass of an iterative fix and/should be implemented with traffic cones. Here’s more of my coning projects
‘Traffic Congestion’ As Solvable, Part 1: evaluating traffic congestion as simply a result mismanaged street space that could to be handled rightly
‘Traffic Congestion’ As Solvable, Part 2: Turning to Junctions, scraping back layers of pseudo-science.
Traffic Congestion as Solvable, Part 3, Intro to Path Shaping: Cars take space, at rest and when moving, and intersections take space, and can be used by more or less people at once, especially when some thought is given to the paths various can use.
“But josh {statement in support of the status quo}.” I find the status quo to be less interesting than alternatives. Consider Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System.
I’ve achieved failures to disagree (a very good thing) with many different people. Thus, I’ve achieved forms of participation and support on this sort of intervention from a few different representative roles: city engineers (golden, loveland, denver?), city council people (golden, denver), a mayor (golden), police (golden, loveland, denver) and lots of residents and mobility network users (everyone, everywhere). People who own and use a car regularly, and people who don’t. Suburb people and city people. I’ve also certainly sometimes annoyed a similarly expansive swath of people.
Applying the EDG in practice: Active Design Principles (essexdesignguide.co.uk)
Inspiring Infrastructure: Shared Space at Busy Intersection, Poynton
details of the ‘traffic bean’, applied to Colfax & Franklin
Killer Intersections vs. Shared Space: From Intersections that Divide to those that Connect
shared space (wikipedia)
what is a shared space?

Footnotes

I’ve written more about bollards. ↩
One of the first parts of the substack I stared is about how much speed is used by a vehicle including a two second stopping distance between the next vehicle. ‘Traffic Congestion’ As Solvable, Part 1 Based on such figure (30 feet, for instance) all sorts of useful things can be inferred, like ‘vehicle carrying capacity per lane in a 100 meter block at 20 mph’ ↩
I, personally, am a cautious vehicle operator, and even when I’m in a car, I don’t assume anyone sees me. I am quite invisible when I’m on my scooter, obviously. I also don’t believe in the concept of ‘right of way’, so I ride at a speed that allows me to easily verify my safety by checking the sightlines of all cross roads. I never “commit” to a junction crossing until I’ve determined it’s impossible for another vehicle to contest the same space. So I, personally, rarely go above 35 mph on roads like this, maybe 40 max. In plenty of the footage above, my speed begins with a 2. ↩
Once the traffic is a single lane of reasonable speed, flowing smoothly through a traffic bean, I’d love to see how it felt giving a similar treatment to the next junction, even though the next closest junction in all directions is an unsignalized junction. The traffic bean pattern solves many/most/all? junction types, regardless of if the current junction is signalized or unsignalized, or has a stop sign, or doesn’t. That’s maybe another blog post. Just know that this pattern theoretically replicates/connects to itself very graciously, leading to great reductions in travel time/time spent waiting around for everyone. ↩
It feels like I shouldn’t have to/don’t want to spend many words explaining the impact on ones sense of psychological/emotional safety, after experiencing something like that, knowing at any moment a vehicle could bounce through a wall with barely a warning. The extreme attunement to fast vehicles/racing engines. Here’s the article about the car accidents.

The homeowner now has several thousand pounds of boulders placed on the edge of the property, facing the traffic which is barrelling towards the property like bullets from a gun, deviating at the last second by a well-timed turn of the vehicle’s steering column. So, the property is now structurally protected, and even now, it’s only a partial solution, and this exact solution shouldn’t be doing all the heavy lifting by itself.

Even for the sake of the safety of a driver who, in the eyes of society, might be completely at fault! Even that person deserves a well-enough designed system, and a well-enough designed system might still cause someone to total their car hitting an immovable object at a certain speed, but an environment supporting moving speeds of 25 miles per hour is much gentler than one accommodating 90 mph and then generating perpendicular road crossings and people sleeping in line of those fast vehicles. ↩
I wandered into the local fire department one night, basically to ask if their sirens were equipped with a volume control knob. Short answer is ‘no’, long answer is ‘no, with inertia’. I tailed them in on my scooter after following the vehicle around the area for a bit, and being tragically bored by how slow they had to move. I asked if they’d want to move around quicker, less interference from bike lanes and lights, everyone gave an enthusiastic yes.

No one there signed anything saying they thought it was a good idea, but they probably would if I asked them, and confirmed that the vehicles would fit. Everything we discussed and their concerns are coherent with this particular plan. ↩

Do Not Neglect The Needful Role of the Witness

2025-07-07T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Elsewhere I’ve mentioned “the role of the witness”, been sitting on this as a draft (in my head) for a long time.

I absolutely cannot move away from the phrasing:

Do not neglect the needful role of the Witness

I capitalize Witness, as this is a real “role”, and it’s needed.

The context when one finds themselves with this role is that of ‘witnessing mistreatment’. The mistreatment of you, or the mistreatment of someone else. Indeed, once the skill/context/landscape of this “witnessing” thing is sorted, you can provide this caring treatment for yourself, and for others. To be able to do it for yourself is to be able to do it for others, and to have the ability is to also find yourself with somewhat of an obligation. Also, once you’re able to Witness for yourself and for others, you unlock a cool next skill, which is ‘Witnessing the other when you are the source of harm.’

Witnessing for Others

When one witnesses (observes) one person mistreating another, it’s like being made (unwillingly) a participant in someone else’s drama. So, sometimes there becomes an obligation to provide the ‘Witnessing’ service to others. At minimum, one can provide Witnessing to the victim of mistreatment, OR the perpetrator, if the victim is no longer available to serve. Here’s something I said to a kid once, after an adult was speaking very meanly to them:

No adult should ever speak to a kid like that. You don’t deserve to ever be treated like that. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably feel things like disappointment, fear, anger, confusion. That’s all on them, it wasn’t your fault, it in fact cannot be your fault, and it’s even more foul that they’re trying to convince you it is your fault.

Someone once basically saved my life, in high school, when they took me on a walk and told me “your dad is an asshole, he treats you terribly, you won’t always have to live in his house.” That was the first time that sentiment had been shared with me, and it re-made my view of the world. My parents recollection of me before and after the walk was “after hanging out with {person}, we have no idea what they said, but you were so much more relaxed and manageable after.” It was because I was given hope, and someone named the abuse.

To provide the Witnessing to the adult would look like this:

The way you were speaking to that other person is wrong. It was coercive, full of anger and meanness and control and fear. Treatment like that is never acceptable, in any way, and I think dramatically differently about you now, having witnessed what you just did, than I did before seeing this. Regardless of why you think it’s their fault, it is, in fact, not their fault, and you trying to excuse it makes your position worse not better.

Remember the abuser’s/supremacist’s syllogism:

That didn’t hurt. If it did hurt, it wasn’t on purpose. If it was on purpose, you deserved it.

This is why I don’t accept the language of ‘punishment’ or ‘consequences’ or ‘discipline’ anymore, btw. All of those are forms of an adult using their power and control to hurt a child/someone else, and are thus the exploitation of a power dynamic, thus abuse!. If you think punishing children is acceptible, you’re an abuser.🖕 Some people try to use ‘positive punishment’, AKA rewarding ‘good’ behavior, rather than ~~punishing bad behavior~~ abusing children. It still does the same thing. It’s a clear message to the child “You will receive love and affection and warmth and dignity and aid exclusively based on if I feel good about you in this moment.”

Abusers are resistant to having their mistreatment named. To my parents, I’m still the child they felt entitled to abuse. A time ago, I spoke with each of them. The me of today knows how to recognize and name coercive dynamics in conversations. Like “DARVO” (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). My dad got in a huff when I interrupted his monologue about sky daddy and patriarchal ways of being (“men deserve to control women, children, and other men they see as lesser than them”), saying ‘if you cannot speak to me respectfully, I will end this conversation.’

He was, of course, clueless (or did he know it all too well?) to the dynamic that lead to him ETERNALLY TREATING ME WITH DISRESPECT CONTINUOUSLY FOR DECADES. The only times he didn’t treat me with disrespect was when we didn’t interact. He and I basically stopped speaking when I was 16, and that is not odd to him.

I only reengaged with him when I needed to tell him he is not permitted to physically assault my child. It’s nauseating that this even needed to be stated, and yet desperately needed to be discussed.

And he accused me of disrespect. That was the ‘Reverse Victim and Offender’ part of DARVO. In that conversation he’d already denied, dismissed, and attacked. I was not giving in, in the way he’s used to people giving in to his bullying, so he escalated to calling me disrespectful, and threatened to stonewall, which is really projection of his own disrespect towards me. It’s innappropriate for a parent to expect their child to parent them (that’s actually abusive! it’s the exploitation of a power dynamic!) so I told him to get fucked. (slightly more gently than that, but only a little - I told him he deserves the treatment we all think persistent, resistant child abusers deserve. His self image is built on him thinking he’s a good person, so he seems uninterested in engaging with narratives that do not build on that.)

He dismissed every single one of my concerns, and I noticed him doing this reflexively for years. When my kid was an infant, and he tried to put words in her mouth (he does this to every kid he encounters, it’s disgusting, he makes the kid tell him that he’s the greatest. Literally.). I said “absolutely in no circumstances is it acceptable for you to put words in her mouth or tell her what to say.” his response was “yeah, whatever, i’ll pay for her therapy later.”

If we were in the same room, I would have perhaps slapped him. We were not, so I just got up (with my kid) and walked out. I cannot keep my kid out of his company, but I think she’ll be okay. I tell her that my parents beat children when they think they’re entitled to it, and while they promised me that they wouldn’t beat my kid, they are still at their core the kind of people that assault children.

Don, if you’re reading this, you probably already know (because I said it very, very clearly to you, repeatedly) that I have nothing but contempt for the ways you move through the world! Thinking about you makes me ill! Before our last phone call, I noticed how familiar the rising sense of dread was, in me, as we got closer to the time of the call. You spent your whole life making sure I feared you, so you could control me! “a fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom” you’d say, and because you thought you were god, you figured “a fear of the dad is the beginning of wisdom”, and you allowed yourself to emotionally terrorize, and you disconnected from me enough that it never actually bothered you, to terrorize your own kid. And you were good at terror, and bullying, and shaming. 🤮

❤️ “positive” Witnessing for others ❤️

I forgot, upon the first pass of this piece, to mention the BEST case for Witnessing! There’s lots of needfulness around Witnessing harm and mistreatment, but the kind of Witnessing that is enjoyable for everyone is to Witness someone else, being them, and name something about it to them, others.

There’s so much obvious care and intentionality in how you did {such and such}.

You’re bringing focus, attention, persistence to {x}.

When I watch you do {such and such}, I notice it in different ways than I usually do, because {something about how they did it}.

There’s tons of this kind of energy that can be directed towards kids. Here’s a few typical statements I’ve made to my almost-four-year-old kid:

Wow, your feet have so much quickness in them.

You noticed that {such and such she commented upon}, from so far away? Wow. I wasn’t looking that far ahead at all.

Also:

You noticed the change in {tree, flowers, spot of grass, a place where something was growing and now something different is growing}? You remembered how it was before? I find that interesting.

How did you learn this? Did you notice it, or did someone teach you? You taught yourself? Wow. How cool to know that, teach it to yourself, and learn from yourself.

The way you do {something} has changed! Have you noticed it? I’ve noticed. It’s fun to watch!

I find you to be an interesting person. Do you find yourself to be interesting? Yeah? I’m thrilled to hear it. And you find yourself to be funny? You make jokes that you find funny? Wow. I’m a fan. Doing things because it’s interesting or funny to ourselves is such evidence of skill, interestingness, distinctiveness. You have great taste!

You balanced for such a long time against that hammock! And on one foot! I’ve never seen that before, have you done it before? Was that interesting to you? Was it tricky? [difficult to do]? It looked tricky from here.

Gosh, I could say so much more. Witnessing, to others, distinctive or interesting things about them, is sometimes an empowering, affirming, helpful energy to direct towards others.

A possible hope I have, for someone reading this, is simply for the person to know that we, as people, hold tremendous power with words, simply by verbalizing observations. Sometimes we can provoke incredible outrage, and frustration, interpersonally, but our words can be just as effective towards promoting peace, integration.

A big thing for Eden that I name and witness is her observation and awareness of herself and things happening around her.

I thank Eden all the time for keeping herself safe. When she falls, she’s skilled at using her arms to keep her head from hitting the ground. The last time she fell while running, she scraped her palms, elbows, and knees! and her head didn’t touch the ground, even though she fell flat. Even as she was crying as I picked her up, and I was getting bandaids, it wasn’t “oh you fell you poor thing” it was “wow, Eden, I see how forcefully you pushed the ground with your arms, and how strongly you moved your neck, to protect your head. Thank you for keeping yourself safe! I noticed that I felt scared when I saw you fall, at first, but I noticed you kept your head so high in the air and away from the ground - you kept yourself safe. Did you notice that too?”

She so often affirms that she’s being intentional about protecting her head. She’s got great instincts, and I tell her often how much I notice her instincts keeping her safe.

Or something like:

Will you use your eyes and ears, while we’re walking, to help us be safe? If you hear a car engine, will you let me know? (if she’s in the jogger, and I’m jogging, she can possibly hear a bit better than I can, since I’m running, so I’ll ask her to help participate in maintaining our collective safety).

I also note that we’ve got great skills for crossing roads. Sometimes she’s on foot or on her striker bike, and she always waits for me before crossing a road - she knows I like to go into the road first, and then she starts crossing as quick as she can, and once she’s started crossing, crosses it as quickly as possible, finishing it a bit before I do, minimizing her time in the street.

I see other parents who obviously don’t quite trust their kids (maybe for good reason, maybe not) around roads, and are constantly issuing commands and anxieties near roads. This isn’t needed at all with Eden. She is so aware of keeping herself safe, she doesn’t actually want to be in roads, and has great situational awareness. She notices if she can hear engines, she notices sightlines and obstructed sightlines, etc. She notices if it seems like drivers are paying attention, if they look like they notice her/us or not.

I comment on all of this. The first time she said “that person didn’t see us” I said “whoa! You were looking at them in such a way, you could tell they were not looking at you?” “yeah!” “wow, some adults don’t even do that, and don’t know that they could be doing that. What skills you have!”

So much for kids. It’s easy to Witness with adults, too. For instance, I spend a bunch of time climbing, I spend time with others who climb, it’s easy to note, kindly, the appreciable things others do while climbing:

The way you did that move looked really smooth this time

You were so fast through that sequence

When you went to that hold, you hit it perfectly. No readjusting the position or the grip. [compared to the last time, where they got three fingers on instead of 4, or readjusted or hit it with an open hand position and then adjusted to a half or full crimp]

I am sometimes drained by climbing with people who seem to practice exclusively ‘wrong spotting’ with their own climbing. Every time they pull onto the wall, when they step off, they have a laundry list of errors or evidences of their inadequacy. It’s not my favorite thing. My approach is to notice what went well, or what was interesting, or something that is different from a prior go. There’s always something here available to comment upon, instead of “gosh, you’re such a shitty climber”. People rarely call others shitty climbers, but they often call themselves a shitty climber. Sigh.

Also, besides commenting and making an assessement or a judgement, one can also ask the person their own observation of something! “Did that feel different than the last time attempt? Did you try something different? Yeah? And it seemed {better/the same/worse}? Cool!”

Witnessing for yourself

Sometimes, the person that needs the witnessing isn’t someone else, but it’s us.

Witnessing the inner critic

Sometimes, during a given day or time, the worst thing you hear is something you seem to have said to yourself. This is very evident in climbing communities, for instance. People will casually unleash devestating criticisms of themselves for making a mistake, or not doing something that’s already pretty difficult and challenging.

Sometimes when I hear it, I’ll interrupt, with something like:

if you just said about me, what you just said about you, we’d all be agreeing that that’s super rude. Right?

There’s always agreement. The person totally agrees that if they said about me, what they just said about themselves, it would be wildly inappropriate.

my model of that critical voice is that it’s not ‘you’, but it’s the internalized voice of an emotionally immature caretaker, often some combination of parents and/or teachers.

So, it’s not you picking on you, it’s someone else using your brain to pick on you. And my obligation to myself is to name that dynamic when I see it happen, because I’m familiar with that thing, this ‘toxic inner critic’.

Sometimes I’ve asked for the name of a parent, and the next time the person says something rude to themselves, I’ll say “Shut up, Marsha” or “Shut up, {name they gave me}”. It’s good for a laugh, and really lands the point that maybe that self-shaming voice isn’t actually us, it’s really something that belongs more to a toxic parent.

A lot more could be said about this. Often it’s hard to treat others much better than we treat ourselves. If someone close to us is endlessly harsh to themselves, it’s a bit of an ill omen for how they might sometimes treat us. Regardless if you need someone to treat themselves better, it’s nice to not neglect the needful role of the witness

Witnessing the outer critic

Now, sometimes the harsh things are indeed being said by other people. The parent IS on hand to say the thing, or a partner IS on hand, dishing out the bad things.

The stuff I tend to be attuned to is the Gottman’s ‘four horsemen of the relationship’, with one more that I added:

Defensiveness
Contempt
Criticism
Stonewalling
Dismissiveness

(I added dismissiveness, it’s a similar energy as defensiveness)

If you are being mistreated, and you imagine yourself Witnessing yourself, that can ameliorate the damage, a little. It can reduce the uncertainty and fear. Thinking “They should not treat me like this” and “I don’t deserve this” are powerful thoughts, if you’ve been conditioned in the opposite direction.

Evangelicalism conditions people, via the motif of ‘the violent atonement’, to think it’s reasonable to be treated terribly. I’d argue evangelicalism creates abusers by ladening every single participant with a giant, strangling burden of shame, then tells them that if they control themselves and the world around them tightly/rightly enough, they can have some temporary reprieve from the shame.

I tell my kid “isn’t it interesting, that some people think that sin is a real thing?”

This is very close, by the way, to how evangelicals teach themselves to hurt their own kids:

If you do something ‘bad’, I will punish you. That punishment is an expression of my love, so if you are hurt by it, please know that it was you hurting you, not me hurting you.

My mother would say “this hurts me more than it hurts you” as she would proceed to dis-attune from me and beat me, until my obviously sensitive self was completely broken. What a bitch. Maybe it wasn’t a disattunement, I don’t have a single memory of her ever actually attuning to me, so that disattunement was just her default way of being. She would do it with a flat, cold affect, and there would be words afterwards like “this is evidence that I love you”, and she would demand hugs, again, with a disattuned, flat, cold, dead affect. 🤮

I wrote about this extensively elsewhere, and have quoted much from a book about the ritualized assaults of adults against children

No one in my life Witnessed to me that this was mistreatment; that was a task left to a grown adult me, at 30+ years old, to witness to myself my own experiences. Eventually, the role of the witness became a way that I cared for myself in the midst of really unfortunate dynamics with others.

One take on why Witnessing matters

Here’s a quote from The Verbally Abusive Relationship, discussing why some different people can experience the same form of harm, and only some of them adopt the attributes of this abusive way of being. (‘abuse’ being synonymous with a belief in power over, controller/controlled dynamics)

I remembered this book having a section about the role of the Witness, in the child’s life, having a protective effect from the mistreatment, by naming to the victim dynamics of the situation.

CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES OF THE ABUSER

Now, let us look at the origins of the abuser’s behavior. The typical abuser also grew up in Reality 1, where Power Over and dominance prevailed, and hence so did verbal abuse. Also, as was the case with the partner, many of his feelings were neither validated nor accepted. However, unlike the partner, he had no compassionate witness to his experience. Without a compassionate witness, he could conclude only that nothing was wrong. If nothing was wrong at all, then all his painful feelings must not exist. Automatically he stopped feeling his painful feelings. He closed them off from awareness as one would close a door. And he did not know what he suffered.

In this way he closed the door on a part of himself. He became inured to Reality 1. And, just as Hitler modeled his behavior after that of his brutal father, so, too, the abuser modeled his behavior after his childhood abusers. He became adept at verbal abuse.

Without the knowledge of his feelings of what he suffered-he could not experience empathy and compassion and so could not cross the threshold into Reality II. This reality was now behind closed doors.

The absence or presence of a helping witness in childhood determines whether a mistreated child will become a despot who turns his repressed feelings of helplessness against others or an artist who can tell about his or her suffering. (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key, 1990, p. 60)

Since the abuser feels justified in his behavior and seems to have no comprehension of its effects, we can assume only that he is acting out his repressed feelings and is, therefore, acting compulsively. Abusers seek Power Over because they feel helpless. The helpless, painful feelings of childhood that “must not exist” and “must not be felt” do exist and, if not felt, are acted out.

A long time ago in the abuser’s childhood, he closed the door on these feelings. To survive in childhood he could do no less. His feeling self, nonetheless, lived on behind closed doors. This feeling child within was, psychologically speaking, locked away in a tomb of agony.

The longer the child within is unrecognized, the more enraged it becomes, and consequently, the more rage the abuser acts out. Alice Miller tells us

As long as this child within is not allowed to become aware of what happened to him or her, a part of his or her emotional life will remain frozen, and sensitivity to the humiliations of childhood will therefore be dulled. All appeals to love, solidarity, and compassion will be useless if this crucial prerequisite of sympathy and understanding is missing. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, 1983, p. xv)

Typically, even though the partner tries to explain to her mate what bothers her, the abuse continues. Appeals to the abuser’s compassion are fruitless, because the abuser is not empathetic. As Alice Miller points out, a sympathetic and understanding witness to a child’s suffering is a crucial prerequisite to empathy in adulthood. Without empathy, the abuser cannot be sensitive partner’s anguish.

To me, the difference between abuse and mistreatment is partially up to how it’s received. Is the ‘victim’ aware of the mistreatment, able to label it as such, and properly blame the perpetrator, and able to express anger protectively if needed? Great. That’s mistreatment.

Conversely, if the victim is told that they are at fault for the mistreatment, in fact that they deserve it, or that it’s not bad, or that they don’t deserve to be upset about it, or that getting angry about it will make things worse, so they turn off the part of them that is experiencing the harm, that’s abuse. (please, see, again, the entire evangelical framework of ‘spanking’ as definitionally abusive, because of how perfectly it conforms to this physical abuse + emotional control dynamic)

Witnessing others, who will never know it

so, Witness to others, mistreatment.

I’m pretty angry at a bunch of people in my life, who saw and became complicit in the mistreatment, by failing to Witness the mistreatment. Not just when I was a kid, or many years ago, but in more recent years. If I queue someone up well-enough for them to respond appropriately, and they still shit the bed/fail to witness, I’m more likely to lump them in as willingly/unwillingly complicit in the bad things.

But there are many other people, or systems, I have beef with. Some of them are dead, like Robert Moses. Others are normal people helping really terrible systems hum along. I think the solution is for those people to be able to Witness all this stuff to themselves and others, and then maybe they become practiced in malicious compliance with whatever system they’re stuck inside of?

This relates to my beef with european-american supremacists. (I don’t use the phrase ‘white supremacy’ or ‘white supremacists’)

A big part of european american supremacy lies in the power of ignoring and withdrawing affective connection to others. That book Conflict is not abuse, a few times touches on the power move that is refusing to discuss something with someone. That’s the move of someone trying to get more power, or it’s the move of someone with more power already, simply deciding on the outcome. I learned how effective this particular tactic is with Donald and Miriam - with both of them, as they tried to DARVO their way into a conversationally secure place, and I evaded it, they both eventually blocked me via the channel we’d been communicating, because now that I have a kid I have given myself permission to speak directly with my parents about decisions they made towards me.

I view the greater united states as a colonial army with a nation attached. ‘Whiteness’ feels like supremacy to me. Capitalism is just slavery rebranded, cops are deputized slave patrollers, and they still have the same energy, and should be treated however you think deputized slave patrollers should be treated.

Lots of modern white femininity is icky to me, because it smells like chattel slavery.

Witnessing for others when you are the source of their harm

A cool skill that gets unlocked with Witnessing is you can use this same idea for when you act wrongly. Out of entitlement, or the expectation of someone else’s obligation or submission to you. It means when someone is reacting as if they were hurt by you, you can gently, easily receive the reaction. A tiny, simple example:

A time ago, I was walking with my kid in the sun, she was in her stroller, she put a hat on, and the brim was folded in a way that looked like it might be uncomfortable. I started reaching to unflip the brim, and she put her hand up, and said clearly, “don’t touch me”. A few moments later, I reached down and tried again to fix the brim. She immediately swung her hand behind her, and said with force and passion and anger, “I told you not to touch me!”

I was shook! My gosh, she was right. So I said:

Gosh, Eden, you’re totally correct. I heard you, I could have respected your boundary, but instead I felt entitled to disregarding it! I felt entitled, I acted entitled, and I violated a boundary. I shouldn’t have done that, I wish I had not done that, and if I find myself in a similar situation again in the future, I will not do that. You’re right to be angry with me, I appreciate your anger and the way you responded. Thank you for all of it.

Or something like that. Do you see how I Witnessed for her the mistreatment that I’d just done to her?

To contrast, I could have denied that anything wrong had happened. “What’s wrong? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Or dismissed it: “Oh, stop crying, it was no big deal, I was just adjusting your hat.”

Or reacted with fear of her anger, and offered a fake/misgrounded apology: “Oh, no! Don’t be upset, I am so sorry! Sorry sorry sorry!”

Or reacted with avoidance, and not responded to her, acting like I didn’t see that she was angry. Delivering silence, icyness, emotional withdrawal, dis-attunement.

Or punished her for displaying anger at me: “Hey, don’t be mad at me! I am your parent, it is not wrong for me to do things like that. You should say ‘thank you’!”

It’s easiest in relationships to get established a baseline of ‘we expect fair treatment by default in all directions, not out of obligation, but something like peace within ourselves + love for others (in general) and the others, in particular. The above story with my kid around her display of anger would have been different if until now, I’d made a habit of dismissing or denying or avoiding or punishing or withdrawing, without ever Witnessing the mistreatment. And if someone says sorry, but keeps doing the same thing, the words eventually lose their weight.

I tell Eden that she deserves fair treatment from everyone, and if it’s not what she gets, it’s reasonable to name it and resist the unfair treatment. So, of course, sometimes I expect to receive those energies, because when it happens, when I treat her with an entitlement I didn’t even notice that I had, I would HOPE she names it and resists it, with me. I resent that my own parents attacked me for displaying dissatisfaction with how they treated me, when they were functionally committed to a regime of emotional subjugation. They thought I was fundamentally bad, thus they needed to squelch my displays of anger and grief. It took a lot of energy, on their behalf, to suppress me, and wasted a lot of our lives together that could have otherwise been spent in a real, peaceful harmony.

In reality, people are fundamentally good, and can be, deserve to be, treated fairly. Just because a person out there happens to be someone’s child does not entitle that person to treat them in a dehumanizing, paternalistic way. To treat kids in a dehumanizing way is to set them up to expect more dehumanizing treatment from others, AND to deny them opportunities to experience healthy, reasonable boundaries. (Like, not being hit, not being verbally assaulted, not being shamed, yes, but what about being also given hugs, being given affirming words based on real decisions and dispositions, being delighted in? laughing with someone, rather than laughing at them.)

Footnotes

Cones, Coning, and Fixing Junctions, And How And Why

2025-05-16T13:00:00+00:00

“Traffic Cones and Junction Fixes: A DIY Guide” ? this is very drafty

This post is probably best viewed on desktop, with some links opening new tabs, viewed, closed, and then this post returned to. There’s a lot of videos farther down, some of them are tiktoks (sorry) and some of them are youtube videos (that’s not my stuff) and then some of my stuff is also embedded via a service called “Wistia”. I hope you watch at least some of the videos below. maybe the piece still stands up well enough without the videos. maybe.

Introduction

Here’s a new word, I am introducing to the lexicon:

Coning, verb

to place traffic cones at specific points in a road or junction to shape how people travel through the intersection. Simplifies and smooths complexity, increases safety for everyone. Dramatically reduces the four types of vehicle emissions: engine exhaust, brake dust, tire rubber microplastics, and noise.

I wrote recently about this separate-but-related-ish ‘traffic bean’ concept.

Consider the following information about coning to be coherent with, perhaps would be used in conjunction with, the traffic bean idea.

A few times I’ve had the privilege of stumbling into an idea, act, or articulation that, while firmly rooted in banal phenomena in one domain, feels quite novel when applied to a new domain. This thing I’m discussing in this post is one of those novel things.

I wonder if you might try something similar some day for yourself, the next time you see a junction that isn’t as safe as you’d like, and there’s a pile of otherwise unused traffic cones nearby.

Examples of my own coning adventures

May 2025, Denver, Humboldt & 16th

I’ll place my most recent coning experience here, then below we’ll go through a list of intersections from first to newest. (It’s evolved a lot, obviously, across 10-20 iterations)

~~TODO: Add youtube embed of drone footage w/no overlay~~

TODO: Add youtube embed of drone footage w/overlay

Here’s a photo album of some photos/time-lapse, same intersection, same time

Here’s some other bits of footage from the same time. Here’s what the project looked like from my window:

part 1

part 2

part 3

p 4: thoughts about traffic engineering/the book ‘killed by a traffic engineer’

p5: other views/perspectives

p6: more (stressful) views from directly adjacent of this junction

Here’s one of the very first traffic cones I set out, in my whole life, with the goal of creating/providing safety in mind.

1. South Denver, a pedestrian crossing of a residential road

One rainy day, I observed from my bedroom these traffic cones floating down the street. The rain literally delivered them to almost exactly where I ended up placing them. I’d not had this idea, but I’d been chafing at the problem for a time.

this video tells the rest of the story:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240202349451595054

I started with what most traffic planners in America would start with: Bulb-outs

As you can see in the end of the video, nothing really seemed to change. I ended up with a small change in placement (instead of bulb-outs, I placed the cones where the lane divider would be), and a HUGE change in behavior:

here’s the first of many videos showing the the CONES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD!

👉 https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240611295966268718

please notice in all these timelapses that people are walking down the street, the length of it. See how they scurry out of the road when a car is present, and how confidently they walk when there is no car.

Here’s a reminder of what the street looks like without any cones: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218

As I say in that video, the mom who walked by was wise to warn her kid about the dangers of the road. Isn’t it a bummer? She’s using the road exactly like a car would, why does she have to be threatened with horrible violence continuously by passing cars? ¹

There was a time that roads were primarily used by people with legs, and often enough the point of the road was to be walked across.

Consider:

The number of cars inversely correlates with how easy it is for people to cross the street. A ‘fair’ street maybe would be crossable perpendicularly by pedestrians at all points.

That’s a high bar, but I see it as available.

here’s another view of the cones, from the POV of cars, looking down the street:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7250134620694482218

another view of the same treatment:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240680684472274218

These cones remained in place for weeks. No one moved them for such a long time.

Now, the above videos all highlighted the placement of the cones. Here’s views from a drone, in which the cones are nearly invisible.

I think the drone perspective is very interesting. From most points of view, the cones are almost invisible. I wish cars could be rendered so invisible. I resent how much of the visual landscape is filled with cars and asphalt for cars, in the world today.

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240668293420322091

another view:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240665861508402478

another view:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7240639996917632302

At this point, the satisfaction I derive from this kind of stuff is undoubtedly similar to what some people experience with public art, graffiti, etc.

Here’s the lightest-weight intervention I’ve ever did, that worked shockingly well:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249134328502947118

2. South Denver, noise reduction on an arterial going past cafes, breweries, lots of outdoor seating

This treatment was excellent, I’m pleased with the results, the noise level came down by so much, AND things were made way safer.

The cones were taken away after a few hours

That idea gave birth to the second iteration, sorta on the same walking path two blocks down:

Another intersection, later in time:

The way one might use this phrase/concept is like so:

Ick, this street is loud and dangerous, I wish someone would put some cones down.

that person almost hit that other person with their car - if that intersection was properly coned it wouldn’t have happened.

The noise along this road is wild. if the area got well-coned, it would be way quieter.

Here’s another denver-area coning, very close to a few different climbing gyms, schools, parks, apartment buildings. I was very pleased with this one. All of these intersections by the way are STILL INADEQUATE even with these cones:

@josh_exists
more cones. huge improvement for all of the people and directions this intersection gets used.
♬ Break My Heart - Dua Lipa

A fully complete intersection would have something like a built-in ‘traffic curve’, either a traffic bean, or if that is a bit too big, the ‘coning’ of the intersection could cause a small deviation in vehicle path.

The big issue is: if the intersection accommodates vehicles passing through it fast, say, 35 mph, without any change in direction, even a slight wiggle/deviation, it’s not fully fixed.

In all these intersections, I didn’t place any cones that wasn’t delimiting what is already theoretically delimited, It’s a good enough proof of concept, though, and shows that with a tiny bit of work, any unwanted speed can be filtered out, by these cones, and building little gates, defined curves, turn radii, etc.

The experience of everyone NOT in a vehicle goes up enormously in these situations. It’s almost dedignifying to enumerate the ways.

I am extremely aware of how dangerous roads and junctions are. ² Cars feel to me as dangerous as guns, and I’m accutely aware of when a car is pointed at me, if it is in motion and when it’s stationary, if there is someone in the driver’s seat, same as I’d be aware of a gun being pointed at me.

The driver of that car could kill me with the press of a foot with a car, just as the user of a gun could kill someone with the press of a finger. Check out my piece on bollards for more: Bollards: What and Why.

I am unable to dissociate from shit roads and dangerous dynamics created by those road designers, and the people who use them. I’ve slightly unusual points of view, but I am aware of feeling something similar about roads my whole life. I am sensitive, sometimes extremely sensitive, and in ways that unavoidably inconvenience others. If you talk to some former partners, you could get long lists of ways my sensitivity and emotional delicacy has been experienced as extremely inconveniencing.

Cars, even when the engines are idling or the vehicle is electric are so loud, and one can infer so much about a vehicle and its driver from things like:

relative ratios of accelerating, coasting, braking. (In a 100 second segment of driving, what is the ratio between accelerating, coasting, braking? How quickly does the driver cycle between the three, and how smoothly or sharply?)
speed in many different ways - speed through curves, speed through turns

this list is simply some of the things one can infer about cars from the noise. Just the noise.

3. Centeral Denver, reducing noise, improving awareness

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7249752983481732394

My friend and I did this, as we rode our scooters past, a few blocks from his house, a few blocks from two climbing gyms, grocery stores. There’s a school directly adjacent to the intersection. It is not tolerable, the speeds that can be accessed by people going straight through the intersection, and how crossing it requires one to deconflict with so much space, in both directions.

The cones we put down obviously changes the turn radii for cars, and created little ‘protected pockets’ for passers-by, without causing a foot or bike barrier for anyone not in a car.

4. Loveland, pedestrian crossing of a four lane road with sometimes 50+mph traffic, I got to plan a project with the local city engineer

This next junction was one I spent a few months living next to, and walking or riding my scooter through several times every day. Some days I went through this junction at least 8 times. I know it well!

It was a whole fascinating saga. Here’s what happened:

First, I lived next to this wildly unsafe junction that feels both rural and urban. Rural, in terms of how fast/straight the roads are, and the spacing of lights, lane widths, etc. Most people driving through this intersection are coming from ‘rural’ points of origin. But urban in that it was just a few blocks from downtown Loveland. It’s the kind of junction/road design we’re familiar with when driving around the USA far from a city, but it’s very close to a city.

Eventually, in talking to neighbors, I heard stories of many car accidents, deaths, vehicles bouncing into yards, fences, trees, etc.

I found a bunch of traffic cones a short walk away, and the ideas started to emerge.

Here was a bit of an outline of what I was planning:

@josh_exists how i could use 20 cones, approximately, to dramatically improve the performance of this intersection. what do you think, tik tok? should I make this change to the intersection and see how it functions? see linked video for some footage of the last time I did this treatment @josh #dji #drone #traffic ♬ original sound - josh

I planned where I’d put cones, and then did so, and got the whole before/during/after on video via drone. The improvements were magnificent.

Here’s the actual cone placing. It’s on Tiktok, I apologize for the jump. I will sometime combine these into a single video and place it on youtube or something:

@josh_exists interesting times are afoot!@josh ♬ original sound - josh

Here’s another view of the junction:

@josh_exists
p8, other people use it!
♬ original sound - josh

Unfortunately for all of us, this was an event witnessed almost exclusively by me. No one else was there to agree with me on how much better it was, besides the people using the junction. Most drivers simply let off the gas and coasted straight through the intersection.

Those that turned reduced their speeds appropriately to turn.

It was glorious. Eventually, I went back out with more cones, and city employees followed me, and tried to get me to take the cones down. (using implication, never threats or demands).

I simply did my normal word-vomit when talking to authority figures: I flood them with polite, relentless, technically-laced monologue. References to the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, street typologies and the implication on sightlines, speed calculations, grief (over all of our loved ones killed on/by american roads), ‘we are all out here, together, united by our desire for us and our loved ones to continue to survive’.

Usually they glaze over, like a dog that licked a toad and now wants the taste out of its mouth.

They left, and returned with a member of the local deputized slave patrol.

She did the threatening and provocative “I need your name and ID, any prior arrests or anything I should be worried about?” routine. (Isn’t it funny how slave patrollers will weaponize their own discomfort, in a way that makes it obviously a threat?)

Again, I did the verbal vomit thing, as only a wealthy-enough-to-have-access-to-lawyers-passing, white-passing american man can do. I have the privilege of treating the deputized slave patrol as a tool for people just like me. I can embody this energy, as I was raised by a person who was also a preacher and a doctor and a military pilot and a supremacist and a military officer and had a penis and was white-passing. He huffed hard on the ‘authority and patriarchy/supremacy’ pipe.

Me:

How often do you deal with car accidents? Lots, really? Isn’t that annoying? Here’s a way to make for less car accidents, obviously this shouldn’t be your problem, it’s an engineering thing, maybe you can help me find the person in the city responsible for the road right here?

she gave me a hint (“talk to {so-and-so} in the city admin office”) which I kept ‘privilege escalating’ until I was wandering around the city of loveland department of works office building, and found my way to the city engineer’s office, Matt. The admin person gave me his email address, phone number, his physical address. It was a few blocks away in a different building so I popped over and the door I parked my scooter next to was unlocked, so I wandered inside. I’ve never been inside a municipal streets authority building before, and having read the power broker I was attending to every detail.

Lots of interesting stuff inside (a sign making shop, feeds from traffic cameras) and implications for anyone who’s read seeing like a state, like… I see why big ugly rural intersections seem so important to municipal people. They have billboard-sized TV’s displaying dozens of feeds of intersections. It was one of the ugliest and most depressing things I could imagine looking at all day.

traffic beans, remember? Breaks my heart to see an intersection empty, with cars sitting around waiting to go through. The rate at which people’s time is being wasted is stunning

Anyway, Matt had time, and was thrilled to nerd out about road junctions. hardly sixty seconds of conversation elapsed, as I gave him a short version of how I ended up in his office, before he had google earth open and we were zipping around Loveland ‘looking’ at intersections. We spoke for a while, it was all interesting. He seemed to obviously want at least some of the same safety outcomes I wanted. What I soon ran into is the very american assumption that ‘fast vehicle movement’ correlates at all with ‘good enough trip time’, among other assumptions.

He and I swapped emails, and eventually met up again at a few different intersections within loveland, him in his city pickup truck, me on my scooter, to walk around and look at different bits of ‘pedestrian infrastructure’. I kept gently pushing my goal along (a coned-and-traffic-bean’ed intersection) and eventually got permission from him to treat with hay bales a connected series of road segments/junctions, including the one directly next to the house I was living in, that I could see from my front window.

The plan was:

using hay bales, the smallish rectangular ones, I could build roundabout/traffic-bean-type junctions, defining the inner and outer edges of the junctions with hay bales, leaving the open space free to people walking/biking, and shaping the flow of traffic to that traffic-bean-vibe
We were going to treat a series of connected intersections, including the ones closest to where I was living at the time, NOT including, in the first pass, the intersection I had first treated

I was thrilled, even as it was the smallest definition of the experiment. My plan was, upon my return to that house, try to obtain a pile of hay bales and then, while he stood next to me, start arranging them on the various junctions. I obviously had a plan in mind for where bales might go on each junction.

I’d ended up travelling out of contry while he and I was discussing it, was gone for a while, ended up moving, and i returned to loveland only for a few hours to collect my stuff. That hard-won project never moved forward. I am still proud of how far I got with my hay-bale traffic bean plan, though.

5. Humboldt & 16th

I moved back to Denver. Soon ended up living where I currently live, as I write these words. Near this intersection at Humboldt and 16th ave. Colefax is the name for 15th ave, so this street is but a single block from Colefax. If you live in the Denver area, you know Colefax.

This street-level video shows a family driving on bicycles, then a bunch of passing cars. Can you see the obvious danger? I sometimes fear I’m belaboring the point, yet I still encounter people that can look at obviously dangerous interactions and not see them.

another view of the same intersection:

Misc other intersections

Long ago, around the time of my first ‘coning’: this drone video of this walk with someone using a wheelchair is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, as if they expected me to act obedient to their entitlement.

another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall?

General complaints about inadequate and dangerous and inefficient American intersections

Oh, I have beef with American intersections. I hate to use them, to even witness them, so I don’t travel much by car, and when I do, it feels emotionally expensive. Feels like I’m walking on the graveyard of evidence of ethnic cleansing, and I cannot help but feel affected by the weight over the years of the death, bloodshed, misery, destroyed places and humans, that this whole regime represents.

Intersections in america are as consumptive as any other part of a colonial culture. They perform unimaginably inefficiently.

I wish all junctions could be evaluated by the vehicles per square meter per second standard. Here’s a bit more about that, on my/this substack

Common complaints/FAQs:

But Josh this is non traditional and I don’t think it will work or should work.

How interesting. Here’s another video for how land is modified in expensive places to accommodate cars

I contend that any modification or change to the norm is, in principal, possibly worth entertaining.

the ‘shared space’ concept in Poynton, UK (youtube.com)
my words on the above shared space concept (substack.com)
“Jaywalking” is a propagandist term I’ve excised from my vocabulary
Evaluating Junction Function
sorta off-topic, I really like this drone video I obtained, sorta a ‘in praise and hate of intersections’
I went on a walk with someone else who was using a wheelchair. this video of the walk is interesting to me. Explains why I don’t always hew to sidewalks like some people would want me to, if they expected me to act obedient.
another video from the above walk. Again, I think the minimum reasonable starting point is close most roads to vehicle throughput, and can you see how an arterial functions as a wall?
one of my all-time fav drone videos I made, isn’t it breathtaking, the amount of space given to these little metal boxes? and the gravitational effect they have on the buildings/environment around them. The ‘building line’ and setbacks are based on the roads, so every house is built up to a spot determined by the road. Even non-road space is dictated by roads!

Footnotes

some people might say ‘well the danger from cars is a fact of life’ and I’d retort that just as cars have streets that connect them to places, a sane mobility network would have a similar level of ‘street ennervation’ via car free streets, as well. If even one out of five of every north/south and east/west streets was shut down to cars passing through via modal filters, and slight traffic bean type treatment at the junctions where cars pass, the network would be transformed. It’s not ‘complete streets’ it’s ‘connected car-free streets’. Linear park type vibes would be the obvious upgrade to car-free streets. ↩
Many, many people seem disconnected, emotionally, physically, with something about the experience of being in/around personal vehicles. I could rant/rave about americans, but it’s really american-ness, which is a certain form of supremacy thinking. How many of your friends need to have been killed by a person driving a car, for you to have some unenjoyable emotional experiences with aspects of being around anyone who is driving? How many people that you know need to have been hit by someone in a car (but not killed!) for you to sorta not be down with the whole thing? How about animals killed? ↩

Mobility Networks via Drone

2025-05-13T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Most recent, most interestingly

Here’s me placing some cones - this is a thing I do, I wish more people would do, read more/see more on /on-coning

I’ll post some videos, and a little description for each.

This is my first time using chatGPT to help me edit some images - I gave it stills from the video I took, and asked it to modify the intersection with some given parameters. I think it did great!

The above video pairs well with this piece I wrote on traffic beans, and patterns of repair for roads and junctions.

Basically, using nearly-free materials, one could convert any junction into a poynton-style traffic bean, doing a first pass in just a few hours out of temporary materials, without needing to close the intersection. One the bean-shaped traffic circle was placed, and the necessary ‘necking down’ of all the inbound lanes accomplished, the traffic light could be covered, and no longer would the junction be dependent upon a light cycle!

One would start the interventon with traffic cones, and then as quickly as possible, upgrade the cones to more permanent placements as one feels comfortable with the placement. Temporary and less-temporary interventions would be at least partially inspired by the standard local urbanism suite of conceptual tools.

I would want to see upgrades include boulders, bell bollards, and regular bollards. Not a single plastic flex post will be involved.

Here’s bell bollards:

A bell bollard is uniquely effective at protecting spaces by preventing vehicle intrusion - a tire gets pushed off the tire, placing the vehicle “back” to where it ought to be, or the vehicle is lifted up off a tire and thus immobilized. If one is going to make a space ‘pedestrian friendly’ in America, it seems disrespectful and rude to also make the space “structurally unavailable” to vehicles. Please see my piece on bollards for more

intersection utilization rate goes up, the amount of time the intersection is empty while there are waiting vehicles would be completely eliminated, and it would become instantly more habitable to everyone else living nearby or passing through the intersection, be it in a car or not.

I just found this cool video showing how/why bell bollards work so well. They’re particularly important for the inside loop of a traffic bean/traffic curve.

but josh, the manual of uniform traffic control devices says…

I know, I know. This is all quite coherent with MUTCD, no big deal.

Timelapse of cars on colefax and park

timelapses are the only way to view footage and not find it boring, sometimes. But can you see how cars sometimes are forced to wait, for a loooooong time, before proceeding through signalized intersections?

Intersections as creators of:

waiting time, in vehicles. (5 vehicles, waiting for one minute each, is a total of five waiting-minutes. An intersection like park/colefax/franklin could be generating dozens of waiting-minutes per light cycle.)
because the first one who doesn’t make it through an intersection, that person has to wait a full (long) light cycle, this intersection induces lots of racing behavior. (a traffic bean would support first-in-first-out junction operation, eliminating racing behaviors)
brake dust (lots of brake use at a light like this)
tailpipe emmissions (lots of accellerating, obv)
tire rubber microplastics (increased tire wear under all braking and accellerating)
noise (the noise from this intersection is incredible)
danger for cars
danger for people not in cars

parking lots, not just street segments and junctons

Here’s the parking lot of the Trader Joe’s on Colorado Avenue:

here’s a bit more footage from trader joe’s

other footage

There’s lots of video I’ve got of intersections, of many kind.

Here’s a timelapse from my scooter riding across denver: https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7502690216558284063

here’s more drone footage

here’s why scooters are time saving tools, and I know most of you have no idea what I am talking about, and do not know that you do not know this!

I encounter intersections when there is zero other traffic at it, in any direction, sometimes. Sometimes there are other vehicles, and I move responsively to all conditions. So, here’s a video that shows how I can treat an intersection as a traffic circle, even if it’s a regular traffic-light-mediated junction:

https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists/video/7381569250302889246

drone footage of a few people riding bikes/e-scooters across city park and an adjacent neighborhood

Relational Antipatterns

2025-05-12T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

This list of relational anti-patterns started as a draft of a written list in a small notebook I carry with me most of the time.

Eventually, I was jotting down notes for both this this particular list and the list on the piece on sadness and grief, and there is certainly overlap.

This ‘relational anti-patterns’ list came about when I was overhearing a conversation among a group, while I was sitting near them at a climbing gym, overhearing their discussion of their ‘red flags’ in certain relationships.

I reflected on patterns I’ve observed, what would go on my own list I appreciated that these things seem to generally hold true for all sorts of relationships, be it family in any way, chosen family, friends, acquaintances, all relationships of love, etc.

so, overhearing their discussions of ‘red flags’, I started thinking of how I’d populate my own list. Eventually, ended up with the below list.

But… I don’t like the red/green/yellow signal of traffic lights. Why does red mean stop? Why does green mean go?

So, instead of ‘red flags’, I’m calling these ‘relational anti-patterns’, or ‘anti-relationship patterns’.

Perhaps instead of ‘green flags’ it could be called ‘relational patterns’ or ‘pro-relationship patterns’.

Some of these are friend/acquaintance filters, some are things that might be learned almost only accidentally, at any point in any sort of a relationship.

Interlude to box breathing

Do you do any sort of box breathing? As you read these words, you could try it. I’m doing it as I write this sentence, I’m doing one long breath hold. to do a good box breath practice, it’s nice to know you can enter it from any point of your own breathing cycle.

while holding your breath, count 1 2 3 4 while exhaling, count 1 2 3 4 while holding your breath “at the bottom” count 1 2 3 4 while inhaling, count 1 2 3 4 while holding your breath ‘at the top’, count 1 2 3 4 continue

put another way:

at any cadence, I start counting in my head from one to four, repeatedly, and time either holding my breath with empty lungs, inhaling across 4 beats, holding 4 beats with full lungs, exhaling 4 beats, holding 4 beats, inhaling 4, holding 4, exhaling 4. You can imagine a box, your lungs following the outside of it, four beats to a side. sometimes I felt a way writing some of these, and found myself doing box breathing when I noticed my own feelings, sometimes. And now you have the same tool. It’s been useful to me, often enough.

Josh’s list of relational anti-patterns

I left these mostly in the order they occurred to me, at least the first ones were indeed the first items that popped to my mind. I note some of these apply to me!

signs of nationalism, at all, especially american nationalism. An “american” flag (the flag of the greater united states) is an instant no-go, especially.
being a ‘truck person’.¹ Not just fords, and not just pickups. I have dislike for all forms of car culture, including how strongly any of us ever has to be identified with ‘our’ vehicle, or other people who possess the same kind of vehicle, or a same-enough kind of vehicle. I’ve had the experiences I’ve had, and know what I know. There’s an energy of entitlement that floats especially strongly in the space, I cannot un-perceive it. I resent their miserable sight lines, how little of the ground around them the driver can see. Sometimes I see truck drivers who seem to BARELY be able to see over their own dashboard. And then they’re also driving fast, with angry energy on the throttle.
being into four-wheeled-vehicles very much at all. I dislike car culture, so sometimes find cars, fast cars, going fast, to be unwillingly pushed upon me. I don’t know how to easily reconcile this with my own obvious, usually over-the-top obsession with my scooter, but I can wiggle myself into a reconciliation if I try hard.
drives fast, or drives with a pressured emotional energy. Hard on the gas, hard on the brake, little stopping distance, seems unaware of others that are/might be in the space, that type of thing. Again, I know how I ride my own scooter, but I also know how I then drive cars, and I don’t carry the same energy into both vehicles, generally. Many people drive like this. :(
un-self-consciously white-passing.
participates in ‘patriarchy kink’. Plenty of ppl move in a way that shows they expect/want to be treated in a patriarchal way. Patriarchy kink sometimes sounds like emotional suppression, and obligation and entitlement, participation in/vocal support of certain gender norms.
Speaking of patriarchy kink… any active participation in evangelicalism. here’s one of several things I’ve written about that.
any past participation in evangelicalism (hi, its me, I know, I wish I didn’t have past participation in evangelicalism either)
believes/acts like they believe in political authority.²
does not view american police as deputized slave patrollers.
any sort of sarcasm, criticism, biting humor directed at others.
unselfconscious (over)participation in car culture/car supremacy. this is sensitive, and complicated. Maybe it looks more like also being under-equipped with non-car options, but most of american housing is the suburbs, and they’re hateful places. Most american cities are hateful, too. Any trip that involves using an ‘arterial’ is made so much worse: Arterials as Walls as Ethnic Cleansing. This is delicate, so many systems are set up to try to coerce a way of being that is dominated by cars, so ‘that the system gets what it wants’ isn’t anything we internalize as our fault. and yet.
eats meat (I’ll often-enough eat salmon, sardines, sometimes shrimp)
others some identifiable group in certain ways, especially shaming or dehumanizing ways. I do this myself! I other ‘them’ in some ways, often enough, I wish I could find a better way! I get pushy, less often find myself feeling any sort of gentleness or openness, etc. I push the undeniably judgy energy of “because knowing is solving, if you can get to a close enough view of the situation _as I see it, you can experience dramatically more peacefulness in your day to day, in/by ceasing to support or enact {behavior that whiffs of something like supremacy}.” This seems paternalistic. or is it something else? I think it could be offered fairly to a peer, even though I’m ‘standing on business’ and offering zero compromise on my view of things, which is certainly something that is unfair in some situations.
grief-phobic. This looks like responses of… emotional suppression, repression, thought-stopping clichés, invalidation or dismissiveness or trying to change the feeling. It’s always done to others after it’s being done to the self, it’s always a learned response, and I can manage my side of someone else’s discomfort with grief, but I then note that I’m managing something, sometimes, which sometimes is no big deal, but sometimes… tiring, or trying.
never playful
functional blindness to the issues raised in The New Jim Crow
doesn’t at least occasionally really enjoy cooking/baking/food prep
uncomfortable with, or dehumanizing to, children.
if my own kid is uncomfortable around them
if they “put on” a voice/affect when talking to kids
into rules
into sports (american football, especially)
makes fun of anyone
doesn’t wear/resists wearing helmets. Climbing helmets (while climbing, while belaying), full-face motorcycle helmets, bicycle helmets.
persistently, unselfconsciously channels a toxic inner critic. The story I tell myself is “sure, maybe right now that critical voice is dumping only on them, but what if it gets directed at me in some situation?” So, now, I always “Witness” someone’s toxic inner critic attacking themselves³, and sometimes someone sees it and ‘turns down’ the intensity of the critic, with improved awareness, but sometimes people don’t. I note sometimes being more critical of myself, when around people who seem very critical of themselves. Usually not.
reacts poorly to ‘i do not like this’ or ‘could we please do {x} differently’.
cannot/will not walk slowly
does not like to walk at all
plays ‘devil’s advocate’ regularly/ever
doesn’t sometimes embrace silence (hi, its me, sometimes, this is something I want more of for me)
willing to “do tourism” to Hawaii. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism is a good starting point.
expresses xenophobia
does not respond with openness towards sadness, or anger. anger can be expressed in a way that does not hurt others, and thus witnessed/received by others as easily as any other expression. It can also be mis-expressed, and can be a bummer to deal with by anyone else, and handling someone who’s mad at you is so different than handling someone’s anger that is directed towards some entirely different situation. (the skills of the latter seem like a pre-req for the former, to me.)
has pets (dogs especially, cats are a bit less of an anti-pattern. Still, i note it as an anti-pattern, for me)
for people with vulvas, wearing makeup, especially ‘lots’ or ‘always’, feels too much like a performance, and I note feeling a little out of step with the norms that lead to that sort of behavior. Feels delicate to name. some performative femininity is uncomfortable to witness, for me, same as performative masculinity, whatever that might mean, might be uncomfortable to witness.
also for people with vulvas, i perceive body hair elimination as at least unwitting participation in something like patriarchy, internalized patriarchy, and clock it as such.
ditto if a person with a penis clocks me as ‘safe for patriarchy’ and spontaneously offers up in my company objectifying (overly objectifying?) comments about someone with a vulva. I usually try to clock it, and tell them as such. (an obligation to Witness bad treatment sometimes means naming to the person doing the mistreatment, that the thing they said/did was mistreatment), and the potential or friendship is reduced.
ditto on a person, offering up objectifying comments about anyone else. There’s lots of ways someone might intentionally or unintentionally objectify someone else, and when I see it happen, I cannot help but notice.
any sort of ‘seems okay with slavery and colonialism’ energy. I note that to experience good-enough emotional safety with someone, it’s best if they’re sensitive to the different… globalized, industrialized, chains of slavery, like: the animal slaughter industry enslaves the animals and the people within it. The sugar industry enslaves the people. all batteries depend on cobalt mining done by children in the congo, so I have ethical issues with electric cars and the way they create that market. The automobile/highway industry is rooted in colonial exploitation of metal resources, rubber resources, and more.
A part of my soul pulls away from activities that are going to involve much driving, or from people that seem to rely lots, or unselfconsciously, on the ecosystem of driving. America does ethnic cleansing via urban renewal projects, which often enough rounded to ‘tear down some people’s buildings and replace them with parking lots’ or ‘do not issue a permit to a building unless there is a parking lot’. I wrote Parking Minimums as Ethnic Cleansing. I dislike to even be inside of a parking lot, i dislike driving and using highways. This obviously sometimes puts me at odds with some norms in the USA, it’s none of our fault’s, I wish it wasn’t this way.
believes in, or bases their decision-making on ‘calories in/calories out’. Certain alternatives are too sound, it’s hard to even muster the energy for someone who unselfconsciously propagates CI/CO narratives. link to continuous blood glucose post, how I eat
references calories at all, tbh.
speaks derogatorily about houseless people.
isn’t horrified by the slaughter of animals in medical research. rats, mice, monkeys, rabbits. horrifying.
overly into the DSM 5, or views it as a particularly authoritative or reputable document, instead of a piece of propaganda, capitalism/supremacy supporting. (like… the story of drapetomania being considered a real thing by ‘the medical community’ seems more sidestepped than satisfactorily resolved to me.)
talks about ‘men’ or ‘women’ through the lense of gender-essentialism. “Men do X” or “Women do Y”. Gender essentialism is one of the two big intellectual supports of this european american supremacy that dominates the world. The other big support is the… superstition? of “race”. I don’t find the phrase ‘white supremacy’ helpful for me to use, because it seems to concede some dignity to the very concept of race. So, even though i don’t view ‘whiteness’ as a real thing, I view the collective concept of whiteness as so dangerous, and is thus completely real. Just like ‘political authority isn’t real’, but the concept, the belief, in political authority, is obviously dangerous for anyone that’s been on the wrong side of someone who raised an army and took it out murdering. So, one doesn’t have to believe in something to get got by it.

relational patterns

writing a list of anti-patterns sometimes knocked loose a corresponding ‘pattern’, but I’m trying to not compile that list in this post. To even start a list feels overly constraining of the many ways people can experience lovely and loving aspects of relationship, togetherness, humanity, etc etc etc.

Obviously to list anything is to be able to list many things, so I’m limiting myself to a single item.

Here’s some particularly nice patterns to encounter:

enjoys (or is capable of enjoying) Studio Ghibli films

Misc

“Why do you care about trucks, josh?” Good question. from several possible answers, some truck drivers are one with their trucks and use it to spew hate into the world. I wouldn’t want to accidentally be associated with some of those types of behaviors, and see having that type of vehicle as being (unwittingly) complicit in something. I just don’t like the vibe of trucks and ‘their’ people. ↩
For anyone who happens to have the option of voting in american elections, I don’t see it as ethical! A president is needed to sustain the american war machine, for instance, and any president seems fine with doing just that. Biden was key in the expansion of the powers of deputized slave patrollers running a domestic war against formerly enslaved people via the concept of a ‘drug war’. they got and used infinite money and resources to enslave and destroy everything black people have ever had.

If the american government is the biggest advocate of genocide around the world today, directly and indirectly, would voting at all be a vote of participation? seems that way to me. many of my friends clock me as safe to shit on trump around (indeed, that’s safe around me) but I wish I heard a bit more shitting on political authority as a concept at all. Consider The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey , _The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose. (It says a belief in ‘authority’ is all one needs to justify doing to someone else something that they could never otherwise justify)

Yet people living in the countries containing the 700+ american military installations cannot vote. people who’ve been attacked and enslaved by american deputized slave patrols cannot vote. Native peoples, literally, _the people who had governments around the region we could call ‘the greater united states’ cannot vote (native people). Voting seems to support the concept of ‘the state’ which I no longer abide by. So even if voting did matter, and there was a time that it mattered a lot (reconstruction-era USA, see how the supremacists killed and cleansed everyone who opposed their supremacy?). Peruse https://josh.works/recommended-reading for some more. ↩
I’ve a draft floating around titled “Do Not Neglect The Needful Role of the Witness”, or something like that. The idea is… if you witness some mistreatment, some exploitation, between one person and someone else, there’s a bit of a role that needs to now be played by someone. The person who was mistreated needs/deserves to have affirmed “that shouldn’t have happened, it wasn’t your fault, it was not love, you did not deserve it, you deserved {something different}, it’s expected that something like that would hurt.” The person doing the mistreating also needs/deserves to be told a rather similar message, slightly modified.

So, if I see someone saying to themselves something that would be wildly rude, or critical, if they said it to/about someone else, I’ll usually name exactly that, simply with the goal of inserting the idea that when they are hearing mean things about themselves, it’s very likely someone elses critical voice, internalized, animated by their own energy and thought processes. ↩

Related to Grief & Sadness & Supremacy

2025-04-30T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

this post is very drafty, but has been sitting around getting longer for a few weeks now, so I’m simply posting now and will do some more rounds of cleanup, probably.

I’d started writing some of this in a letter to a friend, then noticed that, with a little modification, i’d want to share it with a different friend. Then it kept iterating, once I started down this line of reasoning, I kept finding more and more things. It’s nice to have things named. It’s long for a blog post, short compared to watching a movie. Usually my process is ‘get it out’ and then organize it later. Sorry in advance for the length, organization, (lack of) flow.

Many other people than just me claim that to fully feel joy, one also is able to fully feel grief. I’m dramatically less into the idea of ‘suffering’ than I once does, and yet, I agree with the sentiment. Wanna access joy, without resisting when it passes? Get güd with grief.

So, there’s many nods to sadness in the coming words, please also know I evaluate myself as very able to feel joy, peacefulness, connection, etc. Indeed, it’s my capacity for and appreciation of joy and connection that gives me some of my energy around railing against suffering, sadness, grief.

I also affirm that to repress sadness or grief is to eventually lose the ability to experience joy and presence. We cannot ‘choose’ the emotions we feel, and it’s not helpful to try to hustle ourselves out of sadness, just as it’s not helpful to try to cling to a sense of joy or happiness, after the time for it is passed.

So, in this piece, I’m attempting to move out of myself some of the sadness, perhaps externalizing it into this artifact, and in doing so, feel Witnessed, validated, by myself, and i’ll reclaim some emotional energy that feels stuck, pent up.

On this being read by evangelicals, or my parents

Obviously, I imagine people like my parents (or other religious authoritarian supremacists) might read this. Part of the composition process indeed demanded that I expect that they would, or people like them. But when I’m channeling anger at someone like one of my parents, I’m condemning the standard american colonial supremacist, with or without religious components to their being.

The real theorized audience besides myself is others who were raised within any sort of structure like evangelicalism, or a structure shaped by evangelicalism. (operant conditioning footnote? BF Skinner was QUITE traumatized by vivid depictions of hell, told to him by his mother, and says everything downstream of that in his ideas was affected by his desire to not go to hell)

I just read this very interesting post. The title is “The Joy Is Not Optional: The Growing Kids God’s Way protocol” and noticed (sadly) all the familiarity between how the author of that post was raised, and I was raised.

So many similarities. Yikes. Poor all of us. Gary Ezzo’s ideas, the quiverfull movement, james dobson, and his kind of people were familiar names in my childhood home.

Expectation of instant obedience, on threat of physical assault, was an ever-present energy. To this day, I maintain that the emotional damage done by the willingness to assault someone to get their compliance is such a deep betrayal to the idea of love and care. It broke my brain, to believe so hard, so needfully, that the people I loved and loved me were also willing to terrorize me, if I made a mistake or wasn’t in full-enough compliance to how they thought I should be. (“fix your mood, josh” was a common-enough sentiment)

Children are to be seen, not heard, any sign of ‘willfullness’ needs to be stamped out with a genocidal, colonizer-worthy energy. (The ‘paternalism’ between parents and kids in evangelicalism is the same as the ‘paternalism’ between slavers and the enslaved, and the colonizer and the original peoples. One truly needs to be willing to murder, and to believe it’s a good thing, to justify the mistreatment.)

The person who was my dad would brag about how once he finally got me to do my homework by emotionally bullying me until I was sobbing, and then I did what he was demanding me to do. (it seems to have never crossed their mind to consider asking me of my experience of them in any way, and both of my parents begin to deploy heavy, aggressive defensiveness and opposition, when I would ask them to consider me. I sometimes feel a very real sensation of sickness, discomfort, deep in my belly, when I think of some of these experiences, sometimes)

Lots of traditional education is based in shame. To exist in an environment where someone is considered ‘educated’ means someone else is considered ‘uneducated’, or all of us are considered uneducated in some ways. Ivan Illych’s excellent Deschooling Society is a useful antidote. I’ve had horrific experiences around ‘education’, and I know others that internalized the shaming messages as a result of interacting within educational institutions.

And the same is fully felt by anyone who is succeeding within those institutions, too, by the way. Or it can be. Some surely get through it with only a little shame, surely, but enough don’t. Plenty of people who perform exceptionally well in an endeavour are at least sometimes quite bound up by shame. I once saw someone send his second v13 on a tension board in a session and he said diminishing, self-shaming things about himself, based on how hard they felt for him!!!! Many of my friends have experienced me saying something like

Hey, if you said that thing about yourself, about me, or {someone else present}, we’d all be aghast that you were being so mean, even you’d be shook at how mean that was. When I hear someone saying mean things about themselves, I assume this was the kinds of things a caretaker told them when they were younger, and damn, what a bummer. Also I’ll keep slightly judo-ing this toxic inner critic, sorry, I cannot not.

The combination of a toxic shaming evangelical family system, using a shaming religious and academic system, to try to squeeze, contort, hack into a prim and proper shape the humanity of a child who is waging an actual emotional insurgency… it’s tragic.

much of this list will reference evangelicalism and/or supremacy

I believe it’s our responsibility or our opportunity or our ease-of-insight to discuss ‘our own people’. I have substantial lived experience inside the homes and minds of supremacists, colonizers. The kinds of people who have perpetuated genocide, ethnic cleansing, stripping children from their parents to apply a regime of social control to the children.

Whatever practices were common in Australia, against the native peoples, and the i-still-cannot-appreciate-hardly-the-shape-of-it supremacy that defines the history of south africa. Israel’s genocide of palestinians, these are tactics of european american supremacists wanting a regime of social control and willing to, well, murder everyone and themselves.

So, I can channel an insiders perspective to help others defend themselves. Ideally no one would have to defend themselves from people like this. Alas.

Since I was raised by evangelicals, and a primary tool of evangelicals is “shame the children”, I had shame poured on me constantly, as the first line of defense against indications of my humanity.

The people who were my parents used shame differently on me from each other, because of their respective damaged ideas about sex and gender. So I’ve got beef with some constructs around sex and gender, and I’ll talk about that later. (my stance is “don’t push your patriarchy kink¹ on me unless I consent to it, and I do not consent to it”)

The-person-who-was-my-father’s full-throated embrace of patriarchy causes him to erupt with a constant verbal stream of criticism at the idea of feeling feelings, and the-person-who-was-my-mother’s studious refusal to ever see me as a person of dignity, and her instead constant objectification of everything about me caused her to also evaluate the emotional side of me as ‘nonexistent’, in a different way. Abuse is the active, inverse of neglect. Even as I can construct exculpatory excuses for culty people who abuse and torture their kids in general, I note a growing sense of specific, focused anger over some specifics of these instances of people, and these situations. stamps foot.

(keep reading for entries from her diary that she published of physical and sexual assaults upon me as a child, “for jesus”, as early as my third birthday!)

Technically, my parents couldn’t meet me at a better place than they could meet themselves, their unaddressed childhood wounds, etc etc.

The reason I can apply that treatment to them and still evaluate them (technically, their actions. don’t they say things like ‘hate the sin, not the sinner’?) as contemptible is because they are unable to receive input from the people they are interacting with, how they are being experienced, and they’ll do damage to someone else in the clinging to their own self-image.

They would beat me, physically, and interpret the tears of kid josh as evidence that I needed more of a beating, instead of evidence of the relational harm they were inducing and that they could, should, move differently. Anyone who sees someone else as a person would not be able to throw away the person’s humanity and apply hurt and coercion to that person.

doing nothing would be far, far better than making up rules for someone else to follow and then beating them, torturing them, for not following the rules. This would also have obviously been an applicable sentiment in that era of American Chattel Slavery, and yet slavery persisted for hundreds of years, warping the soul of everyone who even only perceived it, let alone the victims of the oppressor/complicit classes, and the people comprising those groups.

the currency of shame inside of supremacy culture

So, here’s a ‘grand unifying theory’ of why josh is so damn sensitive. It is endemic to the supremacy culture of the people here to categorize and group and rank and order things, so there’s a part of me that resists even recounting all of this.

often-enough, I’ve been shamed, sometimes severely, for disinhibited self-expression. grief, joy, wonder, curiosity, grief, enthusiasm. Evangelicalism is obviously a shaming institution, and so to is everything reliant upon operant conditioning structures. That last piece might seem a hot take, it really is not.

Pete Walker was the first person I encountered who articulated something like “people, who hurt others, and then refuse to feel shame about it cause the shame to be felt by the others. Even if it’s only dim echos of that shame being felt by others, they are still being forced to experience someone else’s shame and that stinks.”

thus virtually every supremacist walking around clinging to supremacy is a tiny little factory of shame, emitting noxiousness like a car emits brake dust and tire rubber microplastics and noise and danger.

Photos of my mom’s journal entries describing her repeated assaults of me

Obviously this is some delicate terrain. I don’t remember any of the events described below, that happened to three-year-old-me, of course, but adult me certainly knows what he’d feel about witnessing this happening to child me, or happening to some other three year old. I happen to have my own child, so I can easily access a rather alivened sense of disgust over this behavior, especially when I appreciate that my parents think this behavior is so right, I should be applying it to my own child.

I can appreciate why something in my nervous system goes big when I face icy, stern, cold behavior from others, after reading these entries and remembering the ways this disposition kept showing up my entire life, despite me clinging to hope that my mother had love or affection for me.

In my mother’s words, from a diary she maintained and then printed/distributed to her offspring, here’s an early formative experience of shame. I appreciate the irony that this particular incident happened on my birthday. My 3rd birthday:

On Joshua’s birthday Joshua asked me for his train set. Now, a few days ago he didn’t want to put it away. I told him if he didn’t want to put it away I would do it for him but I’d put it away out of his reach so he couldn’t play with it anymore. He wanted me to put it away anyway, and I did. Each time he asked for it after that I reminded him that he couldn’t play with it because he didn’t know how to put it away. When I told him that on this day, he assured me that this time he would put it away himself. I got his train set down for him. He played with it. When he was done, I asked him to put it back and he said “Mom put back train set.” He expected me to do it like I had before, and I reminded him that he had to put it away. He repeated, “No, Mom put back train set.” I repeated that it was his responsibility. He refused again and received a spanking. This time when I told him to please put away the train set he cried but he did it and then proudly said “Look, Mom!” I thanked him and then he told methe secret of his obedience. “Yord help Josh put back train set.” Oh how God answers prayer.

Wow wow wow. The constructed ‘power struggle’. In religeous authoritarian families, male-passing children are assumed to be ‘strong willed’ or something like that, so the parents are attuned to all displays of preference or agency, and they take it as evidence of evil, ‘sin’, in their kid, and they fantasize situations that justify things like ‘sexual assault of a child, blamed on the child’.

Miriam phrased this, “he refused again and received a spanking”. So, a 3 year old me opted out of a developmentally inappropriate ask (or maybe it was develpmentally appropriate, I’ve seen three year olds put things away, but usually not under threat of assault), then, the person who at the time represented, in theory, safety and nurturance to me, terrorized and hit me, to extract compliance from me, damn the concept of… emotional attunement? Putting the train set away herself? Letting it be out? my god.

Parenting From The Inside Out is an adequate primer for an answer to the question “if not by assault, how am I supposed to interact with a child?”

Key lines:

he refused again and received a spanking

I’ve spoken before about how I view ‘spanking’, and pulled into it’s own post long quotes from Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse

but it’s de-dignifying to tease that part out as much worse than the rest. “spankings” are what less-propagandized people call “adults hitting children and blaming the kid for it” or “physical assault” or “child sexual assault”, as any kind of assault that targets or involves sexually intimate places is default-escalated to sexual assault.

When I brought this up to my dad, he dismissed it. So I updated his status in my mind, appropriately. When I mentioned it to my mother, she never responded and eventually blocked me on whatsapp. Ditto, my father. Shunning and refusing to communicate is a classic move of power retention within supremacy culture. If I still lived in their house and made the same issue, they beat me and assaulted me, now that I don’t live in their house, they block me. It’s the classic appeal of white women’s tears, when encountering some forms of push back against their supremacy.

My dad tried verbally fighting back with me, and when that didn’t work, applied the “shunning” treatment, or at least this is my experience of it. In their defense, I suggested both that they deserve whatever sort of peace they think child abusers deserve.

Here’s another entry:

Lately I’ve been trying to teach Joshua to put away his toys when he’s told. Lately, he’s been in the ‘why’ stage. When I ask him to put them away he asks “Why?” “Because it’s bath time.” “Why?” And so on. The questions go on and on when I ask him to pick up his toys. At bedtime timight I asked him to pick up his blocks and he again asked “Why?” I was too tired to think of any logical reasons so I just told him the end result: “Joshua, pick up your blocks because if you don’t you will get a spanking.” “Okay” he said, as he happily and immediately went to pick up his blocks!

These were obviously the bedrock ideas of Miriam’s understanding of the world, and my childhood is full of other stories in line with this kind of thing. I note now, less happily, how often feedback has been about me, happily, in a work setting: “Josh is so [compliant] when given instruction, and works hard at doing whatever we tell him!”

God, in light of how hard I was working to manage the emotional state of my mother, at the age of three, by repeating back to her versions of her broken view of reality rather than expressing something true to me, like

I am so mad at you for hitting me, and I feel hurt by, and betrayed by and afraid of you now.

As an adult, when I experience coercive, punishing behavior, I can more readily identify it and defend myself against it. Yet every time, the absolute crushing betrayal that it represents, feels like it breaks something in me that I didn’t know I had to break. I recognize a similarity, perhaps, between what I must have experienced, the sadness over the emotional loneliness, the hateful, icy, withdrawn, brutal emotional energy that seeped into every crack and pore and surface of those relationships I had with my parents.

I realize now, when I thought I had a good relationship, it was because I was basically playing for myself both sides of the relationship. I knew how to relate to others without violence or hate, so I simply kept assuming my parents had that capacity within them and occasionally felt well about me.

I could imagine someone like my parents reading the above, and ‘whataboutism’ing me with “well, James Dobson said…” or “it was just a few swats on the butt” (said in 2025 by my 6 foot 1 inch, 180 lb military officer/doctor/preacher father who’s pleased to tower over and terrorize and bully people).

Frankly, the dual processes of 1) their inability to feel grief, sadness, over my/their/anyone else’s situation 2) the heavy cloak of defensiveness that gets drawn over the wound of ‘lack of sadness’, or something. Digging in, doubling down.

(a proper response would be something like a full embrace over my anger, the sadness inherent in this. Evidencing doing work to reduce how quickly they dissociate from the experience of others, welcoming the depth of the human experience, showing that they’re beginning to appreciate how wrong it is to strip someone of their agency, will, bodily safety and lie to that person about why they were assaulted.

I don’t think the damage is repairable. My dad’s last sentiment was something like “If you, josh, want to repair the relationship with me, you’re welcome to come grovelling to me over how you hurt my feelings by saying things that made me feel bad.”

…sigh…

I can appreciate now a bit more why there’s so much emotional deadness within me, towards them, and I find myself angering when it feels like that skillset I built, out of desperation, to defend myself against them, shows up in unhelpful ways today, as an adult. The hot/cold energy they pointed towards me, emotional devestation that went unaddressed and then ‘love’ was performed, later, and because I desperately wanted love, I accepted all of it. The fake love, and the real harm. What else could I have done?

I don’t think repair is available until someone can speak extensively about why they used manipulation and bullying. And if there’s a power dynamic involved, it’s obviously abuse! And all of the exact same underlying ideas of entitlement and obligation hum along in the exact same way, in both of their ways of being today, that are obviously evident in how they perceived others then.

Section FAQ

I could imagine:

well this seems pretty condeming, josh, I don’t see how repair could be done, while you…

blah blah blah, focusing on my attitude marks one as the kind of person who’s complicit with bad things.

I’d suggest The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and how to respond.

An early chapter talks about people who live in reality one “power over” and reality two, “shared power”.

Ppl in reality one feel anxious in some situations when they don’t feel like they’re dominating someone else, because that means they might be getting dominated. Or they might be soon to be dominated, because they dominate others, sometime, when they feel entitled to it.

Since they’re willing to dominate and see it as useful when ‘push comes to shove’, so if someone else shows to this reality 1 person that they’re feeling as strongly as the abuser does about something, the abuser sorta… telegraphs/projects their own problem solving strategy onto the other, and then ‘moves defensively’ by attacking, in order to not get got.

From the POV of someone in reality 2, who does not see violence or domination as anything but vastly hurtful to any situation wants to see the problem resolved. “shared power” appreciates the existance of power dynamics, and generally moves to flatten/reduce the power differential. The book also uses “co-creation” and “Mutuality” to describe reality 2.

Co-creation and mutuality assume out of the gate certain things about positive intent, assumptions of dignity, etc. I notice in myself not even wanting to pollute my own brain, the part of me that loves others and loves co-creation and mutality, when I imagine that ecosystem overly affected by someone that moves through the world like Donald, Miriam, trampling delicate things beneat them, unable, unwilling to feel the sadness over what has been lost.

and my god, the cost of all this is far, far beyond the individuals involved in this story. My own life, and two interpersonal relationships, compared to all the potential relationships I could have, or my actual relationships, OR compared against the billions of people alive today, or the billions lived and died, any of whom experienced good and bad things, fair and unfair things, from some of those lines of reasoning, none of this matters.

So much of this document will talk about supremacy, and colonialism, and evangelicalism, as I view them as like three different lenses, three different frames, of the same underlying dissociation from grief and sadness, belief in the world as dominating, fear of power sharing, and thus entitlement to obedience, of them and others.

I can certainly see how this has affected me, in some ways, I feel i’ve “resolved”, in others I’ve not, and I’m sure in a few more years I’ll be able to speak about things that I’ve not yet found awareness of yet.

I feel a little like I wish a younger version of me had gotten some of the resources current me has. I could have more easily bolstered my own sense of self, clocked the misbehavior around me, etc etc.

this is indicative of… again, unwellness. ‘spanking’ is a propagandist term for adults hitting children.

I’m so angry that she today, in 2025 thinks it’s admirable, laudable, necessary, for adults, caretakers of kids, to threaten children with sexual assault to force them to comply.

This is colonialism, genocidal energy, I welcome it exactly as anyone thinks I would.

If you’ve not been raised within the cult of evangelicalism or a different institution of religious authoritarianism, this approach might be full of unfamiliar language. The first 18 years of my life was full of this motif, after which I was hauled off to college by my parents, and mostly never spoken to again. I’m recovering anger these days over the emotional abandonment of it all. It was bad when I was a child, and as I move through my life today, I anger again at the emotional abandonment I experience from my parents. It’s easier to learn to hold your own pain when you have a memory of sometimes been tenderly held, in pain, safely, by a caretaker. As I rolodex through experiences with miriam and donald, and other evangelicals I relied upon for attuned connection, but esp with miriam and donald, I remember brutal coldness, indifference, or the intentional infliction of deep emotional pain. Donald often enough was physically bullying, grabby, pushy, quick to grab and squeeze and move someone’s body simply because he felt entitled to it. How gross.

So, having my own kid has been great, and healing in some ways for my own ‘parenting the inner child’ journey - I can see my kid developing normally, without our relationship being poisoned by violence and the dangerous superstitions of ‘authority’ and ‘obedience’, and I can appreciate that when I was policing myself, with an intense and devastatingly critical inner voice, I was not channeling ‘truth’ or ‘god’ or ‘me’, I was channeling the delusional, bullying influences of my parents, who hated themselves, me, and many, many others.

So, I can turn down my inner critic, often-enough, and the simple naming of it’s prepense has a nice disarming effect on the worst of the harm it causes.

And yet, this blog post. Why this blog post?

Sadness. Shame.

Other people not easily-enough attuning to me in an expression of pain. When I feel misattunement, the rest of my vulnerability is quick to exit the interaction, because the environment gets labeled as ‘obviously/possibly not safe enough’. Misattunement is endemic in supremacy cultures, so it’s part of the damage done to all of us, and part of the way we might unwittingly propagate that hurt outwards on others.

This is manageable, but is made less so by a key prior intimate relationship partner said, often, plainly mean & aggressive things simply upon witnessing sadness in me. Tears, especially. This happened repeatedly. Eventually, I ‘managed’ my emotions, to alleviate that particular pain, at great cost.

i currently feel “low” on the number of sensitive and non-shaming people in my life. Unfortunately, bc ✨supremacy culture in america✨ many, many people, with all sorts of genitalia, have incomplete or uneasy relationships with grief, their own grief and others. Yes, plenty of ‘men’/people with penises do not have easy access to wild amounts of emotional depth. AND! plenty of people who call themselves female/people who have vulvas also do not have easy access to emotional depth.

Now, most people do not run around intending to openly shame others for expressing emotions, but when someone’s uncomfortable with their own grief, that discomfort gets telegraphed outwards to others. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s extremely not-subtle.

Some of the stories, the contents of the original intent of this written work

when I smell someone responding to an expression of my sadness or grief with something that feels like shame, a part of me operates in a powerful way to shape my future presentation within that relationship. I’m working on naming this thing a bit more directly, so I can give us all an opportunity to perhaps move differently next time.

I am skilled, now, at either 1) hiding when I feel grief, or 2) avoiding within myself the sensation of grief, so I don’t have to hide it/hide it so effortfully.

I don’t love the development of this skill for me. I don’t blame any particular person, I have simply come to resent supremacy culture, which causes grief to get mishandled in many ways, for everyone. It goes back generations. Grief, and the systems we live in, is complex and it takes a lot of humanity to hold it well, our own grief and the grief of others.

In {friend’s name} I grew sensitized because, I remember {friend} saying something like:

If I ever saw {partner of friend} cry, I’d think it was strange, odd, [vaguely unsettling].

sorta trivial, but it felt like an admission of:

if I saw grief I didn’t understand in the visage of someone else who I don’t think deserves to feel grief, I would not be curious or enter into the experience with them, I’d label it as unexpected and deploy coping strategies.

EVERYONE IS WELCOME TO DO THIS! This is simply not the kind of response that helps me move with more emotional safety instead of feeling withdrawn a bit.

another time, in response to something I shared, there was a “well, at least…” or ‘oh, that seems better than {other bad thing}’. I note that this lands on me as dismissiveness, which unfortunately drafts onto other times I’ve experienced dismissive energy, and something in me withdraws, again, relationally.

I could follow the thread of ‘sorta invalidating responses’ farther, maybe another time. I have an actual fear of dragging someone into an emotionally uncomfortable place, without their permission, so if I detect discomfort around grief, I bottle up my own tears, my own grief, pretty firmly, pretty quickly.

There’s been a few other things that round to me having an assessment as “I don’t know how to handle my own sadness in the context of us. My current strategy is ‘mostly avoid my own’, while still modeling fully welcoming anyone else’s grief, and, in fact, continuing to honor my own grief. I’ll name it, and I know people mean well for me, so I can kinda do both sides of ‘handling my grief’, as needed.” It’s nice to not have to hold both sides of it.

This leaves me feeling like I need to, or I want to, minimize something about myself, to preserve something that is otherwise very alivening and appreciated. I have often-enough been overwhelmingly, vastly crushed by sadness because of little things & big, and I feel stuck with it, stuck by it.

There’s stuff that arose around {another person} and I continued a strategy of avoidance. a little turns into a lot. I feel like throughout {friend} experienced bits of this, from me, with your own sense of disappointments or questions or hurts.

Josh’s long list of miscellanea that engenders sadness

One of my first sadnesses is a meta-sadness.

I’m sad about how unskillfully sadness is handled within supremacy culture. In some ways the lack of skills is accidental, a feature of the damage and violence of supremacy culture. yet in other ways it’s necessary. to maintain supremacy culture, one needs dissociation from other’s pain. is a function and coping mechanism of supremacy, war, capitalism, slavery, violence, obv. And it’s rooted in dissociation from one’s own addressed pain or relational betrayals!

Lots of my childhood experiences were fully informed by growing up with supremacists. These supremacists fabricate the concept of ‘whiteness’ and then use that to justify the supremacy, but I won’t call them ‘white supremacists’, even though it would be an accurate label. It’s simply ceding too much intellectual ground to the delusion of race-as-a-real-thing.

So, I am sad about living inside of a supremacy culture.

Supremacy culture vs…?

I’ll be referencing supremacy and some other stuff a lot, but I won’t be talking much about ‘white supremacy’, for the same reasons as I refuse to not airquote “spanking”, I find my wording simpler for me, here is why:

the very concept of race was created to support the ideals of a certain group of supremacists. I might use ‘european american supremacy’, or ‘european colonial powers’, or something like that, but ‘white’ supremacy for me cedes a bit too much power to european american supremacists.

Supremacists also invented a lot of patriarchy

what do you mean by ‘supremacy culture’, Josh?

Take a look at this list of characteristics of the supremacy culture of the greater united states:

the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture

Some of the 15 tenants of supremacy culture seem germane here. Reading the list helped me turn down my inner critic, a bit. When you’re getting after yourself for something that’s also on this list, consider blaming someone for playing on you their own internalized colonizer.

I suggest reading the whole piece. These are all subtle and not-subtle messages poured upon me and maybe you. I find an increasing peacefulness from the ‘toxic inner critic’ that once operated constantly in my life.

Especially as it relates to “firing the inner cop”, or “expelling the inner colonizer”. I found many parallels between how the US military does it’s “counter insurgency” tactics, and how I ended up defending my emotional safety from my parents.

It’s not just evangelicals or the military that believe it’s necessary to “stamp out willfulness” wherever it lives - it’s a colonial religious thing, one that white-passing women fully participated in. Patriarchal white women (or, as I call them, people with vulvas who are supremacists) uphold patriarchy as much as a classic patriarchal white man.

These tenants are non-gendered, non-ethnicity-based characteristics of supremacy culture. Wherever these tenants thrive, so too does supremacy culture. Lets not let these things thrive inside of our own minds, crushing our own sense of self.

Here’s a great, detailed expansion of the list by the original author.

Fear

Phew.

“Either/Or thinking”.

I hear a response, when I say “not this, because…”. The supremacist will say “Well, if that thing cannot be had, WE HAVE TO HAVE THIS OTHER THING!!!!”. That’s thought-stopping. Not helpful.

Worship of the written word

Individualism

Quantity over Quality

Sense of Urgency

Paternalism, Perfectionism, One Right Way, Objectivity

Progress, or Bigger is Better

Fear of (Open) Conflict, Power Hoarding, Right to Comfort

Or “right to emotional comfort”. This sometimes looks like “you know what my preference is, how can you not have given it to me” or “this conversation causes me to think of myself in unflattering ways that are inharmonious with my self-image, I need it to stop and I’d like to distract myself.”

Discussing conflict (rather than accepting the presumed hierarchy/correctness of the way of things)

Power Hoarding

Urgency

Defensiveness & Denial

Seems self-evident. It’s an intimacy-destroying response, and i appreciate how childhood me, and often enough adult me, survived in a desert of emotional intimacy, getting occasional sips of fake intimacy that I convinced myself was real, and good-enough. The last time I spoke to my dad on the phone, I felt many things. I have detailed notes, I noted how scared I was, going into the conversation, and I relived the many, many times I felt a terror having to go speak to him. It arose within me, a disgust for the kind of person who would want children to be afraid of them, out of a need to control others.

I interrupted him as he was monologing, and he got very affronted, and said “if you cannot speak to me with respect I don’t want to be in this conversation.”

Like many of his generation, he confuses respect with control. He’s never experienced me outside of the context of ‘is josh being obedient to me?’ because he and I have not spoken or interacted since I was 16, more or less, and he felt fully entitled to control every aspect of my being, then.

Ooooh, I have anger for behavior like this. More on this later, perhaps.

These concepts have been top of mind for me during my few recent interactions with both of my parents. The interactions were extremely illuminating to me, and saddening. I feel so sad for the me that spent so many years living with these people! Their fear of open conflict, for instance, or desperate entitlement to emotional comfort, would be radiating from them in every word.

an alternative, better response than supremacy culture

I can hop around with different frames, as does the supremacy.²

Curiosity is helpful. An ability to sometimes confidently generate a sense of peace within oneself. Mutuality and Co-creation. Opening questions. Silence. ‘tell me more about that’.

There’s many, many options besides ‘characteristics of supremacy’, and it’s tricky when people reach for available power dynamics to exploit.

SIIIIIIIIGH.

Anyway, here’s my big ol’ list of things that relate to sadness and grief. ³

The one, single time I spent 1:1 time with my mom over the last few years she kept defending her abuse, saying things like:

Your father and I tried everything to make you do what we wanted, and nothing else worked! [Nothing but threatening you with sufficient emotional and bodily harm made you give us what we wanted].

I almost threw her out of my house at her unselfconscious utterance of those words. She wasn’t even angry, just matter-of-fact about it. (That changed, quickly, of course. To quickly name certain dynamics in someone else’s passive observation of something can be a pretty strongly-felt statement)

Her dissociation from others is ironclad. Earlier in the day, I was questing for the possibility of establishing any authentic attuned connection, and like an expert practitioner of judo, she kept blocking and blocking and blocking, reflexively, the possibility of connection.

As the conversation continued, and I kept discussing her parenting decisions, sometimes in light of observations made as I’ve been a parent myself, it became clearer and clearer she hated me then, and hates me now. “hate” is a bit strong for the emotional deadness that usually exists in the space. She’d say “i don’t hate, I feel nothing” or a vague sense of dis-ease. I don’t dignify that with a serious response, because it continues to center as of primary import her non-experience of a very-bad-for-me experience.

An attentive reader (or any reader?) might notice the relatedness of what I said above, and how someone might experience someone else in a sexually coercive situation, or sexual assault. There’s a needful emotional deadness + a plausible excuse for why the deadness existed.

Maybe that’s why patriarchal women cannot attune to the sadness of their children. To do so might cast light on other things in their life of issue. Like,

if I take {specific_issue} seriously for {relationship_z}, I will also take it seriously for {relationship_h}, and {relationship_a}, and that could become Problematic, thus I’ll try to avoid it all.

Both of my parents either hated me, or tolerated me, but the ‘tolerance’ was dispensed when I was not being problematic, which i often enough was just that.

I feel a need to mention that there’s available third-party evidence that I’m not at all times a disastrous piece of shit, which is certainly the dominant vibe I get from my parents in every conceivable way. Yet in conversation with both of them, I kept noticing the constant emission of energy that rounds to either “someone who does X is fundamentally flawed” or “you do X, and are thus fundamentally flawed”.

There’s a HEAVY, overwhelming lean into role compliance. Non-compliance is met with deadness, non-responsiveness, silence, skipping over, if it can be. If it cannot be, they emotionally ‘slap back’. they’ve experienced me as vastly less compliant today than I was when I lived in their house, and are both obviously shook.

Also, some of you might do this kind of stuff to yourself. There’s a cost to this treatment, but that cost can be lowered a heck of a lot if you can quickly name-and-witness-at-least-to-yourself the phenomena.

She said over and over, her only goal for me was “to grow up successful”⁴, which to her meant becoming a faithful evangelical/republican supremacist. Every aspect of my personhood that stood beyond my compliance with her narrow view of the world was simply flushed down the toilet. I’ve been climbing, intensively, for most of the last 20 years. She and I have never discussed my rock climbing. It’s not listed as a thing in the bible, so how could it be discussed?

I have memories of her unleashing icy, cold, contemptuous judgement against me, and not a single memory of tenderness or attuned time in the same space. When I read They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, lots clicked for me. I now strongly endorse this book to others as a form of bibliotherapy. I’ve got lots of kindle notes here.

Several years ago, the last time I saw my father in person, I hadn’t the presence of mind to realize I had no desire to sit next to him for a family photo. He was pretending things were nice between us, even though obviously, obviously, they were not. He decided I should be sitting closer to him than I was, for a family photo, so he did what he always does to people he views as less than/other. Instead of moving himself, or asking me to move closer to him, with his hand, he grabbed my knee hard and tried to drag me closer to him. This piece of shit probably does this thing to kids all the time.

If I could tell you the speed with which my hand moved to his arm, grabbed his upper arm firmly, not bruisingly, and said with harshness befitting his violation of my body: “stop.”, or maybe “don’t do that”. He let go like he’d touched a hot pan. If he’d yanked again, i would have simply shoved him down the bench, out of reach of me. he felt it. i had my own kid sitting on my hip. Things were obviously not unfolding the way he’d expected. I don’t think Donald often encounters resistance to his emotional/physical bulliness, and what he experienced surprised him.

Back when he used to beat me, and long after he stopped physically assaulting me (understanding that physical assault on kids is uncouth after a certain age, he went for emotional/verbal/psychological bullying), I was in a skinny, small, thin, body, and even my (no longer skinny) adult height is dozens of pounds lighter and 15 cm/6 inches shorter.

I was small, bony, unmuscled, shorter person, relative plenty of my peers, growing up. I didn’t really care with my peers, I wasn’t physically bullied by them, and got along with my friends fine, but my dad, he’s over six feet tall, I remember him with big hands and a pushy physicality about him, especially along side his verbal and emotional bullying. I still sometimes fantasize about beating him, I think something in my body remembering the terror and helplessness he would induce, and wishing that I then had access to the same safety I have access to now. (Krav Maga, living inside my body which is also strong, an embodied physical confidence of deserving access to physical autonomy, verbal peacefulness).

I could write a whole article about the last phone conversation he and I had. it was the first time we’d spoken together 1:1 on the phone in several years. I have notes from before/during/after, going into it I saw it as likely a standard template for what it’s like to talk about supremacy with supremacists, and that’s exactly what it was.

He instantly moved aggressively for the control of the ‘frame’ of the conversation. He maintains the fantasy that I call alternatively ‘pro-slavery christianity’, or ‘sky daddy-ism’. He loves the ‘frame’ of ‘we are all under authority. you, me, we’re all under authority. it’s just that that authority ALSO made me authority over you. convenient, eh? so, with that established, lets proceed…’

He said I should thank him, for his child sexual assaults, and it’s irrelevant that I have a single opinion of how he treated me then, because it’s in the past, and he did what he did, and he found a book by a eugenicist advocating child abuse, so he “was doing what experts recommended”.⁵

My only purpose to contacting him was to make sure he know that he had no permission to ever physically assault eden, or make jokes about adults assaulting children in her presence. I don’t get my druthers of fully excising him from the life of my kid, and it’s not worth the effort of actually trying. Most of the danger he represents to children comes from no adults in the space ever naming his behavior as abusive.

So, his response, when I told him to not assault eden?

Josh, you misunderstand [sky daddy’s wishes]. He doesn’t wish for grandparents to assault their grandkids, he only wishes for parents to assault their kids, so i don’t have to hit your kid. that is your job.

I told him he’s a weak, fearful person for avoiding the book “The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia”, because so many of his load-bearing cognitive structures are perfectly described in that book, and I resent being raised in the house of a person espousing to a T the views of slavers.

I view Donald Thompson, Miriam Thompson, as supremacists, prototypical of any other run-of-the-mill emotionally damaged person common in the greater united states today. Their own humanity has been disregarded, by people and systems, starting as children, and they internalized the dehumanization as they aged, eventually projecting it outwards, in some ways, and inwards in other ways. Since the capacity to be a feeling, grieving human is lost to them, every part of his personality exists to paper over the holes and project a sense of togetherness, cohesiveness. The banished bad parts get put on any other definable group, and the psyche finds piece.

I wish I’d never had to meet them, and instead had a real source of healthy-enough maternal and paternal energy in my life.

Anyway, this is but one of the stories i have flowing around my brain when I think of things of parenting, my kid, my parents, and more.

Shaming (non)responses

Part of why I’m even writing this section is because I’m much less affected by this sort of response than I once was. I’m less affected because I can more clearly label diminishing or minimizing or dismissing responses, and be more comfortable in whatever my response is.

When I’m shamed for something, it’s less likely that the other person is trying to shame me out of feeling a particular way about something, though that has certainly happened (thanks, evangelicals), but it also is the other person deploying a reflexive strategy to deal with their own grief. They shame themselves out of feelings of grief, as an adaptive strategy to their own formative relationships, and then deploy the same strategies on others.

They don’t intend to project shame, but all forms of distraction, avoidance, dismissiveness, vs. connecting and letting the feeling breath, projects shame. :(

Like I said, trying to explain a list of things that’ll traverse a lot of territory. Often enough, in American society, especially white-passing society, when someone encounters a whiff of sadness, there’s a collective disgust reflect, or shame or fear. Countermeasures are deployed, like:

“oh, bummer. At least it’s better now.”

or:

“oh. At least it’s not worse.”

I don’t think anyone’s experience is extremely unique, generally. Even my most distinctive trait (heavy scooter usage) is common-enough in the USA, and the default for people of the global majority. It’s rare to ride a scooter as a white-passing person in denver/the greater united states, especially as a primary vehicle, etc etc)

Possibly by writing it all down, once, or so comprehensively, I can also symbolically reclaim some of the emotional energy tied up in it all. Sometimes it feels so heavy, or one piece of it feels heavy, which is ‘fine’, and then that clears up (as it always does), and then another piece of it leans heavily upon me.

There’s plenty more responses that telegraph some shame. Avoidance telegraphs shame, so even as I know intellectually most of these responses are driven by the persons own relationship to their own grief, some of me is an animal with a nervous system and a good-enough response from another person goes a long ways. A good cry does nice thing.

Josh’s list of sadnesses

not ordered in any particular way. There’s about 50 items? I expect I could do 150 without breaking a sweat, I’ve got other hand-written lists floating around, I need to update this written document with those…

lots of family stuff I’m ‘sad’ over. Related to Eden, her mom, my parents, siblings, the dense fabric of relations represented by those words, contrasted with the reality of my particular situation which is that most of those relationships are slightly/severely impoverished, obviously.
Eden! Sadness over the sparseness of our relationship, certain dynamics in her life. (I’ve heard from some, a sentiment like “oh, well, she’s young and won’t remember much.”, as if that either 1) addresses my own sadness. I’m not so young as to not` remember this. the fuq? also, it presumes that i don’t have a meaningful-to-me relationship with my kid, because dads don’t actually love or have real relationships with their kids. Also, this overall fits into the category of a ‘closing response’, so when I get it, the entire conversational space of ‘eden’ feels like it gets closed. Bummer)
Increased sense of fragility of everything. I drive through 100x more dangerous intersections in a normal week in 2025 than I did in 2020, and it feels like a respective increase in risk. I think so intensely about riding around safely, and I resent how effortful it is, how dangerous the roads are, by foot, on a bicycle, a scooter, and yes, of course, the roads are outrageously dangerous in a car. I cannot help but notice when a car is pointed at me, when I’m relying on someone else’s decision making to not die. (walking a crosswalk in front of waiting cars sometimes feels like walking in front of loaded gun. “If any of these people move a limb an inch in the wrong way, I could die”. It feels like most people feel the same anxiety that I do, but dissociate from the experience a bit more than I do.)
loss of so much that represented interestingness and joy to me. Cool projects, golden, a meaningful relationship, interesting outdoor places, easy access to outdoor climbing, better but still not ideal bicycle infrastructure.
cars & car supremacy, the danger I clock. holding how ‘big’ the groups affected are, across time and space, today, and over the last 100 years. About 1 million people in America have died “accidentally/inevitably” in car-related deaths since the November 11, 2001 blowback event that killed 3,000 people and sparked yet a new round of total, global military domination by the USA. 40,000 people a year die on american roads. pedestrian deaths ‘going up’, the spaces where there is refuge from cars are always getting smaller. I look out my window and can witness close-enough-to-injurious interactions between cars and people all the time.
the NOISE of car engines. Even on a third floor apartment, thankfully safe from a car being able to drive through my front wall or whatever, I still am not free from hearing every passing vehicle. Tire noise, engine noise, brake noise, wind noise, they are loud. During the day, and at night. Cars and motorcycles. Loud loud loud. Racing to catch a light. Honking to announce someone’s right of way. I despise it. I wear ear plugs most nights except hot winter nights where I close the windows and run air conditioning. I almost always have a window cracked, for fresh air, even when it’s very cold outside. I love apartment life! I almost never run my heat or my AC, too. Anyway, an open window and quiet indoor space means I hear everything. and I notice the cars. All of them. feels intrusive, disruptive, but it seems like many others I see IRL just… accept, cannot perceive it. I wear ear plugs a lot, and I seem to usually be distinctive in this way. I don’t know how others are not also wearing ear plugs a lot.
parking lots. omg. walking through them. the ethnic cleansing they represent. The standard pattern of downtowns with parking lots where there were once buildings is… ethnic cleansing. There was an ethnic neighborhood, the supremacists didn’t want it there, they used zoning and highways to attack the neighborhood, eventually displacing and murdering and harassing and suppressing the area. Disrepair, fabricated, at first, then real. Then the justification of parking minimums to keep non-wealthy people from being prioritized. And now there’s parking everywhere. New development, of the last few decades, is different, the buildings and lots are laid out from the beginning for parking and parking lots, and… the evil spins onwards.
past partners handling of driving, the dangers inherent within it. Multiple partners, not just one. Truly shocking levels of conflict emerge sometimes from me expressing a desire for more safety while driving. Years ago, a then-partner almost hit me in the car they were driving while I was on my bicycle and got mad at me for wanting to talk about it. 💔
friends treatment of driving. Multiple friends, not just one. Not only have partners driven dangerously and fought me about it, friends have to. My orientation towards my entitlement to my own safety with a partner is different than that of a friend. My friends who drive dangerously, I simply find myself spending less and less time with them. It’s sad, and I cannot prevent my own nervous system from registering the issue, eventually it becomes easier for me to simply not experience the issue.
urban renewal and thus ethnic cleansing in america, plainly visible in every way in every city. Every vista of mine during the day, of Denver, marred by the history of ethnic cleansing, the tragedy of the lives lost and lives being spent, in it. genocide is ethnic cleansing. I’m so sad, watching the evidence of this all around me. Then my (usually white-passing) friends would imply that I am deficient for not being able to dissociate from the grevousness.
supremacy and ‘whiteness’. it’s effects on others, on eden, on me.
grief-phobic people, people groups, among family, ‘community’, friends.
repeated exposure to malevolence and in-the-moment dissociation from the other party. (car drivers, at the same time aggressive and depersonalizing in their treatment of others)
betrayal and betrayal-adjacent behaviors in specific ways w/groups. parents, paternal/maternal, siblings, legally-established family, communities.
how shame spews out of some people/memes in culture
pregnancy & 4th trimester for K, Eden. I obv wasn’t pregnant, and i felt unfairly eliminated from the emotional landscape of the whole thing.
‘death’ of many friendships
as an adult, I want to wander my environment the same way I did as a kid, and I am so outside-constrained. Every city, esp Denver. America, also beyond, so many places are so constraining in the urban environment. Bad roads function as emotional walls to cross.
I am so sad over the painful loss of relationship and friendship over the last few years, leaving family systems and religeous structures. Through little or no fault of them, many people remaining in those systems feel unavailable to me. “I’ve not changed” they might say, and correctly. I have. My heart breaks for it. My heart breaks over varieties of loss of relationship, even as it seemed to pre-break even in some of those same relationships. I miss feeling safe and vulnerable at the same time. Safe enough for disinhibited self-expression. this written document stands as a version of my exercising disinhibited self-expression.
death of a friend to cancer
death of a another friend to cancer
another friend killed in a preventable avalanche incident
another friend killed in a car over-run of a road. Friend was walking, passing car drove onto sidewalk, killed her. Her partner was with her, severely injured. If there were a bollard like the ones discussed here, instead of plastic flex posts, Lovisa would still be alive. Bollards can be installed for free.
the grief and burden of Witnessing mistreatment (to see something bad and fulfil the obligation of naming it as such to the parties, either the victim, or the oppressor, or both). It’s tiring.
an ocean of sadness and pain over the loss of time and experiences with Eden.
the psychological distance caused by Colefax, Park Ave, Speer, Broadway. Not even saying anything about the I-25 and I-70 highways, running of course through ethnic neighborhoods. Not every highway mile goes through an ethnic neighborhood, of course, but enough of them do. The danger and violence of the vehicles and noise and physics of existing in these space. To drive on these highways with eyes to see it is enormously emotionally painful.
people that reflexively attack their own sadness, as a [at one time reasonable] coping strategy with dehumanizing grief-phobic caretakers, and thus attack yours when it arises in the environment, even years later.
i do not personally care too much for most gender construct conversation, and am annoyed when it seems like others do, or do too much. I’m usually annoyed when I get read strongly into the ‘MAN’ gender construct, usually by other people who have penises. ‘MEN’ are expected to not feel things, to not be sad, certainly to not love their children (fuck you, donald thompson) or to feel really anything at all, except dehumanization and objectification of the self and others. It’s a breath of fresh air to encounter male-passing people not traumatically socialized into the reflexive suppression of their emotional nature, but it’s certainly not an affliction exclusively born by english-speaking white-passing people with penises in the greater united states. I’m always pleased to hang with anyone who has easy-enough access to their own humanity.
The book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again does a good job of painting how strongly the emotional damage of people passing as men can be experienced by everyone. The people who consider themselves men, perhaps seemingly willingly clinging to patriarchy (I say propagandized), and everyone they effect with their lives. The tl;dr of the book is thanks to skillful use of skills common in acting and theater, the author became convincingly male-passing, and could thus ‘go undercover’ in a long-term way, building relationships across time with different individual men, or groups of men. The author was harmed, in the same way that you or I would be harmed doing a long investigation into an area where pollution was being spewed into the environment.
I have, in my family, multiple doctors, a therapist, a psychiatrist, many different versions and flavors of these types of people. My dad is a doctor, and we heard about it constantly. Most of these people I have no special respect for. I have very low regard for american psychiatry. That low regard is partially informed by most modern psychiatrists seeming to not know the supremacist origin of american psychiatry, which gave us things like the concept of ‘mental illness’, for not being sufficiently conformed to supremacists ideals. Go read the description for drapetomania, and meditate on how these sorts of people would go on to create the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM 1). The DSM 1 is such an abhorrent document, it feels self-abandoning to fantasize that anything downstream of it could be credible.
i keep appreciating the new, visible, sad ways it manifests that my parents have hated me. (They would feign love towards me if I’d adhered to the pro-slavery christianity cult I was raised in, the patriarchy, nationalism, support of the state of the greater united states. Even when I participated in those systems, fully, I recount confidently the vibe that they hated me. It was simply slightly hidden behind the lie of ‘we all love each other and you’re doing what we think you ought so we give you fake affection!’)
a regrettable number of times, key people in my life have attacked me for looking sad. (this happened in distant memory, from my parents, and much more poignantly, this happened during the end of my marriage, and indeed is part of why the marriage ended. I was tolerated when I performed mood-lifting for others, and utterly rejected when my mood was not deemed sufficiently ‘good enough’). As a in-the-moment useful coping mechanism, I can now ‘manage’ and hide my sadness, so, so well. It feels like this now gets unintentionally activated or used, by others, because it arises in me easily, now.
I tried all the steps of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States with them. First loyalty, and I got abuse and torture. Then voice, and I got more punishment, abuse. Then exit, got me pretend peace, because “strong-willed Josh was finally out of the house”. Now I’m back to voice, and get more shunning and avoidance.
I’ve always been quick to defect and undermine the control being dropped on me, heavily. the first time I read about anarchist calisthenics I thought “oh, easy, I’m already well-practiced at routine, small acts of non-compliance with abusive totalitarian systems! 1.

Many people, even sometimes myself, are grief phobic, and thus reflexively, instinctively, push away all evidences of grief.

So, I’ve had experiences of crying, hard, alone, and crying gently, to my self, in the company of others, and overall hiding it from them, AND I HATE THIS! Sometimes the best thing for a nervous system is a good cry, and a good accepting hug.

I’ve received “what is wrong with you?” or “have you considered medication?” as a normal response to sadness. It hurts to feel disgust pointed at me, for being affected by something, to the point of tears.

I’ve felt the loss of connection to my own grieving and angering, as I so often avoid perturbing others with the upset that would be experienced by me or them, witnessing my sadness.

In about a year, i went from thinking I had four good-enough parent figures (two parents, by blood, two parents by marriage). Then, some death via heart attack, and the remaining three quickly evidenced their incompetence and abandonment, and I sadly appreciated that I actually had zero good-enough parent figures.

As I became a parent myself, hope after hope dashed itself against the rocks of the supremacy and emotional immaturity of those people. I got shunned, pushed aside. My parents often made jokes about how discardable I was: “I could kill you and make another one like you.”, and more

Part of my anger today, is fully rooted in things of the past, and in the context of the relationship with my parents could be fully addressed and resolved, except they’re continuing today exactly the same bad things they did in the past, thus there’s a second layer of anger piled on top. I wouldn’t imagine entertaining the idea of something like ‘forgiveness’ or ‘a repaired relationship’ without

I can only guess how my parents feel about my divorce - neither of them have ever mentioned it, and both seem to studiously avoid me, so I suspect I’ve committed the Greatest Sin in their mind (a divorce), and nothing else matters to them. They’ve never spoken to me about my own child. I have never spoken about parenting, with my parents, in an emotionally regulated way. Perhaps they know that their own parenting was such an abomination there is no point in discussing it with me. All they did was emotionally and physically abuse and neglect me, while my dad was completely absent from the house, giving his entire life over to work, or the church. When he was at home, he was in his office working, continuously. Never once carved a shred of affection and tossed it my way. I experienced my own father as exclusively consumed by himself, or exclusively disappointed in me, disgusted by me.

automobile supremacy & grief

I feel sad that nearly every one of my friendships is mediated by the car dependency common to the greater united states. I don’t have a car, and nearly every single one of my friends has a car and is fully dependent upon it. I want to meet someone in a park? I have few friends that live within walking distance of the park I want to meet at, and so they spend forever driving their car around, finding parking, walking from the parking to the destination, and then however the day unfolds, they have to return to where they parked their car, to move it again.

I’ve had relationships end, in part, because my partner refused to drive gently in the car. I despise being stuck in a car being driven dangerously, and even now when I go places with friends I weigh asking them to sometimes modify their behavior (hey, there’s .75 seconds of stopping distance between you and the car in front of you, and we’re going 60 mph, could we get a little more stopping distance?)

highways, literal highways, now separate me from eden. Not just miles, and distance, but the spiritual/psychological distance of the highway. Tragedy, for all of us.

I feel the weight of slavery, family destruction, I’m re-saddened over the violence, the experience.

If one models police as deputized slave patrollers, one models “no-knock drug raids” as state-sponsored night-riding. It’s simply terrorism and supremacy. Unlike reconstruction-era night riding, when it’s modern policing, all the night riders are getting paid! What a nice arrangement one would set up for themselves, if they wanted to maintain the racial caste system that is white america.

Police riding around with sirens?

Casual emotional neglect in friendships, partnerships, familial relationships. I don’t miss emotional bids for connection, usually, and it’s hard being around people who discard emotional bids for connection. I’ve found voicelessness, within me, disempowerment. A sense of ‘asking for change might cause the relationship to end’.

I deserve to ask for things, so I’ll ask for change, but the number of times this has led to the end of relationships for me has me feeling weight of grief and loss, and increases my sense of fear around asking for change. :(

and I have to fawn my way through the interaction, because if I ask directly and they say no, that’s awkward as fuck, and can rapidly become quite uncomfortable to me. I asked one friend to slow down, and he started arguing with me that my risk perception was bunk, and because he has great reflexes we’re actually completely safe. Another friend said he had great car insurance so if he got in a car accident he’d just get a new car. I never drove with the latter friend again.

I’ve only infrequently driven with the former friend since, and eventually heard me asking him to drive slower, and once he heard it in that way, he changed his behavior.

When I say

I feel uncomfortable

I feel that the risk of a bad outcome is unnecessarily elevated because of X, Y, and Z, could we discuss ameliorating it?

I’d rather not be told “your feelings are wrong”. That’s dismissiveness, defensiveness, and damages the relationship. Certainly is not in line with relational flourishing.

I have so often found myself drawn into what ends up feeling like an argument because the other person acts more threatened by my POV of something than the risk I’m trying to collaborate on, and so much relational damage ensues.

A small instance of someone saying ‘i do not like that treatment’…

… and how I responded

When Eden says “i don’t like X”, I say “oh, thanks for telling me” and then I check in a few times subsequently to make sure it’s all good. There was a time she felt I was laughing at her in some situations. I was indeed laughing sometimes when she did something, and she was experiencing it as me laughing at her. I saw it in her face and disposition, and the emotional energy when she said “dont laugh at me!”

I’ve been laughed at, mocked, criticized by people who think it’s fun to say hurtful things to others, and don’t care that it hurts me. Many family stories I grew up with rounded to “our family (mostly the patriarch donald) mocks Josh because he is sensitive, and ‘men’ are not sensitive, so we’ll bully him into manliness.”, and lots of other mocking behaviors.

I hated this experience. So, when eden says “don’t laugh at me!” I didn’t fight her on if I was laughing at her. I said “my gosh, I don’t want you to feel laughed at by me. I have memories of some versions of something similar, I can easily sort this, thanks for telling me.”

I told her what my plan was: I wrote a sign to myself and taped it up in the kitchen:

josh, do not laugh at Eden

josh

And I told her “going forward, please tell me again if/when you feel laughed at, thank you for telling me already, i’ll check in on this a few times over the next few days”.

I stopped laughing at her, including sometimes refraining from laughing in a situation that I knew I wasn’t teasing her, but I didn’t want her to think she was being teased. I don’t know how other people do/don’t handle her desire to not be laughed at. I’m not going to accidentally be like them.

of course, humor is not gone, in any way shape or form. sometimes when I would laugh with her (in response to her sometimes doing funny things, saying clever things, being funny) I’d make sure we were both seeing it the same.

Eden, a moment ago when I laughed, I was laughing because {x}, and I think you found it funny too. Was that all okay with you?”

she’s since validated several different times that the issue she clocked is resolved, to her satisfaction.

I did not tell her: “I didn’t INTEND to hurt you, I was simply laughing because it was funny, don’t worry about it, don’t be upset by it. It’s how I show love.”

Further emotional abandonment from siblings, which I also assess as the partial responsibility of my parents. They set us all up for gross failure. Once when I said:

Gosh, I’m sad over the current absence in my life represented by my supremacist, propagandized/propagandizing father

A family member (who I think blames me for my relational ‘difficulties’ with my parents, rather than saying ‘the current relationship is a good reflection of the relationship they built with you’) responded:

Well, what would he do that’s nice for you anyway?

Implying, perhaps:

what possible difference could you be experiencing in your current life if instead of an abusive, assaulting, bullying father, you had an emotionally attuned father who occasionally embodied healthy paternal and maternal energies?

what a thing to think and say. supremacy needs gender essentialism (patriarchy) and patriarchy proclaims the message that people with penises have no emotional nature, and I am sometimes angered, or saddened, or both, to encounter people who think they’re not ruined by patriarchy, playing the same tired message upon me. I no longer am surprised to run into overwhelming patriarchal energy from people with vulvas. I’ve been (ineffectively) critizied by supremacists with penises who have sometimes told me, as if revealing a shameful truth about me, that I have a feminine communication style.

This is why I get a blank face in response to grief and sadness so often by these people. I cut outside of the proscribed “rule” of emotional suppression, and someone else’s brain sorta fuzzes out when they witness it, until the moment has passed.

If I am experiencing sadness, and I see the other person with a blank face, I reflexively move away from my own sadness, because if they started assaulting me for my sadness I’d be even more unhappy. I am simply pissed that these people then proclaim that because they experience nice things in the relationship with me, it must be healthy for both of us.

When everyone is committed to the cult, it’s hard to access a sense of aliveness in anyone’s soul. Platitudes abound.

Relational interdependence is impossible with supremacists

My view of relationships has always been that we are influenced by the people around us, their positive or negative regard towards us. Because of that interdependence, it’s reasonable for us to all be mindful of how we hold our loved ones, in our own minds, or in the shared words/ideas that fill the space of relationship. Like, if you’re dear to me, I’ll try to tell you as such and reflect to you the things that I find distinctive, interesting, laudable, appreciable, about you.

When dealing with evangelicals, in particular, I began to note that even as I pointed the above energy towards my loved ones, they reflected back to me not anything distinctive about me, but only things that they thought were laudable that emitted from me playing the role they wanted me to play. (example: my mom’s favorite thing to talk to me about was what I was reading in the bible, not anything real about my life)

next, lets talk about parental coercion towards kids, and the way parents like this used alternatively emotional/verbal/physical assault and emotional warmth as a stick, and carrot, to farm from kids desired behaviors. this is called operant conditioning, and it sorta stinks, yet it’s everywhere. It’s dehumanizing.

I will hurt you unless you do what I want

is not so different from:

I will dispense rewards for you giving me what I want

So we ought to be as sensitive to the latter energy as the former.

josh, have you considered that you’re choosing sadness?

Based on other books, like ‘the courage to be disliked’

a line of reasoning, could be followed:

I think josh is choosing sadness. The sadness and resulting frozenness (‘depression’) is helpful to josh, it gives him something he wants and needs

OOOOH I am 100% ‘choosing’ depression and unhappiness and sadness. I’ll explain why:

First, I’ve had some horrible experiences of disinhibited self-expression, along many dimensions. Intimate partnerships, marriage, family. Expressing hopes, joys, sadness, all has often enough led to emotional devestation. “depression” is a good way to avoid some of those bad things happening again.

when I make the kinds of moves I made when i was happy, I kept triggering the disgust response from people close to me. My then-partner, friends, church friends, others. Or a profoundly blank face. The disgust was when I brought up issues with zoning and land use norms in the USA, that are crippling all of us. I kept unintentionally maligning something core to how they were (evangelicalism, patriarchy, car-normalized culture, militarism, violence, dismissiveness of the other) and often-enough they would want to control me/the conversation to achieve emotional comfort.

To achieve relational comfort, I chose strategies that accomplished safety, which could look like sadness, depression, stuckness. The happy, ageiatic version of me kept running afoul of people near to me. Bummer.

or “sadness is instrumental” in the same way that any form of hiding is instrumental.

bibliotherapy

Here’s some of the books that have helped me, over the last few years. Some themese weave together in interesting ways.

For instance, what’s it like to be colonized by american supremacists? I strongly suggest reading Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, with special attention given to the experience with american missionaries. Both of my parents spent their entire lives fully participating in colonial missions around the world.

recovering a capacity to grieve. I don’t agree with everything in this book, and found it enormously helpful The Tao of Fully Feeling. I learned only recently that Spotify has quite a lot of books on it - turns out this book is available on Spotify, so I gave it a re-read/listen recently. It’s helpful, logical, friendly. The author (and anyone else) loses a little of my appreciation whenever speaking positively of Alcoholics Anonymous or any sort of 12-step program. I strongly dislike those sorts of groups. Most other parts of the book were helpful to me.
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, also by pete walker, is v helpful.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Dang. So good. Talks about the deep, aching emotional loneliness that comes from being ‘stuck’ on emotionally vaccuous subjects and people.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States The delusion of the people of the greater united states of ‘political authority’ and the way those entitlements play out on the world is very similar to ‘emotional immaturity’ and ‘verbal abuse’. The cost is infiniately high. I weep when I read books like this. This book is also why I will never vote again. Native people cannot vote. Imprisoned people cannot vote. Colonized people cannot vote. You know who can vote? The tiny group already almost certainly in favor of more colonialism, so the sytem gets what it wants. More colonialism.
The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How To Respond what a bummer of a book to read, and so damn useful. I’d say it’s worth the read even if you’re not remotely questioning your own key relationships. Reading this book gave new color to my relationship with my own parents, and sparked lots of interesting conversations with peers about their relationships with their parents. Turns out lots of parents, because they feel entitled to control their children, make casual, routine use of verbally and emotionally abusive behaviors, to accomplish that control. Bummer, eh?
White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color I just finished this book, exceptional. I’d note that “white tears” is how miriam usually responds to my occasional questing along the lines of this post, the thing I wrote about evangelicalism (her… mental dis-ease-dampener of choice?). What I observe is first a loss of attunement, or maybe a never-achieved-sense-of-attunement, and then I’d be clocking many signs of dissociation, in her mannerisms. The physicality of someone trying desperately to look like they’re relaxed when they’re really not relaxed. Totally fine, by the way, these are not easy conversations, I too sometimes do a little box breathing or grounding exercise, or try to shift the topic and attention to something else, so the system can settle back down to peacefulness. (Frisbee! Look at that thing we can both see since we’re out on a walk together!) With someone like miriam, there is no settling or peacefulness. no progress. no connection.
When I watched Devil in the Family: The Fall of Ruby Franke trailer I felt so much familiarity with my experiences with my own mother. Do you see how she operates fully emotionally alone, continuousy, coercing her kids, keeping up a front. Often, my mom (and not just my mom) would

Anyway, I now have to think that when the supremacist is feeling overwhelmed, they’re not mindfully staying in a difficult state for the sake of an improved outcome, they’re dissociating from the experience and thus not able to hear you. Then, when you do something so provocative like “So, what do you think about this? What are you hearing me say? Whats coming up for you as you hear it?” it feels like being put on a stage, or being given a test.

(I’ve heard “i just cannot say the right thing to you and that’s why I don’t want to talk about this” so many times). It’s that i am no longer accepting appeals to authority to dismissiveness towards me so, if all someone has is dismissiveness or appleas to authority, for instance, their experience of me is indeed “i just cannot say the right thing to josh”. I simply disagree with their frame. link to frame control piece? it’s still a draft. The collapse from that is to just start sobbing, playing the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Tears are fine, natural, healthy, please note where in this piece about my own tears I’m putting commentary on someone else’s. When this pattern plays out repeatedly, every time I press her directly on supremacy, I cannot help but clock it. Especially having just read White Tears/Brown Scars. Here’s my notes/highlights from the book.

I view my parents as colonizing powers, where “the mind and body of male child #1” was just one part of the colonized territory. Part of what caused me to realize they treated me as colonizers treated the lands and people they violenced against, was as I heard stories of resistence to colonizers, and found so much I resonated with, in my own emotional disposition towards them. Like Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism

So, my parents responses to me all perfectly fit the script for ‘colonial powers responses of their victims’, which is also the abuser’s syllogism:

I didn’t hurt you. And if I did, I didn’t intend to. If I did intend it, you deserved it. If you didn’t deserve it, it wasn’t that bad.

So, I keep naming dynamics in the conversation, sometimes, and that feels quite uncomfortable for people like my parents. They make appeals to authority, I say “That’s an appeal to authority; I continue to evaluate you as the ultimate responsible person for your decisions.”

Here’s a particularly interesting quote:

The concept of whiteness and racism as a form of pathological narcissism that manifests in some individual white people has a long research history. In 1980, Carl Bell, a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, outlined how the hallmark symptoms associated with narcissistic personality disorder, such as grandiosity, entitlement, and lack of empathy, apply to individual racists. More recently, in 2016, assistant professor of education Cheryl Matias described whiteness as narcissistic because its emotional nature insists on positioning itself as the center of the discourse, “especially when one is trying to push it to the margins.”

Another quote:

Strategic White Womanhood is a spectacle that permits the actual issue at hand to take a back seat to the emotions of the white woman, with the convenient effect that the status quo continues unabated. White women’s tears are fundamental to the success of whiteness. Their distress is a weapon that prevents people of color from being able to assert themselves or to effectively challenge white racism and alter the fundamental inequalities built into the system.

In this case, the person trying to assert himself against her is someone who was once a kid, not a person of color, but the diminishment that supremacism applies to the non-supremacist groups it creates is constant, across class (“child”) and ethnicity.

Even more books

In the last few years, I’ve read books like:

I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction. Brutal. The terror and misery surrounding reconstruction, slavery. I cried so often reading this. I highlighted many sections via my kindle.
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism this was an audiobook I got via the library/libby app, so no kindle highlights.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South Got lots of kindle notes here
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness here’s some of my kindle highlights
The Most Dangerous Superstition
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia the male/female coded ‘beauty standards’ are directly eugenicist! Huzzah, read this book, decolonize a bit more of your sense of self.⁶
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI “what kind of things are settler colonialists willing to do, to get what they think they’re entitled to, Josh?” Great question. For an example of how even a single group believing in the fantasy of (political) authority ruins generations and continents regions and peoples, look no farther than this book. here’s my kindle notes Remember, some of us have these kinds of people as parents. 🤮 What should we do about it? “Sorry, world, for my supremacist parent” is a bit of parentification (of the kid) even as it’s a truthfully expressed sentiment.
The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia I reference this everywhere, it’s the most useful conceptual compression of evangelicalism. Everyone is a propagandized participant, wittingly or unwittingly complicit with the strongest themes of supremacy in America. My notes here
The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World I was raised by a certified colonizer - he worked in the pentagon and willingly participated in the war efforts of the greater usa, I was raised hearing some of these stories, told in a reverential, proud way. here’s my notes. The damage to one’s emotional sense of self, ones sense of inherent dignity or worth, in being exposed to this kind of energy, is not trivial. of course colonialists are willing to murder their own kids, or soul-murder them, they are willing to stampede around the world murdering any number of others. What’s one more? willingly soul-murdering your own kid shows your commitment to the cause. Sorta the cost of entry to the club.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair this is one of the best, and I read this book early in the process of ending my marriage and exiting evangelicalism. I began to appreciate how others were responding to conflict that was arising as if I were abusing them. My mother, when I asked why she refused to read something I wrote, said “it is hard to see your children walk away from how they were raised”, as if I was harming her by writing, rather than writing about her harming me and that being my attempt to resolve the issue today. So, read that book, and then go create conflict with supremacists, and expect them to claim that you’re abusing them, when you’re not treating them according to the role they fancy themselves to have, and the role they fancy you to have.

Footnotes

not-yet-integrated loose notes, categorize the above list before randomly adding these entries:

ongoing devestating harm of ‘car-dependent culture’, which even that frame is dismissive of the reality. a supremacist ideal, a regime of social control, is represented by ‘single family housing’ on one side, and the requisite zoning regime, and the highwaymen (rubber, asphalt, petroleum. you know, gdp stuff). urban renewal as ethnic cleansing
the greatest threat to my and eden’s ongoing wellness is the possibility of getting crushed by a car for whatever reason, on our day-to-day. The other main risks are related to car-dependent, car-propagandized american culture. taps sign 40,000 people killed on american roads, not evenly distributed in anyway, by appreciating this it can be fixed
all the sadness of less social time w/friends, bc of how much spiritual/psychological/time/risk/hassle exists for anyone to get in the same physical location, if it’s in america, regardless of the distribution of car users.
I don’t have a car, often-enough wish at times that I did. My scooter works so well and is such an improvement on a car, and I still wish I had a Toyota Sienna, which I’ll purchase whenever I next find myself obtaining a vehicle.
even when I’m just walking to cheesman, I have to cheat death repeatedly crossing Franklin, Colefax, 14th, 13th. I have plenty of valid beef w/supremacy culture materialized in cars proliferating like cancer or girrardia.
sadness that fire department is not part of the solution to improving their domain. (I visited local fire department today, chatted w/Tom Ford, the person in charge and a few others. It was an odd vibe.)
my parent’s routine use of silent treatment as punishment. Kid josh was so damn relational (adult josh is too) that depriving me of interaction, affection, warmth, while still in the same physical place, was such a shocking betrayal. I’d get upset and sent to my room or grounded, abandoned, said “you are not welcome here unless you’re putting on a fake face” and we’ll hurt you until you do.
I experienced few opportunities of ‘disinhibeted self-expression’ until I’d fully left the toxic family/religeous situation

A kid’s addendum

My kid has a few things that bum her out. I live within walking distance of several parks, several libraries, a botanic gardens, three climbing gyms, grocery stores, and more.

Some of these are long walks. My favorite climbing gym for ropes is a 7 mile round-trip walk. 3.5 miles each way. Totally doable, but not something I relsh doing often. I usually ride my scooter, of course, but with Eden have done much more walking than I’d do without.

It’s tons of fun to load up her jogger, and chain trips together. The park, a friend’s house, the gym, another friend’s house on the way back, etc. We can have a super fun trip.

Walking at night is particularly challenging, as cars have wildly bright headlights, especially the LED lights.

Eden says “I don’t like it when the cars eyes look into my eyes”

She’s three feet tall - the car headlights are blinding, a stunning amount of pollution, sometimes travelling hundreds and hundreds of meters.

She also sometimes says about some trips “The walk is too big”.

If we could subtract from the walk, all the distance that exists explicitly for cars, these walks would all be dramatically shorter. I estimate 1/2 the distance, conservatively.

Land utilization is terrible when it’s allocated to vehicles. Of course, that was the point in america - urban renewal as ethnic cleansing. Supremcists WANTED to have parking lots and wide, dangerous streets instead of lively neighborhoods. They went hard in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and less hard since then, but we are all living amongs the rubble of their slow dismantelling of society.

American cities destroying neighborhoods via ‘urban renewal’ is very, very similar to what people in Israel (with the support of people in America) are doing to the people in Palestine. The bulldozers rumbling around, tearing things down. Look at the photos of where Robert Moses destroyed neighborhoods for the ‘cross bronx expressway’

Devestation reigns.

Is not “patriarchy kink” not a brilliant phrase? I did not come up with it. Nor did I originate ‘sky daddyism’, and found it to also be worth a few giggles. ↩
TODO finish draft, publish “frame control”, it’s inherently coercive to ‘force’ someone else into “your frame”, it’s inherently mutual to follow someone else into “their frame”, for their best understanding of the dynamic. https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/. For an explanation and origin of the willingness to enslave and colonize: The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia. I view a belief in authority now as an dangerous superstition, if it mattered to you to keep an appreciation for the figure of Jesus Christ, as one drop-kicks the rest of the structures to the curb, the politics of jesus post, but its not necessary. to treat others gently, one needs, needs to re-access treating oneself gently. I suggested to one friend that they “fire their inner cop”, someone else I pointed out that if they called someone else a fraction of what “they” called themselves, we’d all be horrified. Pete walker calls it ‘the toxic inner critic’, or the internalized voice of a parent, usually or some other caretaking figure who used shame and punishment and coercion to bully others. ↩
Years ago, I encountered this list of 300 ways it can hurt to be a man, and certainly appreciated some of them, and appreciated the impressive number. perhaps it could also be called ‘300 ways it can hurt to be a man inside of american/western/supremacist culture’ ↩
What is her definition of successful? Of course talking directly with her about it involves lots of thought-stopping cliches, but it rounds to the standard toolkit of ‘evangelical religious authoritarianism’ which is a regime of apocalyptic social control? is that too strong? Read some of my notes/quotes from on hitting small(er) people ↩
this is, of course, the classic ‘appeal to authority’, or ‘nuremburg defense/just following orders’. This is why belief in authority is such a dangerous superstition. As a reminder, this is my father, who claims he loves me, enlisting the full weight of his cognitive powers and story making potential to double down on defending child abuse ↩
When passing old white people deign to make remarks now that openly affirm a racialized, supremacist view of the world, out loud, with their full chest, I clap back. the last old white-passing woman that spoke in such a way of eden, to me said in passing to or about my kid “oh, you are such a beautiful little girl” (reinforcing a message of ‘there is a standard, you happen to meet it, therefore you are fundamentally different than someone else, I approve of your seeming conformity to my version of a eugenic ideal.’ Also a bunch of presumed crap around gender roles, femininity, conformity, etc) I stopped, turned, looked at her face, and said “what a strange thing to say to someone.” female-passing people get stripped by ‘society’ of permissible access to rage, by anyone embodying patriarchal, supremacist, emotionally immature ideals. Remember, Rage Becomes Her

I wish I’d said something a bit more specific, but it is enough. I was not neglecting the role of the Witness. Eden heard me. The supremacist heard me. Its enough. ↩

Isometric Deadlift Holds (for Climbing!)

2025-04-03T13:00:00+00:00

alternative titles: yielding isometric mid-thigh pin pulls, isometric deadlift 'holds' for fun and climbing

Introduction

A few months ago, I began some barefoot sprints up a hill at a local park, and discussed also adding heavy kettlebell swings.

My back started feeling great, along with my feet, my legs, the bones and connective tissues and muscles. Truly, i’m now four months in and this is all still part of my toolkit. It also feels great to walk my bare feet across grassy surfaces. The kettle bell swings transferred strongly to climbing.

After building skills and strengths around one-handed heavy kettlebell swings (and giggling to myself over how fun it was to feel so much stronger while climbing). I found myself wondering ‘what will I do when I max out the kettlebells’, also, ‘I do not currently have any interest in maxing out the kettlebells, but I am curious to perhaps incrementally practice some of the same general pattern’

I remembered how I’ve always appreciated things about the deadlift that I’ve never quite managed to embody, or make part of my training, and some of the core parts of the deadlift are pretty unappealing to me, too.

I appreciate the whole ‘strengthen the posterior chain’ thing, but I really, really, really do not care about having any particular deadlift “number”. And the few times I’ve spent a few sessions in a row deadlifting, I’d get to something around 200 lbs and then start getting anxious about how my back would be feeling, because of a prior injury/weakness. AND because of that weakness, I’ve long wanted to get a ‘strong(er) back’, to reduce the chances of an injury, but kept running into that weakness along the way. hm.

so anyway, my back has been feeling great, and I was sorta thinking about deadlifty type stuff again.

I was noticing how little portions of my back would move with the kettlebell swings, thinking about that hip hinge motion. I decided that I could replicate some of the motion simply by ‘pinning’ a bar with a bunch of weight on it close to the top of the deadlift position, and I could then pick it up and hold it.

My first experience of this particular exercise

I had been thinking about the motion/exercise for a while, but not quite set it up, I’d never used the pins like this before, and a friend gave a helpful nudge while we were exercising together, and I got it set up right, fiddled with it, started adding weight, slowly, seeing how everything felt as I went.

AND I WAS SHOOK! The way the exercises felt while I was doing them and the ways my body felt fatigued, sore, later that day and the next day, the day after, and even three days later, was extremely thought provoking. I’m attuned to interestingness. these were interesting. From a proprioception point of view, there was lots of input and awareness throughout the lifts, AND for hours and days in the soreness and sensation generated by the strain and repair.

Photos and videos and timelapses of the exercise, for context

Here’s a still from a video, showing the entire thing. It’s a mostly no-range-of-motion exercise, so I pick it up from close to this ‘finished’ position:

I will tell you about them, but first, it might be best to simply look at the video of the workout:

🎥 google photo album of the lifts

It’s a few short videos, one showing a single heavy-for-me lift. You might notice I hold the bar up for only maybe three seconds. The timelapses show how fast the whole workout can be, and how little time is spent doing anything, and how small the range of motion is.

I spent more than one session googling around, trying to find a useful name that described what I was doing, and finally, iteratively, with the help of two friends, walked into a title for it.

I was describing it:

Okay, so, you know the ‘top’ of the deadlift position? [shifts hands into this sorta stance] I’ll put the squat rack safety bars to this level [lowers two inches] and load a bar there, start with a single 45 plate on both sides… [more gesturing, miming]

… I kept adding 45s until I was quite a bit past my regular deadlift weight. It was so interesting to hold a heavy, heavy bar for 5-10 seconds, with almost zero movement. Based off the soreness and fatigue I felt immediately and the following day(s), I could tell the ‘transfer’ to climbing-specific strength was very high. Not 100%, but close.

This would be considered an isometric lift/hold.

Google told me that “traditional” barbell isometrics would be pinning the bar in place and then pulling up on on it, rather than lifing it and holding it in an raised position. So, this is a ‘yielding isometric’ hold, in that we are activating muscles to avoid yielding to the weight. This is opposed to an ‘overcoming isometric’, like pushing on a wall (or lifting a bar against a pin), where the entire load is delivered by the body trying to overcome the immovable force.

I’m so bad at counting weight plates, it takes a long time to figure out how much weight is on the bar, but I absolutely thought “well, I can easily hold my body weight with one arm hanging from a pull-up bar, so I wonder if I can do my body weight from each hand at the same time on this lift?”

and started adding weight towards 140 * 2, or 280 lbs. Turns out it’s pretty easy for me to hold 280 lbs up there. I was going slowly up in weight, but even on my very first day, I think I went to 320 lbs. (!!!). I always, always evaluate how a back thing feels the day after the exercise, so I eased into these gently.

But each time, the day after, things felt good. So I kept the lifting going, and very quickly saw wild numbers, all the way up into the very low 400s eventually. Mostly I stay at a lower weight, maybe 80% of a max, and aim for longer holds, and other forms of improved holding.

For example, I can find ease with my breathing (slow exhale vs fast exhale and hold) and many versions of trying to keep my shoulders “packed”, and “holding them up” instead of letting them get pulled down (in most of the footage in the album, I’m letting them sag more than I do now).

I’m not trying to get injured. For instance, breathing is difficult when holding this much weight, but if I’m holding it for a ‘longer time’ (>5 seconds) I can exhale and take a half-inhale. When I’m closer to my limit, there’s no way I can inhale under the tension.

Anyway, there is tons of good stuff out there about isometric exercises.

As a climber, nearly 100% of my finger flexor training is isometric, and I’ve noticed over the years more and more of my exercises tending towards isometrics. For example, I virtually never train pullups, but will do lots of holding a 135 degree arm position isometrically in various ways. It’s easy(ier) on the elbow tendons, etc.

I expect this exercise counts as elbow tendon pre-hab, as I appreciate the soreness I sometimes detect, in the elbow joints. Ditto re knee and ankle and foot tendons. I get tons of proprioceptive input from those places, after holding sufficiently heavy weights.

Contrasting this strange lift/hold to a look-alike exercise, the deadlift (lifting a much lighter amount of weight from the ground)

Tons of obviously coherent, rooted-in-reasonableness ideas float around out there about why deadlifts are a nice thing to give to the human body, but again, I don’t deadlift, I’m not a gym person.

I don’t view this lift as even remotely related to a deadlift. There’s no ‘reps’, there’s no movement, it’s just holding it at the top of the position, stressing out the upper body more than a full range-of-motion deadlift ever would be able to do, noticing what I’m feeling as I hold the weight.

Even rock climbers sometimes talk about deadlifts, and some of the other ‘core’ barbell exercises. I’ve never cared for benching or squats, either. I’m not a gym person, though I love as much as anyone else the concept of ‘being strong’.

Years ago, I injured my back in a severe-to-me way. Ultimately found it was ‘just’ a pulled psoaz muscle and not a herneated disk! how nice. the effect on my life and mobility for a long time was that of a severe back injury. Possibly I’ve got a slight congenital back issue (someone thinks the bottom vertebra is maybe partially fused to my pelvis or something, but the x-ray was unclear). I’ve simply always had tightness in my lower back. It’s part of why sometimes I look like I stand up very strait, I think. Anyway, old back injury + legit sensitivity + proclivity to back pain.

I still don’t ‘run’ (besides those barefoot hill sprints I mentioned, and that’s been only a very recent addition), but things about that portion of my back is still a point of physical sensitivity, and emotional sensitivity, for me.

Every time I’ve tried deadlifting from the ground, I can see, feel, witness in video recordings, errors in form and technique, and could not generate for myself the collection of body queues I seem to need to get the form right. I’ll maybe hire a coach for IRL training someday.

Imagine how thrilled I was, then, to have stumbled across this thing that gets me more of the best parts of what I always wanted from the deadlift, and less of the parts I didn’t want, from the deadlift.

I’m thrilled to have discovered this vastly-more-relatable-to-rock-climbing, lower-risk-to-the-back, no-range-of-motion exercise.

Where did the name come from?

I watched portions of a painful amount of youtube videos, trying to find a video of someone doing this exercise like this, and couldn’t find any. It’s not often I discover particularly novel things, and I’m pleased when I do. This feels like one of ‘em. ¹

It’s a no-range-of-motion isometric deadlift pin-pull.

Or yielding isometric mid-thigh pin-pull-and-hold

I don’t know how to signal in the name that the point of the motion is the holding, and not reps, per se.

I can find zero footage on youtube of anyone doing anything quite like this.

I’d like to emphasize, again, the point is not reps, the point is time under tension.

Here’s the videos I collected, again: google photo album of the lifts. Maybe I’ll make

Why does this feel so transferrable to climbing

We’ve perhaps seen people doing the ‘no-hang’ tension block weighted pulls. I think of this exercise as a version of that. I’ve tried those exersises, I like them well enough. I don’t mind that the tension block is a one-handed thing. these yeilding isometric barbell pin pulls feel conveniently two-handed.

I can feel all the columns and structures and musculature and connective tissue of my upper body (and lower body) working, hard, to maintain the position throughout the hold. When I climb right after these exercises, I can feel lots of overlapping use. Or, I do these exercises after the climbing, and can feel it then, or in the soreness. The commonality of energy pathways is distinctive.

It becomes very apparent why this is an interesting exercise as one approaches ‘heavy’, whatever that is for you. Here’s a list of some of the priprioceptive interestingness:

The ‘meaty’ parts of my hands are sore, again, in a delightful way, with the effort of holding the bar.
the pad at the base of the thumb is sore, in a nice way
the weight is very heavy, so I absolutely MUST have my hands on opposite sides of the bar. Either direction feels like a direct mimic of the ‘base’ climbing movement. An undercling or ‘regular’ palm-facing-away position
I feel soreness in the intercostal muscles across the tops of my ribs, in a way that makes sense when you appreciate how much force is being carried with the the lungs acting like a balloon, rigidly working with the ribs, shoulder structures, to carry the load.
delightful soreness all across the forearms, and the rest of the arm and shoulder
i was having issues with callouses building (and tearing. ick. happened once. did not like it.) and found that if I set an intention of gripping the bar really really tightly, my skin sloshes around under the bar less, and skin that gets pulled at less tears less. Also, my hands get even more sore!
the ways the specific shape of the bar transfers directly, directly to certain hand positions on the wall is wild. I never had considered this before. It feels like I can hold a ‘c’ shape in my hand more, and thus feel improved on crimps in different/better ways, especially roofy crimps. I can kinda curl my wrist and hooked hand + crimped finger more into a hold, and achieve an improved body position on it, as a result.
To appreciate the above, perhaps hold your hand in front of you, rigidely, as if your hand and thumb were wrapped all the way around a bar bell. Flex the hand. flip the thumb over into a half-crimp position. I can now imagine stronger intercostals at the base of the knuckles, and stronger wrist flexors. Before a few months ago, it would have been hard for me to imagine how this little chain of pulling could be made independently stronger by pulling hard on a bar, and now that I’ve experienced it, it seems of obvious why these exact pulls make this complex of muscles and structures so much stronger. ²
I can feel soreness in the bones and connective tissues in the a2 pulley region and pip joints, which obviously are frequently injured structures in the hands of climbers, and being able to systemically apply load in such controlled fashion feels great for prompting the whole tissue injury/repair cascade. tendon injuries are most likely during highly dynamic moves, or after a lot of wiggly back-and-forth sawing motion has already been applied to the tendons, these lifts are none of that.
Theoretically, big early strength gains of some exercises are not the muscles getting any definition of stronger, it’s that the muscle fibers are becoming coordinated; it’s that the load is so high, they’re learning to all apply force at the same time. getting from 88% muscle fiber recruitment to, say, 95% muscle fiber recruitment, seems worthwhile, right? Lots of climbing-specific exercises talk about this principal. It’s sorta like ‘free strength’. “I don’t need more muscle to pull harder, nor do I need more force to be generated by any particular muscle fiber, I simply have some muscle fibers that are not trying at all when I am pulling really hard? And I can simply ask them to try alongside the other muscle fibers already trying? heck yeah.” I have no idea what sort of numbers anyone actually has, just that there are known ways of improving the coordinated activation of muscle fibers, and as I reflect on the way these exercises work, I note the same principle being applied.

Similar to the kettlebell swings, holding a round bar feels like an ‘active’ position for the palm and structures of the hand. I could easily feel an interesting and useful transfer to crimping holds, and being able to more easily hold a rounded palm when crimping, vs it flattening out into more of a drag.

Because the range of motion is tiny, this feels relatively easy on my metabolic system and muscles. Again, early gains are at least partially muscle fiber recruitment type things, perhaps, and I’m thrilled for it, and don’t mind at all when that is not an avenue of further improvement.

Please don’t get me wrong, my nervous system felt absolutely emptied of something I didn’t know I had, the first few sessions. The entire body is working so hard - The first time I had the weight of one of me, hanging from each arm was very interesting. I then had one-of-me plus a 25 lb dumbbell, hanging from each arm. this is difficult to me. ³

Over the last two years, I’ve had several friends go through heavy-duty surgical interventions for damaged tendons in the ankle and knee. What they have experienced, I would love to avoid. I am THRILLED to be providing stress to the whole system right now, in such safe ways. I can feel things like my achillies tendons, and lots of things inside my knees, expressing a perception of having been used, the day or two after an exercise like this.

For the next three days my entire body felt like I’d stretched in a way I didn’t know I could. It feels very useful from a climbing pov to be building capacity for this sort of energy output.

It’s become perceivably less effortful to hold certain body positions on the wall, now, in ways I didn’t even know I was struggling with, or realizing I could have a certain competency with. In certain moves, I kept feeling like I was “clicking”, like a magnet tile, into ideal body positions during/between moves, with the improved ease with which I could move all of my body around, because of my stronger shoulders and back. Climbing is a skill sport, and I’m pleased to use my stronger body to develop my skill. Guess what one can do more of, with a stronger body? More practicing-by-trying difficult, skillful moves!

~~TODO add video of my surprise casual send of first v9 on the tb2?~~

I added the video to the photo album of the lifts. or click here to view it directly. It had been months since I’d tried that boulder problem, it was the first of the grade I’ve done on the tension board. I could tell my shoulders and back felt SO STRONG in ways that were not available to me from when I’d last tried it.

In the video, especially compared to earlier attempts, it’s obvious to me that I am feeling so solid in each body position throughout the climb. Sometimes it’s obvious that I’m barely holding various body positions, and in this video, it’s that obvious that each of these body positions is secure. This sensation keeps getting born out on ropes and bouldering in many different ways.

I keep telling people that I climb with that it feels like I’m playing a video game, and I cashed in accrued points for a character upgrade, and I just spent it on stronger shoulders and back. It’s like my joints and the holds I’m holding onto are more inclined to ‘snap into place’ once I grab them.

Fantastic, and delightful. Even if I was not climbing, though, I think I would really like these exercises.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve likely spent about 20 minutes on this piece and the videos, which means you’ve spent more time reading than I usually spend doing the entire isometric pin pull exercise.

So, next time you’re around a squat rack, maybe you’ll think of me and this idea and try it yourself. If you do, I’d love to hear your experience of it.

I subscribe to write it now philosophies, and this exercise is now pretty familiar to me, even as it’s still novel. I anticipate I’ll keep going with it, I’ll drop updates to this post now and again.

Footnotes

a few of the other novel things, which I think counts for something: I was the first one I’d heard of that rode a scooter as far as Denver>Canada>Seattle>Denver, photo album though turns out now people ride their scooters literally all around the world - findable on youtube. between when I encountered scooters as a useful vehicle in the usa (2022) and made that trip (2023) I had not. Even in the decades of experience among the people at the local scooter dealer, no one had heard of someone going so far on a scooter, and they were impressed. I’m counting this as ‘genuinely novel’. It wasn’t just a long scooter trip, but skillful managing of the logistics, the route, the pacing, the sleeping. I genuinely do not like to ‘work hard’ or to suffer, so a trip like this would be unappealing unless it was also deeply comfortable, most of the time.

Secondly, I’ve never seen someone else collect, render anyone’s mobility data in such granular way as this: https://josh.works/mobility-data. Lots more could be said about that. Started as a very simple basic idea that grew into something quite interesting, rendering thousands of precise trips all at once on a single global map. Are computers not amazing??? Also I feel an odd awareness of my own lived experience, being able to zoom out and see evidences, breadcrumbs, sometimes whole meals of lines, evidences of trips, life lived. mm. the data is possibly self-explanatory?

A third point of interestingness, novelty, that I am pleased to have encountered, that is close-enough-to-original: ‘coning’ an intersection, aka fixing the common american-style road junctions with traffic cones.

I also do interesting/novel stuff with drone footage in cities, but ~~don't yet anything super easy to link~~. jk, sorta: example 1: follow-along of a group on bikes thru a park/neighborhood in Denver, example 2: smooth timelapse footage of a stroad, example 3: trader joes paring lot timelapse ↩
In certainly one of my less sufferable traits, sometimes after I have what seems like an insight, to me, it becomes clear, obvious, and then I talk to others like it’s as obvious to them as it is obvious to me, even as I have clearly never arrived at this insight until {age_at_which_insight_was_gained}, and I can “be pushy” or at least experienced as “pushy” in some ways. I don’t deny it at all, also, possibly, I am sorry/i don’t disagree with you. 😬 ↩
I’ve often used unconventional units for calculating things. I sometimes still calculate the cost of items in burritos. “{such and such} is three burriots, with quacamole, is it worth that much?” from the job where I earned about one chipotle burrito per hour. ↩

Barefoot Sprinting Up a Grassy Hill, & Kettlebell Swings

2025-03-12T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

A few months ago, maybe in November, certainly by December, I began this ‘barefoot sprinting up grassy hills’ thing I’m going about to talk about in detail below. Shortly after I started, I began making use of the kettlebells I’d usually ignored at the gym(s) I have access to.

I’ve been dual-tracking in time the two topics in this piece, kettlebell swings and sprints, but because of how text works, I must discuss one of them first, and one of them second.

I’ve been hustling the kettlebell swings hard lately. If you’re one of the folks I’ve hung out with in-person, you know what I’m talking about. You are reading the blog post I said I’d send you.

Someone said, believably, credibly:

tell me more about these kettlebell swings, because I will do literally anything to be a stronger climber.

Gladly.

As usual, I’ve got a page a few pages of paper notes that I’ve put together across time, and am now bringing it to here and organizing it.

I first crossed paths with kettlebells, and the ‘heavy two-handed kettlebell swing’ many, many years ago. I wrote my first piece about kettlebell swings in 2013. Did not write about them again until now.

In 2013, I was using 55 lb kettlebells, and didn’t have access to other sizes. Now that I have access to real kettlebells, and at a variety of weights, I am find a lot more interestingness for myself.

I still stand by that piece, and regularly since then have made kettlebell swings a part of how I use my body. Maybe two months ago I brought kettlebell swings back into my life, first time in many years, and I’m thrilled. My back feels AMAZING, and a bunch of other things.

In case this information makes it incrementally more likely that any reader harvests any of the same nice things, here’s all of my beta. I try to write things when it’s first coalecing in my mind, and this current piece is no exception.

Kettlebell Swings

~~TODO: Add video of 2-handed swings.~~

Here’s an album showing one-handed and two-handed kettlebell swings. The two-handed swings are me & a 75 lb kettlebell, doing reps 81-100 for that day’s work. The one-handed swing is from a different day showing reps 1-5 on each arm with a 55 lb kettlebell. I believe I did ten total on each side that day.

The blog post about kettlebell swings I wrote now 12 years ago is maybe worth referencing. I no longer have the home-made kettlebell. The piece is a good-enough starting point.

I remember getting a TON out of kettlebell swings long ago, especially part of training for a high-elevation marathon, and I’m thrilled that I used them then. It helped my back stay healthy, for sure. Then, after I stopped running, I stopped the kb swings, and then WRECKED!!!! my back doing something completely unrelated, and have not run since then… Until now (More on sprinting below)

I also didn’t really do kb swings the last few years.

Then, for reasons that do not have anything to do with climbing, I found a way to bring back into my life running, and stumbled backwards back into kettlebell swings, and have noticed so many interesting things as a result. In a way that is no longer surprising to me, my climbing has also been nicely effected as well, even though that was never the original intent of the kettlebell swings.

Originally, I didn’t expect the exercise to do anything for my climbing, and in fact felt bummed when the kettlebell swings would sometimes leave me tired enough that I felt I was having a lower-effort, ‘maintenence’ climbing session, rather than a fresh, ‘try-hard’ session.

Then, because of a slight reframe, I’m now thrilled by the soreness I feel from the kettlebells, and don’t mind that i’ve been carrying fatigue into most of my climbing sessions since I’ve started ‘spamming kettlebell swings’.

Here’s misc notes I collected across a few days/weeks:

I really don’t like to work hard, or even breath that hard. When doing my swings, I always breath through my nose, per Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.

I started with sets of 5-10 reps. Then rest until my breath returns all the way to normal, and my heart rate, then i do more. Keep going at a low rate of effort until ~100 reps, if feeling good. If I’m a little sick or whatever, I found myself dropping the weight a lot and still finding 60 reps difficult enough to stop there. (that was part of how I knew I was sick at the time. Came down with a slow-onset illness, and I noticed it first by a stunning loss of power. 60 reps of a 60 lb kb is vastly less work than 110 reps of a 75 lb kettlebell, but when I was sick the 60 reps at low weight were harder than the 110 reps of 75lb swings)

It’s impossible to do kb swings well without chalk, I used to not use chalk, or I’d do swings even if I didn’t have chalk, and that is no longer the case. i found the weights I was using to be so heavy that simply holding on to the dang thing was often-enough a hard part of the exercise. I now recall, the last time I did kettlebell swings without chalk, legitimately, correctly fearing the bell breaking free of my hands during some part of the motion. I don’t climb without chalk, I do not swing kettlebells without chalk.

As soon as any part of the form would ‘break’, if it ever did, I’d end the set. It almost never broke. both of the videos here have pretty good form. My form isn’t always the exact same, across sets, especially the one-arm swings. In both videos, my heels sometimes come off the ground. It’s reflective of me having to try very hard. Often-enough my heels do not rise off the ground, which feels more correct.

Heels up or not, I’m pleased with it, because it shows that my form is and looks quite good, even though I know the exercises were quite effortful. Back and shoulders in particular look “packed”. It looks much more straight forward than it felt in my body.

an unexpected crossover: Kettlebell Swings and Climbing

I noticed lots of kb-swing-related soreness while climbing. Some climbing moves became for a time very sensory-rich because of how it was interacting with soreness recepters.

The soreness in my hands after the KB swings is similar to the soreness in my hands I experienced after trying something from Tyler Nelson’s insta: Drop the load a little and increase the muscle activity. Your fingers will thank you for it (instagram)

sometimes, usually, I’d begin the climbing session with kettlebell swings. Sometimes I’d do the swings at the end.

Sometimes I’d do only kb swings, and would not climb, if I didn’t feel like climbing. the gym I use is close enough that I can walk to it, and will walk/scoot right by it often enough even if I don’t seek it out, so it’s trivial for me to pop in for a few minutes of using a single piece of equipment, and then continue on with my day. #scooterthings

Often enough, when doing the kb swings before the climbing session, I’d notice how nice it felt to be really warmed up, and warmed up with speed, not just slow ‘warm up’ climbing.

The kb is very demanding, and takes speed, the same way that jumping into the air takes certain speed. It’s really nice to soak the nervous system in this level of effort, and helps for the climbing.

I’d do the kb swings, and feel really well warmed up for bouldering. I also sometimes would feel really sore from the kb swings in ways that would be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS when I was climbing. I was thrilled bc that meant I was getting a ton of useful crossover.

right now, as you read these words, consider ‘shrugging’ your shoulders, up towards your ears, and then pushing them back ‘down’, with firmness, and rigidity - these were very often the muscles that I’d feel EXTREME fatigue in, across days and weeks, and plenty of other muscles, but that these muscles in my body were so sore was continuously surprising to me.

I pretty quickly dialed down good-enough technique, and then started adding weight. I got to 75 lb two-arm swings, spent a few sessions there, that was the heaviest kettlebell at that gym, then I found an 88 lb kettlebell at a different gym and have now used that one a few times.

The first time I did it, I’d still not tried any one-handed kettlebell swings. I’ve now done a bunch, and the second time I used that 88 lb kettlebell, it felt shockingly easy to hold on to and swing, compared to how it felt the first time. It’s still wildly hard. That 2nd set was yesterday, as I type these words, I can feel soreness in my thumb, if I stretch it, each of my fingers, and much more.

update from a few weeks later than that paragraph was typed^^: that 88lb kettlebell, while not feeling light, now feels much, much, much easier to move around. I giggled to myself the last time I used it, because of how easy it was to hold on to, and to swing!!!

this kettlebell swing thing is a high-value 5-10 minutes in every session. i almost always do 100 swings. even when moving slow, it’s only like 7 minutes. If you read half this blog post, you’ve spent far longer reading than I spend on most kettlebell swinging sessions, which, for the record, even the ‘active 7 minute workout’ is still mostly me standing next to a kettlebell, not swinging it.

I weigh 140lbs and started with a 55lb kb, then 65, then 75, then 88. Spent a few sessions at each weight before going up one. I switched to one-arm work with a 45 lb suitcase/farmers carry a few times, then 55lb one-arm swings, then 60 lbs, and get use from 45lb one-arm swings too.

I do between 60 and 130 reps of two-arm swings, and started with like ten reps of one-arm swings, then 20, 30, and have not done more than 40 in a session so far.

an unexpected variation: One-handed kettlebell swings

I’ve got a video of me doing one-handed kb swings here.

I started one-handed swings the very first time on accident, because when I went to the gym, the 70 and 75 lb kettlebells were in use. So I grabbed a 55, and thought “i bet I can still get a version of the exercise I want”.

Oh, wow, I was correct.

It feels so stability-encouraging of my toros, back, spine, ‘the box’ of the upper body, because of it’s asymetric nature.

I could feel my spine and the mucles along it, and the entire “box” of my upper body (sides, front, back, bottom of my core), straining to maintain their body position. Straining to resist movement, rather than straining to move. Wildly applicable to climbing movements.

My forearms and hands were quite nicely stressed by the effort - I could feel the familiar sense of fatigue in the muscles/connective tissue inside of my hands, the fleshy part of my thumb, I could feel fatigue and stress in the middle bone of my fingers, too. not the bone in the tip, not the bone connecting to the palms. The one in between. How nice.

I could feel sensation from the muscles along my spine all that night and the next day - nothing felt painful or damaged, simple soreness and the feeling of use. I could tell the entire system had been thoroughly stressed. It felt so good.

I could feel my rib intercostals and so many stabilizing muscles that night, feeling so sore and happy as I crawled into bed and went to sleep. I’ve had that feeling in my body now every time I’ve done KB swings, and usually carry perceivable fatigue into the next day, but it’s partially because I’m often-enough increasing the ‘work’ that I do every session.

Once I started one-arm swings, I’d do five reps at a time, per side. I started at 55lbs, then went to 60 a few times, tried 45 lb swings once, liked it, and will probably keep upping the reps and weight as it feels good.

I’ll slowly ease the rep count up, and sets. I started with 5 reps per side, then did 8, then reduced the weight and went to ten reps per side, and maybe 40 swings total, across a few sessions.

other variations to the two-handed kb swing

Hold a kb that’s like 1/3rd your body weight while standing around, or stretching, or shifting weight and doing bodyweight squats and stretches and stuff. Bounce on the toes. Switch it back and forth between your hands often. I started with like a small number of minutes of holding it, while moving around. The one-arm weight/motion is very interesting, both while moving around or perhaps while remaining very still.
after a 45 lb/33% bodyweight suitcase carry, a 55lb one-arm kb swing isn’t such a leap, even though at first I surprised myself with how much I could move with the single-armed swing.
try to move slowly under/around the kb. Think doing light yoga while holding a kettlebell. mega challenging, interesting. One-leg balancing, golfball pickup type motions, if you want. Felt to me promotive of stability in ways that justified the effort.

So much for kettlebells. These have been something I’ve been doing regularly now for a few months. The same length of time that I’ve been doing this sprinting thing…

Barefoot Grassy Hill Sprints In The Park

I started these sprints I am about to describe before I restarted the KB swings

The sprints had been going great for maybe two weeks, and then one of the times I walked past the kettlebells at the gym, I was like ‘my back and legs are already feeling great/tired, maybe i’ll be able to do kettlebell swings without my back feeling terrible the next day.’

I was right.

Anyway, here’s free-associating through sprints, as recorded in a paper notebook across a few days:

The idea originally had nothing to do with “running”. it started with ‘grounding’. A few friends have spoken in some length about grounding, over the years, the idea always seemed plausible, and I never did any particular action in response to it. years later, another friend that I’d meet at Cheesman Park, throwing frisbee, talked about it as he was taking his shoes off on a warm day in the fall, a few months ago.

I thought ‘what a reasonable idea’, as I took my own shoes/socks off and went barefoot for the rest of the frisbee throwing session. Eventually, I started going barefoot often-enough when the weather was nice and we were throwing a frisbee, but usually never took more than a few lazy steps at a time to catch a disk, while barefoot.

relevant: years ago (2020) I took a gnarly back injury and basically have not run since then, and for a long time could barely walk. Then even short walks would wreck me. Shortly before the injury, I’d run the Leadville Trail Marathon, and was climbing, so I was pretty abled, and the difference was profound. Deserves it’s own blog post or two, some time. As I think on it, it really changed me, the time of that injury, the things I experienced immediately afterwards.

also relevant, years before that injury, after reading the Born to Run book that made the rounds, maybe in 2009 or 2012 or whenever. That was the one and only other time in my 35 years I’d done a specific ‘barefoot run’, for like 12 minutes, on a patch of grass at a park. My calves were DESTROYED, even though it was a short run, and I was used to long runs in normal shoes. I never ran barefoot again, but the memory stuck with me.

So, back to 2024…

I don’t have running shoes, and didn’t want to have to obtain another pair.

I also know that walking up a hill is lower-impact on the body than a level surface or down a hill.

I also know that walking on grass is lower-impact than walking on asphalt, concrete, or dirt. It’s gentle on the skin.

So, I figured if I ran, and even sprinted, with a strong body position, up a hill, on grass, while barefoot and on the balls of my feet, and went only short distances, while doing lots of walking or standing around, I might not injure my back, and might find it interesting enough.

I was right. It was all sorts of interesting, enjoyable, peaceful. I’m calling this ‘sprinting’, but it also involved plenty of ‘meandering back from whence I sprinted at a very, very leisurely pace’.

I started with a short distance and a gentle but fast run. More than ten paces, probably less than 20, usually only the distance I could run while holding a single breath, or maybe two, because breathholding and nasal breathing. It’s a hold-over, always-running script in my brain. Ensuring I’m breathing through my nose, and sometimes holding my breath, or breathing in a very controlled way.

Sprint sprint sprint, then walk, lazily, back to where I began, then walk around a little more, then sprint sprint sprint, repeat. It is vanishingly rare that I begin a sprint while still breathing hard, at all, from the prior sprint, and I usually let plenty of time elapse after my breath has all the way slowed down again.

That was the routine, and it’s been extremely rewarding.

~~TODO: create photo album, link to convey the gist of the vibe of the sprint/walk things~~

👉 Here’s a photo album of the vibe of the barefoot park sprints

These “sprints” vs. distance running

I’m appreciating how uneasy I am naming things sometimes, and ‘sprints’ is making me uneasy. It’s emphasizing the wrong thing. Alas.

So much about the experience compares/contrasts with running. I like easy things, and tend to do more of something if it’s easy than if it’s difficult.

Here’s ways this sprinting thing is easy:

It’s barefoot, and I’m always close to where I start, so I can show up wearing ‘regular’ shoes, normal clothing, with a backpack, coffee, and more. Drop the bag, take off the outer layer of cloathing (i’ll have shorts or leggings under my pants, pretty much all the time, in the winter), take off shoes and socks, fold it all neatly in the grass/under a tree and I’m ready to run.

I started this in the winter in colorado. there’s plenty of sunny days, and as long as there’s not snow on the ground, I’ll run. I’ve run barefoot in as cold as like 21 degrees farenheight. Only because the sun was out, and there was no snow.

Again, much of the niceness to me of the sprints isn’t even the sprinting, it’s the walking around on the ground barefoot. Sometimes it’s cold, or the ground is wet in different ways. wet ground still counts as ‘nice’. It’s like a tiny little ice bath, when it’s snow melt or recently frozen. Like I said, I prefer comfort, and I usually run in dry, warm grass, but there’s a blob of trees where I run, and I sometimes interact with the shadow, which keeps ice/swow longer than the spot in the sun.

Or I run/walk/stand mostly in the shadows of the trees, in the warmth.

The hill I run up is south-facing, and because it’s sloped, water flows off it, so it dries out really quickly after snow, and becomes very usable very quickly, even when lots of the rest of the ground is covered with snow.

Having my backpack with water in it, coffee, my coat, extra layers, makes it convenient even in the winter. Since I ride my scooter even in the cold, I’m accustomed to having a pair of leggings (that I can run in) under whatever pants I’m wearing that day anyway.

I warm up by sometimes moving at a walking speed, but doing ‘high knees’ or doing a slow, ‘in place’ jump on each leg. It can look sorta like skipping. It can ‘build’ towards you doing something that looks like running through thigh-deep water.

My goal was always to simply stress enough that I’d feel it the next day, on the bottoms of my feet. It wasn’t an aerobic workout, it wasn’t a leg workout. I’ll never forget how much a 2-mile barefoot run did me in, when I let myself run barefoot with my normal distance running form, in high school.

The first session I did a low number of trips up the hill and back, I stopped while I felt fine and fresh, and I reflected ‘this small amount of movement is still more than I’ve had for a while’. It felt great, and as importantly, felt great the next day. Since I was at the park again anyway, throwing frisbee with a friend, I did some more ‘sprints’ up the hill.

I’m a curiosity-driven person, I don’t know if that comes across as why these sprint things are so interesting to me.

Eventually, I started jogging slowly back to the start, sometimes, and immediately would sprint again. Or I’d walk back, walk some more, walk even more, stand stationary for a bit, and then sprint again.

After my sprints, to continue with the theme of applying impulse to the balls of my feet, I would/will hop on the balls of my feet, bouncing with two feet a few times and then landing firmly on one foot, to try to catch as much force as I could on each side. I could feel the gentle soreness the next day, always.

I’d always evaluate how I felt the next day, and never pushed anything ‘hard’ or ‘got worked’ or anything, still have not, in any particular session.

It feels so good in the balls of my feet, the arches, calves, supporting structures. I have found tons of interestingness in the simple observation and sensation of the soreness.

I don’t count things, either. I don’t count reps, steps, distance, time. I start when my breath is still and slow, and I usually stop before it’s much more than ‘slightly elevated’.

I got the entire sprint workout from a recent warm day, here. The first video, it was a bit too sunny, so I moved into the shade of some trees, and finished the sprints, in the second timelapse video. The whole thing took less than ten minutes.

It feels so nice getting sunshine on my skin (colorado, afterall) and grass, dirt, moisture on my feet. My body feels so good, months later, still doing these sprint things. SO GOOD!

I’ve been doing kettlebell swings throughout, too. Sometimes on days I’d run I’d skip the swings. When there’s snow out and I don’t sprint, I’m vastly likely to do some kettlebell swings. Often I’ll do both, because both the park and the gym is ‘right on the way’ for me, to many places. The park is close enough I can walk there, or I’ll take my scooter and convert a 12 minute walk to a 4 minute scoot.

My brain and mood enjoy the experience. I’ll often take a frisbee and text my normal frisbee throwing friend(s), and he’ll sometimes join me for some frisbee tossing. I might frisbee before, during, or after the sprints.

I’ve done these sprints with Eden. We were walking through cheesman already, she was asleep in the jogger, so I parked her jogger where I usually sprint, in the shade of a tree, and did the running right next to it. Then tom met me for some frisbee, we tossed for a while, then Eden woke up and was ready to depart, so we did. the whole thing is quite peaceful, full of ease, effortlessness.

It’s nice to not spend a single dollar on traditional running gear.

I don’t like the impact of doing anything on asphalt, and I won’t run on a road that is cambered, because it feels devestating to one’s body, to run across a slope like that. I don’t have to deal with cars, in this sprinting thing, either, and I don’t hear any engines nearby, unlike running on a road.

When traveling, out of town, without access to Cheesman Park, and still wanting to do these sprints, I modified it to run in the playing field of a school near where I’ve visited. It was all fine, by the way. I prefer to run up a hill, yet this format seems to work on a level surface, well enough.

The whole workout can be done in 5 minutes, or, if I’m feeling a longer session, it will stretch across many more minutes.

Grand conclusions

I’m so aware of how some of my skeleton and muscles function together often-enough to maintain the shape of a box, other times these systems function to form something of a column. The column of my spine is very perceivable along side the ‘box’ of my torso. I’m aware of holding tension/stiffness/maintaining a position through my whole body, in various situations. my climbing feels better. way better. My shoulders feel strong, my fingers feel strong, my core feels strong. It’s been interesting to experience the transfer of power from holding the round kb handle, for instance, and the ‘c’ shape one’s hand makes when crimping on steep holds. This is the ‘active hand position’ tyler nelson talks about. Being able to hold that ‘c’ is easier to me now, dramatically so, having ‘trained’ it, unintentionally, with kettlebells.

I feel light on my feet when walking around.

I still do not like to train, or ‘work out’, generally, and I don’t think this will change for me.

I am thrilled that with almost zero time I get so much. The sprinting is also ‘walk barefoot in the grass in a park in the sun’ which obviously we should all be so lucky as to get a little bit of that every day. It’s nice for my 🧠.

It’s also peaceful in my own head, as I always have found various activities to be supportive of. (climbing, distance running)

usually I have earplugs in and can only hear my own breath, I do both the sprints and the kettlebell swings. I wear ear plugs most of the time I’m not at home, and even some of the time I am. 😬 Ear plug wearing while exercising seems to make it effortless for me to perceive my own breath. Again, the book breath is worth mentioning. I care about air quality, running the air through my nose makes it gentler/cleaner on my lungs. Even if I’m exercicing for such a long time that I need to take breaths through my mouth, I’ll be aware of when the aerobic demand exceeds what I can meet through my nose, I’ll switch to mouth breathing only as much and as long as I must, and then as soon as possible back to nasal breathing.

Sidebar: After i got my tongue tie fixed, and it rocked my world, per the recommendation of my myofunctional therapist I got ‘bodywork’ from a Dr. Lopez, and it was such an experience. I did a bunch of reading of his stuff before the appointment, read a short pamphlet about using one’s own thumb to apply a little pressure to the inside of one’s nose for about ten seconds. It suggested that if one does it right, one would experience an increased capacity to fit air through the nose, making what feels to me like a big-enough difference in some leters-per-minute measure. So, usually when I do the sprints, if I find myself breathing hard through my nose, I’ll do ten seconds of nostril stretching, on each nostril. I also now note some pictures or slow motion video of elite sprinters, some of them, at times, moving quickly with a closed mouth and relaxed-looking face. Thought provoking, eh?

Next, I feel light on the wall.

the one-arm swings + sprints helped me feel the intense usage of arms/shoulder girdle/the sides/front/back/bottom of the ‘box’ of my core. (Do not neglect the bottom of the box of the core! Kegles & pelvic floor strength is for everyone with a pelvis!)

Has resulted in me feeling unexpectedly stronger. Been pretty fun.

Updates on sprints after two more weeks

I’m still quite pleased. I did some unexpectedly long walks on concrete, amidst some of the prior exercise, and I felt much stronger, most of the time, than usual. I think it would have been too many miles if I hadn’t been getting stronger.

I did like three seven-mile days in a row, all back to back.

I got a slight over-use tendon sensitivity on one of my feet. There was, and to a much lesser degree still is, pain around the movement of lifting my right toe, entirely coherent with a regular walking motion. I modified my gait a little, when it was really bad, and didn’t use it until it felt mostly better, and I’ve been easing back into using it. It was hurting quite appreciably for a few days, and now five days later it’s still delicate and I retain some of my accommodations. Sooo I wish I hadn’t done that to myself. There was a day after the big huge days of walking where I thought “hmm, this feels like it is damaged” and I went on a bit more of a barefoot walk in Cheesman than I wish I had. That night is when I realized it was pretty sensitive. The toe looks/feels like a bruise along the top of it, close to what it would feel like if the nail had been beaten into the nail bed (like after a long run, something I experienced often enough marathon training).

Truly, this is the only pain of substance I’ve experienced. All the rest of the pain has been pain of interest, where I note slight sensitivities and sorenesses as I move around, in certain ways, body positions, motions, and it’s all, still, interesting. I appreciate how I’ve felt pleasent stress inside of my knee, the tops of the shin bones. I like how my knees and ankles feel.

The sprints still feel worthwhile, and the time walking/bounding barefoot continues to be time very well spent.

Updates on kettlebells after two more weeks

some gyms have kettlebells that have rough, textured handles. The high-to-me weights are therefore rough on the skin of my hands. some kettlebell handles are too rough for me to feel comfortable with the swings. I could feel myself trying to accommodate it somehow and it was hurting, so I did a lot less reps. The skin at the base the fourth finger always gets pulled by the kettlebell, picks up callouses that have never torn but have sometimes felt close. Ideal kettelbell handles look like brushed metal, polished smooth. Don’t forget the chalk.
I’m still getting lots of climbing-specific benefits from the one-armed swings. I’ve now done both lower-weight higher rep one-arm swings, and higher-weight lower-rep schemes. It’s all been interesting to me, which is good enough. It continues to feel deeply supportive of strong climbing.
I’m sorta annoyingly still telling lots of people about this strange magic that helps my back feel great, and everything else too. If you’ve done more than skim a few paragraphs of this article, you’ve probably spent more time reading than your first two kettlebell workouts would take.
I was having issues where the heaviest swings were pulling at the callouses at the base of each hand’s 4th finger. Eventually I noticed that if I sqeeze the handle a bit more at the bottom of the swing, it seems to pull less hard on the skin. So, if the skin in the hands starts hurting, squeeze harder?

My fingers and hands feel nice. I’m not surprised, as often-enough I’ve felt profoundly sore in the small muscles inside my hands themselves, and all over the upper body. Much of the fatigue and soreness moves in waves through the shoulders and ‘shrugging’ motions.

I am really curious for someone else to replicate this, doing lots of heavy two handed kettle bell swings, and eventually trying one-handed (heavy) kettlebell swings. I did one arm swings recently with 65 lbs, which is like 48% of my bodyweight. Heaviest I’ve done yet, and felt ‘lighter’ than the first time I tried 55 lb one-armed swings. My form and posture keeps getting better, and have I mentioned I feel stronger?

More notes from a few weeks later

I’ve regularly been dealing with the skin on my hands suffering under the weight of the kettlebell. HUGE NEWS! When I squeeze the kettlebell handles more tightly, much of the discomfort related to the skin pulling goes away. It took years of swinging a kettlebell for me to make this connection, I’ve never heard it articulated before. 🧐

I was obviously squeezing enough to hold onto it, but the skin was ‘sloshing’ around under the kettlebell. this is now minimized when I squeeze the bell harder. Huzzah.

Footnotes

On Peeing

2025-02-26T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Yes, peeing. Also called ‘pissing’, or ‘urination/urinating’. I noticed a collection of thoughts emerging in my mind, tied together with a very specific theme. I was pretty grown before I had necessarily encountered any of these things, so if any of this is interesting or relevant to any of you, may it go well for you. Please see todays ten thousand for more context.

Also, would you believe this is only the second most contentious thing I am writing today? The piece that is full of actual spicy takes: I think I believe in magic, & implications

Elimination Communication (useful for infants and their caretakers)

The first way I want to talk about peeing is to bring attention to something that is pretty darned cool, and I was routinely fascinated by my own observations of it.

“Elimination Communication” is a strategy of learning to communicate with an infant around its own elimination.

It’s a full drop-in strategy/replacement for what someone is talking about when they say “potty training” or “using diapers” today. (Eden never ‘got potty trained’ because she never ‘got diaper trained’.)

Babies have routines around when they pee and poop, like you and me. If you leave a newborn naked on a puppy pee pad or a little helper waterproof mat while they’re doing their normal infant thing, you’ll be able to see when they eliminate.

You might notice that there is facial expressions or movements or sounds that happen before the elimination, and you might start giving the kid ‘potty-tunities’, where you hold them seated in your lap over a little tupperware, when it seems like a good time. (upon transitions, after they’ve been sleeping, seated for a while, etc)

You take a deep breath for relaxation, their back against your chest, and as you exhale you say “pss pss” or maybe ‘mm mm’. If they have a pee, they might pee, a poop, they might poop. Otherwise, they might squirm a bit and crawl right off and carry on with the day. We taught eden how to say ‘all done’ as one of her first hand signals, so she could simply wave a hand in the air when done.

You’ll always give more ‘potty-tunities’ than the kid needs, and once you start giving enough well-timed potty-tunities that the kid happens to using the container regularly, you’ll be amazed at how much ease exists in your life.

It’s peaceful, and how traditional socieities without industrialized diaper systems would did this. It’s how many people around the world today learn. no diaper changes, can be done literally anywhere, without interrupting anything, like a conversation. If outside, one can help the kid pee into the grass. No container required.

Eden wore lots of long shirts, no diaper or pants, and then legwarmers that went all the way up her legs. We could give her a pottytunity with zero fuss, and she quickly learned the routine of it too. She was only a few months old when often enough she would wake up from a long nighttime sleep with a dry diaper, as soon as she stirred, we’d give her a pottytunity, and immediately she released a huge amount of urine, and then was ready to begin the day.

It’s an experience.

I’d suggest starting with the go diaper free podcast/resources, if you find yourself in this spot.

Forms of ease that were experienced were:

easy to use cloth diapers, because MOST eliminations would be effortlessly caught in a container
zero “diaper rash”. (i didn’t know that the reason some diapers talk so much about how absorbant they are is bc it’s common to leave a soiled diaper on a kid in some situations! Couldn’t be me)
eden never had to cry to announce an upcoming elimination, OR to announce that that she had a wet diaper. She usually didn’t wear diapers of any sort, and never when anything was wet. Obv she eventually was able to simply announce to us when she needed help with the bathroom.
paired well with a bidet (more on that below)

On the Squatty Potty

I’ve long been very pleased with the squatty potty I’ve had. I suggest you watch this extremely classic commercial:

Squatty Potty Unicorn Commercial

One can sorta ‘fake’ a squatty potty by simply squatting on the floor while eliminating, instead of sitting on the toilet seat.

It’s more comfortable, though, IMO to squat while using the squatty potty platform, or to prop your legs on the platform while sitting on the toilet seat like usual.

I think ‘propping legs on squatty potty while sitting on the toilet like usual’ is how most people use the squatty potty.

I put my feet on the squatty potty, and then squat over the toilet, to use it. Very comfortable. Would endorse.

Anyone out there who is pooping is sitting or squatting when they’re doing so, regardless of if they have a penis or a vulva.

That in mind… not only do I squat/sit to poop, I also squat/sit to pee.

On why I sit when I pee

For many years, I have almost exclusively sat down to urinate.

I have a penis, and I know it’s common-enough for others who also have a penis to stand when they pee.

I don’t like to stand when I pee.

I don’t remember exactly why I started sitting. It may have been after I took a back injury that left me unable to stand normally or without pain, even for very short periods of time, or maybe was already the case before then.

I have excellent reasons

it’s comfortable
there’s zero splashing in any way, not on the toilet bowl, the seat, the area behind the seat, ones legs or pants.

One notices, sometimes, if peeing while standing:

one feels little droplets of pee or toilet bowl water sometimes bouncing out of the bowl
if one is wearing pants and thus not feeling the droplets on one’s skin directly… one is still splashing urine on one’s pants.

When one cleans a toilet regularly, it’s effortless to tell if someone is peeing in it while standing, or if no one ever uses it while standing. There’s a yellow gunk buildup behind the toilet bowl from the splashing. No thank you.

once someone, upon seeing me in the bathroom peeing for the first time, said:

that is the most attractive thing I’ve ever seen a man do.

🤷‍♂️. I say this person would be considered a credible evaluator of attractive attributes in people with penises.¹

By the way, when I am using public restrooms, I’m more likely to use a urinal and then stand off to one side, aiming to make as oblique an angle between the stream and the urinal, to achieve some of what is achieved with the shape of splashless urinals

If I use a regular seated toilet out in the while, I’ll almost exclusively squat over it (for peeing or pooping). I mostly squat over my toilet at home, too, but I combine it with the squatty potty for a very comfortable squat. (by that I mean my butt doesn’t come in contact with the seat often-enough)

This isn’t super novel to me. I use my own bathroom many times a day. I know plenty of other people with penises who also sit when they pee.

So, if you have a penis, and don’t often pee, consider trying it out more often and see what you think. If you have a penis and want to possibly reduce the cleaning burden of the toilet where one pees, certainly sit down.

And if you’re sitting, try squatting, AND try squatting WHILE USING THE SQUATTY POTTY. mega comfy.

Bidets and Wand Bidets

Since at least 2019, I’ve used a bidet, exclusively, to clean after defecation. I long used a under-the-seat tushy bidet.

One still needs to dry oneself after using a bidet, so most people who have bidets still use toilet paper. It is a lot less toilet paper and used in a different way, because it’s needed soley to dry the skin.

When the pandemic happened and toilet paper shortages were a thing, it felt satisfying to not be affected. One can completely get off toilet paper by using a designated fabric wash cloth to dry, too.

The under-the-seat bidets can be sorta a pain to install. The warm-water function ends up being pointless.

I ended up switching to a wand-style, hose-style bidet a few years ago, and never went back. they come as a two-pack from Amazon for like $30, I’ve now installed them in quite a few different houses.

A bidet and especially a wand bidet helps with cloth diapers and elimination communication. Effortless to rinse out the container when used, or rinse of the cloth diaper if it has a little poop on it, before running it through the washing machine.

A wand bidet helps with cleaning the toilet itself, and if it’s near the tub, you can use it to rinse things off in the tub.

A wand bidet doesn’t interfere with the toilet seat.

The clip for holding it sits over the toilet bowl itself, so there’s no screws to be dealt with, it doesn’t even need to have a wall-mounted clip.

One doesn’t need to really touch oneself when using it - I direct the stream of water into my other hand, which I use to splash around or scrub anything that needs it. Using the second hand is key wand-bidet usage beta. One needs no hands when using a seat mounted bidet, but then one is getting a jet of water STRAIGHT TO THE BUTT! (or the vulva).

The wand bidet lets you easily direct the water to flow over, across, parallel to, anything that needs it. You don’t have to spray it straight at your skin. It’s extremely comfortable for anyone with pain or sensitivity in the region. Not having to use paper preserves the skin, if it’s sensitive. If one is pregnant and needing to use the bathroom a lot, a bidet of any sort is gold.

Notes on a two-container toilet system

Long ago, a friend nerd-sniped me with this amazing book:

The Humanure Handbook: Shit in a Nutshell

I read it all, found it exceptional. Cannot unread it. Was written by someone a few miles from where I went to college, he said

instead of writing a PH.D dissertation about bacteriology that no one would read, I decided to write a book about humanure that no one would read… and now we’re on to the fourth edition. a surprising number of people have wanted to read this.

I was so curious by it, I ended up setting up a full, working, two-container toilet system.

This was possibly the most interesting thing I did that year, tons of learnings, and I kept being shocked at the convenience and ease that was being experienced as a result.

Alas, I no longer live in that house, but I plan on setting this all up again when I next have the opportunity.

I wrote in various ways/places a lot of words about what I experienced, and I’ll probably bring that here when I find them.

Small people peeing

For eden, at home we have a portable toilet that is available to eden at all times. She usually likes to use the regular toilet, which has a stool in front of it, and usually gets a little help, if she wants. She sometimes opts to use her toilet.

In her stoller, I keep this portable kids toilet. She knows we always have it, or almost always have it, especially if we’re going out for a while, and we can use it under a tree or in a private-ish place, even when at a park, and it’s provided a lot of ease to all of us, when using a ‘regular’ bathroom isn’t an option.

Modern american bathrooms, especially at commercial facilities, have bright lights, bad accoustics, smells, strange sight lines, etc etc etc. Not super kid friendly. A portable toilet is mega convenient, mega peaceful. She also can still simply pee in the grass when she wants, though doesn’t exercise that option as much as she did as when she was an infant.

Conclusion

I really like ease. I want ease, and usually I want it to be effortless. I know, I know. There’s a lot of ease baked into Eden’s elimination routines. That was a big piece of what I wanted to highlight. If you, or anyone you know, finds themselves on a path of helping a newly-born person sus out peeing and pooping, maybe you’ll think of some of these things.

Then, of course, the other main part of this piece has nothing to do with kids and helping kids use the bathroom - it has everything to do with helping me use the bathroom, and I like to be comfortable, clean, and I don’t mind at all being a little unconventional.

on that note, I’m gonna go use the bathroom/squatty potty/my ability to squat/a wand bidet/a washcloth, brb

It feels strange to type so many words about urination (and, of course, technically, defecation), in some ways, and yet I also know I spend a lot of time/frequency peeing. It’s a pretty core human experience.

I like things to be easy (squatty potty for me, elimination communication for infant), clean (wand bidet, sitting to pee), and I like where I’ve ended up.

Footnotes

I note my language feeling most natural when I use phrasing like “people with penises” and “people with vulvas” as generalized stand-ins for ‘male’ and ‘female’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’-coded language. I still find myself wrestling with the language, I made some upgrades when I read Becoming Cliterate: Why Orgasm Equality Matters–And How to Get It. ↩

On Magic, and Magic Strings

2025-02-26T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

v drafty, but wanted to get this out today.

I’m publishing two pieces today, this piece you’re reading now is vastly more important than the other one, but it might be worth the click: On Peeing. It’s very different than this one.

I’ve long had a central organizing principal of my life oriented around the concept of “Magic Strings”.

A string being defined from the programming point of view. A collection of text characters, as opposed to an array, a float, an integer, a boolean. True is a boolean value, "True" is a string containing the stringy characters T, r, u, and e.

Don’t believe me? If you’re on a mac, open your terminal, type irb, hit return (you’re now in a ruby interpreter) and type "string".class. The return value will be String. Windows-machine-using people can use an online ruby interpreter like replit

In this world, today, 2025, I believe it’s goverend by real energies that animate real things, and some of the things governing the world are strings.

Real examples of almost/maybe magic, contained in strings

Patio11’s Dropping hashes: an idiom used to demonstrate provenance of documents

GUIDs, or ‘Globally Unique ID’ wikipedia

While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is generally considered close enough to zero to be negligible.

The second part of that sentance is a big deal.

Between hashing documents and GUIDs/UUIDs, I think it’s easy to say there is real magic being accessed. It’s sorta mathy magic, and I see it as magic.

So, by this definition, if this is magic, I believe all the way in magic.

But this isn’t the only form of string magic I believe in.

Magic strings in computer systems

Next, to upgrade the magic, I’ll explain why strings pick up magical properties in computer systems. Lots of processes/objects/rows in databases are accompanied by a UUID, so if you’re trying to trace the completion of a process across systems, if, if you can find the right magic string (or you can create the right magic string now for a future version of you to find, then), you can follow a process through time.

Imagine someone using a system requests an export of some data. A computer system might log something like `export 2a621613-9d65-4443-b662-547eb2ac715c starting…’

and then dispatch that request to other systems that compile the data, build the CSV, wait till it’s done, emails the customer that the report is ready, etc. And so you can search your whole logs for that string, 2a621613-9d65-4443-b662-547eb2ac715c, and anytime you find it, you know it has to do with that original process.

It can be like magic.

Next, magic strings can be found as ‘sha’s. We discussed ‘dropping hashes’ above, or Patrick Mckenzie did. One uses that concept everywhere. Hunting through a git repo for a certain sha, looking through a codebase for a certain class name, looking through the ongoing, running system for certain instances of that class name or certain strings…

so much of the job of a software developer is mediated by an ability to see value in an otherwise seemingly arbitrary collection of symbols.

Magic strings in archival documents

So, again, software development is often-enough ‘reading code’, so I’m used to looking through things that are old, or older versions of things that are newer. Sometimes ‘older versions’ means ‘a week ago’, sometimes it means ‘a decade ago’, sometimes much older.

A sure, sure sign of something that matters now having been placed in a document then is if it has sufficient randomness and is visible in the document then. Here’s some examples of sufficiently random things that if you find them now AND THEN you know it existed then:

2a621613-9d65-4443-b662-547eb2ac715c
ea306dbfe385d5fe9710ac98b514ffba547fc4bb
271b9a

Any of these, including the last one, contains way more than enough randomness to be useful.

Where we take a turn into ethnic cleansing

Who’s surprised that this is taking a turn into genocide, murder, war?

Here’s some other numbers that I think are close enough to magic strings:

35, 50, 100, 150 (feet tall)
2.5, 2 1/2 (stories tall)
625, 1250, 5000 (square feet)
R1, R2, R3 (race/residence zone)
U1 (dwelling house district) U2 (apartment house district)

These are some of the documents contained inside of this other document, a 1922 document originating zoning in the USA

Look up any zoning code today, and you’ll see it full of references like:

up to a maximum height of 35’
6,000 sf 

to read the 1922 document is to find a lot of phrases that hit different when you see them cropping up over and over, like in 1926, when a legal body in the usa approved the government’s use of ‘zoning’ in euclid v. ambler

Here’s some quotes from that judgement:

With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district.

Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities – until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed.

holy run-on sentance. Seem familiar?

That U-1. Where do you think it came from?

The court below seemed to think that the frontage of this property on Euclid Avenue to a depth of 150 feet came under U-1 district and was available only for …

And that’s how america legalized ethnic cleansing. Because the person that wrote the 1922 document, elsewhere in that document, said:

Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other. [emphasis mine]

We all live now in a world fully mediated by someone trying to create ‘slave housing’ and ‘ghettos’, and doing so successfully.

No wonder everyone’s ‘mental health’ in america is shit.

Notes on the movie Frozen, which I dislike, and Suzume, which is excellent

2025-02-20T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

part of a longer series of drafts about the novel experience of being a parent, to someone currently best defined as ‘a young child’. I once wrote a lot about my experiences of things, then took a break, and drafted this blog post on a few pages of yellow legal pad, by hand, brought/edited/extended for the internet here. Write It Now and such.

This will end up maybe being a series of recommendations and anti-recommendations Please skim, or make judicious use of the anchor links to skip around.

I am happy to watch movies/shows with my kid. Because of that, and that I follow their interests, generally, I’ve watched a few movies/shows lately that I wouldn’t normally watch. This blog post started as a single page of handwritten notes about the movie Frozen.

Why did you draft a blog post by hand, in this particular format?

Often-enough I watch a movie with eden, if it’s a painful-to-me movie, a way I process my feelings/disappointment/anger is by creating something out of it. I also don’t begrudge Eden her taste for the interestingness of things. I get why Frozen is so appealing to kids, that is precisely why, or part of why, I am so frustrated by it. Some of the reasons it’s appealing is perfectly valid, of course. Interesting music, interesting visuals, crunchy-enough story line. Eden has normal-for-young-person taste, and I think sophisticated taste.

I love to watch movies with Eden. We’ve watched and enjoyed the movies of Studio Ghibli, over and over. There’s also been a whole bunch of days where the temperature has been extremely cold, like a weekend of a high of four degrees farenheight. On most of the days we’ve gone out side at least a little, but my gosh we’ve been inside a lot lately. I’ll probably find more to say about it at some point.

For instance, we’ve seen Ponyo (2009) many times ¹, and enjoyed it’s beautiful depictions of all sorts of sea life, dignifying view of the ocean, people who are young, people who are old, the world, the ocean, water, hills, trees, sky, weather, food, independence, and more. We’ve seen many more Ghibli films than just Ponyo, but Ponyo is a good example of a movie that perfectly attracts the interest of a child, and is not demeaning to an adult, and is full of beautiful themes, beautiful depictions of the world, and interesting and exciting movement of the plot through the movie. You might be able to watch it on Amazon Prime right now: Ponyo with English dubs on Amazon Prime

Studio Ghibli films are so dignifying and beautiful that to watch them is, to me, like taking a vitamin or going on a walk. It’s so dignifying in so many ways, I’m pleased for anyone to soak in any aspects of those movies.

More recently, Eden has begun to get socialized into American media, because (unfortunately) we happen to live in America, and kids references to Paw Patrol and movies like Frozen and Disney and a number of other bits of media intended of kids are ubiquitous. There’s of course a giant commercial industry around making tons and derivative media around Frozen, Paw Patrol, etc. 🤮

Those shows unfairly weaponize kids’ interests and attention spans into something that honestly feels like grooming, and it’s despicable, and anyone involved ought to feel shame for their role in the creation of the piece of media. Truly. I think I’d never watched the movie Frozen until watching it with Eden, and my jaw hit the floor many times. When someone else saw just a few minutes of the movie with us, they also routinely expressed shock at what was in the movie.

Strong words Josh, can you back that up?

Oh yes. Keep up.

I’ve got a media review of Paw Patrol ~~coming up~~ appended to the bottom of this post.

Regarding Frozen, I wrote this blog post via paper, as I watched the movie with Eden. She likes to ‘process’ media, usually some of the interestingness she experiences is around knowing what’s coming next, so she gets a lot of enjoyment from re-watching movies. Without further adeui, here’s the notes, with light editing, as I captured them across multiple re-watches of Frozen.

I’ll sometimes quote dialogue or a song, and add my reactions to it. I don’t think Eden is unfit to make her own assessments of anything, by the way. She often has astute observations.

When we watch a movie, if it’s the first time we’ve seen it or especially later times, I sometimes (SOMETIMES! NOT OFTEN) ask a question like: - what do you think of that person’s tone? can you tell they have anger? can you hear that tension? are they being kind? do you think they are happy? sad? what do you think they are feeling? did that seem safe? what do you think of that music?

notes upon watching Frozen

Oof, re-reading the notes as I transcribe them here is a trip. Skim, treat the formatting loosely.

I don’t dislike only patriarchal themes, I also believe that political authority is a myth, and dislike mononormativity, and moto-normativity.
I don’t like jokes in a kids movie that are callbacks to american car culture.
Anna, at the beginning, showing that her entire existence revolves around getting chosen by a person to become that persons… property?

🎶 Maybe I’ll be noticed, maybe I’ll find romance? 🎶

Both the children in this show, elsa and anna, experienced a few gnarly things in sequence. emotional abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents, then the parents died, and the kids were raised by… no one? for a few years? Then Anna and Elsa just reunite in advance of a coronation ball? Is a nation really choosing a traumatized child to become their symbolic head?

The beauty norms, so painful. sexualizes children, explicitely, as the movie starts with the depiction of these two female protagonists as children, maybe 5, and ends with them supposedly ‘adult’, where someone at disney finds it appropriate to see these people as sexualizable objects. Many parts of the the look is the same, and there is little distinction between how a five year old is being depicted, and an adult. And certainly something appreciable about that distinction might be lost to the viewer of this piece, who is often-enough a child.

the ‘big, innocent doe eyes’ gives helpless, shows matching the idealized male gaze of femininity. The skinny arms, impossible waists, over-exaggerated breasts, the belt that profiles hips, butt, and pubic region. Please read Fearing The Black Body. It’s all gross, and has been said by a thousand other people.

Frozen normalizes emotional neglect and abuse.

The dad (before his death) repeats over and over “suppress your emotions, conceal yourself, don’t show things” to Elsa, and then _coercively destroys her and anna’s memories to hide their own past from themselves”.

Identical to how supremacists ‘cleanse’ the history of their victims, to hide from the victims the extent of their own abuse.

In literally every single interaction between Elsa and Anna, for much of the movie, Elsa ends a conversation with violence. Anna keeps saying “She wont’ hurt me, we’re family”, normalizing the idea that not only is it acceptable to overlook clear harms and mistreatment from someone because they are family, that it’s in fact good to end up dying as a result of their misdeeds.

later, Elsa attempts to murder Anna via proxy by creating a vicious snow monster that, among other things, throws Anna off of a cliff. As soon as the snow monster lept into frame, the first time we saw it, Eden’s whole body stiffened up and she said “i don’t like that”, and we skipped the scene. In all the watchings and re-watchings of this movie, we’ve skipped that scene every time.

The “we are family” admonishment is particularly painful to see, because much of the harm that people experience is at the hands of their family members. Parents abusing children, spouses abusing spouses, neglect all around. ²

Jesus, I’m three entries into this, and I’m so angry at supremacists, evangelicals, the family system in which I and others was raised, and the long, long legacy of chattel slavery + the ethnic cleansing of the natives/nations, all by european americans.

Frozen normalizes centering the lives of aristocracy, for no reason. It’s dedignifying to children and young adults.

This entire movie could be about two people who are, in fact, not members of the nobility or aristocracy. I tell eden “belief in kings and queens and this ‘ruler’ stuff is a mental affliction experienced by some people who live in this country right now”. It’s extremely annoying when Anna bullies others because she is assuming a magical authority by right of ‘royalty’.

[…]

The ‘simple’ townsfolk are depicted as experiencing a naive giddy joy about the castle ‘opening its gates’ and a party. I am not interested in watching the self-aggrandizing fantasies of the ruling class. 🤢

The townsfolk: “It’s corination day!” or “The castle gates are open!!!”

Studio Ghibli, every single one of it’s movies, are infinitely more dignifying, and comprehendable to children.

I feel ANGRY that the seemingly nice person Anna meets after her first song (who also commits an act of traffic violence, running her over with his horse) actually is a con man who goes on to almost kill Anna at the end of the movie!!!!! OUT OF SPITE! I get to explain to my three year old what ‘willfull betrayal’ is, and why this person who seemed good is in fact now being ‘bad’.

[…]

More family BS:

Frozen pushes a message:

Family would never hurt you, family is more important than everything, thus accept mistreatment’

Frozen reinforces a colonizers mindset: No one indicates awareness of the subject class, or a displaced/enslaved people. (Compare this to Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke)

Anna displays helplessness, self-abandonment, needs saving because of something inherent in her femininity, not because her key support structures hurt her and abandoned her when she was a young child, including her parents, which is what actually happened.

Cristof is written to be obsessed with who posseses her. “You got engaged???” or “She’s engaged!” as the only distinctive things he can note about her. Her status vis-a-vis another male. It’s painful to behold the dehumanization.

In Frozen, nearly every interaction between two people who presumably have penises is an interaction mediated by dominance. It is inherent to being a man, to try to dominate someone else, and if you don’t dominate them, you’re getting dominated. Yes, this is a movie intended for children. But it’s also being watched by their parents. Every message this movie purports to send about the experience of being human makes the world a worse place.

[…]

Anna, upon meeting a new and novel, sentient, non-threatning being pretends to surprise to justify kicking off its head, anna and cristof written to be disgusted by Olaf’s injured state, saying things like “eeeewwwww its head” or “eeeewwwwww it’s body”. When Anna puts Olaf’s head back on Olaf’s body, it first goes on wrong, then she flips it over, and Olaf thanks her.

Talk about supremacist fantasy. That’s what a supremacist would love - devestate an indigenous people, then, when slightly repairing the harm caused by that supremacist, they want to be earnestly thanked by the victim.

supremacists expect to be thanked by their victims for the abuse they meted out. ³

Frozen plays ethnic tropes regularly, as supporters of colonialsm. Non-state people as backwards, un-understandable, fractal variations of the ‘magical negro’ trope.

[…]

Cristof is depicted as being seen by the trolls as an obviously superior being. #supremacy

The whol movie is obsessed with romance take away romance between the protagonist and ‘love interests’ and there is hardly a plot move remaining. Obviously fails the bechdel test.

The entire movie is settler colonialist propaganda. erasing the existance of anyone/thing existing before they showed up. Frozen II is vastly worse.

Normalizes women as property, belonging exclusively to someone else, never to themselves.

Troll song about Cristof is :vomit:, ‘shipping’ him and anna, without anyone’s consent. When he says “BUT SHE IS SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY, THATS WHY SHE CANNOT BE MY PROPERTY” the trolls say “Eh, that claim of property is weak, you can totally own her.”. Agriculturalist, state-supporting. ‘true love’ :vomit:

side-note, as I’m writing this blog post a while after writing the original paper notes. got bored of the movie quickly. We would rewatch it, skipping more and more of the movie, and now when we put on Frozen we may only watch the two main songs. the opening song sung by Anna, and _Let It Go, of course._

Frozen makes white people look like royalty, or makes royalty look like white people.

Frozen depicts impalement as a joke. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUUUUUUUUCK. Someone wrote a scene with Olaf getting impaled, indirectly, by Elsa, and it’s supposed to be read as a joke, not a reference to a horrific act of violence.

I talk with eden through these movies. Sometimes extensively. She’ll initiate conversation or I will. She appreciates my help skipping the scenes she doesn’t like (vicious wolves, violent snow creatures attacking others, soldiers fighting and trying to kill each other with blades and arrows)

We discuss themes of adults controlling kids, neglecting kids, coercion, support of the state, the myth of ‘true love’.

Settler colonialists suppress the sexuality they ‘allow’ themselves to express, and obviously suppress/exploit the sexuality of the ‘other’, and then do strenuous mental gymnastics to justify the whole thing. Please see The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia

The troll song about Cristof says “He’s a bit of a fixer upper”. This normalizes ‘weaponized incompetence’ and enmeshment and self-abandonment. I wonder which of the creators of Frozen are being horrific partners to their partners, and expecting the other partner to just keep accepting bad behavior.

Cristof says ‘but shes engaged to someone else’, normalizing marriage, monogamy, ‘possessive’ love’, ‘true love’

Frozen has incredible violence, casual malevolence, and betrayal.

Anna is so unwise, high conflict, needlessly provocative. (Throws a snowball at the snow creature created by Elsa, after being violently thrown out of Elsa’s ice palace, and the snow creature throws her off a cliff! instead, what if she read the room, said ‘ew, i hate how my sister is treating me, i am out of here’ and ran away/escaped)

… I will write something dedicated about Suzume, the movie, soon. It’s the perfect drop-in replacement for Frozen. Just watch Suzeme, never watch frozen. I watched parts of it with Eden, while she was in her Frozen era, and wept with it’s beauty. I’d love to do a bunch of screenshots, or snippets of scenes, to help illustrate a point. There’s obviously things challenging to convey about a musical through the written word, especially if you’ve not seen the movie(s) in question, or recently. My notes contain ‘call outs’ to parallel/comparing/contrasting themes between Frozen that really shows the intellectual/emotional un-self-conscious poverty of the people involved with Frozen.

The city-scape differences of Frozen and Paw Patrol and the cities/towns/landscapes of Ghibli. You, and I, would be right to anger about the built environment in the world today, and it’s parallels in the landscapes of Frozen. Enough people in the USA have forgotten there ever was a good streetcar network in every town, so they forgot the kinds of trips and adventures and places enabled by those infrastructures.

Multiple acts of traffic violence, and car propaganda.

Phrases like “Oh noooo, I just paid it off” (a sled, upon witnessing it’s explosive, fire-ball-containing destruction after falling off a cliff after being CHASED BY WOLVES!), comments about treating it in a certain stereotypical way that mimics propaganda about cars, the fact that a sled explodes after falling off a cliff after being chased by wolves, all because this random helpless white woman threw political weight and threats of violence at someone, demanding that they head into the dangerous, cold night, causing catastrophe after catastrophe, because she felt obligated to other people’s obedience.

The movie ends with Anna buying Cristof’s forgiveness by buying him a car. It’s a sled, in the movie, but obviously in the minds of the writers, it’s a car.

[…]

“you should wait out here”, she’s so pushy to Olaf and Cristof and Sven, who have supported her well through difficult times, as she heads into the demonstrably dangerous territory of interacting with her sister. Abandon your friends who show support of you, to receive more hurt from a family member?

elsa is dangerous, over and over, to anna. So dangerous. To rely on family binds makes all this worse.

the sexualization of children. Cristof says something, she makes a breathy “I like it fast!”, seeming to make a nod to aggressive sex? Again, this is horrifying. Big breasts, the eyes, eyebrows, lips.

Cristof, looking at elsa’s ice palace, he is an ice professional, says “its so beautiful I could cry” and Anna says, derisively, “Go ahead… i won’t judge”. Which directly gives judgement for the sentiment, how did this make it into the script. That was basically the single most dignifying, humane line in the entire movie, and the female lead brushed it off, encouraged emotional suppression, and issued more demands.

Stuiod Ghibli films/Suzume is full of reasonable moments of people displaying nice rapt attention to mundane, beautiful nature, of course to WITNESS AN ICE PALACE WOULD MOVE ONE TO TEARS and Disney literally attacks someone who displayed an emotional response to beauty. I wish the entire concept had been cut, OR she had given a non-abusive response to his exclamation.

Elsa’s power was plainly mishandled by her caretakers. She obviously has tons of creative potential, it’s a powerful tool, she just was shamed and attacked and tortured from a young age to think she had no power.

She could have done useful things for her community, or made things of beauty, and ease, like parks, sculptures, slides, maybe some sort of perpetual motion machine to unburden the townspeople of some labor. If one can fabricate heavy things effortlessly anywhere in space, the potential is unbelievable and it’s dedignifying to kids and adults to act like demanding that she hide her power is at all a reasonable response.

She also didn’t need to be doing work or a slave of capitalism bc she has a rare/valuable skill-set. What if she cared for children, because they found her entertaining? Put on free, funny outdoor shows using animated characters for the entertainment of all? to believe that erasing someone’s memories of their own power is reasonable enough to model in a movie is disrespectful to children.

I’d like to add that Eden has me skip large parts of Frozen, because it’s scary. We no longer skip the part with the wolves, but did early on.

Elsa creates a sentient snow monster that tries, plausibly, to kill the other party. The whole movie could be her doing cool stuff for the entire town, as an inventor/creator/artist/advocate/engineer. Eden has me skip the snow monstor part. Also there’s a part where soldiers attack Elsa in her tower, we skip that part. Wild to make a kids movie and inject war into it.

the entire troll meme is offensive, based on a bunch of supremacist stereotypes about non-domesticated people groups.

Olof, about cristof: “He is crazy”, jokes about taking off clothes, then being written to push agricultural marriage norms. to anna: “why are you holding back from such a man” (!!!???!!!)

More on Frozen, from a subsequent re-watch

i’ve got a few pages of notes from multiple re-watches of Frozen

Are Producer/writers trying to hide their own misdeeds? Are we seeing deep into their subconcious? The normalization of emotional mistreatment makes me concerned for the personal lives of all who were involved with crafting this movie.

🎼 people do bad things when scared or tired or stressed… but throw a little love their way… [and you can maybe influence them to not harm you, themselves, or others JFC!!!]

I’ll link to that song. here it is, ‘fixer upper This is the normalization of abuse. It could have been:

“People get stressed and tired and scared, but if they use that to justify violence or intimidation of you, you can call them at least in your own mind on the bullshit”

I skip all the overt violence for Eden, as she requests me to do, and its still so violent. prison-based motifs, arrows, implied impalement death, violent and intimate at the same time. In one scene anna is lying her entire body down on the person who she just met and later betrays her, and this moment of uncomfortable closeness she experiences becomes a joke and justification for later pushy behavior.

“true love” meme makes me hurt each time it’s mentioned. so de-dignifying.

To eden, I ask “Did that surprise you?” often enough. She will say yes or no, and sometimes why, often enough. I firmly believe she enjoys being able to anticipate what is coming in a story line, and how reasonable of a thing to enjoy, eh? In a world one has inhabited for only a few years, one can anticipate/predict what is happening next, in certain situations? How interesting. [^questions-for-kids] [^questions-for-kids]: I have a draft of ‘words I do and do not use with eden’. ‘was that surprising’ and ‘did you anticipate that happening before it happened?’ are rich, rich phrases. I do not use words that convey an expectation for things like obedience, compliance, obligation, authority. I don’t say ‘good job’ or ‘good work’, I say ‘that looked interesting’, or ‘that looked tricky’, or ‘i could see you thinking about that’ or ‘that was so smooth’ or ‘was that interesting to you?’ or ‘what did you like about that?’ or ‘I appreciate how you did {thing}’.

It’s a very rich and active experience, to watch movies with her. It’s not turning a show on and tuning out of the experience. We often-enough have it going in the background, too, as other things happen, the normal movements of life. I don’t put a special magical power around “watching TV”, and I help her have a good, curated, enjoyable experience of the media. My own childhood was filled with this strange magical gatekeeping around screens, plus shame, plus never actually being interested in the stuff I found interesting.

Once she’s digested a movie, it quickly becomes vastly less interesting to her, and if there is anything else interesting going on, she’ll attend to it. Sometimes she creates the more interesting thing (painting, playing, climbing on things) sometimes I create it (she’s happy to participate in anything like cooking, loves it when friends visit, loves to accompany me to a climbing gym or a park or a playground, she enjoys throwing and catching games, etc.)

I take children seriously. Sometimes people witness it, and are obviously stunned by the kinds of cool interactions they witness. I’ll ask Eden very specific, detailed questions, they obviously think she’s incapable of hearing it or giving a thoughtful response, or of offering her own spontaneous thoughts, and they’re shocked sometimes. It’s always entertaining. I can hear her a little more clearly than someone who’s unfamiliar with her mannerisms and cadence and specific words for things, but when she tells me something, when I relay it with a small dose of translation, they’ll sometimes show with surprise how clear and reasonable they find the statement.

During a movie (like Frozen) I’ll sometimes say something like ‘hmm, I don’t like how that person is speaking to that person. seems mean.’ or something like that. She also will clock, sometimes, when one person is speaking meanly to another. I really, really approve of her being sensitive in these ways. I don’t want her to think she needs to endure someone speaking meanly to her, or if she cannot escape the situation (common, when an adult is speaking meanly to one or many children) she at least will clock it as the adult’s misbehavior, rather than something brought on by her fundamental wrongness, for instance.

Suzume, a delightful, beautiful movie

THIS movie is the one that I’m thrilled for Eden to have in her mind. It’s not a little kids movie, so while we’ve seen most of it, together, we had to skip lots of it and some parts of it are (understandbly) not interesting to her, so it’s not in the rotation with the same level of ‘play it again’ as some other movies currently are._

It wouldn’t surprise me if someday this movie gets seen many, many times around here.

Here’s the synopsis: 17-year-old Suzume’s journey begins in a quiet town in Kyushu when she encounters a young man who tells her, “I’m looking for a door.” What Suzume finds is a single weathered door standing upright in the midst of ruins as though it was shielded from whatever catastrophe struck. Seemingly drawn by its power, Suzume reaches for the knob…. Doors begin to open one after another all across Japan, unleashing destruction upon any who are near. Suzume must close these portals to prevent further disaster. The stars. The sunset. The morning sky. Within that realm, it was as though all time had melted together in the sky–guided by these mysterious doors, Suzume’s journey to close doors is about to begin.

Suzume, made in 2023. here’s a trailer

I’ve now seen it a few times, and found it deeply moving. I remember weeping through the end of it the first time, and again the second time. I’ve only seen portions of it with Eden since then and have not been moved to tears subsequently, but I doubt that I’ve shed all the tears I’ll ever shed watching it.

In Suzume, a young female protagonist travels around japan in an attempt to achieve certain goals (just like elsa/anna) and has normal interactions with the people she encounters along the way. There are so many parallels between suzume and frozen, and in every single point of comparison, suzume shows itself to be able to be serious, dignified, and frozen shows lack of seriousness.

Suzume notes, continued

OK, these are all written out on yellow legal pad, I’m gonna draft the suzume stuff here, it might get its own post later, I wrote all these notes over the last…. at least a few weeks, I really want to get it written and done

[…]

I’m so pleased to watch this movie compared to Frozen.

so much healthier interpersonal stuff. Mom/daughter, aunt/niece, friend/friend, adult/kid, kid/kid interactions. No one gets insanely betrayed by someone who is first presented as kind and safe. (Talking about Frozen.)

Features the real devestation of the loss of a parent.

Also says ‘the world is made safer by feeling fully what you are feeling’, instead of frozen’s ‘let it go, the past is in the past’, ‘suppress your emotions’ motif.

here’s a trailer, and here’s the delightful theme song. I’ve listened to this so many times.

features a strong (like, actually strong) female lead, as a non-sexualized child. her childness is far more often a factor than her feminine-ness. (unlike frozen)
it’s a coming of age trip, with strong built tension. there are even scenes comparable to ‘violence’ and ‘aggression’ but are not the absolute idiotic, fabricated drivel that is frozen. There’s intense expressions of power, force, resistance.
Helps if you’ve seen/are able to appreciate Studio Ghibli films.
creators love and understand cities. In one scene, a downstairs shop owner helps provide access for Suzume to Souta’s apartment. Jane jacobs, talks about this phenomina directly. this is what american-style ethnic cleansing stole from us. American-style ethnic cleansing literally wants/wanted to eliminate the ‘upstairs residence downstairs shop’ pattern, from all cities. American movies usually depict the americanized urban spatial form of suburbs/single family housing mixed with ‘downtown’ city cores and massive, car-choked streets connecting everything. There’s certainly not people walking around on streets. This is all handled correctly in Suzume

Eden is sometimes activated with fear. Scrambles into my lap, shamelessly, and keeps watching. I check in if scared, or she wants to skip this part, she says ‘no’ fully credibly, so we continue. (sometimes she says yes, of course, and I skip the scene). She crawls back out of my lap when the scene ends, back and forth, this goes away as she gets familiar with a movie.

I find it charming, cute, and useful for her to experience (without being shamed) fear, the safety that comes from responding to it, experiencing an adult as attentive and helpful, and then the ebbing away of that fear. I have a single memory of a scary scene I saw as a kid, it shook me and my dreams for weeks and months, and as I was watching this movie with my dad, I don’t think it crossed his mind that anything had happened. I was young, it was an Indiana Jones movie, a skeleton erupted from a wall with an arrow embedded in an eye socket. I still remember the scene. 🤮

I don’t like the english dubs a lot, vs. original audio + subtitles, this is the first time I’ve seen it with the english dubs, of course it’s far more accessible to Eden when it’s in English, though she watched a lot of the movie in the japanese, when the original audio is all I had.

beautiful, beautiful depictions of indoors and outdoors places.

I think Eden ‘processes’ a movie across re-watches, and easily departs the movie or skips it, once it’s no longer interesting or novel to her, in a reasonable way.

I value these kinds of times, even though other people criticize it. I’m not a ‘quality time’ person, though I do care about it. I simply also happen to prize the mundane time, too. I protect us from unwanted pressure, trips, rushing, restraining, limiting. I want to see her practice feeling seen as fundamentally good and trustworthy, and her instincts for what she wants as being taken as reasonable things.

She will confidently and enjoyably watch something, then, when done, herself close the laptop and move on to the next thing. Sometimes we have real grieving that happens over what happens when we cannot watch something right now, and again, I take that grief (and the opportunity to witness it and hold emotional space for her in it) seriously.

She enjoys naming when some part is coming. it’s a form of readying herself for scary parts, sometimes. I see it through a lense of helping her build inner resources to deal with the tricks that adults will sometimes play in moves to get a certain response from you, with or without your permission. (jump scares, certain bits of dialogue).

Complaints about other hard-to-avoid-here/now shows

I don’t begrudge Eden for anything that she finds interesting. She knows I’m down for everything that’s interesting to her, and will help maximize her enjoyment of it. (Skipping the scary parts, if any, starting/re-starting the desired bits of media)

I’ll pus

Paw Patrol

eden happens to really like paw patrol. Again, understandable, from a toddler’s point of view. I feel nothing but contempt and derision for every adult involved in the production of this show. It’s canadian, paid for by the canadian state, and ruthlessly reinforces authority, authoritarianism, political control, single family housing, and a very machanistic/industrialized view of nature. Extremely car-centric, celebrates all things involving engines, and vastly supportive of police, policing. (slave patrollers, slave patrolling)

[deep breath]

I’ve written a little/lot about zoning, and how I perceive zoning to be precisely enough how america did/does things that round to ethnic cleansing.

“cops”, “police”, mete violence continuously in very specific ways. If one evaluates systems as “the result reflects the need”, there are people in the greater united states who need society to have the role ‘deputized slave patroller’. Police enforce zoning laws, and target people who use roads for hassling, intimidation, robbery. (police commit 1/3rd of the ‘murdered by a stranger’ violence in the USA. Police commit two thirds of annual burglury via ‘asset forfeiture’ ritualized theft, robbery, assault, obviously in a way that does not upset the supporters of police. They are obviously good at the ‘deputized slave patrol’ thing.)

Police and domestic violence go hand in hand, obviously, these people have given themselves over to supremacy and are ruined by the ruin they enact on others. how could it be otherwise? Whenever I have a police interaction, I extract entertainment for myself, from them, by asking them if they know certain things about the origins of their own industry. Believe it or not, most cops do not know that “they deputized the slave patrollers” was the origin of half of american policing. (The other half was ‘protect the buildings of the capitalists’, that was the policing imported from europe used more in the north east. They were Bad People too)

I wrote the above upon discovering a certain document that is what got enshrined/encoded in Ambler vs. Euclid, in 2926. Virtually every zoning ordinance that exists in America is rooted in some way in that document, in a way that seems clear to me from a few different frames.⁴

So, it’s not exclusively american, but it’s some distillation of something representing the ideas of european-american-passing decendents of immigrants, and their idealized sense of social control, or whatever.

It’s unfair how disney/ppl like this grab the attention in an unfair, gross way, then fills the story with colonialism, authoritarianism, pro-deputized slave patrol propaganda!.

Eden likes it, and knows that I really don’t like it, so often we’ll reach great compromises. She’ll simply choose a different show she wants to watch. (E, to me: “put on {other show}. I choose it for you, because it doesn’t have police or cars”. me: “wow, gladly, i appreciate your thoughtfulness about what is easy or not so easy for me to watch.”)

And paw patrol still sometimes is played. No sweat either way.

specific complaints about paw patrol, first page

the ‘patrol’ obviously references police, policing, the concept of ‘going on patrol’, and always a ‘patrol’ is virtually synonymous with a supremacist occupying force controlling with violence and intimidation the ‘native’ peoples. In america, many police interactions are the slave-patrolling action of policing jaywalking. In killed by a traffic engineer, the author mentioned that at one point in time, something like 40,000 people were arrested for ‘jaywalking’ in chicago????? my jaw dropped. I still hope I am wrong. phew, I checked myself, I am wrong. It was Detroit, not chicago, and it was 20,000 people, not 40,000. Here’s a link to all my highlights for this book.

Thanks to goodreads, amazon, kindle versions, and the delusion of ‘american police’, we have the proper quote from the book:

In the same 1958 report, AAA says that “it is time that we become concerned with pedestrian violations and unwise walking practices” and then highlights all the progress on this issue in cities like Detroit, which arrested 19,765 pedestrians for crossing against the signal but only 8,662 drivers for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. The report noted that San Francisco arrested 165 pedestrians for crossing between intersections as compared to 7,304 drivers arrested for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. But don’t let the numbers fool you; San Francisco also arrested 32,968 pedestrians for public intoxication.

Thus, i leave it as an exercise to the reader to infer my opinions for what is sometimes called ‘police’, in the greater united states. Here’s my thoughts on ‘jaywalking’

Therefore, because in the USA, where this show is being consumed (even though it’s created by a canadian group, and because of the internet, and colonialism, undoubtedly this show is being requested/demanded beyond the united states, so i bet people in countries victimized by american armies get to watch their kids want to watch this show), the origins of ‘police departments’ was to deputize the existing slave patrols. The very concept of deputization is sorta religeous (“here, random person, have a stamped piece of metal. Affix to your shirt, you now have magical powers”), and simply conceeds so much that doesn’t justify that concession. (“the state”, “authority”, “retributive justice”, AND THE LIVED EXPERIENCE of people on both sides of that police power, like the story told in Killers of the Flower Moon)

not only ought one to appreciate police as slave patrolling, but that this role of slave patroller/deputized slave patroller filled a desperately needed position in society. what was that position, that role? maintaining the suppression of ‘slave rebellions’, also known as ‘people of the global majority taking minimum steps to slightly reduce the daily oppression of themselves and their loved ones’.

So, ‘slave patrol’ energy is strong in American policing.

not only are police slave patrollers. not only were they needed/wanted by american society.

other energies got rolled into American policing, too. Slave patrolling dealt with only one of the two primary fears of european americans.

Displacing native populations was also critical to the formation/survival of that group of european-american white-passing immigrants!

Killers of the Flower Moon, mentioned above, is a good-enough sample of the experience of the people who lived in the greater united states before the immigrants arrived with political authority. For someone else’s experience of the same people group, I invite a read of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. here’s my kindle highlights

One of the roles a slave patrol would fill is simply reminding people that violence could happen at any time, and no tactic (rebellion, passive resistance, fawning) could make any individual safe from harassment. This is why I don’t like to see or hear police (or sirens in general). Every time, it’s a proclamation, piercing the air and walls and consciousnesses of everyone around, that the local ‘slave patrol’ is on the move, willing to mete some coercion, if it feels right.

I have a related contempt for fire departments, by the way. Their sirens are ear-splittingly loud, actually damaging to hear from any proximity, disruptive, pierce the city for hundreds and hundreds of meters in all directions from their vehicle, they drive in dangerous and entitled ways, and RAM their way through a city with their vehicles, and like children hold to strange tropes about their own profession, and continue to resist efforts at narrower, safer streets, because some part of the system acts afraid it might not be able to fit their giant vehicles into a small space.

God forbid they demonstrate skilled driving or drive around with the kinds of vehicles used _in any other place.

So, this show, “Paw Patrol”, constantly venerating the institutions of slave patrollers and people who do not actually contribute good things to society. I say defund fire departments, fund ambulance riders & libraries/librarians. The vast majority of trips fire departments make in their huge ladder trucks are adequately served by an ambulance, and are inspired by american highway supremacy, so like three orders of magnitude of improvement would be trivially gleaned.

Not only does paw patrol hold on a giant, childish pedestal the vaunted role of ‘first responder’, it paints a unbelievable depiction of how the world works. Because kids like animals, and kids shows that depicted (for example) the police brutalizing and assaulting an ethnic group might not do so well. So instead, the police, in Paw Patrol, are involved in things like “rescuing a narwhale that got its horn stuck” or “helping guide a sleepy/hibernating bear back to its den”.

Paw Patrol features a bumbling mayor and some other sinister wanna-be mayor who plays a trope throughout the show that sparks conflict, when the show needs conflict. Eden is generally unable to appreciate that adults would pour their entire lives into hurting others and controlling them, so some of the tropes in the show goes over her head, or lands with confusion. She has no idea what a mayor is, or why someone with that title would behave in the ways depicted in this show.

Another page of notes about paw patrol

more notes as taken by hand, across various episodes, and days

statist, arrogant, high-modernist drivel. “police are helpful”. the world and nature desperately need A WHITE MAN TO TELL EVERYONE WHAT TO DO!!!!! It’s an honor to be given a command and to do it joyfully, and if you do it well enough, a white man might tell you ‘good job’ and scratch you behind the ear as your payment.

Ryder passes out TREATS when they do what he says. This show doesn’t even understand real dog training, or indicates that the adults see children as no more sophisticated as dogs, and equally responsive to treats/threats. (Operant conditioning. 😬). (If one gives treats as rewards, one will also give threats as anti-rewards. This is Not Good). Isn’t it funny how ‘treat’ and ‘threat’ are so similar in spelling?

Vastly supportive of the 15 tenants/characteristics of european american supremacy culture

each pup has a magic backpack that has a machine, claw, gun, shovel, whatever, that because it’s a machine, solves a problem. high modernist, every problem just needs a technology applied to it. Force and mass and movement are magical, no basis in reality.

Ryder, a domineering white male, in nearly every line of dialogue, is issuing a command. he is never given orders or direction, even by the pups, never shares/models sharing power or control (remember, that’s one of the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture).

Basically fills the authoritative role of ‘god’, or ‘the state’, or ‘benevolent patriarch’. Exercises complete, unquestioning control of the city.

constant reinforcement of the concept of role confomity. every aspect of every person’s existance, except for the role they play, is expunged from existance.

The role of the patriarch is ironclad. Gives instructions, endlessly, in fake cheerfulness voice.

the entire mayor motif i think goes over eden’s head right now, because she is not yet traumatized/inculcated into political authority, where the mayor/political authority motif makes sense to her in the way it ‘makes sense’ to me.

childlike love of military vehicles portrayed throughout, by the shows creators. Vehicles modeled on v22 osprey, some ocean lander/transport thing, tanks. TANKS!!!!

eden and I talk a lot throughout the show, often enough. Talk about things happening in the show.

about the first of TWO paw patrol movies

about Paw Patrol: The Movie which is AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH_

Movie opens with act of traffic violence, same as Frozen.

It normalizes people doing things (white-passing men giving orders) to solve nature’s problems with technology.

normalizes: ‘bad things’ come from obviously bad people working to nefarous purposes.

tons of offensive sterotypes.

people/animals need saving by emergency services constantly.

they have a hero’s lair, like a marvel movie universe. It’s despicable, I am loath to see it.

Iron-man esq suits for all pups, glorifying the power and authority of the state and Authority.

Their HQ vehicle launching thing is so fucked. Every pup isn’t just a specialized pup, but gets a specialized vehicle, that they rev the engine on and drive dangerously. A pup says ‘I could get used to this’ about a car before launching the police car through the downtown city, totally devoid of awareness or concern for the people in the roads.

that launched police car launches into a traffic jam, and then gets help from a ‘local’, native guide, codes as black, who leads them thru shortcuts. wow wow wow.

An iraqi-style MRAV type vehicle gets featured/driven around! By the police!

water cannon bombs a territory for their own benefit. (“bombing people is good!”).

Normalizes a sense that cops risk themselves to help others. (see Warren v DC, 1981, to see how they really feel about that).

Bombs a different agent of the state with water to put out flames. See? Shooting people is good!

white sky daddy receives scared police force member. Literal domestic abuse. (performative violence when the mayor is angry at the pups).

bluey

Australian, funded by the australian government, has lots of similar vibes to a different state-funded show I’ve seen lately. (Paw Patrol).

Ruthlessly normalizes suburban, single-family-home, nuclear family concept. monogomous marriage. Fumbling, emotionally disconnected dad, mom ‘momming’ the entire family, including dad. I dislike Bluey less than paw patrol, and plenty of moments in the show are fine/appreciable, but for me the whole thing is hamstrung by the context, the expectation of another terrible thing being normalized.

season 3, episode 38 “cubby”.

I’m trying to articulate why I don’t actually like bluey, even though so many people say it’s touching. I say it normalizes patriarchy, belief in authority, abuse.

dad: “The TV is too small, it’s only 50 inches wide” OMFG, he’s ‘watching the game’ and dissociating from the family.

agriculturalism, settled/domestication, marriage = the state, patriarchy = entitlement/obligation. ‘i’ll play this role, you MUST play this other role’

they’re building a play/space/fort out of blankets, a cubby.

Dad shows exasperation, annoyance with them. dad plays obvious trope of bumbling, clueless male-figure

the fort they built is SO COOL!!!! he didn’t say this once. how did he dissociate from their whole life/project?

Bluey episode, 43, ‘dragon’

dad diminishes mom and her skills at drawing BECAUSE SHE’S BETTER THAN HIM AT DRAWING!!!

he could have said “mom’s so good at drawing, I love to see the things she draws.”

Jesus **. it’s literally abuse to hack away at someone’s skills, it undermines them/their confidence/independence. this is horrifying to see.

that does it, my notes. might get this published finally!

another episode

the mom/kids get pulled over by cops, treated as a friend. the cop is wrong about the law and instead of doing something realistic, like shooting the family or at least a dog, the cop says to the mom “you’re right, I shoulda known that”. They say “thanks officer”, joyeously, and ride off in the car.

Zero evidence of ppl of the global majority. The normalization of european-american/nobility/suburbanization-of-everything. Cars take us from our house to everywhere else, all activity is at grocery stories, restaurants, arcades, bowling alleys, back yards.

In conclusion

Mmm, this thing has been months in the making, perhaps that is clear. Based on when I first started editing this file, it was five months ago that I first started copying down notes, but I think that was after more than one page of notes had been created.

I really like all things by Studio Ghibli, the movie Suzume, all episodes of Sagwa (available for free on Youtube here).

For Studio Ghibli, start with Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle. I hadn’t seen or heard of these movies until very recently in my life, I’m so pleased to have encountered them, and the other films made by Studio Ghibli. You’re probably not gonna feel the same about Grave of the Fireflies as you do Totoro. Be careful, and be warned.

I dislike Paw Patrol, Bluey, Frozen, in particular, and all Disney in general. Luca is less-bad than most. Finding Nemo is atrotious.

Settler colonial culture is hurtful to exist inside of, and more hurtful if it exists inside oneself unrecognized. These disliked shows push a message of normalization of the supremacy culture inside of which the shows were made.

Footnotes

some of the movies I’ve purchased online or found on youtube, like Sagwa the chinese siamese cat, here’s the 20 episode youtube playlist line with Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, I generally look for shows first on the pirate bay https://thepiratebay.org/, to download the raw files in a piecemeal way called torrenting. Obviously now there’s conversation about the legality of it, but I’ve always been vastly more impressed by the simple mechanics of torrenting. The piecemeal receiving/sending files, peer-to-peer, instead of server/client. How refreshing. Then save it somewhere easy to find, and use VLC to play it on a laptop, my perfectly functional but mostly retired, genuinely aged apple laptop. Would be harder to do all this quite as easily on a smart TV, for instance. It feels wasteful to stream a full-length movie many times, and on many normal internet connections in the world today, it still is. ↩
my own father, who proudly celebrates the notion of adults assaulting children, in his own words, continues to think that the concept of family makes it not just appropriate, but necessary for adults to assault and sexually assault their own children. I ~~am still working on~~ finished this collection of ideas around ‘spanking’. TL;DR spanking is the ritualized hitting and sexual humiliation of children, served up with a big dose of emotional abuse when the victim is coerced into believing not soley that they are causing their own victimization, but that the assault is an act of love between the adult and the child.

I tell Eden regularly that anyone who hits children does not love that child/children and in fact might not be capable of love. I tell her that adults hit children only if the adult wants to hit the child, and they sometimes tell the strangest stories to explain that away, in a way that would certainly not be acceptible in other dynamics.

An adult who hurts a child and doesn’t recoil in horror at what happened and take extensive efforts to prevent it from happening again needs a different imagination. I’ve another blog post about how the concept of ‘punishment’ or ‘discipline’ and even ‘obedience’ are in themselves abusive. Stay tuned. ↩
Don Thompson, when I pressed him about his abuse of me as a child, eventually exited the conversation with “I did what I did, you are welcome.”. LITERALLY. Those were his words, he was trying SO HARD to make me play the role he wanted me to play - adulating child. He emotinoally kicked my head off, over and over, but because he thinks it was an expression of love, his self-concept needs me to say “thanks, don, I think you were a great parent.” ↩
In the world of software, one encounters fancy identification labels called ‘guids’ or Globally Unique ID. It might look like 19e38c497fa028936823325fb6a57f25142f25152f5b086882c0fa38ab885538d364ffd8941cde001033b4d99d4fc5f35ea66d08d060fb6dd959b3d36f518e04 or in more likelihood, it’ll look like 9542e1b6-a78b-4b11-8a01-16d1a8adf642. If you google the first of those ‘magic strings’ you’ll find a really specific blog post by Patio11 titled ‘dropping hashes: an idiom used to demonstrate provenance of documents’. If you google the second one, you’ll find nothing. Also common in software are ‘magic strings’. Some strange little string that keeps showing up in different places. Maybe it’s the logs, maybe the codebase. Maybe it’s ‘35ft’ or 5000sq or 16 dwelling units per acre but when you see it first show up in one place, then another, they might be linked. The person who invented zoning desperately wanted to live in a supremacist enclave and wanted to keep people of the global majority in ghettos, and was pretty damned successful. ↩

My Favorite (and all) body modifications

2025-02-11T13:00:00+00:00

In the range of the human experience, there’s a lot of possible body modifications one can purchase for oneself. Over the years, I’ve purchased three.

LASIK vision correction in ~2016

When I was pretty young, mid-20s, my then-employer placed like a few thousand dollars a year into an HSA account for me, as I switched to a ‘high deductible health plan’, so since it felt like ‘free money’, I decided to spend it on LASIK. Possibly right after a long climbing trip, and I remembered struggling with glasses (mine were heavy and prone to falling off my face) and contacts (dealing with contacts without running water for days on end isn’t tons of fun)

For about $3500, I got LASIK somewhere in Rockville, MD, and for a long time I’d say it was the best thing I’d ever spent money on. It’s now one of the top things I’ve spent money on, still ranks very highly.

I used to take contacts out of my eyes in tents, then wake up and try to get contacts back in my eyes. I would clean my hands before touching my contacts (which would then touch my eye, of course I never actually touch my eye with my finger, when placing/removing contacts).

I also didn’t like the dependence on the contact subscription, getting new ones every few months, etc. Some of you know the drill.

Driving in the morning into the rising sun, wishing I had sunglasses, but preferring the comfort of my glasses.

At night, not being able to see clearly while moving around my room until I put my glasses on.

Issues with helmets, hair.

I didn’t/don’t actually dislike my glasses much, but it wasn’t until I was fully free of them, post surgury, that I could feel in my bones all the ways I was accommodating my need for HEFTY vision correction. I’m pleased that I had a great, normal-ideal outcome from the surgury.

Without glasses, my vision was so bad i really couldn’t drive, and walking on any sort of uneven surface could be dicy. Anyway, that was over a decade ago, now I just live life as a person who has perfect vision every time my eyes are open. It’s so cool.

Tongue Tie “Revision”/Repair in 2024

Skip over a decade forward… Eden, who is now a toddler, was born. She was born with a tongue and lip tie, and it was preventing her from being able to breastfeed!

We were lucky and fortunate to get it fixed when she was five or six days old, but at that point it had been missed by many medical professionals.

She’d been losing weight, basically starving, because her mouth and tongue and lips could not work together in the correct way to generate suction. Her mom’s milk wasn’t coming in. For the mom’s body to make milk, the baby needs to be ‘requesting’ it, and if the tongue and lips are not free to move in the right way, there is no good requesting going on.

After that, I didn’t think about a tongue tie again for years. “It’s heritable” they said. eventually, it bubbled up in my brain a few times. All sorts of oral health/mouth functioning/breathing things relate to the proper movement of that muscle in the bottom of the mouth.

A tongue tie can be related to things like sleep apnea like syptoms (the tongue falls into the back of the mouth), which can relate to teeth grinding, because the way the brain ‘frees’ the airway after the tongue has obstructed it is by moving the jaw back and forth!

Back pain (lower back pain) was related to teh tongue tie - my head had been slightly tilted forward/downward because of the reduced mobility. One of the functional tests of a tongue tie is if you can tilt your head all the way up and still swallow. When I had a tonue tie, I couldn’t swallow, I had to bring my chin back towards the ground to ‘get space’. These are all observations that were made most clear post procedure.

It’s a wild change, I am a huge fan. Lots of things are different, better.

I explain more, much more, in the blog post:

👉 i got my tongue tie fixed, and it rocked my world.

Tongue tie’s correlate to things (that I was actively experiencing) like: all sorts of mouth problems, sleep-apnea-like symptoms, sometimes sounding like I’m choking while sleeping, but I didn’t snore.

I had some of the best sleep of my life after the tongue tie revision.

I didn’t appreciate how free the structures SHOULD be, between the tongue, throat, sternum, and the top of the spine. After mine was fixed, my head sat in a slightly different tilt/orientation, and there’s less/zero forward lean and there’s less strain on my lower back.

Again, here’s the full blog post:

👉 i got my tongue tie fixed

Vasectomy, permanent birth control

Also in 2024, I had already realized that I felt fully satisified with Eden as my kid, and do not want to have another kid. I’d always figured I’d get a vasectomy whenever I was ‘done having kids’, and I think that is an easily arrived-upon spot with even one kid.

I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does “no-scalpel vasectomy with no-needle anesthesia.” $800, 30 minute appointment in Boulder, basically zero discomfort during or after the procedure. No intake call. He’s exceptionally competant, as you’ll see if you click around. If you want a vasectomy and don’t live in colorado, Chris’ methodology is still worth checking out, because if someone else doesn’t seem to be at the same level of quality as him, keep looking.

Having a kid is a big deal, and so is not having a kid. For a bunch of crappy reasons it seems like the responsibility of not getting pregnant is carried mostly by people who can become pregnant, the people with vulvas.

Options for male birth control have been popping up, like RISUG in india, relabeled as Vaselgel in the USA. (inject an ionized polymer into the vans deferans, it causes cell walls/tails of sperm to be damaged, they still exit the body like normal but are ‘non-functional’, and is permanent, reliable, and reversable) but the various authorities in the USA related to health advances are trash and absent, so people with penises and people with vulvas continue to suffer without abundant, reliable, non-hormonal birth control.

I got a vasectomy as a step in the direction of carrying more of the responsibility than I was before of not getting anyone pregnant. It’s a big deal to decide to ‘not have more kids’, perhaps, but it’s a big deal to ‘have another kid’. In 2025, having any children feels enormously delicate, risky.

If everyone has a recent-enough STI panel and discussed it, the remaining reason for condoms is the REALLY CRITICAL ISSUE of not getting pregnant. Huzzah for improved margins of safety.

I have a friend of a friend whose then-partner lied to him about taking birth control, and intentionally, without his permission, became pregnant by him. Horrifying. There’s lots of good ways of not getting pregnant, and most of them seem fully, unfairly, on the shoulders of the person who has the uterus. Also, if one gets pregnant and wants to be not pregnant, all options are stressful. Having Plan B on hand seems reasonable, and of course I’m an all-the-way supporter of access to easy, skilled, ideally free abortions, too. It is noteworthy to me that the catholic church made a HUGE deal of making sure birth control/pregnancy management was as unavailable to it’s people as possible.

Virtually all forms of birth control available to the people who can get pregant are heavy duty. IUD or the pill, both are a hassle, and IUD placements are often-enough very bad experiences.

I have a lot of thoughts about the obligation of not getting anyone pregnant. Things went poorly with my kid’s mom, I wouldn’t have tried to do parenthood in the exact way I’m doing it now, and EVEN IF things had gone great with Eden and her mom, I still would want a vasectomy for myself. I still don’t want more than 1 kid.

It’s easy to be generous as a parent with time when there is one child. It’s easy to be generous with emotional energy. It’s easy(er) to be unpressured in schedule, location needs, etc. Multiple kids seems gnarly, all-consuming. I can carry 100% of my children on my scooter (with a special harness/strap) because I have a single child. How convenient for me. School drop-offs for life can be done via a two-wheeled vehicle thus I’ll never have to sit in a line of cars. Ever, in my life. Seems nice.

American culture is individualistic, so there’s no natural community for raising multiple kids. For this reason alone I think it’s fairest to everyone, including any already-born children, to not take from their resource pool what would be needed by another child in the mix.

Anyway, the vasectomy was the “right” kind. I was thrilled to discover Chris Tonozzi, who does no scalpel vasectomy with no needle anesthesia. Super chill, quick, he’s got spots around colorado, I took the flatiron flyer bus from Denver to a few blocks from his office in Boulder, caught a later bus back, and was good to go. No more kids for me.

I was thrilled that there was no consultation required with Dr. Tonozzi. I’d called around denver urologists and other offices, doing a little research after reading up on Reddit, and was amazed when multiple offices thought that it was fine to tell me I had to show up for a $250 intake appointment before anyone would authorize scheduling me for a vasectomy! So much needless complexity to accommodate how some americans see health care.

anyway…

I really struggle to find the right tone to talk about some of these things.

I’ve spoken about vasectomies now with a few different friends. I heard about one of these from his female partner - she said “I wish my [50 year old!!!] partner was willing to get a vasectomy bc I hate having to use birth control”

Her partner has multiple kids! She has multiple kids! She doesn’t want more, he “thinks” he doesn’t want more! I couldn’t imagine being him.

the risk profile is not the same, between people with penises and people with vulvas. It’s wildly risky to become pregant! people plan for and hope to have kids all the time, and are anxious throughout the process, because it’s risky.

It seems worth noting also something like:

Sometimes/often times emotional safety correlates with enjoyable-for-all sexual experiences. A sense of emotional safety gets built in many different ways. Having taken real steps to measurably improve the risk profile around pregnancy dramatically increases a sense of safety for some people.

My own emotional safety goes way up. A partner’s sense of emotional safety can go up. There’s plenty of world for deep emotional safety (and great sex) without having a vasectomy, but it’s unamibigous, undeniable, that the margin of safety is higher. I didn’t realize how much more peace I would feel having sex, post-vasectomy, than before.

Anyway, if you’re in Denver/Boulder/Colorado, Chris Tonozzi at GoVasectomy is the way. ~$800, and a 30 minute appointment. He and I chatted the whole time, and I watched the whole procedure with curiosity and interest.

That’s it, there’s my body modifications. I’m thrilled with all of them, and if you are eligible for any of them, you might enjoy having some of these too.

On Hitting Small(er) People

2025-02-06T13:00:00+00:00

this has been hard for me to write, has been sitting in one draft form or another for months. Finally getting it off the ‘drafts’ list, but only reluctantly. This is far too long for even me to try to read in a single sitting, especially on my phone, so it might be too long for you to try to read on a phone, or at once, too.

I sometimes imagine that if I phrase something gently enough or the right qualifiers, I’ll somehow ‘farm’ goodwill from the imagined reader. It feels adjacent to a willingness to manipulate, though, and I don’t like that, either. I don’t wanna be manipulative. I think some of you have done bad things to others. To the degree you wish it were not that way, we can be friends! Otherwise, eh.

Some readers have perhaps never existed inside of the USA, others never outside of it. Some have had a lot of exposure to religeous influences in the USA. I speak with first-hand knowledge of being ‘raised evangelical’, and this particular blob of writing addresses themes common within that group of people. Specifically, the concept of “spanking”.

I had gotten close to publishing a shorter first draft of this, then a book that I’d long ago requested via interlibrary loan finally arrived. It has the provocative title Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse. It’s very good, and caused this whole blog post to spiral into something even longer. ¹

First, book-keeping:

If you have ever hit your children and then told them they deserved it, and are today, right now, willing to defend that, i feel contempt for you and it’s hard for me to contain that, so I’m not gonna try.

If you hit kids, but then said:

I hit you because I wanted to, I was angry over something, and I hurt and scared you to regain a sense of control for myself. Bummer. I bet that was terrible for you. Was it? I’d like to do differently, I wish I hadn’t done that, and I’m doing {thing 1} and {thing 2} to make it less likely that I’ll every do that again. Just to reiterate and confirm, it’s not okay for me to hit you, shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t ever happen again. It did, and it might, it is reasonable to me for you to be angry at me now and get angry at me if it happens again.

this post isn’t to you or about you. It’s about the people that say:

I hit you, child, and it’s because you deserved it, you called my violence down upon you, and my hitting you is evidence that I love you, and as long as you do not make a mistake again in the future, I won’t be forced to hit you again.

I feel contempt for the latter sentiment. I can work just fine with the former.

I’ll get the hard parts out on the table up front. Free-associating through some of the interconnected issues:

Within evangelicalism, the concept of “parents spanking children” is held up as one of the core tenants of participation with evangelicalism. Indeed, if a parent does NOT beat their child, or threaten their child with physical and sexual assault, some others in the group will shame that parent.
“spanking”, as I define it, is adults, usually parents, assaulting their own children for instances of the child displaying a will. If a child says “no” to a parent, that often-enough is considered grounds for assault.
The spanking itself is at best simple physical assault. On top of that physical assault is further emotional violence/verbal abuse. If the spanking is done on the gluteal region/butt, it is sexual assault. Additionally, because the ‘spanking’ blames the victim for the harm, all uses of ‘spanking’ have emotional and verbal abuse embedded within it.
‘spanking’ is the sexualized assault of a child. ²
I do not even pretend to evaluate as safe the kinds of people that think adults spanking “their” kids is fine. I view this attitude as deeply problematic. To those people, my main hope is that your kids survive you, as a caretaker, as best they can, with as little damage to their sense of self as can be had in an environment such as that.

But wait there’s more: Not only is physically assaulting a child abuse, but acting like ‘punishment’ is a valid thing that an adult can appropriately do to a child is also abuse.

this is all hard for me, as it puts me on the wrong side of a lot of people. My immediate family all is full of physically abusive people. The family I was married into, ditto. Same with the extended family I was born into. And plenty of people around me in various social relationships.

All these people believe that adults hitting kids and blaming the kids for it is laudable and evidence of good-enough parenting. The emotional distance between us grows all the more. I wish it didn’t; i no longer try to pretend to feel warmly towards people who condone adults assaulting and sexually assaulting children.

So, I’m going to take a few turns at ~~shitting on~~ explaining themes of evangelicalism, because we all deserve it.

The mountain of victims deserve it. I am also taking issue with something that isn’t strictly evagelicalism - it’s more describable as americanism, or american-ness, or “The West”, and to show participation in these systems, among other things, one most tout/affirm the concept of ‘obedience’, and that if someone doesn’t ‘obey’, they ‘should be punished’. ³

This language is all minimizing what really happens

the message of spanking and punishments

What’s a concise re-expression of punishment/spanking energy?

If you do something I don’t like, I or someone acting on my behalf will hurt you, torture you, coerce you into doing whatever it is I wanted you to do. And I’ll say it’s an expression of love, and i’ll hurt you even more unless you act like you believe me.

So, fuck that energy.

Critically, there are alternatives to punishment.

your only hope of existing non-abusively with the kid(s) in your life is if you and they know that you do not see “punishment” as part of your problem solving toolkit.

I have lots more on alternatives to punishment below.

I continue to be unsure how to channel my own anger over this. I am livid at Miriam and Donald Thompson, the people who contributed to my physical and emotional existance, for many reasons, and I have no intent of or desire to change that, especially while they are alive and actively claiming the rightness of adults assaulting children. The first thing my power-obsessed father bullied out of me was the right to protest his unfair treatment, the right to say ‘no’ to him. The last time he physically yanked me around (as an adult) I almost hit him, before stopping myself, and I realized how truly helpless my little child frame felt before his 6 foot 1 inch military officer bullying self. I’m not helpless before him anymore, and critically, I never have to speak to him, so physical conflict is less likely, but if he treated me today in a fraction of the way he treated me as a child, I would absolutely, without hestation or guilt, hit him, repeatedly, until he stopped aggressing against me.

They both physically, sexually, emotionally abused and neglected me, and had abundent opportunities to do better, or differently, at any moment in their lives, including within the last few months. The book Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse was published the year before I was born. I could try to extend graciousness for them not knowing better, perhaps, if that claim was plausible or used non-defensively, but they both said to me “we were doing to you what other people told us to do”. Meh. My father is also deeply misogynistic, patriarchal, but claims God told him to be that way thus it’s the way of the universe.

Not only could they have refrained from beating me as, like, a three year old, but they displayed poor decision making and head-in-the-sand isolation, when I brought these issues up as an adult. they alternated between ignoring me, or saying I was the problem, or “nothing they could say wouldn’t make me more angry” and then settled on them blocking me in whatsapp. ⁴

I’ll possibly still email them a link to this blog post. I told them both, basically, “You deserve whatever peace you think a child abuser deserves.” and “I’m honoring both of you by using the experiences you’ve both provided to me, then and now, to warn others of these exact things.”

It seems worth mentioning that the level of emotional dissociation required to beat someone else into submission is profound, and correlates with an overall inability to ever form an emotional connection. In 2024, I saw Miriam for the first time in several years, and kept being stunned by 1) the level of emotional disconnect and 2) how familiar it felt, as something I’d experienced consistently my entire life.

I never-not-once had a good-enough relationship with my parents.⁵

I am resentful of them, because there were times I wanted a hug, kindness, healthy maternal or paternal energies, and they attacked me instead. Over and over and over. But part of the harm is that as a kid, I knew what sort of attitudes were supposed to exist between healthy parents and kids, so I kept trying to pretend we had a real relationship. Once I became an adult, it eventually became obvious no relationship had ever existed, and I would never be friends with people like them. If I had my druthers, they’d never meet my kid.

They both seemed extremely offended, when, individually, I contacted them to say:

Please confirm to me that you will never hit Eden, nor make jokes about, or threats of, hitting children in her presence.

I ran into an astonishing level of evasion around this.

To make a point about the association between discipline and punishment and rules, and how punishment is really just physical assault, I said:

if I find that you have hit eden, after having heard this unambiguous statement assessing the wrongness of that act, shall I arrange a meeting between us, where I will ‘give’ you a spanking, for your “disobedience”?

For the note, this is why violence begets more violence. I despise violence, force, coercion, and yet, when dealing with someone who interacts with the world nearly exclusively through coercion and violence, one finds coercion and violence emrging from the woodwork around them. I recognize that I could perhaps act more ‘healed’ towards them and treat them as simply the confused, wayward, supremacist, aged, violence-using colonizing european-americans that they are, rather than holding onto a specific vindictiveness towards them. Alas.

I don’t think they’ll ever try to hit Eden, and if they did, the psychological damage to her would be much less than it was for me, to be hit (repeatedly, by them), so i’m not overly concerned. So much of the real harm of ‘spanking’ is that it’s one’s caretaker who is saying ‘i love you’ and hitting and humiliating you is evidence of that love.

My mom hit me many times, always saying “this is because you disobeyed me, and thus God, and the wages of sin is death, so be thankful i’m only causing you a little death, instead of a big death, to teach you to be obedient.”.

Eden knows:

Anyone who loves someone else wouldn’t want to coerce and overwhelm them. They wouldn’t hit them, and if an adult ever hits a child, that adult certainly does not love that child, probably never did, and are likely incapable of experiencing love.

So, she knows I view my father/her grandfather as dangerous, that he hits kids, and has sexually assaulted children in the past, and then lies to kids about why he does it.

She knows it’s insanely hurtful to be willingly tortured by someone else, so if for whatever reason one of my parents or anyone else decided to assault her (‘spank’ her), she would hopefully experience it as “simple” assault, and not as a perverted expression of love. She also is extremely quick to say and move and clock when she doesn’t like something, and this instinct will accomplish a lot of providing for her own safety.

The repeated, hopeless, helplessness of adults hitting kids at home over and over for any certain expression does a lot of damage, too. Eden gets to know what it’s like to exist in an environment where ‘punishment’ is a strange concept that some emotionally immature people use to coerce the people in their life they construe themselves as deserving to coerce.

All the way up until I was at least 31 or 32, I would have said I thought my parents loved me, even though I also knew hitting children was wildly inappropriate. I ‘gave them a pass’, because I wanted to believe I had a family, and it was more useful to pretend that things were good than to fully appreciate how disruptive it is to trust and intimacy to inject physical and emotional assaults, mixed with an overwhelming power dynamic. They freely withdrew warmth and affection to extinguish unwanted or unfamiliar behaviors, and would use emotional warmth/acceptance as a reward when they saw things they liked.

A quick map of what we are covering

it’s easy for me to end up on tangents, but also I want to explain things well-enough. I suspect this particular post will end up turning into several posts.

Here’s what I want to make sure I touch on:

reframing ‘christ suffering for sins’ to ‘self-justifying intellectual dressings for the nobility of feudal europe, which is when it was invented’. (Anselm of Canterbury “invented” the modern motive/meme of ‘substitutionary/satisfaction atonement’, which is the pivot around which all of evangelicalism turns)
I no longer view the concept of ‘sin’ as having any validity. No more so than ‘spanking’.
demonstrate a coherent reframe of “suffering”, transforming it from “something maybe good” to “something certainly bad and simply to be avoided”
demonstrate that the motif of “suffering is good” is how parents dissociate from the painful experiences they are causing, directly, to their children.
a reframe of “Jesus significance was in His death” (what evangelicals say is the central tenant of evangelicalism) to “if he mattered at all, it was because of what he did and said, OBVIOUSLY. (Yes, I am accusing Christians of having absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ)

I write in the spirit of write things now (rather than, for instance, never).

Because evangelicals talk about jesus

Evangelicals sometimes talk about Jesus, or seem to like to do so. I too, in very certain situations, like to talk about Jesus, if and only if the other person already finds that person interesting before even showing up to the conversation. If that’s you…

a way that a big bad became a big good

there was perhaps a time that jesus’ teachings were tightly bound to the literal concept ‘do not murder’. This particular injunction, simple enough for a child to plainly understand, is still bandied about. However, any churchy institution you or I have interacted now declares the issue “complicated”.

Churchy institutions say:

Jesus still says to not murder, and he failed to specify was that sometimes killing someone is not murder, thus not bad. play close attention while I explain…

Christianity became the state religieon of rome in 300 AD. An emperor named ‘Constantine’ did it, and that’s an easy date to pick for when the state decided to improve it’s fitness by adding the ‘religeousness, christianity’ mod.

600 or 700 years later, the fitness of the state was being constrained by ‘not enough army’. The state/church looked at the problem, and the available solutions. The church liked the support of the state so “church authorities” helped raise armies for their nobles.

Raising armies was tricky when the peasents say they can opt out for religious reasons.

The church authorities decided they would/could “pre-forgive” the peasants who were being dragged into armies and taken off to fight a war. Now there’s no barrier on killing for the ones that wanted to kill, and no barrier for not joining the army, for the ones that didn’t want to fight.

The peasants once could avoid the draft by saying “jesus says to not kill, and war is obviously killing, so i don’t have to participate in the states wars because I am also obligated to the church”.

That was, as I said, inconvenient to those trying to raise an army, so the church did them a solid and said “hey, cannon fodder, i just said magic words that i’ve decided makes it cool for you to kill on someone elses behalf, have fun in the army, bye!!!!” To “make it permissible”, they said they would not issue fines or punishments for murder anymore, and might even incentivize murder with first dibs on loot and plunder for the most murderous and such.

If murder can be made good, why cannot adults hitting kids also be made good?

It’s that easy to go from “murder is bad” to “if it is desired by the right person (an authority, the pope or the king or the president), it isn’t murder, or if it is murder, it isn’t bad, or even if it is murder, and it is bad, it’s not as bad as not committing murder”.

Hitting is bad, we all agree, but to permit someone to utter or hold the term spanking, one accepts (sort of) the statement: “It isn’t hitting, if the right person pre-determined that you should be hit. It magically becomes ‘discipline’, ‘punishment’, a ‘spanking’, and therefore, obviously an acceptable or laudable thing.

So, this isn’t a diatribe just on the concept of “spanking”, or “adults hitting children and then convincing the child it is an act of love”.

I also contend that to assume the validity of the idea of spanking is already a disaster, because this perversion already drags behind it further perversions, usually floating around the idea called ‘discipline’ or ‘punishment’. To accept the validity of discipline or punishment, one is casting their lot in with child abusers and (literally) Nazis. It couldn’t be me.

I hold rage in me, and feel indignant, that I am going to say some of what I’m about to say. I’ve spoken on this topic with a number of people, including those who abused me when I was a child. They said “well, nothing else was working, so we had to abuse you”. I wanted to scream in their face that perhaps their obvious needful desire to assault a child ought to have been evidence enough that something was obviously already going very wrong.

The framing becomes clear as soon as you reverse some of the players:

well, if my aged parents do not instantly obey me, how will I extract future obedience from them if I do not physically, emotionally, and sexually assault them to break their will?

my wife did not give me instant and unflinching obedience, so I hit her hard a few times, until she’s I can tell by the change in tone of her crying that she no longer is resisting me, then I tell her I love her. I wouldn’t have to hit her if she didn’t make me.

Obviously we’d say “you are a domestic abusers and intimates should be kept far away from you. You’re not safe to have around vulnerable populations.”

never not once have I felt inclined to hit a child, especially my own child, and I’d like to help you find an easier way of being than your current pro-abuse stance.

There is obviously a lot to be said about how one can foster a loving and trusting relationship with a small/young person that isn’t based in violence and terrorism, but when my brain is in the mode of “writing against child abuse” I do not find it easy or pleasent to drop into a mode of answering the question of “well, if I am not going to abuse a child, how else should I engage with them?”. Another blog post will perhaps talk about that. For now, go read https://takingchildrenseriously.com/ for a primer.

the theme of entitlement/obligation and supremacy

In the year of 2024, I’ve talked with people who have built into their sense of self the “rightness” of adults hitting children, while at the same time rejecting the possible rightness of children hitting adults.

I want to tie in to this piece themes of supremacy. I use ‘supremacy’, ‘entitlement/obligation’, ‘abuse’, and ‘emotional immaturity + exploitable power dynamic’ throughout. I believe a certain form of supremacy is in operation for adults who hit children.

If anyone “makes” it permissable to exploit a power dynamic to cause pain to someone else, it stinks for them and the person they are hurting. It’s also a bummer to these sorts of people sprinkled about society, because if it’s okay a little bit, to them, it needs to be okay in big ways, to them, and they’ll undoubtedly be complicit with some other harms, if the situation were to go just right.

Settler colonialism is obviously built on the idea that it’s okay to do a litte murder and violence somewhere, as long as the “benefits” are “worth more” than the costs.

The root attitude, one that is clearly visible over and over and over again when interacting with these people/systems, is one of entitlement and obligation.⁶

The man whou contributed to the pregnancy that led to the birth of the person we now know as “Josh” (me), his name is Donald, he is obsessed with the concept of authority.

He perceives it to benefit him today, and its a primary organizing principle for the world around him. He is military, a doctor, has an ‘advanced degree’ from the educational institution most affiliated with the southern baptists/slaveholder christianity. He’s obsessed with authority, believes it’s real, and thinks he has TONS of it. ⁷

The Origins of Pro-slavery Christanity

Christians didn’t start purely with beating their own children. They got plenty of practice beating slaves, in fact needing to beat the slaves, to prevent the slaves from walking off or walking away or resisting the beatings.

Here’s a quote from The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black and White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia

When black men and women of their own initiative joined evangelical churches in numbers that far surpassed white evangelicals’ expectations, white evangelicals realized the irrelevance of the Old Testament model of slavery and searched for new ways to understand a master-slave relationship in which both parties belonged to the community of faithful.

I just gave the above quote without context. it comes from a book titled _. Read other quotes from it here.

It explains how slaveholders were effortful and strenuous in their re-workings of ‘theology’ to support their overt domination of the people who were slaves. As soon as the power dynamic shifted (unfavorably, to the slaveholders) they were quick with a response, to minimize the change, the loss. Evangelicals today continue that noble tradition.

Some slavers claimed that an authority external to the slaver demanded this treatment of those they enslaved.

[a god] ordered the world for slavery, I’m simply doing what he wants me to.

Ah, the Nuremberg defense.

When I found the title of this book, the first time, I instantly purchased it for my kindle and began reading it. Generally, when talking about it with christian people, I get met with a fascinating look of passive non-engagement. Like, they’ll willingly order their entire lives around this thing (christianity), they will claim it’s the most pro-freedom way of being imaginable, they’ll allocate dozens and hundreds of hours of time to the regime, and then claim they don’t have time to read a book about it.

I think it’s actually because they clearly see the book, even from the title, in the exact same way I did, and know that it is far too dangerous to read. To read it and appreciate it would end their way of life.

When I read this book, I remember saying “I don’t know if I’ll ever attend another church again”. At that point in time, holding to the premis of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, I was using the “voice” option, excitedly sharing what I was learning with others around me. I’d send this book to church people, I talked about it with a pastor, I told my friends, and I remember gaining such insight from their responses.

Some of my friends heard it, appreciated it, and have largely left the church. this book wasn’t the only reason, but the concepts inside of it did for them what it did for me.

I struggle to give my full reasoning for why this book is so powerful.

I might be code switching repeatedly throughout this writing. I’ll exlain it through the lense of ‘frame control’. Frame control is a rhetorical tactic by which someone in the conversation keeps forcing the conversation to be had through a certain frame.

I refuse to talk to you unless you use the language of {x}

is a form of frame control. I link this piece regularly: Frame Control. It’s an excellent piece written by an interesting person, I think it’s worth the read.

As part of something of an experiment/attempt to improve the state of things even as I expected it to not work, I became “pushy” with my parents, about decisions they made raising me that previously we never discussed. (Like their decisions to hit me until I gave them what they wanted, and to use other forms of emotional coercion, terrorism)

To the degree we never discussed things they proudly did to me, they kept a sense of comfort about themselves (perhaps) when thinking/interacting with me. I didn’t ever discuss what I wasn’t supposed to, because I was terrified of my father during and after I lived in his house, because he would terrorize me into compliance with whatever he wanted.

I’d learned to get safety by making him feel good about himself, and ignored the parts of how he treated me that was dehumanizing, and mostly didn’t have a relationship with him, though he liked to claim everything was good. (We have hardly spoken since I was 16 years old, I’m now 35). A few years ago, at the beginning of this little pro-slavery christianity journey I was on, when he started realizing fractures were growing, he said “I have not changed in the last few years, I have no idea why you’re pulling away.”

This ignored that I was telling him, and that the environment was littered with clues about why things had shifted. His need for plausible ignorance wasn’t a good look. But, since I wasn’t using one of “his” frames, he could claim to not understand it.

Miriam does this too. If you speak to her from outside one of her perferred frames, you will not be heard. She is not distrubed by not understanding, she’ll just let everything slide off until it lines up with her patriarchal, slave-holding christianity view of the world. It’s maddening

As I was appreciating that miriam and donald’s right to comfort didn’t equal my need to self-abandon, and because they are occasionally seeing/interacting with Eden, and because I wanted the relationship to be clarified. They claimed to love me, I claim they hated me, lets just bring it back up and see what shakes out. This post is part of that story, and it contains excerpts of conversations (spoken, text) I’ve had with them, that explains a way that some people today cling to ideas that cause incredible harm and suffering.

The thing that changed

A lot got clearer in my mind once I had a kid, especially once she became the age at which I know my parents had already begun hitting me.

It hurts enough to witness constantly the oppression and coercion and dehumanization that is pointed towards children today. At her day care, I’ve heard adults barking orders at groups of children, being mean, being aggressive, being dissociated from the kids. I always say something like:

oof, can you hear the way that adult is speaking? that tone? That’s not appropriate. I hope you never experience someone speaking to you like that. That’s mean, and demanding. If anyone does speak to you like that, they are being mean and cruel, and if you cannot avoid a person like this, I hope you can at least find a way to be safe from them.

Alternatives to Needing Violence

The alternative to using violence on your children is not trying to do all the same stuff without violence.

It’s to stop persuing things that justify or demand being overpowering. No appropriate goal can ever call into existance violence around itself, so if you’re willing to use violence, it’s your fault.

Here’s a list of things that will cause me to hit my kid (and any kid):

Here’s what causes others to hit kids:

an attitude of entitlement
expectations of obedience
a willingness to overpower, overwhelm, coerce

Here’s what I do instead of hitting kids:

bring mutuality and co-creation to the table

Mutuality and co-creation respect differences in power, and are incompatible with overwhelming energies.

These particular words come from The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond.

I witness verbal abuse from parents towards children constantly. To stop being abusive to someone, one needs more than a goal of ‘not being abusive’ or ‘not being controlling’ but one needs a clue at the alternative way of being. Patricia Evans in the above book talks about abusive people living in ‘power over others’ reality, while non-abusers live in a ‘power with others’ reality.

Kids, and people overall attune to the difference in energies between mutuality, co-creation, and the energies of a willingness to overwhelm, to coerce, and to extract compliance in the least painful way for the authority figure.

An extra quick shortcut to parenting without violence would be to read The Most Dangerous Superstition, and extract from it a reframe, perhaps, of your relationship with authority. I.E. read the book, update a mental model to view a belief in authority as a dangerous superstition, and proceed in your life without ever again relying on the concept of authority.

It’s not technically a parenting book, but one of the domains I see most soaked in language of entitlements and expected obligations is parenting.

Children are a deeply, oppressed class.

In part because this ironclad belief in the authority of parents’ permission/expectation to treat their children as farmable property, not so different than cattle. Cattle never had rights.

a meaningful line from Killers of the Flower Moon, during a “legal trial” about some very murderous people, was: “No one is questioning if this american killed these indians. It’s simply that the americans don’t think any murder happened. No people were killed. Animals were killed.”

The level of dissociation from the humanity in another that can be directed towards any non-self ethnic group can also be directed towards ‘outgroup’ members of the same ethnic group as that person. The part of the soul that needs to be alive to stop one of those would stop both, if it existed, and because it doesn’t, all parts of the self that would rely upon it doen’t have structure.

That root issue of ‘violence feeling right’ is entitlement.

The few times I’ve spoken to the people who gave birth to me about the violence they meted out to me, and listened to them justify their own violence against me, I can hear their words dripping with entitlement. I was labelled ‘rebellious’ since well before high school, and my parents cannot imagine that I perhaps disliked being controlled and disrespected, continuously.

Evangelicalism Is Similar In Enough Ways To Colonialism

Evangelicals point the techniques of settler colonialism at the personalities of their own children.

When someone is entitled, they think others are obligated to give them whatever they’re entitled to.

American society is drenched with entitlement and obligation, someone acting like there is a right to coerce, and a duty to obey.

I am, broadly, addressing evangelicals.

Obviously there are people who beat their children who are not evangelicals, but there’s something particularly insideous about the beatings that evangelical parents dispense, because along with the beatings is also heavy psychological mistreatment and coercion. it’s also what I experienced, thus what I am speaking to.

Most concisely, the modern sense of entitlement and obligation, emobied by the treatment of parents towards “their” children, is firmly rooted in the sense of entitlement and obligation that european americans exhibited towards people kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, and who’s ancestors were kidnapped from Africa.

The Origins of Pro-slavery Christianity part 2

This book ended my ability to exist within evangelical circles: The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: Black And White Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia

I now view existing within or parallel to evangelicalism in silence as being complicit with the kinds of supremacists that created the pro-slavery christianity described in the above book.

Here are a few highlighted sections from the above book

If the command to love one’s neighbor made Lumpkin realize in 1915 that segregation was wrong, why did so few white southerners realize that race-based slavery was wrong? By all accounts, white southerners in the nineteenth century were among the most devoted Christians in the Western world, but their faith seems only to have strengthened their determination to hold another people in bondage. This book represents my attempt to understand this staggering moral failure-to understand why the parable of the Good Samaritan fell on deaf ears for so many generations.

[…]

As long as the vast majority of slaves had “lived and died strangers to Christianity” in colonial days, keeping the occasional convert enslaved had not caused white evangelicals many scruples. When tens of thousands of people of African descent were clamoring for admission to evangelical churches following the Revolution, however, and were starting their own churches when whites were too slow or unwilling to facilitate the admission of blacks to white congregations, it became impossible for whites to maintain the illusion that religious commitment provided a meaningful distinction between them and their slaves.

[…]

He justified slavery as one of many hierarchical relationships approved by God in a 1757 sermon, The Duty of Masters to Their Servants. In what would become the most important plank of the proslavery argument, he taught that “the appointments of Providence, and the order of the world, not only admit, but require, that there should be civil distinctions among mankind; that some should rule, and some be subject; that some should be Masters, and some Servants. ⁸

This was brought into hilarious and tragic relief for me recently. I was in my early 30s before ever considering that I’d been raised by emotionally abusive people. I believed the spoken narrative, that it was ‘love’, and I’d accepted that there was no relationship between me and my parents. When my dad left the house when I was 16 to conduct colonialism in the middle east on behalf of American empire, we hardly ever spoke again.

It never struck me as odd that I had no relationship with my mother. Never once in my life did it cross my mind that I could obtain nurturance or emotional comfort from her, or a sense of attunement. It wasn’t until I started watching other adults having nice relationships with their parents that I realized something had been wrong in my own childhood.

I still couldn’t place it. I noticed having a confidence that my parents hated me, but they enjoyed having me around IF I was playing the role of ‘successful, subservient son’. If I stop playing that role, or raised any sort of issue, I’d get treated with either withdrawal and shunning, or open opposition coupled with intimidation and manipulation.

For some context setting, my parents read and embodied the ideologies of a man (of course) named James Dobson, who was a eugenicist, and taught that parents, if they suitably controlled the behaviors and thoughts of their children, could ‘raise’ them to be good members of a civil society, defined as “participating in european american settler colonialism with a certain ideological bent.”

Settler colonialists use ethnic cleansing as a primary tool for accomplishing their goals, because it works well ,obviously.

So, the kinds of people that would support population confinement and displacement and genocide, on the concept of ‘race’, make for interesting parents. I resonated with what the athor of The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir shared about his childhood experiences.

Settler colonialists use violence and coercion to get what they want. Violence is expensive and risky, so sometimes other, ‘gentler’ forms of coercion can be made effective, if the person is willing, interested in using violence. Economic coercion, for instance, might seem gentler than knocking someone’s house over with a bulldozer, but it’s all on the same spectrum.

The bulldozer shows up only if the other methods are deemed to have failed. Abusers say they usually don’t have to assault their children, but it is still all full of violence because they and their kids know that if certain compliance isn’t had, the violence emerges. I think this is a good way to ‘give’ someone ADHD, by the way. Let them stew in an environment where violence lies behind many doors, and they have influence over if the person sometimes uses that violence agains them, or not.

This is the core, fundamental dangerous attitude of all people who concede the correctness of the concept of ‘spanking’. It’s an extension of the concepts of ‘punishment’ and ‘discipline’.

How Spanking Works In Evangelicalism

I have many notes (typed, written) floating around on why spanking is abuse. I could quote James Dobson’s books if I wanted to, but I don’t need to. Here’s how spanking works in evangelical circles, in my own words:

If your kid does something that you decide justifies you beating them, you’re not supposed to just reach out and hit them in the moment. You are supposed to ritualize it a bit. Take them somewhere else. Show them you’re calm, and doing the hitting from a place of reason and love. Shame them for a bit, then make them disrobe, or walk over to you and bend over. (Do they do this willingly, or do you force it on them? Oh, the nuances of child abuse!)

Then as you hit them, you’re not supposed to use your hand, that might cause them to flinch away from your hand in public, which would be awkward. Maybe use a spoon or a thin stick. It might not leave as many marks as something that would lacerate or bruise. Anyway, hit them until you feel better, or until you feel anything at all, and then (here’s the kicker) tell them you love them, and that god loves them and that next time if they obey you/god better, you might not beat them. Tell them that you’re hitting them because they made you hit them and that you’re hitting them for their own benefit.

I recently read a few stories the woman who considers herself my mother wrote (about me) that revolved around ‘spanking’ three year old me for the ‘sin’ of not doing exactly what she commanded me to do in a timely manner.

As her written notes go, on my third birthday, I didn’t put a train set away to her liking. So she beat me, and blamed god/me for the beating. The next time I put the train set away, I did it, through tears, in the exact way she wanted, and said “the lord gave josh obedience”, through tears. I wonder if this has anything to do with why I dislike to celebrate my own birthday, even 30+ years later.

The issue for her wasn’t that I didn’t put the train set away. the issue was I didn’t comply with her demand. She viewed her ‘authority’ over me as an extension of her fantasy of how God controls her, or how God controls a husband who controls her. Regardless, that whole chain of control is diminished if she doesn’t get the same level of control over the kids in her charge.

So, because the bible says ‘the wages of sin is death’, christians think ‘as long as I don’t kill someone, I can hurt them all I ~want~ deem necessary to ensure compliance’, and if I beat them more they’ll be more Christlike, and Sky Daddy will give them more nice things like he gives me, so I’ll threaten them all the more.

The concepts of punishment & discipline is abusive

deep breath

This section deserves its own article, I’ll get it there.

When I talk with evangelicals today, they can tell quickly how I feel about adults assaulting children. sometimes one might backpedal and say:

yeah, that form of violence is bad, I would not endorse adults assaulting children either. Of course, adults need to discipline children sometimes.

And I note a need to quickly register my strong disagreement. Now I can send anyone a link to this page, to the above anchor heading, if I want to say:

I think a willingness to concede “punishment” as a valid thing is definitionally an endorsement for supremacy or some other abusive ideology and I dont think you wanna be a supremacist or abuse others. Can we talk about it?

The softest way I can say it

Maybe a softer way is:

I clock something in your wording that correlates with the kinds of things people with power have said to justify the violence or neglect they point towards people with less relative power. I have found myself becoming a better advocate for the people I love when I’ve reframed and reworded some concepts. Could I tell you the story?

Maybe.

Discipline is punishment is retribution is revenge

So lets talk about “discipline” and “punishment”. These are propagandist terms for something better called “retributive vengeance” or “retributive violence”, ‘retributive justice’, etc. Wikipedia has an entry for ‘retribution’ it’s simply ‘punishment’. It’s very little different from revenge. Again, a simple reframe of ‘spanking’ is ‘adults revenge-hitting kids’, and it is much clearer.

Retributive justice is a legal concept whereby the criminal offender receives punishment proportional or similar to the crime. As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others, and employs procedural standards.

Retributive justice, wikipedia

So, retribution is slightly different from revenge, and we know revenge is kinda crappy. If parents were “hitting their children regularly out of a sense of revenge”, that seems suss.

Here’s the wikipedia definition of Punishment:

Punishment, commonly, is the imposition of an undesirable or unpleasant outcome upon an individual or group, meted out by an authority—in contexts ranging from child discipline to criminal law—as a deterrent to a particular action or behavior that is deemed undesirable.

Ick ick ick. Remember, to this person who doesn’t believe authority exists, all these words just round to open defenses of abusive ideologies.

It’s all obviously devestating to have this sort of contemptuous, exploitative energy unfold in the context of a family relationship. I was constantly being punished and disciplined by my dad who picked at my every move. (Remember, doctor/military officer/pastor type person). He was nothing if not coercive and evaluative, and he felt entitled to punish me, so he did.

I survived by running an emotional insurgency against him, and parts of myself, and it makes me angry to have had all these experiences.

How the emotional concept of discipline escalates to physical violence

It goes like this:

If I tell my child to do something, or to not do something, and they do not do it, or do it, unless I cause them pain and suffering, they will think it is acceptable to continue to disregard the injunction.

This “I have permission to cause them pain and suffering” hinges on the superstition of authority-as-a-thing, we might as well disabuse the system of both misapprehensions.

It takes a belief in authority + a belief in the concept of ‘punishment’, or ‘hurting others because you want to’, to justify making threatening statements:

If you don’t [put somthing away, do the dishes, take a shower], I will psychologically hurt you and I am willing to hit you if the psychological pressure isn’t enough.

Now, even if all the other person does is nothing, they are now in a position where you would be blaming them for the physical act of hitting them. This obviously hurts, sows great mistrust, rightfully.

So ‘discipline’ and ‘punishment’ means an adult arbitrarily increases the suffering and pain in a childs life, to try to ensure compliance later on.

Discipline and Supremacy

Discipline and punishment are inherently supremacist. Usually when someone says “discipline”, they mean “punishment”, and “punishment” is shorthand for ‘retributive violence’. The theory (as it works in patriarchal/authoritative/supremacist families) is simple:

if a “bad” thing happens, someone or something is offended, completely independent of the simple effects of that thing.

If I ask you to take out the trash, and you say no, the ‘bad thing’ is that the trash is still in the trash can.

If I tell you to “stop walking ahead” and you keep walking ahead, an evil act is done, the honor of the noble (me) is offended, and retributive violence must be meted out. To evangelicals, it’s never actually about the wrong act, it’s that a presumed authority figure (a parent, sky daddy) is displeased because the subservient person has treated the authority as an equal, and like any good noble from the middle ages, it is time to hurt someone.

The real concern is that the honor of the patriarch has been offended, because the property/possession of the patriarch has presumed a state of equality with the patriarch. To fix the offended honor of the patriarch, a further harm needs to be obtained - pain must be extracted from the willful individual, to enforce the concept of supremacy: “There is a hierarchy here, and you damned well better understand where you sit.”’⁹

‘retributive justice’ (revengeful violence) is propaganda justifying all sorts of the worst parts of human behavior. It underpins war, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, child abuse.

Yes, I am condemning the violent regime of social control some call ‘the criminal justice system of the greater united states’.

For all the money ~~wasted~~ spent by supremacists on that system, everyone could be housed and fed and given safety and security without coercion. Even the people who find themselves working the system as the oppressor. Yes, I propose housing, food, dignity, even to the people currently complicit in perpetuating the evils of that system. even deputized slave patrollers/police deserve shelter and food, because they are sentient.

Common objections

But Josh, if I don’t keep my children afraid of me with threats of violence, how will I force them to…

🤫

I won’t dedignify myself by considering you to be an advocate for your own children if you presume your chief role in their life is to bully and abuse them. I hope your children, for their own good, realize that they might not be under your control their entire life and they might someday be able to save themselves from you.

But Josh, it would be dangerous for my child to run into the road and get killed by a car, how will I prevent them from doing so without assaulting them?

Great question. Do you feel a sense of curiosity about how this thing could be accomplished without violence, and without threatening anyone with anything? I’ll take it seriously, because roads occupy some special place in my heart, and evangelicals use the threat of vehicular homicide to justify all sorts of control of their kids.

First, kids deserve far more access to safe roads than they’ve ever had in the USA.

In America, traffic violence is accepted by many levels of society, and children experience it from their first moments of life. Everything about the existance of a child is wrapped up in layers and layers of american car-centric supremacy.

Car seats, being stuck in car seats, at least in america. Lots of constraints around roads are experienced by children in the 96% of the world beyond the boarders of the USA, but the USA has a particularly special level of vehicular oppression. Constantly hearing cars. Seeing the cars with horrible sightlines and visibility, knowing the drivers of the vehicle cannot see the kid. Seeing light glinting and reflecting off cars, the movement of them attracting the eye. The smell of them. So much of the world being ‘parking aprons’ and parking spaces and parking lots and roads or walking between a parking space and the door of a building. walking in front of or behind a parking space. Being able to see almost nothing from inside a car seat. Motion sickness, even if the driver is good, but especially if the driver is jerky with the steering wheel or rushed/panicked on the gas and brake.

Being threatened with death every time a car is simply pointed at you, because very little space in America is properly protected by bollards (josh.works).

I’ve formally registered my objections with the concept of jaywalking, I extend this to kids, obviously. Kids, and the duty of play/playing, ought to have been preserved within American culture. Unfortunately the needs of kids and the needs of houseless people overlap too much, so spaces conducive to kids being kids have been eliminiated.

Shade in the summer, sun in the winter, comfort, quiet, water, a bathroom, a spot to lie down for a few minutes or a few hours, grass, trees, a place to sit, running water, a structure to climb on. A pile of rocks, a slide, a piece of art, a tree, a swing, some mulch and dirt.

By telling kids what they deserve, and sharing in the disappointment of the world they’re in with them, completely, makes a solid foundation for working with them to maximize their options in the dangerous world they live in.

I keep my kid safe in the road without ever blaming her for the potential violence she might experience. I tell her

in this country, most people drive very dangerously and would murder you without hesitation, though they would probably feel bad about it.

The greatest source of fear I feel for her is that in this abomination of a country, 40,000 people die every year on roads, and globablly, it’s like 1.2 million people that die, per year. This is wild! The USA went to a 20-year war over the death of 3000 people once. Since that date, around one million people in america have died on american roads from entirely preventable accidents.

It’s not that ‘individual drivers are bad’ it’s that:

building a road network entirely around supremacist ideals hurts the people they intended to hurt and people they did not intend to hurt, and literally all hope of progress is constrained by those people who accidentally or intentionally support those supremacists.

So, most of you that want to talk about roads and punishment with kids are, to me, not ready to have a real discussion about it, but I think the kid’s intuition is correct, and you could/should use your adult skills to help the roads be safer to them.

So, she is intimidated by roads, as I am also intimidated by roads. When riding her bike around, she always stops well short of intersections, waits for me to catch up, lets me pass into the intersection slightly ahead of her, once it’s deemed safe (we often work together on the timing piece) and then she crosses it quickly, finishing the intersection before I do. At least on most american roads - when the streets are quiet and safe, she’ll enjoy using them the same as anyone else does.

Another thought-stopping cliché you might hear offered about punishment or hitting kids relates to the kid reaching for something that will hurt them. All outlets could/should have covers, so there’s no issue with them exploring their favorite past-time, ‘putting things in other things’, right?

My dad, when I pressed him on assaulting me as a child, used the classic evasion “if the stove is hot and can hurt a child, who reaches for the stove, to keep them safe, I would have to punish them for reaching for a stove”.

This is the cry of a person who has no imagination. When there’s things Eden might learn regarding heat, I give her things to put in the frying pan to see how heat works. She’s watched me cook many times, seems to perfectly understand heat. I might help her hold her hand near a pan to test for how hot it is.

I might see if I can touch it for a split second to feel if it’s hot, and let her do the same. I scaffold her skills so she can learn to accomplish whatever it is she wants, with the skills and awarenesses to do so safely.

It’s ludicrously easy to navigate the world with a child without violence. It boggles my mind how invested parents are in reigning down violence and terror on their kids. I also happen to remember clearly how it felt to be terrorized by my parents, and the many ways I rejected every aspect of their need for control over me, and continue to reject every authority that meets me with an energy of “I believe I am entitled to coerce you, and you’re obligated to obey me”.

I’ve always helped kids defend themselves against this kind of energy, because it’s so familiar to me, and I’ve found in virtually all situations the kids respond reasonably, kindly, and treat me with dignity.

If you want to get along with your kids, read and internalize some messages about the fantasy of authority, then share these with your kids:

gee, josh, I’m not interested or willing to read books that might help me not abuse my child, or help me stand as an advocate for other children who are being abused by adults.

Ah. I see that you do not want to read these books.

I’m not a fan of this kind of thinking. I propose that you embrace the resistance, and then read the book(s) anyway, or at least recognize that your resistance might be rooted in something. It is possible that as you free your children from the shackles of your condemnation and control, you will do a little of the same for yourself. It might be worth it.

If you are your own child’s first abuser, and habituate them to think it is love, you are crippling them, destroying their ability to navigate the world and themselves safely, because abusive people and institutions abound, hungry for more bodies to consume.

Which kid do you think will be safer around other kids and adults?

The child who is occasionally humiliated and assaulted by a parent hitting them, who then tells them it is an act of love
The child who is told, with complete seriousness: “It is never acceptable for an adult to hit you, ever, and if anyone tries to do this to you, I hope you can evade, escape, or resist, and if you are able to communicate it to me, I’ll expend substantial resources to protect you from that person.”

And an adult who no longer hits the kid, but still controls and coerces them with emotional and verbal assaults, is only slightly better, maybe, than one who hits children. An adult who coerces and threatens a child is fundamentally unsafe. An adult who coerces and threatens another adult is fundamentally unsafe.

To the kids of parents who assaulted them:

How distressing it is to be terrorized by someone who then also convinces you that they loved you. It really causes the brain to break, and the psyche to attack itself (in some ways) and to dissociate from reality (in some ways) and to project/displace shame and anger towards oneself or others.

It’s virtually guaranteed you have something like “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder”. Please do not waste your time reading The Body Keeps the Score, instead read Pete Walker’s books Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and The Tao of Fully Feeling.

What gets unlocked if punishment and coercion are dropped

Parents who believe children exist to serve their ego and obey them issue admonitions to children nearly continuously. The entire tone of the relationship is dominated by the parental willingness to inflict violence. The parent is unable to “see” the child.

So, one thing that gets unlocked:

silence. Sometimes there is profound and extensive silence. If something is needed or noteworthy, parent or child will mention it. Otherwise, harmony, everyone is involved in their own thing.

interesting conversation. We have interesting conversations, regularly enough. Very reciprocal, back-and-forth.

curiosity. I express curiosity towards her, as a default, and especially when there is upset or pain. there’s never rejection of an emotion or sentiment. For instance, coercion cannot abide “no” or “don’t do that”. So, coercion cannot abide the anger that arises after that initial boundary violation. Since we have no coercion, there’s no need to suppress any emotions, it’s easy to greet all feelings warmly, and because there is no coercion, there’s a high baseline of peace and easy, confident expectation of problem-solving anything that arises.

one of the reasons I will never beat eden is I don’t view our relationship as one where I am entitled to control her behavior.

I seek her wellness, and thriving, easily, and view myself as someone who can help her accomplish and do whatever she wants to accomplish and do, because I have different skills and capacities than she does, but at no point am I entitled to simply control her simply because.

There’s genocide happening in the world, there are dangerous streets and loud engines and a coercive school system’s demands to comply, and there are limitations on schedules and people’s availability and it certainly seems like money is not infinite. All of these things are worth railing against.

When she says “I want {x}” I usually respond, truthfully, with something like “I think you have great taste. That sounds like it could be excellent.” and if it’s something we can do, we do it. Otherwise, it goes into a ‘that sounds nice and maybe we can do that/you can have that some day’ bucket.

Why punish kids for having good taste and liking to configure the world to their liking?

I will never see intentionally terrorizing her as a ‘useful tool’ to coercively extract compliance from her.

Would you believe that we have an extremely peaceful way of being, and interact with mutuality, consideration?

I am considerate towards her, and she is considerate to me. There’s obvious regard for each other in ways that people like my parents would never be able to appreciate, and I don’t think they would be able to even see it, really, even if they witnessed it, because they so willingly polute the intimate space of a relationship with coercion and violence.

no problem solving is achievable if one of the parties knows the other one will hurt them if they become suitably displeased.

Oops, I’ve “spanked” (abused) a child of mine in the past

If you’re reading these words, and you’ve “spanked” or “punished” your kid(s), a little or a lot, what to do?

OK, so, starting point is… my goal isn’t necessarily to be gentle with your ego. A fair approach is to first attend to the experience of the victims. Lets first concede the power of language. it’s not ‘spanking’ it’s ‘hitting and then creating intellectual or moral justification’.

The impulse to hit is tightly linked to attitudes of entitlement and obligation. We’ll talk about that more, I mention it now because I believe the most efficient avenue of repair with yourself and your kid(s) would be tot find and appreciate the fullness of attitudes of entitlement.

One hits someone else when one feels deeply entitled to that person submitting to them. Talk about that with your kid(s), perhaps. Solicit their experience of your overwhelming coerciveness.

It’s worth appreciating that settler colonialism has lots of entitlements to it, as does european american supremacy culture, and it’s all sorta connected.

the repair from the myth of the “correctness of spanking” is closely linked to walking out of a supremacy culture.

The alternative to entitlement/obligation is cocreation and mutuality.

Here’s some ideas on things that might contribute to a different and non-dominatior model of interactions with ones kids:

you will now not utter ‘spanking’ seriously again. Use ‘adults hitting children and then self-justifying’.
if you are willing to read some books, read The Verbally Abusive Relationship but from the lense of a child experiencing verbal abuse from their parent. (virtually all physical abuse is preceeded by verbal abuse & neglect)
read the taking children seriously website and tell any kid(s) around you that you’re reading it.

I am interested in not being complicit with people who abuse children or anyone else.

So:

Hi, [child], there were times in the past that I thought it was okay to use my size and role in your life to hurt you and scare you and control you, either with my hands or extensions of my hands, and my words and tone and emotions. I’d decided that it was appropriate for me to overpower you in in these ways, to force you to experience me as overwhelming, terrifying, hurtful.

That alone is pretty bad, but then I also further assaulted your sense of self, by trying to convince me/you that all the rage and hurt you felt about all this was wrong, because I told myself that that this mistreatment of you was loving, and that you’d brought it on yourself, rather than me creating every bit of this harmful and painful dynamic.

It is, in fact, terrible to intentionally hurt someone, for any reason, even in response to a ‘perceived wrong’. especially so when there is a power dynamic being exploited.

As a starting point, I am practicing the concept of taking children seriously, and am trying to bring mutuality and co-creation into my way of being. I cannot fully insulate us all from demands outside of us, which means we sometimes have to do things we don’t want to do, or I am sometimes unavailable to spend time with you, or we cannot have and do the things we want to have and do. however, I will no longer be making valid threats to extract compliance from you.

It might take me time to learn the new habits. Feel free to clock me when it seems like I’m heading in the direction of making a threat. I hope it doesn’t happen, and obviously these are all simply words. I recognize I destroyed precious things by inflicting pain on you.

Things might be strange around here as we adjust to this new state of affairs, I’m pleased for newness. There will undoubtedly be less/no more spanking, hitting, punishing, attacking. Clock me on it all.

On “Sin”

Usually evangelical parents won’t say “i beat my child whenever I feel like it” they’ll say “when {child} sins, I must discipline them”.

So strange, to believe in sin, now.

There’s bad things that people do, to themselves, each other, or to non-people (concentrated agricultureal feeding operations jump to mind), and those things need to be addressed, but the concept of sin isn’t needed to fix those harms.

my kid sometimes goes to a daycare at a church/school facility. She hears the normal set of evangelical thought-stopping phrases. I was raised on these, it’s really interesting to encounter them through her brain.

She’s quite reasonable in many ways.

She picked up the phrase “God keeps us safe”. We digested that a bit, eventually ended up with

in so many ways you keep yourself safe. And people around you can help keep you safe. But in many situations, you are making big contributions to your own safety. Walking safely, catching yourself skillfully when you fall or trip, riding your bike or running skillfully. Being aware, planning ahead, especially with roads. all skillfulness and awareness is a form of safety.

It’s not “thank god for keeping Eden safe” it’s “thank Eden for keeping Eden safe”. She’s attentive with her movements, her bike, roads. She is, literally, very responsible for her own safety. I obviously stay nearby when she’s with me, I work with effort to maintain her safety too, and appreciate her own skillful management of her own domains.

another time she said “jesus fixed my sins” or something like that.

I didn’t respond much. How interesting. I think she said it before she was 3 years old.

I remember my response, clearly. I said “how interesting it is, that there some people who think sin is a real thing.”

And that keeps being my general response. “How interesting it is, that some people think sin is a real thing. I wonder what else they think is real.”

The very first concept she brought with her, related to the concept of God:

God is so big

I could hear the kids songs in her language that her church camp makes her sing. There’s a kids song all about “god is so big, so this and so that”.

I said “hm, indeed. There’s so many big things out there. [looks around] That tree, and that mountain. That cloud. so much is so big.” We talked more about it, both a big god and bigness in general.

A few days later, at her school parking lot, when a HUGE suburban pulled in next to us, Eden said, in the same way she said ‘god is so big’, ‘that car is so big’. I laughed.

I just talk about ‘the evangelical’s god’ or ‘some peoples god’ or ‘the god of certain americans’ when I’m with her. It’s pretty graceful and ele

If you’re coming at me about someone elses sin, I’m just clocking you as a perpetrator or victim (or both) of settler colonialism and the intellectual self-justifications they spun around themselves. The concept of “sin” goes hand in hand with what Pete Walker might call “Toxic Shame”.

When someone says ‘sin’, I now hear ‘i am probably trying to get you to shame yourself into a regime of social control I’m about to tell you about…’ and I get so bored, so I leave.

Additional Reading/Resources

All of these count as parenting books, loosely. I find most parenting-specific books to be meh, and I find lots of parenting help stuff in non-parenting books.

taking children seriously
legal systems very different than ours, that link is the book, this link is the book online, shared on the author’s website. ¹⁰
The Politics of Jesus (josh.works) If you want to keep the person of Jesus central in your life, and you want to move away from european american supremacy, the ideas in this book are a good place to start. If, along the way, you end up also dropping the person of Jesus from your life as a central organizing principle, this book is still a good place to start. Here’s something else I wrote about this book: Was Jesus’ ethic normative? (josh.works)
The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity (goodreads.com) This book points to the origins of ‘paternalism’, which is the underlying intellectual support for the sense of ‘duty’ some adults feel around hitting children, and the obligation they think their kids have to receive their physical abuse without protest. It started as the ‘duty’ masters had towards their slaves to be ‘good masters’, and the obligation they felt their slaves had towards them to be ‘good slaves’. here’s some of my highlights from the book (goodreads.com)
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (goodreads) This book is relevant to the concept of ‘discipline’, because it’s full of accounts of white female slaveowners ‘disciplining’ the slaves around them, or showing shocking degrees of entitlement to the very personhood of someone else. That these people wouldn’t beat and abuse their own children defies reason. here’s some highlights of mine (goodreads)
The Secret Of Our Success, Joseph Henrich (still goodreads). An amazing book. Here’s a really nice book review (slatestarcodex.com). Not technically a ‘parenting book’, but tons of useful mental models for the transmission of skills, ‘skills/knowledge toolkits’ and more.
On Leaving Evangelicalism and Opposing it (josh.works)
Quotes from ‘Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse’ (josh.works)

Footnotes

I wanted at least one or two quotes from the book findable here, I might just paste a bunch of text to it’s own page soon. I could only get a paper copy of the book, so I cannot use my usual “highlight text on kindle and share entire quote automatically to goodreads” thing. Here’s some of page 60, a section titled BREAKING WILLS: more quotes here.
[Quoting someone else:]

The child can decide on his own when he wants the chastisement to cease. Whenever he is willing to submit to the parent’s will, he can profess his willingness to obey. He should be given the opportunity for an honorable, but unconditional, surrender [emphasis added].

In his book God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (1982), Larry Tomczak (a charismatic from a Polish Catholic background) describes a battle of wills with his eighteen-month-old son which took place in a parking lot. When his small son refused to hold his father’s hand, as he had previously been trained to do, Tomczak says that “He was defiantly challenging my authority.” He adds, “What followed in the parking lot was a series of repeated spankings (with explanation and abundant display of affection between each one), until he finally realized that Daddy always wins and wins decisively!” Apparently, only repeated acts of force could compel this small boy to submit to his father’s authority and comply with his will. But the issue of winning clearly was paramount.

Win or lose: These are seemingly the only alternatives available to such parents. No choice is offered children except to surrender their wills to the wills and superior force of their parents. In the warfare between parents and children, the parents expect to win. If not, the war continues until such time as the children submit and obey. Only by giving in to the adults can children escape the pain and suffering brought about by the application of the rod or other implements in the name of Christian discipline.

Whether thought of in terms of breaking wills or shaping them, the obsession with authority, control, and obedience remains paramount.

Evangelical writers have been preoccupied for centuries with authority and obedience, and the image of authoritarian family government often shapes their arguments in favor of harsh discipline for children. Early in the nineteenth century, one anonymous evangelical advocate of the rod offered this advice: “To insure, as far as may be, the proper behavior of his children, let every parent make it his inflexible determination, that he will be obeyed-invariably obeyed.” He added, “The sum and substance of good government is to be obeyed; not now and then, when the humor suits; but always, and invariably.” “The connexion between your command, and his obedience,” this writer noted, “should be the unfailing consequent of the other.”

more quotes here ↩
i note discomfort writing these words. Me saying “Spanking is child sexual assault.” is correctly heard as me saying “I asses [some of you] as sexually assaulting your own child(ren) every time you spank(ed) them”. Some have weasled: “oh, it was just a few swats on the butt”, or “we only spanked you sometimes” or “we stopped spanking you once you grew up to a certain age”.

Obviusly one might cease physically assaulting someone else as they age, and become more capable of resistance. a parent might ‘get got’ somehow. Evangelicals are brave about assaulting children, but are less comfortable with when the power dynamic is less imbalanced. I keep saying ‘the morality of this situation seems revealing by switching out some of the players, and seeing how it sounds.”. If i overheard someone saying about their partner “I dont hit them as long as they do not misbehave”, or “I only hit them when they do something that makes them really deserve it, I’d clock that as deeply concerning. ↩
most society-wide regimes of punishment are simple social tools to accomplish social control and ethnic cleansing, supporting the oppressor, reducing the power of the oppressed. Imagine having a bunch of people who speak a different language hop off a boat, kill a bunch of people, say they are instituting ‘rule of law’ and then you and your friends magically keep getting got by the police. European American supremacists showed up on Turtle Island in the 1600s and used the printing press + delusions of ‘political authority’ to justify their regimes of physical and economic violence, against literally every other people group existing in Turtle Island. Those particular european american supremacists of course also enslaved populations of people from Africa, and needed a bunch more ‘laws’ to justify and maintain the enslavement regimes. The first police departments in the greater united states were created in the slaveholding south by giving badges to (‘deputizing’) the existing slave patrols. read more at https://josh.works/jaywalking. ↩
Indeed, nothing my dad could say was eliciting from me the response he wanted. He was being defensive, all the way, on the rightness of beating children, and I was prolonging the discomfort he was experiencing as a result, and he feels entitled to psychological comfort. I think he experienced me as threatening, because I was forcing into his mind a very uncomfortable thing. Him as an abuser of children. So, rather than confronting himself as an abuser, he simply transformed the discomfort to ‘josh is making me uncomfortable and I deserve for him to make me comfortable, so I’ll simply ban him from my conciousness.’ ↩
my dad was barely ever in the house when I was growing up, and then from ~16 onwards, he and I never really voluntarily spoke again. Something similar with my mother. The contempt energy was strong from 16 and 17 years old, onward. She and I never had a close conversation. As I play back the last 35 years of our experience, I can tell clearly that they resented me, had contempt for me, from before literally my third birthday, until now. Nothing I said or did ever impacted them, they viewed me as ‘a strong willed child’ (more on that later) and thus viewed my will as something to be broken, and when I maintained my sense of self, despite their abuse, every evidence of my distinctiveness, my willfulness, confirmed in their mind that I was “rebellious”. 🙄 ↩
A delicious read that might fix all parenting woes for all readers: The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey ↩
Consider a read of the short book The Most Dangerous Superstition. It goes:

The primary threat to freedom and justice is not greed, or hatred, or any of the other emotions or human flaws usually blamed for such things. Instead, it is one ubiquitous superstition which infects the minds of people of all races, religions and nationalities, which deceives decent, well-intentioned people into supporting and advocating violence and oppression. Even without making human beings one bit more wise or virtuous, removing that one superstition would remove the vast majority of injustice and suffering from the world.

The book is about authority. Certainly do not pair it with The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey ↩
Supremacists use this justification for their supremacy all the time. Not “I want to be dominant over you” but “someone else, long ago, wanted people like me to be dominant over people like you”.

My father sometimes is in the company of my child, regrettably, so I once got on the phone with him to confirm that he knew he had no authority or basis to ever threaten my child with hitting, or to make jokes about hitting children in her presence. He reacted with indignance, not that he wouldn’t hit a child, but that only parents are supposed to hit kids, not grandparents, and he had the “luxury” of not being required by his god to beat my child. ↩
It was said in the family in which I grew up: “I could kill you and make another one just like you.” Mmm, thanks for affirming the inherent dignity of a person. I was so desirous of a modicum of affection from the man considering himself my father that I’d pretend it was funny. ↩
the “Pirate Law” chapter in particular is exceptional. Go to the author’s website to download each chapter at a time as a docx, or the whole book. Often when rule-enforces justify their coercion, they might say “I have no other option but…”. In reading this book, one’s imagination for problem:remediation ideas might be increased, after reading about legal systems beyond what is normalized within the the greater united states. my stance on violence is that not only is it inherently abusive, it’s also unbelievably lacking in imagination, compared to co-creation and mutuality. Unfortunately, if one cannot regard their own/other’s humanity appropriately, one might not be able to get this bit right. ↩

Quotes from 'Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse'

2025-02-01T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Here’s quotes from Spare the Child: The Religeous Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, by Philip Greven. It was written in 1989, same year I was born, 35 years ago as of 2025.

It’s sometimes nice to be able to share quotes with people. Photos of pages from books work only so well. Some books, many books, I’m able to read via my kindle paperwhite + the library. So it’s free to get on my kindle, and I can simply highlight text with my finger, save it as a highlight, and when I next sync books to it from the library, those quotes end up in my goodreads account, attached to the book. Sharabale, if I so choose. It’s how I get quotes like this. So paper books take a bit more work, but sometimes only a little extra effort. Until recently I didn’t know the above Goodreads/Amazon/Library book workflow and thought I had no way to get quotes off the kindle en-mass.

I invite you to skim, see what lands with interestingness.

From a section titled “Rationales”:

page 68

… child is crying, not tears of anger but tears of a broken will. As long as he is stiff, grits his teeth, holds on to his own will, the spanking should continue, 43

But how long is long enough? When will the child’s will be truly broken? What sounds indicate to a parent “not tears of anger but tears of a broken will”? Hyles [the author of the above quote] does not say. What is remarkable, though, is the imagery of breaking wills, for that language links him with previous generations of twice-born Protestants who also sought to ensure that their children had no wills of their own.

Often a distinction is made between a child’s will and his or her spirit. Roy Lessin, for example, declares: “A correctly administered spanking will break the rebellion and stubbornness in a child’s will but will not break his spirit.” James Dobson ¹ a psychologist and the director of the multimillion-dollar organization in California called Focus on the Family, whose books on child-rearing (especially Dare to Discipline, which has sold over a million copies) have been enormously popular among evan-gelical Christians, explores the issue of children’s willfulness in The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence, thus joining a long line of corporal-punishment advocates obsessed with the wills of children. As a man who believes that “pain is a marvelous purifier,” Dobson has no hesitation in recommending that parents use “spankings” to control and to suppress their children’s willfulness and rebelliousness.

The language of warfare is invoked at times in these treatises on will-breaking and punishment. Dobson, for example, uses the imagery of battles in his books such as Dare to Discipline, in which he notes:

The child may be more strong-willed than the parent, and they both know it. If he can outlast a temporary onslaught, he has won a major battle, eliminating punishment as a tool in the parent[‘]s repertoire. Even though Mom spanks him, he wins the battle by defying her again. The solution to this situation is obvious: outlast him; win, even if it takes a repeated measure.

Similarly, Fugate invokes the imagery of rebelliousness that arises from the willfulness of children:

If the child’s rebellion has been the defiant resistance of his parents’ authority, he should be chastised until he chooses to give in.

From a section titled “BREAKING WILLS”

The focal point of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant child-rearing always has been the emerging wills of children.* Breaking the child’s will has been the central task given parents by successive gen-erations of preachers, whose biblically based rationales for discipline have reflected the belief that self-will is evil and sinful. From the seventeenth century to the present, evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants have persistently advocated the crushing of the will even before a child can remember the painful encounters with punishment that are always nec-essary to accomplish such goals.

The theme of breaking children’s wills was voiced even before the Pilgrims had taken firm root in America. John Robinson, who had been their minister in Holland but did not accompany them on their voyage to the New World, acknowledged in his essay of 1628 on the education of children that “It is much controverted, whether it be better, in the general, to bring up children under the severity of discipline, and the rod, or no. And the wisdom of the flesh out of love to its own,” he rec-ognized, “alleges many reasons to the contrary. But say men what they will, or can, the wisdom of God is best.” Citing Proverbs to confirm his point, Robinson noted that

surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time, be built thereon. This fruit of natural corruption and root of actual rebellion both against God and man must be destroyed, and no manner of way nourished, except we will plant a nursery of contempt of all good persons and things, and of obstinacy therein. 37

Robinson’s language of breaking, beating, and destroying is no accident, as his advice concerning children’s willfulness makes clear:

* ⁠In For Your Own Good, Alice Miller extensively quotes German and other European sources from the eighteenth century to the present concerning the breaking and controlling of children’s wills. The texts’ interchangeability with those from English and American sources is indicative of the omnipresence of such views throughout both Europe and America for many centuries. They are so much alike that any reader who compares the quotations in this book with those in Miller’s surely will be conscious, as never before, of the pervasiveness of what Miller labels “poisonous pedagogy.”

For the beating, and keeping down of this stubbornness parents must provide carefully for two things: first that children’s wills and wilfulness be restrained and repressed, and that, in time; lest sooner than they imagine, the tender sprigs grow to that stiffness, that they will rather break than bow. Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own, but in their parents’ keeping: neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will” or “I will not.”

A century later, Susanna Wesley used the same harsh language while recommending a similar course of action to Christian parents in her famous letter to her son John: “To inform the understanding is a work of time, and must with children proceed by slow degrees, as they are able to bear it; but the subjecting the will is a thing that must be done at once, and the sooner the better,” she insisted. Her advice still resonates:

When a child is corrected it must be conquered, and this will be no hard matter to do, if it be not grown headstrong by too much indulgence. And when the will of a child is totally subdued, and it is brought to revere and stand in awe of the parents, then a great many childish follies and inadvertencies may be passed by. I insist on the conquering of the will of children betimes, because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual. But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents till its own understanding comes to maturity, and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind.

Subduing and conquering wills in the Wesley family required repeated infliction of painful beatings, beginning in the cradle and continuing throughout childhood, a process Susanna Wesley also recounts in considerable detail in this letter. Physical punishment clearly seemed to her indispensable to her aim of conquest.

[…]

[Philip Greven is quoting someone else:]

The child can decide on his own when he wants the chastisement to cease. Whenever he is willing to submit to the parent’s will, he can profess his willingness to obey. He should be given the opportunity for an honorable, but unconditional, surrender. [emphasis added].

In his book God, the Rod, and Your Child’s Bod: The Art of Loving Correction for Christian Parents (1982), Larry Tomczak (a charismatic from a Polish Catholic background) describes a battle of wills with his eighteen-month-old son which took place in a parking lot. When his small son refused to hold his father’s hand, as he had previously been trained to do, Tomczak says that “He was defiantly challenging my authority.” He adds, “What followed in the parking lot was a series of repeated spankings (with explanation and abundant display of affection between each one), until he finally realized that Daddy always wins and wins decisively!” Apparently, only repeated acts of force could compel this small boy to submit to his father’s authority and comply with his will. But the issue of winning clearly was paramount.

Win or lose: These are seemingly the only alternatives available to such parents. No choice is offered children except to surrender their wills to the wills and superior force of their parents. In the warfare between parents and children, the parents expect to win. If not, the war continues until such time as the children submit and obey. Only by giving in to the adults can children escape the pain and suffering brought about by the application of the rod or other implements in the name of Christian discipline.

Whether thought of in terms of breaking wills or shaping them, the obsession with authority, control, and obedience remains paramount.

Evangelical writers have been preoccupied for centuries with authority and obedience, and the image of authoritarian family government often shapes their arguments in favor of harsh discipline for children. Early in the nineteenth century, one anonymous evangelical advocate of the rod offered this advice: “To insure, as far as may be, the proper behavior of his children, let every parent make it his inflexible determination, that he will be obeyed-invariably obeyed.” He added, “The sum and sub-stance of good government is to be obeyed; not now and then, when the humor suits; but always, and invariably.” “The connexion between your command, and his obedience,” this writer noted, “should be the unfailing consequent of the other. “

Footnotes

I cannot believe it. This person, James Dobson, decades after Spare the Child was written (1989, same year I was born) came back into the life of my family (and possibly your family) via my parent’s participation in his cult during my own childhood. I overheard TONS of ‘focus on the family’ programming as a kid. ↩

On Scooters as a class of vehicle/tool

2024-12-18T13:00:00+00:00

Introduction

Often when I say “scooter”, especially in the united states, the person thinks of something different than what I mean. Here’s a recent post from the Sportique Scooters instagram:

source

This is the kind of vehicle I’m talking about when I say “scooter”.

I once had a vehicle just like this photo. The helmet I used (and still use) is not as charming as this helmet, unforunately, but it is a bit safer, and I want the best head protection I can get. ¹

There’s more to say about this kind of vehicle, and I’ve tried to, a few different ways. This page currently serves as “just” a jumping off point to other scooter-related resources.

Collections of writings about scooters

See, it’s not really about scooters, per se. It’s the verb of the thing. Scooters are different than cars, but the only reason it matters at all is because scooter-ing is vastly different than using a car, or a bike, or a motorcycle.

👉 https://josh.works/scootering

My tiktok has lots of footage from/about scooting, mostly of me experimenting with different aspects of showing trips from place to place, or how I might view a certain feature of american road design.

I’ve happily and comfortably ridden scooters around countries where nearly every motor on a roadway is attached to a scooter, and the driving norms are sometimes generous. It can be so peaceful. traffic flows very smoothly and at an incredible number of vehicles-per-minute through relatively low-square-meter intersections, in terms of land allocated to the intersection.

Footnotes

I always wear a full-face helmet of the “modern” style. An integrated sun visor is ideal, along with a clear visor that can be completely closed.

If you see some of my scooting videos you’ll have a sense of it.

These kinds of helmets are the most protective, provide the most protection from wind and sunlight and noise.

I also wear a disposable painters mask. It’s a heavy-duty N95 “Odor respirator”. Scooting makes one quite aware of air quality issues. Obviously there is plenty of vehicle tailpipe emissions, but also tire rubber microplastics AND metal dust from brakes, so there’s a lot in the air I want to keep out of my lungs.

Here’s what the internet has to say about these kinds of masks.

An R95 Odor Respirator 8246 is essentially the same as an N95 respirator in terms of filtering 95% of airborne particles, but the key difference is that the R95 is designed to be somewhat resistant to oil-based particles, while a standard N95 is not, making the R95 a better choice for situations where oil mists or fumes might be present; both are NIOSH-approved respirators.

fumes? brake dust? airborn bits of rubber? I’ll wear the best mask I can, please, and I’ll wrap my whole head in a bubble (inside my full-face helmet with a closed visor) of mostly un-moving air, with all the vents closed up, unless the air is super clean.

Here’s the exact 10-pack I last got off of Amazon. Once you try a nice mask like this, it might be hard to go back. Once I started getting choosy about masks, I started wearing them a lot. I appreciate that to smell a vehicle or be downwind of it while it’s changing its speed via brakes and thus increased rolling friction on the ground, or its changing its speed via the engine, and thus increasing the particulate shedding rate and tailpipe emissions, is to be sorta ‘bathed’ in a plume of emisssions. ↩

Practicing with Polylines Part 2 - Get Your Data (as a polyline) From Strava

2024-09-16T13:00:00+00:00

Last time, I did a minimum first pass on rendering a polyline on a map.

It wasn’t just any polyline, though, it was a path of a walk I went on. (Technically, just a fragment of a path).

this is a heavy draft, I’ve had issues getting this all working well in the past, still have to suss it today.

the dictionary definition of a polyline is ‘some string that decodes into lat/long pairs that can be traced on a map’. I’m interested in the lines I’ve always looked at, which were made by Strava, from a device on my person, while I was walking, or biking, or riding my scooter.

So it’s data, but it’s also extremely-specific-to-me location data, and it obviously has the capacity to be fascinating.

My data is likely to be boring to you, though.

What might not be boring would be your data.

You could go on a walk right now, with the Strava app running on your phone, save the activity, and a moment later be looking at a map with that new activity data rendered upon it.

Lets do just that. Like any good thing on the internet, there’s others who have done this thing in a concise and better-than-i-could way.

These were my first sources and inspiration for this project:

Today, I’m going to try to ‘quickly’ get a working auth ‘thing’ set up, close-enough to a copy/paste ruby script, so you can run a script or run some ruby commands in an IRB terminal, and get your data back from Strava, including any activity data polyline strava has.

The goal being a polyline you can copy and paste, yourself, into a html document and get a cool map, showing off a walk or journey you went on yourself. It’s strongly based on Mark Needham’s stuff.

First, download the Strava app (android/iphone whatever: https://www.strava.com/)

Create an account, and then go on a ten minute walk while tracking that as an activity in the strava app. Finish the walk, end the activity. It’ll upload to Strava, and now we can use the Strava API to get that activity data back out and look at.

You can keep working through this guide without activity on your Strava account, so maybe plan on taking a ten minute walk in the next hour or so.

Set up a ‘strava application’

Strava has apps, and you can give those apps permissions at a per-app basis. You’ll set up an app that you’ll then give permission to know certain things about your data.

So, to make the app account, and get your account id/ key, head to the developer settings. go to https://www.strava.com/settings/api and follow the prompts to get an API application set up.

When you have your client_id and client_secret available, you’re ready to continue.

We might use https://github.com/dblock/strava-ruby-client at some point.

Authorize the app to access your strava data

You’re going to need to generate a token (a refresh token and )

We’re going to do some creative things. Paste this into a pry session.

do gem install 'strava-ruby-client' first.

Then, fire up a pry session or irb session in your terminal. I recommend a text file where you can keep text for copy/paste accessibility. Copy the below text into your own blank file, update the client_id and client_secret variables (don’t commit any of this to github, you can make it an environment variable later. Or now.)

require 'strava-ruby-client'

client = Strava::OAuth::Client.new(
  client_id: "id",
  client_secret: "secret"
)

redirect_url = client.authorize_url(
  redirect_uri: 'https://localhost:4000/oauth',
  approval_prompt: 'force',
  response_type: 'code',
  scope: 'activity:read_all',
  state: 'magic'
)

this did not work:

https://www.strava.com/oauth/authorize?approval_prompt=force&client_id=63764&redirect_uri=developers.strava.com&response_type=code&scope=activity%3Aread_all&state=magic

this worked:

https://www.strava.com/oauth/authorize?client_id=my_client_id&response_type=code&redirect_uri=http://localhost/exchange_token&approval_prompt=force&scope=activity:read_all

Look in the URL for “code” variable, and carry it on to the next step, where we give Strava this code, it’s treated as a ‘refresh token’, and if we give strava a refresh token it’ll give us back a valid access token that can then be included in the request authorization of every subsequent API call, and we’ll get back data for the strava account identified by that access token. This is all ‘just’ ‘basic’ auth stuff, but it can get tricky sometimes.

require "uri"
require "net/http"

url = URI("https://www.strava.com/oauth/token?client_id=YOURCLIENTID&client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET&refresh_token=REFRESH_TOKEN&grant_type=refresh_token")

https = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
https.use_ssl = true

request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url)

response = https.request(request)
puts response.read_body

# look at the response before continuing, save the `access_token`

In following that link, and approving the app, you’ve given your own app access to your Strava account data. Finish the oauth “flow” to view your data.

With that code, in Postman you can now make a request.

To see if it works, you can also paste this into an IRB session:

require "uri"
require "net/http"

url = URI("https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/")

https = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
https.use_ssl = true

request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url)
request["Authorization"] = "Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN_FROM_PRIOR_STEP"

response = https.request(request)
puts response.read_body

boom. Look at your activities! The polyline(s) might be visible now. If so, phenominal! Save them to a text file, or a CSV, manually or automatically.

To get the detailed polyline, and not just the summary polyline, you need one more request:

require "uri"
require "net/http"

url = URI("https://www.strava.com/api/v3/activities/YOUR_ACTIVITY_ID?include_all_efforts=true")

https = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port)
https.use_ssl = true

request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(url)
request["Authorization"] = "••••••"

response = https.request(request)
puts response.read_body

Does that work? I hope it does for you. It worked for me.

Practicing with Polylines

2024-09-10T13:00:00+00:00

This is a first pass at trying to do something interesting (repeatedly) with the same base primative, in this case, a “polyline”. Read the rest of this post, understand what we’re going for, then go to part 2: get your own polyline from strava. It’s not trivial to get, but its interesting data, and you’ll have an abundance of polylines, if you want them.

The polyline in question I got from Strava, after recording a scooter ride:

This post should be interesting to programmers and non-programmers alike. A polyline is a way of encoding a bunch of latitude/longitude pairs, so it can be drawn in detail on a map.

Here’s what the polyline looks like, raw:

oops, in a browser this string simply disappears off the side of the page. Here’s what it looks like in an editor:

u}pqFttt_S@NFNB?JA@@DIH@@CEEBAPAFBHK@@FEf@??FLEPA\?LD@CECDI?BBEH?DHLCT@BLBtB?@FADDDMADC@BJEIBAEMA@AC?HKACDDAHQEMA{@?e@BCR@FBJ?DBJAHB`@AF@LAHE~@?FEJLVC\?DNBA@BFBBAPMJAP@NCBE?CIO@Cn@Fl@Cj@BDEDBFALDN?^?HILCRHNAVD~@?XKz@k@HSBWHKVOD?b@VJBHA?KCQBi@n@Sp@e@`AMHIJDZB^?\KPKVYLq@f@i@Nm@L}@Cg@Q_AMWDH?CUa@g@YCEBGJQ`@]Eu@AA?HAG?f@CFSZITDHXXJPN`@BBAU}@s@_A][EEBAA?OEA}@JQL@F?EMAKLKBEFPd@Ma@QBA?D@EHKBKJKDILEGHe@@WAAEA@BBCADD@ABCK@UCW@IRO\GDGLABBF?TGD@TI^GX?@EDBJCNBFCLDHJLMBBBCL@NFDC@MH?JN@X@BD?NIJBh@SZ@HK@BVA@CDALDHHRAHBZBFEBYFO?MBSAECHDPANOIOC?CJIFDFB@DDEEA?DC?B@ALLKADACADC@AC@@GBAA?ECBARDPBKEHDA?IEA@@?C@F@AB?@FCKAF@D?C@@EC@A?BCC?E@P?CCB?GFAGB@CAA?BC?D??D@K?AAB@@AAC@@EDACD?CBBABCA@CADACB@CAC_@@UCKAABGAUAEICAEBa@FU@_@@ED?^BDA@IEQ?k@FCF?DBBGEOCWCAMAG]EAKBADGECECa@Bk@Dc@EaBDQE?CGD_@PIH@LHD?@BIFEEOAf@CDAAI@DBEF@IC?B?CFFDBBFF@LC@ICEQE?B?M@LCAD?EDAC@A@DA@FKACGCFBABCAEIHDB??DCABB@AEGDFEABFAC?CABECJHGBDXXPD`@L@HBDZ@NAJC@O?DOD@CM@BBABNAHEBI?GEKAM?QDDCL?RBJ?HIBKISR@CHBACBECDDG@BB?C@FCGKrC@\?BCABB@\?d@@@?C@H@AC?CF?\GFK?G@EA?CG?gABQFCFCn@Ft@JDT?BFBKNBEGGE?EGAMD@EJQBBFIJGB?@FAFC@B@ABHQ@BMN?H?KCA@@@A@@ABAAHEA?@B@GDCI@?BAEABCA?CB?CBBHGCB?CCBFC?@E?@BC?BCD@CC?BAA@?E@?@AC@AF@??C@G@LEEWFD??FHALD@DGF]CMR@SCAABDADDC@AEED@ADABDCBEA?@?CDAEB?NCCBEABBBDPXJFFDGJ?RGBEB@\R^LHJJ@d@Kb@E^MD?@@C@@IABDEDBj@?~@GNBJANDr@?TDXNNPPd@Fz@Gz@?f@BZAVBb@Cf@@HELG@?EDB@ADHBrBDz@KpA?~@Kv@a@|@_@Va@`@G?KES[KGKWGEa@CQEBDk@CYBKDc@XSAODUA]DSC[Bk@Ck@BUAUDIAAAUFQIYCIMK]MAODEDAGDBC?CIBUECE@DEACCFD@ACADE@AEFFGMFA?@IAI@AGBMCE@HBBKBG?DCDKLCG@@IBA@MZWA@?CGGCAAGKUAK@MCKIGM_@IA@KDEC?CHAAAD@BB?CA?B@CHJADBBCCC@CNGFBHJJMCC@DT?F?AF@FH?HGXBTFNKPFAAAG@CD?E@DH@@EAIDD?ACCFDDLGB?FELAAC?CMA?BJBMEKA?@A?DJHE?CCCFCAJED@ACA@@EHXFC?EEACKFQ?EEAM@AFC@L?LUHXD?ABCCCFAC@B@GKG?KOUAKKIq@RCD@DHB?@CBVUPo@D?A?BDNQCS@GDQHMCHDIJq@HMBMDI@KC??DBCH?EO?CBACKL_@HI?KCXICJMFS?GGCID@PPQA@GEE?HDHKHC^DBABGLENA@CFe@CMCk@CACD@BCAEIBMB@BGHCB@EM?KBI\CNBPYEGGB?MCCCLG?@CCHG@EE@CFA?DSFAJBEEDBXCF?V??@E@MFCOi@?KDCB@?FIB?BB`@CN?ADDHY@a@AAADEBAD@HFEC?@CEA@EB@AG@BPEJ@CGOGQ\AIDCA@EYBMFKH?E^BXAHAAGQFB@ACC?HHIDKC?@BDGB?@FGDE?CKCDAG?FHUYEIDBRHBDF?C?DAGBO?KD[KUEBIABDE@WAIBF?M?ADDv@D@FE?FHGJBBH?RDD@MGOGG?IB@C@@ABF@LHLJBFABKCIBJE@@BG@IJO@?BB?CDB\DVCDCME?@L@FAB?IFL@J?NEL@X?CCPCAADKAEBWOIBO?a@OG?OQQGG@ML@LEJCZ@@AD@AGJI`@EFCABA@BCH?CMJOBENIp@CDAHEDAAIDMH@@I@?B@AJF@PEFQDC?@@D?WHYRo@R?DQDKRQJG?UFIAm@HOEACDBABE??FIE@AJABKOJGNKACFFdBADG@@BEAZAp@KdCCRG@?AB@CDHLA^Dv@Gd@BNEDUJUBQDID?Ae@C?IBECCC@FGPDTKBIKVy@?UFQF]GMKK[QMAOFYVE?OHO@ULSRGBSb@^r@RXJDXD^ALBhAEDWCI?SC?EBCJ?JDEE@B@BCACC??BDEB@C@FC@CM@GFAABBNKFK@@G?KBIL@@XMDIGH@@BA?OMGMFGFYh@CNAAAEADIDIGSA[HUCGEQ_@_@Y_@q@c@NEDUD]LI?MC}@@e@GUAGDEXUXg@Xa@NGFc@AOBY?k@Ig@Fq@A]DCDc@AY@GGQD_@@GLC@eA@OCqCG}@HO?ICc@DYGMBEEM?MLSE_@?SDm@EO?IDGEG?KFFl@?n@K@QC]@OAKFAFFh@I\?HDBTCBCEAE@@F@B?Da@PJEKAACDAVWd@[??ALBFNIWHDA@FFA?GGABICC?@s@FSAj@@J@BFCEQCs@DLGH?GBF?C@F?EAB?C?BACAC@?CCBBDHBFAOABA?ACASDH?BBFA@CBBH?KGM@HAMABDF@ICB?EEDDC@?AFAGAB?AAC?D?AB@AO@JDcCP|BWF?DFCGAB@EDLEKFD?@IGF?ED?CAAFHAEA@ACCFECC@?CIDBEGGABBBJAH@@CSDREBMGJB@CAB@AAABBBCGABB??BCBUJFKB@C?CCTIYDEFFEZAICWJAKD@HEF@AB?EDDAHHKCGOJ?BHCENNM@EA?AAD?C@?C?D?E?B@AA??A?DH??BKC@C@DCE@D?EBBCCM@F?AAFBAA@?C@@BA?BCA?@??CA@@AA?@@?A?@@AA?@?CA@BGEI@ABR?KHB?ACF?CIFWIFADB?JEKHDDECDE@HIDFA?MABD?GNEDNQCC@@GDE?BAFA?BD?MBCBBAAAFKA@@FAA@C@BCBI@DEBAABB?@AAE?BC?@EB@GADD?@AA@BGSFRAA@A?H@AAECJEFFE@M?H@AAI@BDAG?@@AC?@CABB?A@?A@@EC??CC?F?CJB?CACB@?E?AGFECBEEHB@FABACJ@BCC@KKC@BGF@A@ACDFAF@DAI?@E@DGDA?@CBCAADBG?BAAAFEAF@AAEBB@?EC@P@BBI@EKBKC?AHBFCK?DBBHAGAADO@H??BD?C?@ADBCGD@YJXAIKBA?EGFBG?B@CA@AC?BC@CCDC?ADAEJB@ACC@B@CBN?EC?BGD?FBEI@B?@IM@G?NIH?DDIIHD?EAD?ICBIAHACDBBA?H@EBLAO?BAG?BCC@B@GED?ABFB?D@CEADEM?AABCDDKAL?CBBA@FEC?CI?B?A??EB@EALBABBC?BE@DAA?@@A@BAD?E@D?WDF?FE?BEAFBCABAA@ECDBCEEDB?ACD?ABDAIBD@AABAC?BAI@F?AGC??@DAC@DDA@BCCBE?AIH@@J@AADB@?KE?DFC?EEKCD?ADD@AA@AD?E@BAGCL?G?A@@ABBE?@EIAL@AB@BAG@@CAF@O?@@C?@@DA?CC@B?C?@A@?CB?EB?CAD?SAh@FK?MCMBF@?@B??EBCD?OABCNBKB?BH??CL@Q?@E@FC@HBI?AAE?HAAAGBFB?DB@GCBCEAH@G?B@CBDCA?BAAA??G@FA?CC@BAGAIBT@QBl@GKAO@B?A?F@UBD@BAI?FMCNBOEHDEKDJIMDFBWDTBDC@GAAB?ECF@EF@GCJBMCF@EAHACF@HCG?F@K?@DE?BMFDCAACUBRACBN@QDDACGBAI?H?C@B@?I[JH?A@NCKCS?P@VE@@@J[MJ?HFEDYAN?@E@@FCL?FCK?QBJ@O@b@@MIM@LDICJE@KA@@@AFG@DFE@@@E?AE@?CCBAI?FJF?E??ICEF?C??HCABC@F@CC??CE@FAAE?D@AC?@@F?G@@DC?AE@@?@@AGAH@A??C@?A?CBFEIB@?CED@AECHB?C?FCCAB?AB?CA?@@ADCARAG?BBIAD@A?DEIFFCG@BEB?E@?AEHDE?ECB?DBAG?DAA@B@@AEA?C@BEDD?@E?BBAAC?BC?AED@GDDE?BBC?BGCLGM@A?FACHEEBAE?D@A@D?A@?CD?M@F?A@HBCA@GCB?CC@D@C?@@A?@B?ADCICCDD@@CBHOAJAAAB?@EG@FNAA?EEAA@BCC?FACEB@E@BAAE?FCBJEC@B@SBLD?CEADDDCI?BA?CCA@??B@CB??BCB@AAAB@CAB?C@@CB@C@B?I?@?@BGAJIE?DEEAHFE@A?BCE@J?CAD?A?@AG?@@ECHDOB?BHDCA?G@?A@FAG@?@D@KJDEACBABC@@C?@BEAD@?@CABB@CK?HCKDB?A@BEB??@CABAAAEDHAGADA?CC@@@C?EB@?AABB@C@@C?BAAAJ@C?EADAEAA?F@EAD?IDDAEAD@A?@?@AE@BA?@C@B@ABEABCCADACBG?J?B?CA@?C?ACD@BAC@@ACA@BC?ECB@C@D@C@DAEAF?@@A@EA@CB@E?FAIDECE?ABCA@ANDBAEAD@CC@CC?D?E?EDNBC@@B?EEA?@B?G?DAADAA@CHA@@E?ABCABAA?DB?@CC@CBBE@D@CADAEA@EA?@@A@@HI@DIA??ED??BC@@CCABEACGDC?@A@BH@?DC@JBECDCGCBCG@IA@?C@@@BAACD?BCEABABBAHLB?GC@?FQCFA?ARFEBD?OAFACDCA@CG@F@C?CE@A?BD?C@AAH?@CK@D@FAACBA?CEBB@@AQADACDG?L?ACA?DBCFDBABJ?KEEEI@HADB@AACG@B?@@A?BAAANCB@E?AFE@B@E?JCCB@@CA@C@?A?BAAC@?I@?DI@BB@CCA@EEE@@?F@A?B@A?BDA?CA?@AK@B?DIE@BFB?EBBAC?D?BA?ACAB?C@D?@D?ICACBHDGDEAEGG?T@GI@?C@CAABF@DCE?D?A?@@C?D@BA@?A@C?@BE?BBA??@B@ACB@EA@AD@KAPBKE@??@C?DACCB@C??@DBEADDEA@BA@B?G?CCD?C@@CBAGCBAI@?BF@AC@@A@@AEAAEC?DBA??AA@D?BKOAPBM@LBC?D?K@L@C?@B@?CCJ?ICE@FAGAJ@O?@AC?BA@BF@M?AGCCD?OCA@DBNDEAAJ@A@BAEDBIGDA@@E?BDCEAD?AD?CA@ADFAGA?B@QMLFBBA@?AEBACHAG@@??B@C@@C@BB@CEB@EC?DABFEC?@@ACE?BACIAB??BAADCAC?BC@B@?@E@F?@@CEDAA@?CIAJ@A@E@J?K?D?C?PFMAFDJ@ECFA?AQMOH@?AE@BDAA?B@FCADB@C@A@?CBC@@GA@AABBCDDC@B?ACQ?H@?BC@E?PEAABAC?ABCCBECDHFMBBEK@C@@BPGD@Q@AF@@BCLSDAA?@@KBB?CD@AGBJAQ@DCRAI@CE@@GBD??EDAJDCFYCGCCBLCCC@BHAC@B?A@DECBB@CA@AAB@CA@B?AAABBA?@AA?@W@NCC?@?EFa@DFIAA`@??GPCEBBDCACBBAA?@?ACABB@?GCDB@C?@AF?M@BA@D?CC@HCCB@?AC@C?@BAI@DCMCE@BLB??FC@BCCQPGJ?EFMD@HFGCAF@MD?ABCH?S?@DDDBAG@@G@??EC@CAB??BFI@?EDE@@FFS@BCDG?CDCCJD?DCA@CCGBCDBCA?B@ELDCEHBGA?@D?EAEDBCAAC@?BEBMEREB@KDBCF?C@DCC?AE@DDGG?KFGALCB@AB?AB?G?F@ZGKAYHVGB?ODEAAJD@?FB@BCACEC@CABE?@CC?IMFVL??IE??@AA?@?EC?B??D?E?@@A?BCC@FBDAE?DB?GK@??@?AAA?B?C@?@NDCCFBEFEEGM??BD@A@E?FCMCE?J?@BBCI@HCD@I?ABD@?C?BCAF@M?ABBBFAAA@BBAC@?EBBCAIBBKDACA?@E?BBAEEDICNBO??CD?BBGBB@F@CCBCG?B?ADFFBCC@BI@@CCDDI@@ACAAGQFJADBDGB@ECC@PFGDIATCE@ICBCD@AAE?C@@@C?AAHAIILAJDQ@A?FBABQ@?DC?LA@KC@B?@?ACBAE?ABB@KBB?CAPAE?@AGAH@C@?DB?ACFAAEK?J@M?GBD?ADBAABHACEBAFDK@D@O@EC@AECHCJ@C?D?ACDAGFDB?ACCGB@@M?b@?I@DFD@?ED@CCH@Q@EA?A@@C@QESH?IJ?VEDIDCYBTGUJLADDCGBFA??DAEBECGCBHDJ@I?Gn@?YH?CEEBEA?ADAEFE@AAFEB?BFCFGHECEO@GNGCEGBC?FKJD@HDBV@HIKAOFIC?BHBBAI?DCACKGE@?@FBEFAKKMHAK?R?SCNB?BHNADB?BFFBD?c@GHEBEA@QAMBF?\JAEG@@CH?BEMAHIEBCK?BD@GTBDGGJGGBBC@??EFHYAHAA@BBPD?EKE?@ACB@CBBCA?@??CAB@@@AEA@?AB?CBBAC@DEABBC@BAA??GDDAB@GC??@?CCDBEBB?DCI@B?CABAC@@A?@??AAB@C?D?E?B@CA@B@C??A?@BAA??DC@@CC?BE

That string is suuuuper long. The only way to get it on your clipboard is to triple click it, highlight the whole thing, ctrl-c. You could then paste it into a polyline decoder. I googled my way to this one: https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-convert-encoded-polyline-to-latitude-longitude-list.htm, and see all 3321 lat long points. Here’s a snippet of what some of it might look like:

update, using a different polyline than what I started this whole thing off with - it was maybe giving me issues.

72873,-105.00070
72877,-105.00071
72882,-105.00062
72894,-105.00062
72898,-105.00060
72904,-105.00051
72904,-105.00040
72908,-105.00035
72925,-105.00034
72929,-105.00030
72930,-105.00024
72932,-105.00038
72933,-105.00039
72951,-105.00032
72967,-105.00032
72971,-105.00027
72979,-105.00020
72992,-105.00015
72999,-105.00005
73016,-105.00005
73020,-105.00004
73031,-105.00007
73039,-105.00006
73043,-105.00002
73043,-104.99993
73040,-104.99989
73032,-104.99991
73033,-104.99996
73024,-105.00000
73018,-105.00000
73016,-104.99998
73023,-104.99993
73037,-104.99995
73037,-104.99992
73036,-104.99997
73033,-104.99999
73032,-105.00005
73030,-104.99999
73027,-105.00000
73029,-105.00001
73028,-105.00000
73029,-104.99998
73032,-104.99993

Those lat/long pairs are not super useful to look at, so to make a polyline ‘useful’/viewable, you need a map. (and html and javascript, including one very specific JS package, I suppose, and global supply chains of computing technology and the internet!)

One can pop the polyline into Google’s polyline decoding utility to see it rendered. Here’s what the original polyline I was working with looks like:

If you plot the polyline above (triple-click, ctrl-c, paste) you might see activity data from Denver, I went on a multi-hour walk with my kid through the local park and botanic gardens. More about those later.

If you don’t see that data, maybe there’s some issues with the copying and pasting.

Now, lets do something interactive, close to what google is doing there under the hood.

I’ve used Leaflet before, and mapbox, a little, so I’m going to start with those.

Lets render a bare map, but open it up to about where the polyline will go. I’m sorta writing this blog post top down. Lets add a map, and initialize it.

Following the Leaflet quick start docs, and soon making use of a js/leaflet plugin that lets us decode polylines directly via L.Polyline.fromEncoded(polyline). I was stressing about how to add JS without something like NPM, but then realized I can source the file directly in the head of the document

Open up a new file on some directory - maybe leaflet_practice.html

We sourced there css, then JS, then added a div for a map, did a tiny bit of styling, and minimum JS. Telling the map to open on Denver’s approx lat/long.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.css"
     integrity="sha256-p4NxAoJBhIIN+hmNHrzRCf9tD/miZyoHS5obTRR9BMY="
     crossorigin=""/>
<!-- Make sure you put this AFTER Leaflet's CSS -->
 <script src="https://unpkg.com/leaflet@1.9.4/dist/leaflet.js"
     integrity="sha256-20nQCchB9co0qIjJZRGuk2/Z9VM+kNiyxNV1lvTlZBo="
     crossorigin=""></script>

<div id="map"></div>

<style>
    #map { height: 180px; }
</style>

<script>
    var map = L.map('map').setView([39.742043, -104.991531], 13);
    L.tileLayer('https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
    maxZoom: 19,
    attribution: '&copy; <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a>'
}).addTo(map);)

And here’s what that renders:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://rawgit.com/jieter/Leaflet.encoded/master/Polyline.encoded.js"></script>
^------- this line is a critical addition

There we go! It worked! A basic map. Pinch and zoom and pan. Cool, huh? Lets add the polyline next. We’ll assign to to a variable, and ask Leaflet to decode it and add it to the map.

edit, that was really hard, what you’re about to see is a much smaller version of what I’d planned to do. It’s just a tiny fraction of the whole polyline, arbitrarily cut off at one end. I’ll explain what I did below.

bleh, I didn’t even get the polyline directly encoded/decoded, I had to do an interstitial bit where I was working directly with lat/long pairs, as retreived from the decoder. Dang.

Here’s what I did:

var map2 = L.map('map2').setView([39.736532, -104.977459], 17);

L.tileLayer('https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
maxZoom: 23,
attribution: '&copy; <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a>'
}).addTo(map2);

var encodedPolyline = JSON.stringify("u}pqFttt_S@NFNB?JA@@DIH@@CEEBAPAFBHK@@FEf@??FLEPA\?LD@CECDI?BBEH?DHLCT@BLBtB?@FADDDMADC@BJEIBAEMA@AC?HKACDDAHQEMA{@?e@BCR@FBJ?DBJAHB`@AF@LAHE~@?FEJLVC\?DNBA@BFBBAPMJAP@NCBE?CIO@Cn@Fl@Cj@BDEDBFALDN?^?HILCRHNAVD~@?XKz@k@HSBWHKVOD?b@VJBHA?KCQBi@n@Sp@e@`AMHIJDZB^?\KPKVYLq@f@i@Nm@L}@Cg@Q_AMWDH?CUa@g@YCEBGJQ`@]Eu@AA?HAG?f@CFSZITDHXXJPN`@BBAU}@s@_A][EEBAA?OEA}@JQL@F?EMAKLKBEFPd@Ma@QBA?D@EHKBKJKDILEGHe@@WAAEA@BBCADD@ABCK@UCW@IRO\GDGLABBF?TGD@TI^GX?@EDBJCNBFCLDHJLMBBBCL@NFDC@MH?JN@X@BD?NIJBh@SZ@HK@BVA@CDALDHHRAHBZBFEBYFO?MBSAECHDPANOIOC?CJIFDFB@DDEEA?DC?B@ALLKADACADC@AC@@GBAA?ECBARDPBKEHDA?IEA@@?C@F@AB?@FCKAF@D?C@@EC@A?BCC?E@P?CCB?GFAGB@CAA?BC?D??D@K?AAB@@AAC@@EDACD?CBBABCA@CADACB@CAC_@@UCKAABGAUAEICAEBa@FU@_@@ED?^BDA@IEQ?k@FCF?DBBGEOCWCAMAG]EAKBADGECECa@Bk@Dc@EaBDQE?CGD_@PIH@LHD?@BIFEEOAf@CDAAI@DBEF@IC?B?CFFDBBFF@LC@ICEQE?B?M@LCAD?EDAC@A@DA@FKACGCFBABCAEIHDB??DCABB@AEGDFEABFAC?CABECJHGBDXXPD`@L@HBDZ@NAJC@O?DOD@CM@BBABNAHEBI?GEKAM?QDDCL?RBJ?HIBKISR@CHBACBECDDG@BB?C@FCGKrC@\?BCABB@\?d@@@?C@H@AC?CF?\GFK?G@EA?CG?gABQFCFCn@Ft@JDT?BFBKNBEGGE?EGAMD@EJQBBFIJGB?@FAFC@B@ABHQ@BMN?H?KCA@@@A@@ABAAHEA?@B@GDCI@?BAEABCA?CB?CBBHGCB?CCBFC?@E?@BC?BCD@CC?BAA@?E@?@AC@AF@??C@G@LEEWFD??FHALD@DGF]CMR@SCAABDADDC@AEED@ADABDCBEA?@?CDAEB?NCCBEABBBDPXJFFDGJ?RGBEB@\R^LHJJ@d@Kb@E^MD?@@C@@IABDEDBj@?~@GNBJANDr@?TDXNNPPd@Fz@Gz@?f@BZAVBb@Cf@@HELG@?EDB@ADHBrBDz@KpA?~@Kv@a@|@_@Va@`@G?KES[KGKWGEa@CQEBDk@CYBKDc@XSAODUA]DSC[Bk@Ck@BUAUDIAAAUFQIYCIMK]MAODEDAGDBC?CIBUECE@DEACCFD@ACADE@AEFFGMFA?@IAI@AGBMCE@HBBKBG?DCDKLCG@@IBA@MZWA@?CGGCAAGKUAK@MCKIGM_@IA@KDEC?CHAAAD@BB?CA?B@CHJADBBCCC@CNGFBHJJMCC@DT?F?AF@FH?HGXBTFNKPFAAAG@CD?E@DH@@EAIDD?ACCFDDLGB?FELAAC?CMA?BJBMEKA?@A?DJHE?CCCFCAJED@ACA@@EHXFC?EEACKFQ?EEAM@AFC@L?LUHXD?ABCCCFAC@B@GKG?KOUAKKIq@RCD@DHB?@CBVUPo@D?A?BDNQCS@GDQHMCHDIJq@HMBMDI@KC??DBCH?EO?CBACKL_@HI?KCXICJMFS?GGCID@PPQA@GEE?HDHKHC^DBABGLENA@CFe@CMCk@CACD@BCAEIBMB@BGHCB@EM?KBI\CNBPYEGGB?MCCCLG?@CCHG@EE@CFA?DSFAJBEEDBXCF?V??@E@MFCOi@?KDCB@?FIB?BB`@CN?ADDHY@a@AAADEBAD@HFEC?@CEA@EB@AG@BPEJ@CGOGQ\AIDCA@EYBMFKH?E^BXAHAAGQFB@ACC?HHIDKC?@BDGB?@FGDE?CKCDAG?FHUYEIDBRHBDF?C?DAGBO?KD[KUEBIABDE@WAIBF?M?ADDv@D@FE?FHGJBBH?RDD@MGOGG?IB@C@@ABF@LHLJBFABKCIBJE@@BG@IJO@?BB?CDB\DVCDCME?@L@FAB?IFL@J?NEL@X?CCPCAADKAEBWOIBO?a@OG?OQQGG@ML@LEJCZ@@AD@AGJI`@EFCABA@BCH?CMJOBENIp@CDAHEDAAIDMH@@I@?B@AJF@PEFQDC?@@D?WHYRo@R?DQDKRQJG?UFIAm@HOEACDBABE??FIE@AJABKOJGNKACFFdBADG@@BEAZAp@KdCCRG@?AB@CDHLA^Dv@Gd@BNEDUJUBQDID?Ae@C?IBECCC@FGPDTKBIKVy@?UFQF]GMKK[QMAOFYVE?OHO@ULSRGBSb@^r@RXJDXD^ALBhAEDWCI?SC?EBCJ?JDEE@B@BCACC??BDEB@C@FC@CM@GFAABBNKFK@@G?KBIL@@XMDIGH@@BA?OMGMFGFYh@CNAAAEADIDIGSA[HUCGEQ_@_@Y_@q@c@NEDUD]LI?MC}@@e@GUAGDEXUXg@Xa@NGFc@AOBY?k@Ig@Fq@A]DCDc@AY@GGQD_@@GLC@eA@OCqCG}@HO?ICc@DYGMBEEM?MLSE_@?SDm@EO?IDGEG?KFFl@?n@K@QC]@OAKFAFFh@I\?HDBTCBCEAE@@F@B?Da@PJEKAACDAVWd@[??ALBFNIWHDA@FFA?GGABICC?@s@FSAj@@J@BFCEQCs@DLGH?GBF?C@F?EAB?C?BACAC@?CCBBDHBFAOABA?ACASDH?BBFA@CBBH?KGM@HAMABDF@ICB?EEDDC@?AFAGAB?AAC?D?AB@AO@JDcCP|BWF?DFCGAB@EDLEKFD?@IGF?ED?CAAFHAEA@ACCFECC@?CIDBEGGABBBJAH@@CSDREBMGJB@CAB@AAABBBCGABB??BCBUJFKB@C?CCTIYDEFFEZAICWJAKD@HEF@AB?EDDAHHKCGOJ?BHCENNM@EA?AAD?C@?C?D?E?B@AA??A?DH??BKC@C@DCE@D?EBBCCM@F?AAFBAA@?C@@BA?BCA?@??CA@@AA?@@?A?@@AA?@?CA@BGEI@ABR?KHB?ACF?CIFWIFADB?JEKHDDECDE@HIDFA?MABD?GNEDNQCC@@GDE?BAFA?BD?MBCBBAAAFKA@@FAA@C@BCBI@DEBAABB?@AAE?BC?@EB@GADD?@AA@BGSFRAA@A?H@AAECJEFFE@M?H@AAI@BDAG?@@AC?@CABB?A@?A@@EC??CC?F?CJB?CACB@?E?AGFECBEEHB@FABACJ@BCC@KKC@BGF@A@ACDFAF@DAI?@E@DGDA?@CBCAADBG?BAAAFEAF@AAEBB@?EC@P@BBI@EKBKC?AHBFCK?DBBHAGAADO@H??BD?C?@ADBCGD@YJXAIKBA?EGFBG?B@CA@AC?BC@CCDC?ADAEJB@ACC@B@CBN?EC?BGD?FBEI@B?@IM@G?NIH?DDIIHD?EAD?ICBIAHACDBBA?H@EBLAO?BAG?BCC@B@GED?ABFB?D@CEADEM?AABCDDKAL?CBBA@FEC?CI?B?A??EB@EALBABBC?BE@DAA?@@A@BAD?E@D?WDF?FE?BEAFBCABAA@ECDBCEEDB?ACD?ABDAIBD@AABAC?BAI@F?AGC??@DAC@DDA@BCCBE?AIH@@J@AADB@?KE?DFC?EEKCD?ADD@AA@AD?E@BAGCL?G?A@@ABBE?@EIAL@AB@BAG@@CAF@O?@@C?@@DA?CC@B?C?@A@?CB?EB?CAD?SAh@FK?MCMBF@?@B??EBCD?OABCNBKB?BH??CL@Q?@E@FC@HBI?AAE?HAAAGBFB?DB@GCBCEAH@G?B@CBDCA?BAAA??G@FA?CC@BAGAIBT@QBl@GKAO@B?A?F@UBD@BAI?FMCNBOEHDEKDJIMDFBWDTBDC@GAAB?ECF@EF@GCJBMCF@EAHACF@HCG?F@K?@DE?BMFDCAACUBRACBN@QDDACGBAI?H?C@B@?I[JH?A@NCKCS?P@VE@@@J[MJ?HFEDYAN?@E@@FCL?FCK?QBJ@O@b@@MIM@LDICJE@KA@@@AFG@DFE@@@E?AE@?CCBAI?FJF?E??ICEF?C??HCABC@F@CC??CE@FAAE?D@AC?@@F?G@@DC?AE@@?@@AGAH@A??C@?A?CBFEIB@?CED@AECHB?C?FCCAB?AB?CA?@@ADCARAG?BBIAD@A?DEIFFCG@BEB?E@?AEHDE?ECB?DBAG?DAA@B@@AEA?C@BEDD?@E?BBAAC?BC?AED@GDDE?BBC?BGCLGM@A?FACHEEBAE?D@A@D?A@?CD?M@F?A@HBCA@GCB?CC@D@C?@@A?@B?ADCICCDD@@CBHOAJAAAB?@EG@FNAA?EEAA@BCC?FACEB@E@BAAE?FCBJEC@B@SBLD?CEADDDCI?BA?CCA@??B@CB??BCB@AAAB@CAB?C@@CB@C@B?I?@?@BGAJIE?DEEAHFE@A?BCE@J?CAD?A?@AG?@@ECHDOB?BHDCA?G@?A@FAG@?@D@KJDEACBABC@@C?@BEAD@?@CABB@CK?HCKDB?A@BEB??@CABAAAEDHAGADA?CC@@@C?EB@?AABB@C@@C?BAAAJ@C?EADAEAA?F@EAD?IDDAEAD@A?@?@AE@BA?@C@B@ABEABCCADACBG?J?B?CA@?C?ACD@BAC@@ACA@BC?ECB@C@D@C@DAEAF?@@A@EA@CB@E?FAIDECE?ABCA@ANDBAEAD@CC@CC?D?E?EDNBC@@B?EEA?@B?G?DAADAA@CHA@@E?ABCABAA?DB?@CC@CBBE@D@CADAEA@EA?@@A@@HI@DIA??ED??BC@@CCABEACGDC?@A@BH@?DC@JBECDCGCBCG@IA@?C@@@BAACD?BCEABABBAHLB?GC@?FQCFA?ARFEBD?OAFACDCA@CG@F@C?CE@A?BD?C@AAH?@CK@D@FAACBA?CEBB@@AQADACDG?L?ACA?DBCFDBABJ?KEEEI@HADB@AACG@B?@@A?BAAANCB@E?AFE@B@E?JCCB@@CA@C@?A?BAAC@?I@?DI@BB@CCA@EEE@@?F@A?B@A?BDA?CA?@AK@B?DIE@BFB?EBBAC?D?BA?ACAB?C@D?@D?ICACBHDGDEAEGG?T@GI@?C@CAABF@DCE?D?A?@@C?D@BA@?A@C?@BE?BBA??@B@ACB@EA@AD@KAPBKE@??@C?DACCB@C??@DBEADDEA@BA@B?G?CCD?C@@CBAGCBAI@?BF@AC@@A@@AEAAEC?DBA??AA@D?BKOAPBM@LBC?D?K@L@C?@B@?CCJ?ICE@FAGAJ@O?@AC?BA@BF@M?AGCCD?OCA@DBNDEAAJ@A@BAEDBIGDA@@E?BDCEAD?AD?CA@ADFAGA?B@QMLFBBA@?AEBACHAG@@??B@C@@C@BB@CEB@EC?DABFEC?@@ACE?BACIAB??BAADCAC?BC@B@?@E@F?@@CEDAA@?CIAJ@A@E@J?K?D?C?PFMAFDJ@ECFA?AQMOH@?AE@BDAA?B@FCADB@C@A@?CBC@@GA@AABBCDDC@B?ACQ?H@?BC@E?PEAABAC?ABCCBECDHFMBBEK@C@@BPGD@Q@AF@@BCLSDAA?@@KBB?CD@AGBJAQ@DCRAI@CE@@GBD??EDAJDCFYCGCCBLCCC@BHAC@B?A@DECBB@CA@AAB@CA@B?AAABBA?@AA?@W@NCC?@?EFa@DFIAA`@??GPCEBBDCACBBAA?@?ACABB@?GCDB@C?@AF?M@BA@D?CC@HCCB@?AC@C?@BAI@DCMCE@BLB??FC@BCCQPGJ?EFMD@HFGCAF@MD?ABCH?S?@DDDBAG@@G@??EC@CAB??BFI@?EDE@@FFS@BCDG?CDCCJD?DCA@CCGBCDBCA?B@ELDCEHBGA?@D?EAEDBCAAC@?BEBMEREB@KDBCF?C@DCC?AE@DDGG?KFGALCB@AB?AB?G?F@ZGKAYHVGB?ODEAAJD@?FB@BCACEC@CABE?@CC?IMFVL??IE??@AA?@?EC?B??D?E?@@A?BCC@FBDAE?DB?GK@??@?AAA?B?C@?@NDCCFBEFEEGM??BD@A@E?FCMCE?J?@BBCI@HCD@I?ABD@?C?BCAF@M?ABBBFAAA@BBAC@?EBBCAIBBKDACA?@E?BBAEEDICNBO??CD?BBGBB@F@CCBCG?B?ADFFBCC@BI@@CCDDI@@ACAAGQFJADBDGB@ECC@PFGDIATCE@ICBCD@AAE?C@@@C?AAHAIILAJDQ@A?FBABQ@?DC?LA@KC@B?@?ACBAE?ABB@KBB?CAPAE?@AGAH@C@?DB?ACFAAEK?J@M?GBD?ADBAABHACEBAFDK@D@O@EC@AECHCJ@C?D?ACDAGFDB?ACCGB@@M?b@?I@DFD@?ED@CCH@Q@EA?A@@C@QESH?IJ?VEDIDCYBTGUJLADDCGBFA??DAEBECGCBHDJ@I?Gn@?YH?CEEBEA?ADAEFE@AAFEB?BFCFGHECEO@GNGCEGBC?FKJD@HDBV@HIKAOFIC?BHBBAI?DCACKGE@?@FBEFAKKMHAK?R?SCNB?BHNADB?BFFBD?c@GHEBEA@QAMBF?\JAEG@@CH?BEMAHIEBCK?BD@GTBDGGJGGBBC@??EFHYAHAA@BBPD?EKE?@ACB@CBBCA?@??CAB@@@AEA@?AB?CBBAC@DEABBC@BAA??GDDAB@GC??@?CCDBEBB?DCI@B?CABAC@@A?@??AAB@C?D?E?B@CA@B@C??A?@BAA??DC@@CC?BE");


console.log("🙄")
var decodedPolyline = L.Polyline.fromEncoded(encodedPolyline)

line = L.polyline(decodedPolyline._latlngs , {color: 'red', weight: 2, opacity: .7, linejoin: 'round'})
line.addTo(map2)

console.log('omg')

map2.setView(decodedPolyline._latlngs[0]);

~I’m still doing something funky to escape the escape characters in the polyline.~ Able to get around that with JSON.stringify()

If you’d like to see the raw html that is being used to generate this exact page, it’s available in an extremely hacky way here

Next time, might animate a marker moving along the line, something like https://github.com/openplans/Leaflet.AnimatedMarker?tab=readme-ov-file, or maybe make the line blink, or see if we can give a sense of which direction the movement was happening in.

Useful additional resources

Get the ‘decode raw polyline’ function in your page with this package
Leaflet: Mapping Strava runs/polylines on Open Street Map ()

Paths In Which I Am Interested

2024-06-25T13:00:00+00:00

this is still in draft status

this page serves as a placeholder for various paths I’m interested in.

I hope to bring attention to “linear parks”, or a park that functions more in size and shape to a street, crossing blocks of distance, but maintaining park vibes throughout.

Path Segment One: Voodoo <> Cheesman, down Franklin

Pardon my language. “segments”? “paths”? I’m referring explicitly to places that connect places, so it’s sorta hard to think about the ‘place’ directly, especially as a path. ¹

This is a simple extension of the existing closed street exiting Cheesman.

Here’s what it looks like, looking into Cheesman, at the current barricades.

I basically want to move the barriers “towards” the camera, there’s a few (not trivial, but very solvable) obvious issues that might need addressing, but I think this as a first move makes sense.

If it could be moved a few meters, and backfilled with something everyone agrees is nice, I say keep moving it, 10 or 20 meters at a time, down franklin:

Components

Moving barricades down an existing closed road
making a little traffic path
displaceable and non-displacable barriers, like art, play structures, benches
much more

To make the spreadsheet people happy

Heavy foot traffic corresponds with great business, all the time. More and more of Voodoo’s business would come from people who walk to it, from the park, or walk to it, on their way to the park.

I can do some magic number work + video footage of foot traffic, to show the value of someone walking/biking vs how much space someone takes when they drive, and fill a whole parking space for 30 minutes or an hour.

Segment 2: Ideal Market <> Cheesman Park, down 11th

footage inbound, I’ve flown my drone around the area a bunch and am going to put a little video together, do a voice overlay, and add it to this page.

Thoughts about these two segments

These paths, Voodoo to Cheesman, and Cheesman to Ideal, are paths that I use, personally, all the time, some days more than once a day. Take a look at my activity/mobility data, noting where these two paths overlay that data:

My actual map with the data overlay is devoid of labels, but if you can find Cheesman Park, you can find the segments I’m talking about. You can see in the data where I’ve walked all around the Ideal Market building, and the Voodoo Donuts building.

https://joshs-mobility-data-54dab943ebba.herokuapp.com/?zoom=16&latlng=39.735985, -104.971018

This is, admittedly, an unusual project, and some might call it audacious, but I say it’s audacious only in a very narrow sense.

Also, a huge thing I want to practice is getting buy-in and tacit or formal support from the exact right people, in the exact right way, to nudge through real improvements. If you’re even reading these words, that means so much has already gone right. :)

If we somehow get these two segments ‘fixed’, we’ve done distinctive, uncommon things, I say it’s comparable to even those who build buildings, and we’ll have done it accidentally, as a by-product of doing other, more interesting things.

Interested entities

my guesstimates of people associated with entities that could ostensibly have aligned interests on this. This is who I am thinking about, none of this reflects anything others have said.

I come most recently from the software/computing/networking industry, some of my default ways of sharing information and building consensus might strike others as distinctive. :)

Pando x2
Voodoo x1
Avanti x4
Ideal/Wholefoods x2
Cornerstone x >15

Bleh, more to talk about. I might direct potential traffic to this page if I expand here on certain best practices, and why there’s certain barriers to certain kinds of fixes.

I’ve spoken elsewhere about some of the root causes of all this, don’t really want to pollute this page with more of that energy.

paths are places, and places are often used as a path. For example, Cheesman Park is not just a place to go, but for many, many people, passing through/along Cheesman Park is a beautiful portion of their trip, as they take a path from one place to another. I want to draw attention to the way that I think about these two ‘segments’. I think about the roads as connections, and how well they serve that function, and could they be more beautiful and peaceful for all people, kids, adults, old people. And if a one block could be done, why not two? etc. ↩

Denver Botanic Gardens - What, How, Why

2024-06-02T13:00:00+00:00

note: since writing the following piece, I wrote something of a part 2, discussing in detail the portabella/brown/white mushrooms that grow in the park

I recently got access to a delightful amenity, based on where I live. I’ve been sharing it with others as quickly as possible, because they too have access to it.

From here on out, when I reference “botanic gardens” or “the gardens”, I’m referencing the Denver Botanic Gardens, next to Cheesman park.

The purchases are for a year, so it works out to $100/year. Botanic gardens as a thing have colonialist origins, so there’s some total downsides to these particular gardens and what they represent. Also, they were built on a mass grave, and have generally been reserved as a privilege for economic elites. If you end up getting a key fob let me know and we’ll go on a walk and I’ll rant more about it then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m happy to get this great tool/amenity into the hands of the everyperson in Denver. I’ve shared this info with others I live near, but manually cutting/pasting links via SMS isn’t super efficient. Now this page serves as a reference for all.

Here’s where the gate is, some spots to sit when the weather is nice/not as nice:

The lines are where I’ve ridden my scooter/walked while running Strava. Long story, here’s a starting point: https://joshs-mobility-data-54dab943ebba.herokuapp.com/?zoom=18&latlng=39.740677,%20-104.968804

How I use them

I can take about 3 minutes on my scooter to ride from where I live to where I park my scooter right next to the gate into the gardens from Cheesman. I can easily walk and often do, or bring Eden - it’s far enough that a stroller or jogger is best for everyone, too far for her to walk unaided, and lots of the walking is crossing dangerous streets, unfortunately.

but once you’re close enough to the gardens, it’s lovely

In the winter, there’s a ‘conservatory’ that stays warm and humid. In the summer, there’s cool spaces.

Lots of people walk to them, or ride their bike. It’s not super accessible via car, so I reserve my strongest endorsement for this plan only if you don’t plan on ever driving.

I go here by my self, with friends, with my daughter, all the time. Sometimes I bring a frisbee and toss for a few minutes outside the gardens, if I’m there with friends. I might bring a kindle and laptop and pack a lunch and buy a $1.80 espresso at a cafe and work for a bit.

I’m writing and publishing this post from the gardens, before my laptop battery dies.

Steps to get “Key Fob” Access via the gate to Cheesman Park

It’s a two-step process to get the full experience. An online purchase, then an in-person purchase.

Step 1: Become ‘digital member’ of the gardens

If you ‘become a member’ of the Denver Botanic Gardens:

Go to https://www.botanicgardens.org/join-give/membership, and select/pay for the $75 Individual Plus membership.

Buy online and it’s $10 less, so really $65. Renewals are less.

Step 2: In person, purchase the key fob membership upgrade

There’s a service counter near the front of the gardens, tucked sort of ‘behind’ the Copper Door coffee shop. Go there, ask for the key fob, pay $35 for the fob, it’s supposedly $15 to renew subsequent years.

Information about this on the website wasn’t hard to find, once I knew what I was looking for:

https://www.botanicgardens.org/membership-faq#fob-faq

You’ll get a little plastic key fob. For me and my friends, it’s active and working as soon as they hand it to you, even though they say it might take a day to activate.

Congratulations, have a wonderful time. Most days the gardens are open 8a to 8p, and that key fob seems to open the door from Cheesman even as late as 7:45p, which was later than I expected.

Questions? Let me know. I’ll update this post as makes sense.

other details

Forage mushrooms, feed to the koi

One can usually find button mushrooms growing in Cheeseman park, so pick a few on your way into the gardens, if you’d like. Tear them into pieces, feed to the fish! Mushroom is sorta ‘chicken of the forest’, and is edible to fish. I take eden to the gardens all the time, sort of stumbled across the idea. Now she always makes sure we have a mushroom with us to feed to the fish. ‘here, buddies’ she says, as the tosses mushrooms into the water. It’s easy to find a handful of mushrooms on the way into the gardens, every time.

Use the library

There’s a library inside, with a kids section, and then regular books, all appropriately themed for a library in a botanic garden. It’s quite nice.

Parenting: A Place for Sources And Stories

2024-05-25T13:00:00+00:00

As some of us are or might be, I “am a parent”, or I “have a child”, or something like that.

This is complex for me to write and engage with, because something that is certainly true for all of us is that we “have a parent” or we “have been a child”. To talk about any of it is to talk about all of it.

Also the status of ‘child’ is quite temporary in society, and then perhaps less so in different structures. Also, to be a child in America is to be a member of an oppressed class. I entirely oppose the energy

I think a helpful frame might be

I am responsible for someone who will some day be in many ways a peer, who is not yet fully equipped with the same or equivalent sets of tools/skills as I, and I happen to enjoy the company and personality of this peer.

The ‘peer’ part is not to adultify or parentify a child, of course. It’s to elevate or express the commonality of some shared humanity, some shared participation in the human experience.

I am pleased to regularly embody a way-of-being that is quite accommodating and peaceful to a toddler, and because of the other people who’s interactions I now witness, and my own lived experience as a child and adult, lots of the natural way of being of adults/western&modern&american adults is quite inhospitable to children. 💔❤️‍🩹

I’m not quite sure how I’m proceeding through this post, by the way. There will certainly be some book lists and links to articles, as usual. Write it now and such.

I’m inspired by people like Robert Heaton. One of his many posts about his child: Height: 2ft 10 inches. Occupation: baby. Patrick McKenzie’s vibe with his children, Simon Sarris. Penelope Trunk. Certainly many others.

Some of the books That Have Informed Me

The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs It\
Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think (less enthusiastically recommended today than say 2017)
The Secret of Our Success, one of the best books I’ve ever read. Hard to summarize myself, so here’s scott alexander’s book review

Many western parenting tropes rely quite a bit on coercion and a punishment-informed mindset. When pointed out, a reactionary defense of ‘what other options do I have’ is sometimes offered up.

Besides indicating that the speaker has an operating belief in the entitlement to dominate¹, I earnestly, humbly suggest a self-paced ethno-biographical study of 14 different cultures and legal regimes that operated in specific times and places. One can imagine at least partially enlarging one’s array of non-coercive tools for mutuality with others after embarking (willingly) on such a journey.

Elimination Communication

This concept, this possibility was groundbreaking to me when I crossed paths with it.

This was perhaps responsible for most of the early-stage ‘this child seems extremely chill’ vibes. I’m perhaps trying to cover too much in a single post, sorry.

Western diaper culture, esp disposable diapers, is not how it’s always been done. Eastern cultures were aware of the rhythms of children/infants, built routines of baby-wearing + ‘easy’ aided waste elimination, so from a young age the person is simply eliminating into the ground or a suitable container by default instead of defaulting into soiled diapers.

This is also the first move of learning to be non-coercive towards children. Observe, study, learn to communicate, use your adult brain/skills to bridge towards their brain and skills. Their skills grow so quickly in healthy environments.

Baby sign language, and recognizing/helping-into regulated nervous system states. Go Diaper Free: A Simple Handbook for Elimination Communication

On people meeting

Eden loves to meet my friends, in her words, and my friends love to meet her (theirs). She meets strangers, and interacts with adults, in my company, regularly. I’ve seen many different patterns of interactions, and I’d like to speak about some of them.

I barely concede the use of this language, but it might be legible enough.

Often, when a large adult meets her and directs too much emotional energy straight at her, especially if she has not interacted with that person or recently or just doesn’t feel like it she will turn her face away and give the body language of disengagement.

It’s plainly visible to me, it’s easily namable by both of us, before and/or after, and of course I always help. I’ve got skills and capacities and status that she doesn’t, so it’s easy-enough for me to manage, even if I resent that I have to ‘manage’ something like this at all.

I’ll put myself physically between them, more than she’s already done, and if I’m holding her I’ll turn her away, and I might even also turn away from the speaker, and direct our attention to something else.

Not her, not me, but that plant, that person over there, the thing. A step to the side/away also might happen. At least once or twice, an adult still changes their location, elevation, tone of voice, and content of discussion from what seems conventional, and sort of swoop in again to try to, quite literally, ‘get in her face’, but with a certain expectant energy.

To pick from one of several available frames, it’s a little bit of a projection of a role onto someone, while that same person steps into their own projection of their own role.

Eden feels the projection of the role, and doesn’t like it. It’s usually a pretty namable energy, every/anyone can see it, Eden will name it to me, sometimes before or after. “I didn’t like that person”, she might say, or other things like it.

A nice alternative energy is something more akin to:

allowing non-demanding emotional engagement to extend in her direction, in an ‘opt in’ kind of way.
keep most of the energy and focus on whatever is normal, which is usually some mix of whatever you were up to 30 seconds ago, or engaging with me, or participating in the flow of whatever is going on.

on scripts

The kinds of people who script social interactions and believe they’re entitled to verbal engagement from someone tend to say things like:

“say please/thank you”
“say […]”
“say i love you”

I’ve often-enough/too-often informed others of a norm for interacting with eden:

we do not put words in edens mouth, or demand her to place your words in her mouth.

To the credit of some, i perceive this norm to have been well received. Adults “tell” kids to do or perform something all the time.

My parents attacked me as a child when I didn’t look happy enough for them. “Have a good attitude, Josh”. “Put on your happy face”. “We do all things for the Lord, and He wants you to be happy.” I spent enough of my life around people who heavily suppress the emotions of people around them, and I no longer permit it from other adults, when I am present.

When Eden would cry, I’ve seen adults turn to her and say “you’re not upset” or “don’t be upset” or “here’s a distraction”, instead of allowing her whatever is going on, attending to the environment (“oh, you have to go to the bathroom? thanks for letting me know!”), and supporting her with their own regulated nervous system.

Unhealthy adults need to suppress the emotions of other people if they are unable to access their own sense of that emotion. Grief and sadness and anger is heavily suppressed in evangelical/white cultures, so those are the ones children raised by them tend to not have easy access to.

I make sure Eden knows her grief and sadness and anger do not cause me trouble, and I’m happy to support her through it all.

Possible word swaps:

“good job/nice work” becomes “that looked interesting/tricky” or “was that interesting to you? what was something interesting about that?”

“Shy” isn’t a helpful question or label

Sometimes an adult acts entitled to obtaining a certain reaction from Eden.

Sometimes people ask me “oh, is she shy?”, while Eden is with me, pointedly not making eye contact with the question-asker, who perhaps just walked up and has never shared a moment of real interaction with her in the past…

They perhaps think she doesn’t understand what they’re saying, or isn’t able to comprehend our conversation.

I say some version of:

That framing makes useful conversation less accessible, rather than more. Eden knows that she doesn’t ‘need’ to ‘give’ anyone any sort of concession, just because that person thinks they’re entitled to it, nor does she need to perform for people. It’s inappropriate for an adult to demand a certain kind of interaction from a child.

I usually figure out how to be diplomatic about it, and fortunately ‘shy’ as a concept is sort of fading out of society, I think.

I’ll always add something like:

And obviously if we don’t feel comfortable with someone, we wouldn’t try to act like they’re a trusted person because they believe in politeness, or their feelings might get hurt.

So, sometimes Eden pointedly refuses to even turn her face towards someone. Sometimes the person correctly infers that it’s her de-escalating the intensity of the interaction, and they take their own steps to reduce the intensity, instantly and perhaps even subconsciously.

Others cannot see it, or refuse to act on it, and instead keep stepping closer and trying to get in her face, to get her to look at them and say hello or something. Or to say “thank you” as they make an evaluation of some aspect of her physical appearance.

Broadly, it’s possibly appropriate to comment on thinking someone made distinctive choices in picking out an item of clothing or displayed prowess in judgment or skill. “sick rainbow shoes.”, “that thing you did looked tricky, and skillful.”

What not to say

I don’t like to make it sound like a child’s entire existence is already the same as an adult slaving away.

References to jobs, and work, are not interesting to me, so “good job” and “nice work” are not phrases in my lexicon. “That looked interesting” and “what did you like about that?” or “did that feel tricky?”

Eden is also quite happy to stare at a something with intense focus. Sometimes it’s a dog, or a bug, or a person. If the person is close enough, and notices, and feels self-conscious, they might call it a withering intensity.

It’s distinctive enough that complete strangers often commented on it, even at a really young age. I proffer it’s maybe the look of someone who’s totally focused on what they are looking at, they’re not performing ‘social softening’ of the gaze. As a toddler, she’ll turn her head to look at something as it or she passes by, in a way that is identical to when she was an infant, and I presume is motivated out of a similar-enough inner state.

She’s permitted to look at something as hard as she wants, or not at all, and I perceive that some adults are unaccustomed to be looked at in such an evaluator-like, non-apologetic way, by such a young child.

On “Beauty”

I dislike the energy that some people have, when they insert themselves into me and Eden’s day to pronounce that they find her physical form appealing. It’s very strange to have grown adults continuously talking about the “pleasing physical form” of a child. (settler colonialism! Seeing children as possessions/nationalism).

Sometimes it’s very visible that an interlocutor has an internal values system that is coherent with white/american/western/racialized beauty norms, and that they see in Eden an attribute that seems coherent with their norms, it feels like they’re playing a role in supporting those beauty norms. Taking anyone seriously necessitates at least being able to refrain from stating objectifying statements, or trying to.

Eden doesn’t like having her appearence commented upon. If you happen to notice, for instance, that her shoes are distinctive and colorful, and there’s something appreciable about the pattern of an item of clothing, and told her about it, she’ll probably brighten up and say “yeah! I think it’s cool too!” and will talk to you about it.

But…. on the ‘unwanted communication’ side of things, recently someone said, in this falsetto sing-songy voice, sort of to eden, sort of to me, “Ohhh, you’re such a beautiful girl”. This was just as we arrived at their stand where they were selling some wares. When it’s white people acting entitled, I’ll usually stamp it out quickly. If one conveys the message of “doesn’t it seem strange to have strangers comment so openly, their thoughts about someone’s body?”, it usually jostles the person a little and they refrain from more comments. I do this to _privileged, entitled, european-americans, especially if their age clocks as ‘close to boomer’.

This feels sensitive to write even a few paragraphs about. I want to throw a bunch of books out that talk about ‘whiteness’ or ‘supremacy thinking’. There’s a few energies still bandying about today rooted in the beliefs that supported chattel slavery, genocide, that sort of thing.

It feels vastly under-appreciated in ‘normal’ society how total of a regime of social control chattel slavery represented, and how fundamentally and totally the dehumanization that occurred affected the mind of the oppressor, the consciousness of the classes and races, that “it” created. Often enough, this commenting on one person’s beauty is an implicit statement about the not-beauty of a different person. It’s inherently supremacist, demeaning to everyone (yourself, the target of the assessment, anyone who hears the utterance) and would best be not said.

But what would I say if I cannot comment on the body of a child???

I know, right? What else possibly could you say? </sarcasm>

How about “hi”, or “would you like me to explain what these things are?” or “The flower patterns on your shirt indicate that whoever chose it has good taste.” or, say nothing.

Race isn’t real. Ethnicity is. White people get angry when you call their conflict ‘inter-ethnic-group conflict’ but that’s all it is. Settler colonialism in the USA was supremacist european americans showing up and using violence to displace some, enslave others, and they used english, books, and authoritarian language to justify it, instead of simply saying

Yep, we [european americans] like people like us, we don’t like people who are not like us, and we’re willing to kill them if they don’t give us exactly what we want. or even if they do, but especially if they don’t.”

It’s manifestly obvious when at least some streams of it reach out to touch Eden, and I don’t like it. We last walked through a weird little art fair in cheesman park, and she very quickly wanted to leave. I couldn’t figure out why at first. She just didn’t want to go in there, wanted to walk around the outskirts of where the stands were. I couldn’t figure it out, then:

me: “Do you notice a lot of people looking right at you, when I’m pushing you around in the stroller”

kid: “Yep”

me: “Do you find it to be uncomfortable?”

kid: “Yep”

me: “I believe it. I find that sort of eye contact to be uncomfortable myself sometimes, and I’m way bigger than you, and people treat me very differently than they treat you. I’ll think about how to reduce their staring at you.”

I usually wear a big floppy hat and sunglasses, or turn my head down and away from people as I walk by. I make vastly less eye contact with people than I less did, generally I’m happy to pass in a sorta invisible way. BUT when I’m mixing this with walking Eden around by stroller, if people can tell that by the brim of my hat I cannot see if they’re staring straight at eden they get much more open with staring at her, compared to if they look at her, look at me, and see me staring back at them. There’s less staring at eden after that.

It’s all very odious to me.

Words I do not use

Here’s a few words I have no use for:

obey, obedience, respect, authority, comply, compliant

I was raised by modern day settler colonialists, fully intent on replicating their view of the world on the consciousness of “their” children. My parents, to this day are obsessed with the notion of children being compliant with them. My dad gets violent if he smells something that feels like non-compliance, from a child or an adult. His entitlement is perceivable from a mile away. (a long career in the military doesn’t leave anyone more in touch with their humanity or the humanity of others.)

That’s the language of an authoritative, domineering, person, in european american settler colonialism, this is the ‘masculine’ role. My mother leans into the ‘feminine’ side of religious authoritarianism/settler colonialism. being a good ‘domestic servant’, cheerful and chipper about playing the role she sees for herself, but she feels entitled to control the thought lives of ‘her’ children.

As children, we all got attacked in various ways by our parents, who would pour messages like “you are fundamentally bad” and “every aspect of your conciousness is being picked apart by sky daddy, who hates you”.

To interact with her is to be silently judged, and to be rendered unknown and unknownable, while she points a fake cheerfulness and a utterly real withdrawal and avoidance from that which she doesn’t approve of. Her words are full of “should” and “should not” and “if you don’t do what ~I~ sky daddy says, you’ll be tortured forever, alone, far from your loved ones”.

A few other words I don’t use:

“good job/nice work” > jobs/work reference capitalism, she’ll have enough of that later in her life. I want her to do things that are interesting to her, for no other reason than it’s interesting to her.
“Go higher” or “try to get to the top”. I am thrilled that Eden knows her own physical capacities very well, and never pushes into territory while climbing or running that feels unsafe to her.

Where someone else might say “good job”, upon seeing Eden do something she’s proud of (which happens all the time), I say “oooh, that looked tricky. Did it feel tricky? Was it interesting?”

Words I Do Use

Evangelical settler colonialists have in their toolset the ‘weaponization of shame and guilt”, and want you/themselves to strive strive strive, for a modicum of affection. Soooo the antitode to that is some words I do use that are explicitly guilt/shame dispelling, in addition to being generally affirmative of someone’s humanity:

“I am pleased to know you”.
“it’s interesting to watch/observe the things you do/how you exist.”
“it’s fun to see how interested you are in things”
“i’m pleased to share with you the times that you are upset”
“I enjoy your company”.
"I am pleased to spend time with you _right now_! I am pleased and unpurturbed to witness and experience your tears, your anger"
“It is fun to watch your skills and competencies grow”. They i’ll name something specific about her biking, walking, smooth/precise movement, jumping, flips, pulling, recognizing landmarks/objects/people/places, running, playing, drawing, movie-watching, sleeping, expelling metabolic byproduct.
“was that interesting to you?”
“I appreciate how quickly and forcefully you oppose things you do not want.”
“how did you come up with that idea?”
“was that tricky?”

There’s so much more. I’ll make it it’s own blog post at some point.

Misc Resources

Footnotes

It’s worth noting when there’s an energy of entitlement operating, because to not name it is to slip into a weaker frame. “What other way do I have of making my child go to school than heaping punishments on them?” belies an entitlement. Entitlement sounds like: “it seems appropriate to me to dominate someone in this situation, so I’m simply looking for the easiest-way-for-both-of-us to accomplish that domination. I’m willing to do a light touch if they make it easy enough.”

This book is Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. Also available for free, chapter by chapter, on the author’s website². ↩
Would you believe the author uses different ‘intellectual property’ norms than the american publishing system? ↩

Robert Moses - The Most Important Person You've Never Heard Of

2024-05-24T13:00:00+00:00

this was originally posted a few years ago, republishing as a blog post as I organize an increasingly large number of links and resources here.

Here’s a big dumping ground for some resources on robert moses I’ve got floating around.

Obviously, this has grown to an unwieldy sizy and less would be asked of you if I organized it a bit better.

Here’s some starting points, to start conceptualizing his reach and influence, and to start appreciating how he obviously set systems up around himself, and people, which faithfully reproduced his very specific way of being into the world around him.

What is currently underappreciated, in the narrative of Robert Moses, is a point that I feel like I can maybe express semi-concisely now, but has been coalescing in my mind for a while. There’s a few potential kinds of poeple that might find themselves reading this, so I’ll state the same concept at least twice, or have to define some terms, before feeling like I’ve landed it. Relates to appreciating phenomina that are operating today, tightly linked to recent history.

“Urban Renewal” is a real, namable, visible process that is plainly visible within every single american city. Not only are the evidences of it clear, but the evidence is not hidden. Nearly every american municipality has a body named “{LOCAL JURISDICTION} Renewal Authority”. Various similar titles are “Urban Renewal Authority”. There is both a Golden Urban Renewal Authority (still running today) and a Denver Urban Renewal Authority. Prior to Colorado, I lived in Maryland. Here’s Montgomery County ‘office of planning and development’ ‘redevelopment and revitalization efforts’. [^urban_renewal] More of the same for Prince George’s County, MD:

“Urban Renewal” is a propagandistic phrase, those who were getting it done to them understood it to be a cleansing, a displacement, a relocation. All/enough parties understood it to be what it was. The people experiencing the ‘renewal’ understood it to be what it really was - cleansing. It involves efforts of one group to define, confine, and relocate, persons that can be ‘pushed’ into another group.
Urban Renewal is virtually synonymous with ethnic cleansing, and needs to be treated as such. The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing
Robert Moses invented the social tool “urban renewal” as his “title 1” powers. He created systems around himself to duplicate his own thinking into the world around him. His was the godfather of the Federal Highway Administration, and pioneered ‘innovative’ ways municipal governments could work with federal governments, and how various parties could ‘drive stakes’ and ‘whipsaw’ political interests into whatever one wanted.

To appreciate Robert Moses and to appreciate the scale of the urban renewal programs (always aimed at maintaining the supremacy of some) is to both want to die at the scale of devestation, to weep over the ongoing harm this causes everyone today, and will cause tomorrow, and it’s to appreciate a way out, perhaps. A post-robert-moses world.

God, I want to get there, out of his world. Highways? Parkways? Signal-controlled intersections? controlled-access highways? setbacks? residential zoning and commercial zoning and strip mall zoning? Parking minimums? General Motors and Ford? Robert. Bobby Moses. RM. Its your boy.

(When you read the book, you’ll learn that when we was doing all these things for NYC, the country was so small that whatever NYC did eventually everyone else wanted to do the same. sorta still the same. RM was synonymous with “NYC infrastructure” and, in fact, New York infrastructure and beyond. HIS dam, the Robert Moses Power Dam, is the dam of niagra falls. 😳)

A review for The Power Broker.

In a moment, I’m going to quote extensively from a book review left on the Goodreads listing for The Power Broker. Here’s a link to the review itself, directly, if you’d like.

I will never be able to write as well as this reviewer, and I believe so much of what they say so accurately conveys some of the experiences I had, so I’m quoting it in full below. I’ll add linebreaks, and emphasize some sections:

[The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro] is definitely the greatest book that I have ever read.

Midway through adolescence, I began wondering a bit which life event would finally make me feel like an adult. Of course I had the usual teenaged hypotheses, and acted accordingly to test some of them out. Getting drunk? Having sex? Driving a car? Going to college? None of these things did make me feel grownup; in many instances, their effect was the opposite.

I had a brief thrilling moment of maturity when I voted for the first time at age eighteen, but election returns in the years since (in particular the 2004 presidential race) dulled the sophisticated glamour of the ballot box, forcing me to admit that an ability to vote does not indicate the presence of intellectual maturity…

The first time I got a job with benefits and sat through a presentation explaining the HMO plan, life insurance, and “401K,” I did feel old in a certain kind of way, but there was a sense of the absurd to it, as if I were in drag as an adult, staggering around in my mother’s too-big high heels and smudgy lipstick in a silly effort to look like a grown woman.

For the past few years I’ve had the sense of wearing an oversized grownup life that wasn’t actually mine, while that magical rite of passage into adulthood continued to elude me. Maybe when I have children things will click into place, I’ve mused, listening to Talking Heads with one ear and sort of doubting it…. Part of this might be generational; if thirty is the new twenty, it’s no wonder that I get that Lost Boys feeling, and shrug confusedly when overnight company makes fun of my teddy bear.

I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the glory of Robert Caro, this stage is basically behind me. Having finally finished The Power Broker, I feel much more like a grownup, and believe it or not, I’m pretty into that.

When I was a little kid, I felt that the adults around me had a thick, rich, complicated understanding of the way the world worked. They knew things – facts, history – and they understood processes and people and the way something like a bond measure or a public authority worked. It was this understanding – which they had, and I didn’t – that made me a child, and them adults. Grownups had an infrastructure of information, truth, and insight that I lacked.

As I grew older, I was dismayed to discover that grownups really didn’t know a fraction of what I gave them credit for, and that most of the people ostensibly running the world had no clue how it operated, and my intense disillusionment caused me to lose sight of that adulthood theory for awhile.

But reading this book made me feel like a grownup because it helped me to understand the way the world works as I never had before.

This book is about power. It is about politics. It is a history of New York City and New York State. It is an explanation of how public works projects are built. It is about money: public money, private money, and the vast and nasty grey areas where they overlap. This book is about democracy, and the lack thereof. It is about social policy, and economics, and our government, and the press. This book is about urban planning, housing, transportation, and about how a few individuals’ decisions can affect the lives of the masses. It helped explain traffic in the park, and the projects in Brownsville, and a billion other mysteries of New York City life that I’d wondered about.

The Power Broker is about ideals, talent, and institutional racism. It is about inequality. It is about genius. It is about hubris. It is the best goddamn book I have ever read in my entire life, hands down, seriously.

Please do not think that it took me five months to read this book because it was dense or slow! This was a savoring, rather than a trudging, situation. Robert Caro is an incredibly engaging writer. One thing that happened to me early on from reading this was that I lost my taste for trashy celebrity gossip. Who CARES about Britney’s breakdown or, for that matter, Spitzer’s prostitute peccadilloes when I could be reading about the shocking intricacies of Robert Moses’ 1925 legislative consolidation and reorganization of New York State’s administrative structure?

This book gave me chills – CHILLS! – on nearly every page with descriptions of arcane political maneuvering and fiscal policy so riveting that I lost my previous interest in reading about sex and drugs. Let’s face it: sex and drugs are pretty boring. Political graft, mechanics of influence, the workings of government: now that’s the hot stuff, when it’s presented in an accessible and digestible form. Nothing in the world is more fascinating than power, and Robert Caro writes about power better than anyone I’ve come across. There are no dry chapters in this book; there’s barely a dull page. It is infinitely more readable than Us Magazine, and not much more difficult.

Of course The Power Broker is many things, among them a biography. While any one portrait of New York power icons from Al Smith to Nelson Rockefeller is more than worth the price of admission, this book is primarily about Robert Moses. Caro understands and explains the relationship between individual personalities and systems. One of his main theses is that Moses achieved the unchecked and unparalleled levels of power he did because he figured out how to reshape or create systems around himself. The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority would not have existed without Robert Moses, and Robert Moses would not have been what he was, or accomplished what he did, without the brilliance he had for shaping the very structure of government into conduits for his own purposes. To explain this, Caro needs to convey a profound understanding not only of how these systems worked, but of who this man was. He does so, and the result goes beyond Shakespearean: it is Epic. The Power Broker is the story George Lucas was trying to tell about Anakin Skywalker’s transformation to Darth Vader, only George Lucas is no Robert Caro, and The Power Broker succeeds wildly in the places where Star Wars was just a hack job (of course, Caro wasn’t handicapped by Hadyn Christensen, which does indirectly raise the burning question: WHO’S OPTIONED THIS???).

Robert Moses was an incredible genius. He was also an incredible asshole. Robert Moses was probably one of the biggest assholes who ever lived, or at least, who ever got free reign to redesign a major modern American city to his fancy. One of the innumerable triumphs of this book is that while it certainly does demonize Moses to a great extent, it doesn’t seem to do so unjustifiably, and it never strips him of his humanity. Caro conveys a deep respect and empathy for his brilliant subject, even as he also expresses horror, disgust, and rage as he describes Moses’ forty-four-year unelected reign of power.

I know it’s a mistake to do this review right after finishing, and I’m a bit grossed out that I could write something so gushingly uncritical; that’s unlike me, and it’s possible that later I’ll think of some complaints… I might not, though. I really do think that this is the best book I’ve ever read, and I wish there were some way that I could adopt Robert and Ina Caro as my grandparents, and that I could go over to their house for Sunday dinner and then take walks together in Central Park. Right at this moment I believe that Robert Caro is the smartest person in the world, and I’m not in the least bit resentful that I’m going to have to devote the rest of my life to reading his LBJ doorstoppers; in fact, I welcome it (though I’m not in a huge hurry to start).

Oh, I’m sure this book has flaws like any other. My main problem with it was that it was too short. Caro did not go into nearly enough detail about a large number of issues that I’d expected to learn about. For instance, there was little more than offhand mentions of Moses’ upstate projects; I was surprised that there was virtually nothing in here about Niagara Falls. There was also almost nothing on Shea Stadium, and while they did keep coming up, I never felt adequately informed about Moses’ plans for the three crosstown expressways, and the successful opposition to them. How real a prospect were these, and what did the public fight look like? I wasn’t so clear on that. While it’s possible that Caro had nothing interesting to say about these projects, it’s more likely that he had to draw the line somewhere, and 1162 pages was that place. I mean, otherwise he probably could’ve gone on forever…. There’s a lot to say.

I definitely recommend that anyone who reads this book do as I did, and divide it with an exacto knife into four duct-tape bound commuter volumes. It’s fun to draw your own Power Broker covers on your personalized editions, and a good excuse to pull out those crayons which, as a bona fide adult, you so rarely use!

It occurs to me that I’ve babbled on forever but still haven’t explained at all what this book is about. If you think you might want to read it but you’re not sure, check out this article by Robert Caro: Robert Moses: The Man Who Built New York

It has those stupid New Yorker dots, which the book thankfully does not, but otherwise is kind of like a miniaturized version of The Power Broker and gives a much better sense than I just did of what it’s all about.

An Interview with Robert Caro

Here’s a 1h45m Audible “short” with Robert Caro, the man who wrote The Power Broker

On Power, by Robert Caro (Audible)

Here’s the audible summary:

From two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and two-time National Book Award winner Robert A. Caro: a short, penetrating reflection on the evolution and workings of political power - for good and for ill.

In On Power, an Audible exclusive, the legendary historian Robert A. Caro reflects on what drew him as a young journalist to study political power and what his half century of reporting on New York City urban planner Robert Moses and President Lyndon Johnson has taught him about the inner workings of government and democracy.

Adapted by the author from two recent speeches and filled with thoughtful lessons and personal moments, On Power goes behind the scenes in the author’s decades-long quest to understand how power works, often in ways he could have never imagined.

Listening to On Power, narrated with emotion and humor by Caro in his unmistakable New York accent, is like having a private audience with the author often hailed as our greatest living historian. Longtime fans of Caro’s books, as well as those seeking a more personal introduction to his life and work, will be treated to his trademark wit and revelatory insight.

But more than anything, On Power is a timely reminder for those who want to better understand how power and government work.

In Caro’s words:

Why political power? Because it shapes all of our lives. It shapes your life in ways that you might never think about. Every time a young man goes to college on a federal education bill passed by Lyndon Johnson, that’s political power. And so is a young man dying in Vietnam. Every time an elderly person is able to afford an MRI, that’s Medicare. That’s political power. It affects your life in all sorts of ways. My books are an attempt to explain this power…. Because the more America understands about political power, the better informed our votes will be, and then, hopefully, the better our democracy should be.

A Sense of Scale - The Cross-Bronx Expressway

What do you think of when someone says “The Bronx”?

Everything you think about The Bronx, and indeed New York City, and the weight NYC has had on global culture is shaped by Robert Moses.

From Robert Moses and the Cross-Bronx Expressway

Here’s the Cross-Bronx Expressway:

Another view of it: It crosses that elevated bridge on the right, and continues to the bottom left of the picture:

What do you think it looked like to cleave such a deep cut through a heavily built-up area?

Robert Moses was considered the most “powerful modern builder of all time”. He was know especially for the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway.

This highway connected New Jersey, North Manhattan, South Bronx and ended up in in Long Island through wither either the Throgs-Neck Bridge or the Whitestone Bridge. The building of this new highway system meant that over 60,000 residents would have to be uprooted and relocated to new areas. Most of these people lived in South Bronx. Moses led the white exodus out of the Bronx. Most of the white residents moved to either Westchester or Northern Bronx areas and others moved to small suburban houses being built around the Cross Bronx Expressway in New Jersey.

The poorer residents who where given a meager $200 per room compensation were forced to move out and settle in new high-rise apartment buildings that were being built. These new behemoths had could include up to 1700 apartments per building.

As a result of this mass relocation the economy of the Bronx suffered immensely. The South Bronx area (mostly Black and Puerto Rican) lost over 600,000 manufacturing jobs. Youth unemployment rose to 40 percent and in some areas as high as 80 percent.

The most devastating affect of the Cross Bronx Expressway took place when the newly built apartment buildings passed into the hands of slumlords. These people used many different tactics such as demanding more money when they shut off heat and water supply to the tenants.

Another tactic that the slumlords used proved to be the most effective and profitable for them. They would find junkies and rent-a-thugs to set fire to abandoned apartments and then they would collect the insurance polices from the city. The slumlords profited greatly from this enterprise as they collected as much as 150,000 dollars per fire. The insurance companies didn’t really mind in the begging as they were leasing out many new insurance policies, but after a time even they realized that their costs were beginning to get to high.

In the end as insurance companies refused to provide insurance policies to cover certain buildings in South Bronx and the fires continued to spread, whole city blocks became completely abandoned and opened up a place for crime and gangs to fill the void.

Chapter 36: The Meat Ax

I’m copy/pasting the summary of Chapter 36: The Meat Ax from somuchtoread. That website doesn’t have deep-linking to the page, so it’s easier to stash notes here:

Chapter 36: The Meat Ax

Caro is firing on all cylinders now, and it turns out that “The Meat Ax” is how he describes Moses’ approach to building roads. In a way, this chapter is an introduction to the following two brilliant chapters, “One Mile” and “One Mile: Afterward.” The title of the chapter is referring to how Moses once described the challenge of building in “an overbuilt metropolis,” noting the only way to achieve success is to “hack your way with a meat ax.” This is horrifying language to Caro and he intends to show how Moses’ meat ax destroyed homes and families and neighborhoods.

Caro writes that “it is no accident that most of the world’s great roads–ancient and modern alike–had been associated with totalitarian regimes.” The reference is obvious to anyone who has read 846 pages of this book. Moses, “had a dictator’s powers”, and was able to cut and carve up communities to work his will on the people because of his power. He, like others in command of a totalitarian regime, was able to make a decision because his mind, and his mind alone, had been persuaded.

The title of this section of the book is “The Lust for Power,” and this chapter fits nicely into that theme. Caro points out that Moses enjoyed working his will on a neighborhood–“he loved to swing [the meat ax].” It’s a damning charge: Moses isn’t someone who wants to build a project because the project itself is good, he wants to build the project because it strengthens his own power and feeds his own ego.

At times, I’m still in awe of Moses. Believe me, Caro makes it tough to like the guy. But he is pressing forward and paying attention to infrastructure. Neighborhood groups be damned. In the Cincinnati bridge example we’ve already considered, a true Moses-like figure would run roughshod over the buildings and houses in Covington that are adding money and time and opposition to the project. Our inability to be like Moses is delaying by years a bridge that is imperative. Moses always claimed that “succeeding generations would be grateful.” What are we going to say generations from now if we never build that bridge because we’re worried about a few houses? Wouldn’t we be grateful if we had our Moses once in a while?

I guess it depends on whether you live in those houses or not. So much to think about with this book.

Gowanus

Gowanus is a neighborhood that is featured in The Power Broker, as an example of how Robert Moses would use highways to destroy neighborhoods.

I’ve listened to the Nice White Parents podcast series, which I remember ending, then “the next episode” the host was like “wow y’all after I finished up reporting this crazy cycle started up again and I watched in rapt awe as it played out again lets follow along”.

I wasn’t surprised, because I’d read The Power Broker and followed along in rapt fascination. She basically expressed shock watching the effects of de facto segregation playing out, again.

de facto segregation, not de jure¹

Anyway, it was the ‘school of international studies’ for a time. The school in Nice White Parents.

From a great story about Robert Moses:

The construction of the Gowanus Parkway, laying a concrete slab on top of lively, bustling Third Avenue, buried the avenue in shadow, and when the parkway was completed, the avenue was cast forever into darkness, and gloom, and its bustle and life were forever gone.

And through that shadow, down on the ten-lane surface road beneath the parkway, rumbled (from before dawn until after dark after the opening of Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel flooded the area with freight traffic) regiments, brigades, divisions of huge tractor-trailer trucks, engines gunning and backfiring, horns blasting, brakes screeching, so that a tape recording of Third Avenue at midday could have been used as the soundtrack for a movie of a George Patton tank column.

And from above, from the parkway itself, came the continual surging, dull, surf-like roar, punctuated, of course, by more backfires and blasts and screeches, of the cars passing overhead.

Once Third Avenue had been friendly. Now it was frightening. (…) Once the avenue had been a place for people; Robert Moses had made it a place for cars.

Denver, Colorado, has it’s own version of Gowanus and the International School like the Nice White Parents pod, the Denver Center for International Studies. It’s right next to a HUGE 5-line one-way insanely bad road.

Everything around me is ruled by the systems Robert Moses set up. It hurts to behold.

Twitter convo between me and Matt Swanson about this book
Robert Moses and re-making the political machine (substack)
Chapter-by-chapter summary of The Power Broker
somuchtoread.com section-by-section read-through (original site broke, now links to wayback machine copy). Follow the link, scroll down the website to the author’s summations of Chapters 37 and 38: One Mile and One Mile Afterward. Or the section on the chapter “The Meat Ax”, ch 36.
Beware of the Robert Moses Revisionists
The City-Shaper (by Robert Caro!)
Robert Moses and the Cross-Bronx Expressway
The Power Broker by Robert Caro: Summary & Notes
The Power Broker notes (nateliason.com)
In the Footsteps of Robert Moses: Roadtripping across the bridges, highways, and parks of America’s most controversial urban planner
The History of Denver’s Streetcars and Their Routes Robert Moses hated the kinds of people who used street cars and trains for travel, so he hated their trains, easily managed to run the train companies out of business. Look at what Denver could have had, but for Robert Moses and supremacy thinking. The reason Denver is currently a car-dominated hell-hole is… Robert Moses.

Various shorter-than-the-book resources

👉 22 minute modern documentary about Robert Moses on Youtube

👉 a 25 minute ‘comedy show’, episode titled “I Won’t Go”, youtube about an entire municipality and police force evicting an old lady from her house, and her various ways of trying to remain in her own house. Episode ends with her pointing out to everyone where her house used to be, under what was then turned into an approach road for one of Robert Moses’ bridges.

👉 Motherless Brooklyn, 2019 movie/crime-drama, features the devastation experienced in a certain neighborhood experiencing Robert Moses-inspired ethnic cleansing. It was originally a book, Edward Norton turned it into a movie, and he also played a leading role. I didn’t realize he was obsessed with The Power Broker - I sorta stumbled into the movie, and was shocked when I realized the opening scene of the movie is the exact same as the opening scene of The Power Broker. (wikipedia). The rest of the movie is excellent, even if only to appreciate yet another lense through which Robert Moses’ influence was being experienced.

👉 1-hour Vimeo documentary about Robert Moses

I just found this link. It’s the first time I’ve seen so much footage of Moses himself talking, and his acolytes talking about him.

THE WORLD THAT MOSES BUILT (vimeo)

The reflexive love so many people had of his high modernism/authoritarianism/supremacy is on full display.

Appreciate the kind of person that could be responsible for the Henry Hudson Parkway

The person single handily responsible for building that highway is powerful indeed. This person built many other highways, and displaced about 250,000 people, almost completely comprised of ethnic groups Moses considered undesirable.

Read what is said about the author of Robert Moses’ incredible biography:

As a reporter for Newsday in the early 1960s, Caro wrote a long series about why a proposed bridge across Long Island Sound from Rye to Oyster Bay, championed by Robert Moses, would have been inadvisable. It would have required piers so large as to disrupt tidal flows in the sound, among other problems. Caro believed that his work had influenced even the state’s powerful governor Nelson Rockefeller to reconsider the idea, until he saw the state’s Assembly vote overwhelmingly to pass a preliminary measure for the bridge.

“That was one of the transformational moments of my life,” Caro said years later. It led him to think about Moses for the first time. “I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’”

This biography is long. If you’re like me and you’re thrilled to find a long book that you’ll love, you’ll be happy to know his biography is almost as long as all of the harry potter book series.

Footnotes

old legal texts like to use magical words with special meaning. “de facto” means “the express written goal of the act” while “de jure” means “it just sorta happened as a byproduct”, and some of the ‘american narrative’ relies on structural support from the projection that ‘segregation’ was a ‘byproduct’ of something else going on at the time. ‘de facto’ means ‘nope, the thing you’re calling byproduct segregation was actually the point and everyone at the time knew it’.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America gets into it more. ↩

Jaywalking: What, So What, What To Do

2024-05-24T13:00:00+00:00

What Is “Jaywalking”

authors note: This feels very draft-y. There’s two distinct perspectives I note in my mind, as I write this. Some people might “believe in jaywalking” and view non-car-users as an underclass, and act in such a way that makes this belief manifestly obvious. Other people maybe know something feels off about it ‘being illegal’ to walk across a street, and might ‘simply’ be wondering why American streets ‘feel so dangerous’. I feel friction in my mind as I hold both of those.

There’s two definitions of jaywalking.

a “legal” definition might be:

To ‘jaywalk’ is be to cross into or across a street, outside of a ‘signalized intersection’¹, outside of an ‘appropriate time’, especially in a way that might ‘impede’ a passing vehicle.

The truthful definition of jaywalking:

“Jaywalking” is a legal fiction invented by supremacists in america, who wanted to prevent cars from getting banned in cities in the 1920s as cars/car drivers were causing chaos and death. “the pedestrian should not have been jaywalking” has been used reliably to as a figleaf for road engineers (and others) allowing dangerously-designed roads and dangerous vehicle operators to keep killing people.

As a bonus, ‘jaywalking’ is super convenient for deputized slave patrols (‘american police’) ² to hassle non-white people, who often-enough would cross roads, thus ‘police encounters’ could be coerced.

If you ‘jaywalk’ in the presence of a police officer, you might get got.³

If you ‘jaywalk’ in the presence of a car, you might be killed by the driver of that car. Who would be given a full pardon for killing you, because you were ‘jaywalking’.

Of course, in the vast majority of time and space, including today, ‘jaywalking’ is also called ‘using the street on foot’. If you can get out of your mind the idea of jaywalking and can instead see streets in their historic function, the below diagram will ring intuitively true:

source: Driven To Excess: Impacts of Motor Vehicles on the Quality of Life of Residents of Three Streets in Bristol UK

An ethical read of streets says “they’re available to everyone”, and just because someone is not currently in a car or moving in a way directly parallel or perpendicular to the street doesn’t mean that person needs to give enormous social deference to the presence of a different person in a vehicle.

It could be noted that lots of the individualized supremacist driving is a result of terrible systems that normalize/indicate-the-correctness-of that kind of driving. I do take issue with the people, but mostly with the engineers and people who claim special authority and expertise. Please see my piece on bollards for more of the same.

Tupac Shakur beaten unconcious by deputized slave patrols/police over ‘jaywalking’

If you’re a person of the global majority, or perceivably poor, you’re vastly more likely to have an encounter with violence-dealing, coercive people.

“Jaywalking” is a propagandist slur that supports the norms of the oppressor class. It is a slur, castigating both an economic and social norm, created by the auto industry in conjunction with white politically powerful government officials to solve a problem the car industry was facing - their products kept causing people to die, and were at risk of getting banned in cities!

The ‘social innovation’ of this jaywalking was a huge step forward for american policing.

Here’s how to view “laws” and “claims of authority”:

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.

Because American Police got their start as “deputizing the slave patrols”⁴, jaywalking gave another HUGE realm for social control. Now police could justify assaulting someone as ‘enforcing jaywalking laws’.

In 1991, two police officers stopped Tupac Shakur for jaywalking. He said he was knocked unconscious during his arrest, and sued the city of Oakland for 10 million dollars [he ultimately got a few thousand dollars, a total slap in the face]. His lawyer says many of the police brutality cases he’s worked on started with jaywalking stops.

from the This is Criminal podcast Episode 267: Right of way

What Wikipedia Says ‘Jaywalking’ Is

Another spin through the legal/actual definitions of jaywalking:

Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept:

Jaywalking is the act of pedestrians walking in or crossing a roadway if that act contravenes traffic regulations. The term originated in the United States as a derivation of the phrase “jay-drivers”. the word jay meaning ‘a greenhorn, or rube’[, a ‘country bumpkin’], ‘jay drivers’ being people who drove horse-drawn carriages and automobiles on the wrong side of the road.

“Jaywalking” was coined as the automobile arrived in the street in the context of the conflict between pedestrian and automobiles (also then known as horseless carriages), more specifically the nascent automobile industry.

Jaywalking laws vary widely by jurisdiction. In many countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and, with the exception of certain high-speed roads, there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways. This has caused confusion among British people visiting countries with less freedom, with the BBC reporting on a case where a man from the UK was arrested in the U.S. city of Atlanta for crossing the road.

Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City:

The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a “jay walker,” in Kansas City.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1917. The word was promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, according to historian and alternative transportation advocate Peter D. Norton. Today, in the US, the word is often used synonymously with its current legal definition, crossing the street illegally.

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

American traffic planners, if they had an ethical bone in their body, would see ‘jaywalking’ as an environmental sign that better infrastructure is needed to meet the needs of a group of people moving about a geography, safely and smoothly. Jaywalking is more akin to desire paths than a crime, unless you want to maintain social control over certain people with violence.

Roads in America are built as often to accomplish the goal of walls as anything else. So a Jaywalking law says something like the following, to people of the global majority:

please respect our intent of placing a wall across this community/neighborhood/junction, and if you don’t we’ll ruin your life.

Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post on how to recognize in the environment that a wall was built for a road, and upgraded repeatedly to better accomplish the goals of severing a community. It’s screamingly obvious, once you know what to look for. City engineers cannot be held responsible for the deaths they oversee and bring about, and this is unforgivable. An abuse that deserves open condemnation and ridicule and contempt for as long as it’s in place.

Anarchist Calisthenics as the Antidote to Jaywalking Propaganda

This is a hot take, perhaps.

‘law and order’ is the rallying cry of the oppressor class. There’s a quote that went big, created during live recording while some folks were playing a game:

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. (source: dnd/dimension20, reddit meme)

So, how to not participate in the domination?

Exercise anarchist calisthenics and jaywalk, yourself, and enlist friends and others in your scheme as often as possible.⁵

The whole piece is great, 2050 words.

The place you’re most likely to be struck (and killed!) by a vehicle, while crossing roads outside of a four-wheeled vehicle, is while using pedestrian infrastructure, while crossing at an ‘approved’ time. Car drivers are sometimes not paying close attention, or they drive like supremacists, or the sight lines are atrocious, and it’s extremely common for right-turning cars to run over pedestrians who are crossing the road.

The ‘pillar’ of the windshield is often obstructing the driver’s view of where pedestrians might be standing, and when drivers are trying to slide into gaps in traffic, they often do not scan conflict areas with their eyes.

It’s vastly safer (in america) to cross a road outside of the established times/places, because you can see/thread gaps in traffic, as needed. If American ‘traffic planners’ or ‘city engineers’ or ‘municipal planners’ were not hell-bent on maintaining oppressive systems set up by actual white supremacists, American roads could be rendered safe in about two weeks.⁶

My Jaywalking Exploits

If you and I go on a walk together, we’re jaywalking as we’re walking around, and I’ll explain all of this (again) to you.

The legal regime of America is ‘just’ the wet-dream of settler colonialists trying to implement regimes of social control on the colonized populations. Lets not extend dignity or respect to a regime such as this.

Colefax, near Park Ave, in Denver, is atrocious. Cars regularly go 50-60 mph, and vast swaths of it have zero lights or crosswalks or even center signs or cones to separate the lanes going in opposite directions.

There’s a donut shop right across from my house, with no pedestrian crossing, so I ‘jaywalk’ across the street all the time, and when I go to Cheesman Park or the Botanic Gardens. Here’s what some of my activity data looks like. This isn’t all just walking, most of the activity is technically me on my scooter. Maybe I’ll make the difference distinguishable by color some day.

The green boxes show where there is zero road-crossing infrastructure, the red lines are where I’ve ridden my scooter or walked across Colefax. It’s very dangerous and un-fun to cross or ride along on my scooter, too.

I have open contempt for the kinds of people that exert effort to maintain a bad regime, especially when it’s obvious they’re simply trying to maintain emotional comfort. I vomit these people out of my mouth, they are not welcome in my home or around those I love. Unfortunately, I have lots of these kinds of people in my direct, immediate family. (I was raised by white supremacists, grew up around a lot of them, I know them intimately)

Yet we live…

Additional Sources

This is Criminal podcast Episode 267: Right of way, about Tupac as a child being abused by police officers, and everyone involved acts like it’s obviously common and banal. That’s just what the police do to black people, this is America, are you really surprised? If you’re pretending surprise I’m assessing you as a witting or unwitting member of the oppressor class. 🤷‍♂️
Behind the Police a 7-part podcast on Spotify about “policing” in America. remember, southern white people were correctly concerned about ‘slave rebellions’, some southern counties were 15% white, 85% kidnapped, enslaved people of the global majority. Maintaining an adequate regime of social control was a TOP LEVEL CONCERN for white people of the day, which is why they founded “Slave Patrols”. A group of armed men who would harrass and emotionally dominate non-whites. Those white people literally could not feel safe without ensuring a strong regime of physical and emotional control over those non-white people, and that ‘cannot feel safe without control’ thing continues for some white people today. Oh, and plenty of white people today continue to harbor the mental disorder of supremacy.
Police Union Power, Politics, and Confrontation in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Issues 2nd Edition This is a book written by police union leaders, talking about how to best accomplish the goals of being a police labor union leader: the police need to keep getting increases in pay, increasing in retirement benefits, and insulation from abusing their victims, the book is full of principles of organizing and agitating to extract whatever concessions are needed from the political folk.
Anarchist Calisthenics
The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
The Most Dangerous Superstition an interesting book about how the concept of ‘authority’ is best viewed as ‘the most dangerous superstition’. People all the times do to others things they never would do unless some ‘authority’ instructed them to do it.
Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities If cities were built by reasonable people, instead of people hell-bent on ethnic cleansing, Alain Bertaud’s lense of Urban Economics is the correct approach.
The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
I made a one-minute video about ‘jaywalking’ in Denver, and then I made a 4 minute video about the same topic. basically, ‘if you [a driver] are having an unpleasant interaction with a non-driver, the non-driver likely also wishes they were not there and this represents systemic failure not individual failure of you or the carless driver you are beefing with’.
the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine, Warren v DC, 1981 In case you didn’t know, the idea ‘to protect and to serve’ is pure marketing. The police go to great effort to make it really clear that they own no specific duty, to any particular person, to actually protect or to serve that person. you can see why the marketing is useful, though. If they all said “to abuse and enslave” on the side of their vehicles, that would hit a bit too close to home, even though if you look at how police spend their time, the latter is vastly more common than the former.
Jaywalking should really be viewed with the same lense as a desire path
A federal highway administration brochure blaming pedestrians, over and over again, for their own deaths (among other things) Would you believe the federal highway administration exerts hilariously little influence or ‘control over’ municipal streets departments, relative to what all parties might sometimes allow you to mis-apprehend?
City of Denver’s utterly banal guidelines to itself about it’s uncarred drivers how to ‘legalize vehicular manslaughter’ for as little as $2000: “Section 42-4-803. Crossing at other than crosswalks: (1)….Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.”
Why I Break the Law Every Day (the story of ‘jaywalking’), by Mr. Beat
Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System

It’s de-dignifying if I keep adding sources as if to “prove” my case. I’m simply noting that the regime of propaganda around ‘jaywalking’ is strong.

Did you know that the most likely place to die on a road, as a carless driver, is crossing the road in an intersection, while the signal is instructing you to go?

Here’s a good-enough explanation of the concept:

The data shows that the majority of the time pedestrians are hit, they’re in the crosswalk crossing with the signal, which blows the “irresponsible pedestrian” narrative which is sometimes present in discussion of this topic right out of the water.

source: r/chicago, map of cars striking pedestrians and cyclists

Apologies for the scare-quotes. It’s my small noting the unwilling use of these words. This is how you might hear a traffic engineer talk about jaywalking, or a police officer, or how you yourself might think about it, because the concept of jaywalking is a convenient-for-some social fiction that has perhaps been coerced upon many from a young age, same as geocentrism. ↩
Some people think I’m making a hostile statement when explaining that for many police departments in the greater united states, the ‘origin story’ was when the local municipalities fabricated metal stars, and ‘deputized’ the existing slave patrols, and little-enough has changed since then. In the words of the National Law Enforcement Officer’s Fund themselves: Slave Patrols: An Early Form of American Policing.

Compare the slave patroller’s oath with NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy:

I [patroller’s name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power

↩
If you’re white-passing, or perceivably not of the lowest economic class, you’re less likely to ever hear from a ‘law enforcement officer’ a breath about ‘jaywalking enforcement’, and even less so to end up assaulted, kidnapped, or murdered. Still possible though! ↩
The podcast behind the police discusses more than just this, but perhaps you’ve seen an american ‘western’ movie. A common trope is where the town “deputizes” a local vigilante, to better enlist his support in defending them from some external threat. He pins a metal star to his leather jacket, and does his thing. During the chattel slavery time, the wealthy white people used the poor white people to staff ‘slave patrols’ to ‘manage’ the 85% of the people that lived in the region, who happened to also be slaves. When ‘policing’ made it’s way to America from the UK, southern white people ‘just’ fabricated police badges for the existing slave patrols. The innovation of social tooling is the darnedst thing. ↩
from the piece

Outside the station was a major intersection. During the day there was a fairly brisk traffic of pedestrians, cars, and trucks, and a set of traffic lights to regulate it. Later in the evening, however, the vehicle traffic virtually ceased, while the pedestrian traffic, if anything, swelled to take advantage of the cooler evening breeze. Regularly between nine and ten o’clock there would be fifty or sixty pedestrians, not a few of them tipsy, who would cross the intersection. The lights were timed, I suppose, for vehicle traffic at midday and were not adjusted for the heavy evening foot traffic. Again and again, fifty or sixty people would wait patiently at the corner for the light to change: four minutes, five minutes, perhaps longer. It seemed an eternity across the flat landscape of Neubrandenburg, on the Mecklenburg plain. Peering in each direction from the intersection, one could see a mile or so of roadway with, typically, no traffic at all. Very occasionally a single small Trabant made its slow, smoky way to the intersection.

Twice, perhaps, in the course of roughly five hours of my observing this scene, did a pedestrian cross against the light, and then always to a chorus of scolding tongues and fingers wagging in disapproval. I, too, became part of the scene. If I had mangled my last exchange in German, sapping my confidence, I stood there with the rest for as long as it took for the light to change, afraid to brave the glares that awaited me if I crossed. If, more rarely, my last exchange in German had gone well and my confidence was high, I would cross against the light, thinking, to buck up my courage, that it was stupid to obey a minor law that, in this case, was so contrary to reason.

It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh beside their scolding. Striding out boldly into the intersection made a more striking impression, perhaps, but it required more courage than I could normally muster.

As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this: “You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is anarchist calisthenics. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim — and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.” ↩
A skid steer + well-shaped rocks, serving as bollards, large enough for an adult to sit on, obtained for functionally free, could sneckdown every road that has more than one lane in a given direction into a one-lane-each-way road. For all junctions, one would convert from lights/stop signs to small-footprint roundabouts, shaped by rocks and bollards, with a target max speed of like 15mph and a target min speed of 4 mph. everything would be fixed. “but car drivers would be surprised” says every traffic engineer and police officer I’ve spoken to about it. me: “behold, my field of f*cks, you can see that it is barren!” ↩

Tongue Ties: What, So What, What To Do

2024-05-12T13:00:00+00:00

“tongue tied” (my first time hearing the word, my newborn’s experience)

A ‘tongue tie’ was something I’d heard discussed (the little bit of fiber under a tongue) as the kid we now know as Eden was en route and not yet born. I didn’t think much of it then.

Cut forward to 5 days post-birth, Eden and her mom get the first at-home lactation consultant visit, from a lactation consultant affiliated with The Mama’ hood. That entire organization is super cool, they introduced us to our doula, too.

Something that’s common knowledge about babies, and was new to me then was that whatever weight a baby is born at, its normal for its weight to go down by up to 10%, as it’s metabolism changes over from ‘being fed via umbilical cord from mom’ to ‘being fed via milk and digesting and eliminating waste’. It’s fascinating. thus, weight would be lost and that it’s not good to lose too much.

Eden had lost 10%, the max weight that ought to be lost before going back up again.

The hospital lactation consultant had checked in on Kristi and Eden and pronounced all as fine.

The at-home lactation consultant said:

I’m technically not allowed to make a formal diagnoses. and, by my estimate, Eden has a severe tongue tie, and probably a lip tie, and it’s interfering with her ability to generate suction, which is why it seems that Kristi’s milk hasn’t come in, because her body doesn’t know anyone’s requesting milk.

That’s something of an emergency state, as you could imagine. So, they began “triple feedings”, which means:

Eden and Kristi, nursing as usual (feeding 1)
After eden would finish a defined few minutes of nursing, I’d bottle feed milk from other mothers, obtained via friend networks and online mothers-supporting-mothers groups
Kristi’s milk needed nursing to come in, so using a electric pump, she’d pump. We’d freeze it to later give to Eden.

And all of this happens every two hours, start-to-start. We’d spend an hour feeding, rest a bit, and then another hour would pass and we’d start it all over again. Slowly but surely, she drank lots of donated milk from other nursing moms, she began more then eventually suffient nutrition from her mom (because post tongue-tie-release, her entire mouth could suck correctly, so her mom’s body was getting all the helpful signals to generate milk, which it did.)

We tracked everything to the nearest 5 or 10 ml, at the very beginning. After a weekend of this, and a weigh-in at the pediatrician’s office, we could see that Eden was gaining weight, and we all collectively breathed a sigh of relief.

At the pediatrician’s office, I said something about the proposed tongue tie. (“someone else was looking at her feeding and said she thinks eden might have a tongue tie, what do you think?”)

he said:

Yeah, maybe, no biggie either way. As long as her weight is going up, all good. If not, she’ll need to go on formula. We’ll re-weigh her in a week.

author’s note, I just for the first time ever lost a bunch of the text I’d written! I had this whole story typed out, saved it, gone. I’m sorta not willing to re-do the whole thing now, pardon the brevity, I’m typing out a summarized version of the story

We of course wanted Eden to be able to work her own mouth and contribute to the system generating nutrition, and it would be much easier on everyone if she could. The next morning, we visited our dentist who referred us to their favorite pediatric dentist.

We spent a morning driving around and talking to doctors, dentists, surgeons, but by the end, had what we wanted and what eden needed - the tongue tie and lip tie release.

Her mouth and lips opened up so much more, she was able to finally generate an obvious and proper seal when nursing.

Her mouth opened so much more than it was able to before the procedure. Her cry was different, stronger. Everyone commented on it, the nurses holding her, her grandma later that day. Her tongue could move up and around, in a normal way, making it obvious but only in hindsight how restricted it was before.

The procedure looked relatively straight forward, the pediatric dentist removed upper lip tie, lower lip tie, and tongue tie. The last ‘tie’ wasnt wasn’t just the thin mid-line fiber visible inside her mouth, but it was actually removing quite a lot of material from the mid-line to the outer edges of her tongue, deeper into the throat than I’d originally expected.

She was in great hands throughout the procedure! The staff at the clinic had their own kids, and of course it’s so rare to see so small of a kid. She was held gently and cried during the procedure yet was quickly at peace again after. The surgeon was very efficient, quick, and gentle.

I watched the whole procedure from over his shoulder, looking at her mouth or the camera he sometimes used that sent video to a monitor. As soon as he was done, I remember thinking to myself “why was this not instantly diagnosed in the hospital as soon as she was born?”

It was sooooo obvious. For a simple example, it’s reasonable for ones upper lip to be able to ‘unfold’ away from the teeth and flip up over the nose, sorta covering the tip of the nose. her lip tie was so tight that her upper (and lower) lip could hardly move away from where they were, most of the time, near her teeth. That was just the lip ties! The tongue was similarly restricted.

Life carried onward, I didn’t really think about tongue ties again.

Tongue Tied (the book, and my adult experience)

Skip forward a few years. Other than the story of how inadequate the American medical system is, I didn’t think about the tongue tie thing for a year or so. then I remembered, in the conversations with various people about it, several times someone saying “it’s heritable”.

I looked up a some functional tests, for myself, and on all of them, failed the ‘test’ hard. Most notably:

look straight up and swallow - can you swallow without pain in your neck, or bending your neck to accommodate the movement of the throat/hyoid bone? I felt pulling all the way into my sternum, and had to sorta dip my chin/jaw with some of the movement.
holding your lips close, open your jaw as wide as you can. keeping the lips closed, can the tongue reach the roof of the mouth? pre-release, my tongue couldn’t reach the roof of my mouth. Now, there’s plenty of room to spare.

Here’s an example self-assessment youtube video. Also google tongue tie self-assessment and hunt around. There’s different ways the tongue and lips can have extra tissue hanging out, and as you explore you’ll find those ways.

Tongue Tie Test: Quick Self-Test to see if you are secretly Tongue Tied! (FOR SINGERS)

I obviously had one, so I next got from the library the book Tongue-Tied: How a Tiny String Under the Tongue Impacts Nursing, Speech, Feeding, and More.

After reading that, I was fully committed to the procedure, just needed to line up the details. It’s not trivial, but not difficult or complicated.

I called around American dentists, to see if they did it, and wasn’t inspired to confidence.

Eventually I found the Colorado Tongue Tie center and was instantly onboard. They’re trustworthy, you can read the reviews. They said:

we don’t do the procedure until it’s recommended by the myofunctional therapist you’re working with. here’s some we recommend…

I ended up calling and working with Megan Dewalt, who is exceptional. Megan is based in Denver, thus the recommendation by the Colorado Tongue Tie Center, but all communication is zoom/email/text, it was great to not have to leave my house and travel somewhere to do the therapy.

If all you do is read this blog post, read the book, and then set up a intake/evaluation call with her, and do what she tells you, and you have a tongue tie, your life is about to be transformed. :)

at some point, out of curiosity, I’d contacted my dentist to see what notes/records they had on this tongue tie thing.

They have spent plenty of time looking in my mouth, and I’ve had a LOT of dental work done, tons of cavities, despite being rather attentive with oral hygiene. as a kid I had braces twice bc my pallet wasn’t shaped right because my tongue wasn’t working right. I also ground my teeth in my sleep, and wore a night guard. I was a little disappointed no one had uttered the words, or mentioned the possibility, in all like 35 years of my life.

I didn’t expect them to say anything, but they gave me a Formal Letter on Formal Letterhead:

Based on our notes, we agree that the patient might have a tongue tie that might benefit from release, obviously up to the wisdom of the involved medical professional, we refuse/are unable to make an assessment.

Each time I saw someone in person about this, they said “oh, yeah, that’s an intense tongue tie, no doubt.”

My personal life is full of stories of things like:

some stuff that sounds like sleep apnea (minor snoring, sometimes nighttime airway obstructions)
night time teeth grinding
braces (and pallet expanders) as a kid
adhd? sleep issues, for sure, in various ways.
sometimes sounding like I’m choking in my sleep (reported to me, and I wouldn’t note the episodes well enough or at all, so I wouldn’t remember or note it when I woke up.)
obviously limited tongue mobility
lower back pain issues

BuuUUuut… I also “seemed fine”. I can eat, I can talk, I sleep, blah blah blah…

I spent time recently in Asia and thought about getting the procedure done there when I was passing through Thailand, without doing any myofunctional therapy. Thankfully my sister convinced me to consider a wiser path instead of only getting the release done.

The reasoning makes tons of sense, as soon as she says it:

Your oral anatomy has been constrained, massively, so you’ve learned compensatory movement patterns. If your tongue gets unstuck from the bottom of the mouth, and you don’t know what new movements to do with it, you’ll only partially benefit from the new options.

(My paraphrase of her words)

Right she was. By then, I made it back to colorado, and found Colorado Tongue Tie Center

I live in google maps, here’s their listing/the reviews

I called them up to see what it was like doing the procedure with them. They said they book the procedure once the person has been given a go-ahead by a myofunctional therapist. I worked with one of the ones they recommended, Megan Dewalt, did a few weeks of tongue strengthening exercises and drills, given by her, and then got the procedure done, then did a few more weeks of tongue strengthening exercises and drills.

✨ My Post-surgery experience ✨

As the procedure was happening, I giggled to myself the first time I noticed my tongue touch the top of my mouth while my mouth was wide open. I’d never felt that before, I had been looking forward to that moment for a while, and I finally got it, though my mouth was full of local anesthesia, so I was feeling it only in some ways.

even sitting in the chair afterwards, I noticed that my head turned better, more easily, to the left and the right. It makes sense, turns out my tongue was basically… stuck to my hyoid bone. (If you can look straight up and swallow without pain or tight pulling from your throat to your sternum, congrats! No tongue tie for you!) Here’s the wikipedia for the hyoid bone, look at all the muscles that attach to it.

My throat (‘hyoid bone’) had been turning when my head would turn to full extension - because it was uncomfortable, my head either wouldn’t turn farther, or it would hurt.

Post-op, no pain. It was amazing.

Next I noticed indeed that my head sat a bit higher/differently on my neck. The tongue tie (in my mind) caused a bit of tugging on the top of my spine, so to keep things comfortable I was compensating in posture. This was plainly visible to the therapist/doctor, but I’d never noticed and couldn’t really see it, until after the procedure.

i felt differences in my sternum, diaphragm. shoulders. neck. throat. voice. swallowing became less burdensome.

And this was all still while my tongue and mouth was in quite a bit of pain, because it had just gotten rather er… opened up.

So, I did what any normal person would do and drove to Rifle for three days, where I proceeded to have a LOVELY trip, climbed a bunch of moderates, and did (and sent!) harder-for-me things.

My climbing

My climbing is different.

Turns out my head wasn’t rotating freely on the end of my neck, so, because one spends a lot of time looking up the wall while rock climbing, I was changing the posture of my contact with the rock, often enough, to accommodate the needs of looking up/around. With better mobility/de-linked neck/head rotation, my movement is different. I can pause in “restier” stances, still breath deeply, and simultaneously look around/up/behind me.

I’ve always been able to climb smoothly, and I don’t know if this difference is visible from an observer’s perspective, but I can easily feel a difference in comfort, just looking around and finding various positions relative to holds.

My posture

I stand differently, and I’ve had a HORRIBLE lingering back issue for a while, that was exacerbated by my head being incorrectly tilted forward. I’d compensate in my shoulders somehow, and then compensate again in my lower back. Now, everything ‘stacks’ nicely, and I can stand vertically without effort. I would have said I could stand without effort before, but I was wrong. Now I know, it was very effortful.

My tongue

After six weeks of tongue strengthening and stretching, I’m very aware of my own mouth. I spend SO MUCH time now exploring the inside of my own mouth with my tongue, or exploring the movement of my throat, soft pallet, throat/hyoid bone, and tongue, all in relation to each other. I notice that I can open my throat in a different way, that is much more comfortable.

Driving and scooting

My head sits differently on top of my spine, and I can turn my head easily, farther, as I mentioned. This manifests in more ease while driving and scooting. I can easily feel the difference. A helmet is heavy, so a slight correction to head posture lets the weight of the helmet be more easily carried on top of my spine. It’s comfy. I can quickly turn my head far too the side to check blind spots, as needed.

Some of my frisbee throwing changed

I sorta got a new throw unlocked. I can point my head at wherever I’m throwing a backhand to, and with some hip hinging, using that extra extension of my neck, I can do a pretty powerful backhand throw while keeping my destination fully in sight, through the entire arm motion.

The disk doesn’t come out flat, the only reason it works is because it doesn’t travel flat - the arc of the arm+disk uses a bit of the natural slicing ‘fall’ of the parabolic arc of the disc as it gets thrown across the space.

This wasn’t a combination of options that was available to me, pre-tongue-tie-release, or at least not one I’d noticed. Getting a few extra degrees of rotation available to me, between where my shoulders are pointed and where my head can be pointed, absolutely opened up some new options for my throwing. I felt immediately improved across all of my backhands, which had always been my weaker frisbee throw, relative to my forehand.

Now that I’m skilled with the throw, though, I note that it’s possible that maybe I could have thrown like this pre-release. I’ve showed it to a few folks, who have indeed noticed that it’s an interesting variation of the backhand. A skillful version of the movement does not demand a huge range of motion, and can be used in subtle ways. who knows.

My emotional state

Pete Walker says, basically,

emotional flashbacks tend to happen when we assign emotional meaning to physical sensations. Stopping the flashback is to first engage in thought-stopping behaviors, then try to localize where/what the physical sensation is in the body, and hold space/honor/work through that physical thing.

I now know in a way that is clearest once the ‘strings have been cut’ that I carried substantial tension (think… muscle tension, fascia tension, whatever) in my throat, connecting my tongue, the top of my spine, my hyoid bone, and more. That physical knotted-up-ness would contribute to a turbulent emotional state, AND would limit my rest-and-digest systems from fully getting online.

If my sleep is compromised, I’m getting less restored, and if I’m less restored, things seem incrementally harder and more dim, rinse and repeat.

I could say more but this was written in a single session, and i lost a bunch of what I’d had due to minor computer errors. I’m a write-it-now kind of person.

I’ve gone all the way around with depression, need to do an update to that post, but would posit that an emotional state and inner physical tension can have a relationship. I prefer the version of my body post-tongue-tie-release than pre.

My climbing partner was subjected to near endless exclamations to myself about my own mouth. “I love my new mouth!” “I love taking my new mouth rock climbing!” “wow, that thing I said earlier about breathing and my diaphragm applies to breathing while climbing, too! Amazing!”

I could say more.

How I proceeded to the tongue tie release, 5 days ago

I’m writing this whole damn post because I want to write down the profound and many differences I feel, inside my own body, often in shocking and beautiful ways. If you have a tongue tie, and can get the work done (myofunctional therapy, tongue tie release, more myofunctional therapy, and body work) you might find your body a drastically friendlier space to inhabit. I’ve had tears come to my eyes, more than once, as I’ve noticed new forms of relief or relaxation settle in.

There’s been cascading things unfolding across days, weeks.

Colorado Tongue Tie Center

The procedure was done by Dr. Chad, he was exceptional, it was chill, easy, pain was non-existent (during the procedure) and minimal during the post-procedure repair time.

It was like an hour in the office, and 30 minutes in the chair. It felt akin to some minor dental work. I rode my scooter back home after, and other than being ginger with my mouth, there wasn’t any issues.

I ended up with six sutures after the procedure, so went heavy on ibuprofen and tylenol for a few days, and took a light dose of narcotics the first night to sleep, drank TONS of salty broth.

It’s ~$1500 on a credit card, some health insurance agencies will reimburse you, and if the health insurance company won’t, the dental insurance company might. Or no one might.

Megan Dewalt, OMT

Megan was (is) my guide through the whole process. We did a few pre-procedure meetings, a few weeks apart, where I’d get exercises to build tongue strength and proprioception so I can know where my tongue is/isn’t. To make sure I mouth breath, etc. Then I did the procedure, she’d given me notes ahead of time with the stretches to do throughout the rehab. (super light immediately after, light/medium until sutures dissolve, then go hard after)

Dr. Chad at the Tongue Tie Center said it was easy to do my procedure, as it’s always easy to do the procedures for Megan’s clients, because I had plenty of musculature in my tongue, which made it easy for him to find the tissue to remove, vs. the tissue to not remove.

I spent ~$1k on the pre-op prep, and about $1k on the post-op rehab, spread across six weeks each, with 2-4x/daily strength building exercises, paid/scheduled right after the intake call.

The obvious book, Tongue Tied

Tongue-Tied: How a Tiny String Under the Tongue Impacts Nursing, Speech, Feeding, and More. Get it, read it.

Bodywork from Daniel Lopez

Daniel Lopez, DO. My first time ever getting ‘body work’ done, but I was so thrilled for the nudge. Turns out the tongue connects to the soft pallet which moves up and down in coordination with the hyoid bone. That thing feels connected to the top of the spine, and all this can be incorrectly bound together, and when the tongue is released, there’s so much new movement potential. Dr. Lopez did grand work on me, from the cranium through the sternum (and even worked on a back injury that is now dramatically better, bc my head sits on my spine differently, so i don’t have to compensate/over-compensate elsewhere in the spinal column)

I did my first appointment ($300) the day after my release. I kept having nearly tears in my eyes as I could feel the ‘unclenching’ of various portions of my body and musculature, in the days following the release. I sorta wish I had done one session before the release, and one after. Alas, it was all exceptional, none the less.

Nasal Breathing

A big part of a tongue tie is it’s contribution to things like sleep apnea. A big part of sleep apnea is snoring.

It’s ‘super unhealthy’ to breath through the mouth exclusively, or majority, or much at all. Oops, RIP my entire childhood. Tongue ties also relate to cavaties, because an open-at-night mouth is more prone to cavities. teeth grinding, which I did, so I wore a mouth guard, which pushed my mouth open even more, so I was 100% mouth breathing when I slept, even though when awake I’m aware of how dry the air in denver is and would close my mouth.

As soon as I read the book below, Breath, I began taping my lips at night. A thin little strip, vertically, right under the center of the nostrils. I could still mouth breath if I wanted, too, the tape simply prevented the lips from popping open on their own. My sleep changed, perceivably. For the better.

So much sleep issues can be fixed, just with that bit of tape. the first tape I was using was too sticky, left a residue, but I found better stuff and enjoyed being able to look forward to waking up with the inside of my mouth feeling rested instead of dried out.

Consider reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. It’s sorta pop-sciencey, yet it nudged me into mouth taping most nights (certainly not 100%), and I certainly upped my percent-of-the-day nasal breathing when awake, too. It was already pretty high, now its quite close to 100%.

Misc Sources

Here’s some internet rabbit trails to follow:

Anarchy (or, less provocatively, Mutuality and Co-Creation)

2024-05-03T13:00:00+00:00

In 2017, I read The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey; everything and nothing changed.

Lots changed because all of I sudden, I could clearly label a dynamic that had always irked me. I could see that some people would avoid coercing others, only because both parties believed firmly enough that there was a duty for the others to obey.

That duty to obey was backed by a belief that a failure to obey would eventually bring pain or absence or lack.

I expect most people who have been coerced by others will report it as unpleasant. Or dangerous and violating.

I have so many problems with coercion, and can speak against it all day, but an under-appreciated problem with coercion is what it supplants and replaces, in the inner/outer worlds of both the coercers, and the victims.

Because coercion is fundamentally unethical and dehumanizing, any institution or structure that relies upon it, or is rooted in it, is unable to function in any way but a perverted, violating way.

The human spirit is destroyed in the face of coercion, and everything about the human experience is enlivened and made healthy when those involved have ‘access’ to adequate safety and resources.

Most coercion, in America today, especially White America, is of an emotional kind. But when it fails, it becomes verbal, and when that fails, the ‘muscular’ bits of coercion come out. Denial of access to resources, credible threats of violence, etc.

It’s like watching a disregulated adult experiencing a temper tantrum in which they performatively yell and throw things, in order to get their way, and when they do, they slip back into a dissociated fugue state and retreat from the world.

It’s a statement of:

If you don’t give me what I want in the right way and schedule, I’ll dominate the experience with unpleasantness, until you relent.

It’s impossible to problem solve with coercive people, because the fact that they are not coercing you in this moment is not affected by the slightest that they will coerce you as soon as they next decide they want to. They don’t find the coerciveness to be the problem, simply that you have a problem with it, is the problem.

What coercion destroyed and propagandized

I dislike, fundamentally, the space given to coercion as “just” or “ethical”.

Coercion goes hand in hand with entitlement, or a belief that it is right to dominate someone else.

a patriarchal system of belief is the idea that men are entitled to dominate women, at least one other ethnic group, children, and other men less willing to participate in domination. That adults dominate children.

The propaganda that will be pushed out into the world is:

{patriarchal ethnic group} is fundamentally superior to {all other ethnic groups, or at least that other ethnic group}

The alternative to coercion is what existed before anyone showed up with credible threats of violence.

Mutuality and co-creation

I don’t believe that I have the right or entitlement to coerce anyone, nor do I extend welcome to people who act entitled to coerce me.

My updated view of the world could be something like:

Violence of all stripes (physical, obviously, but in some corners of society emotional and verbal violence is vastly more common) is the tool of emotionally immature people enacting their childish view on the world, and serious people are completely nonplussed by the idea of ‘using violence’.

A believe in political authority is now, to me, now different than the belief in church authority that dominated the middle ages.

The pope says no sex on wednesdays, so no one is having sex on wednesdays, right?

It is dedignifying to take seriously the kinds of people that think violence is a reasonable problem solving mechanism.

What else happens in the world without coercion?

A broad class of acts, attitudes, and beliefs that can be summarized as: Mutuality and Co-Creation

Mutuality might be opposed to ‘individualistic’. It assumes a checking-in and temperature-taking with others. It’s the opposite of competitive. It sees the other as a fully-dignified participant in the experience. It doesn’t require false humility or making everything equal - parents can be mutual to their pre-verbal children, and people of a dominant ethnic group can be mutual towards people of an oppressed people group.

Mutuality simply spends time evaluating “us”, and observing the perspective of “us”. There’s an eye towards the health of the ecosystem, accomplishing the reduction of harm and want and lack is as important as (or more important than) pursuing some reward or accomplishment.

Co-creation contains elements of making something new with the other person/people. It’s assumed that the end result and the process will be improved for the full creative, emotional part of all parties fully engaged.

Coercion is like pouring bleach on a garden. It destroys everything it touches.

Authority as Propaganda

Jacques Euller noted that propaganda plays two functions, the second of which I’d not considered:

For anyone who happen to agree, intellectually, with the propaganda, or some preceding idea, propaganda does indeed shape some societal attitudes directly, via the message, to be in conformity with the message.
But for those who disagree with the propaganda, even if they roll their eyes at it and feel contempt for the kinds of people involved in its creation… propaganda still plays a role as a reminder of power and authority. It takes MUSCLE and MIGHT for an institution/person to so boldly proclaim something so preposterous. “War brings peace” and “Eat more chicken”, “I punish you because I love you” and so on, so forth. It serves a role as a reminder of privilege, and the distribution of power. It’s an assertion of power.

The concept of authority serves as propaganda. Authority is a societal fiction, a dangerous superstition.

The words behind someone who “believes” in authority (similar to how someone might believe in a god) is:

I did {such and such} because someone else said so and I am willing to throw away my own dignity and yours, simply because they gave me credible legal fiction to do so

When large groups of people are killed by other people, usually most of the killers report something like:

Well, i didn’t want to do it, gosh, that person never did anything to hurt me, but {external_authority} made me do it.

It’s tragic.

A retrospective addendum

2017 was my official entry into the anarchist camp. Cannot, will not, ever do anything but resist the coercion and violence in the world around me.

I lived a bunch of life between 2017 and 2022, I use words like ‘nervous system regulation’ and ‘intellectual colonialism’, and already was walking away hard from the normal protestant white evangelical mono-normative nuclear-family type stuff, stumbled into the phrase ‘relationship anarchy’ and instantly was ruined.

I then began the canon around how marriage and the state are inextricably linked. A little while ago, I read Marriage Will Never Set Us Free, and found it concisely expressing things I’ve been thinking on.

I’ll never get married again. There’s no limit to the depth of the relationship(s) I can have without marriage, and to even participate in marriage, now, rubs me the wrong way, in terms of what it normalizes.

Relationship Anarchy

The Books, extra resources

I’ve got a bunch of books that relate to Anarchy, Authority and more. Because Anarchy and interpersonal relating are born out of the same core views, I’ll mix ‘relationship’ stuff in with ‘political’ stuff. Decolonization stuff, etc.

Part of my movement away from marriage and monogamy is because I view those as shaping the ecosystem for conditions favorable to colonialism and supremacy. Turns out lots of people who say they mean well for you would gladly watch you self-abandon to try to conform to an unmanageable situation.

Continuous Glucose Monitors: Why & What

2024-05-03T13:00:00+00:00

This is a story and explanation about why I sometimes wear a glucose monitor. It’s visible on the rear of my upper arm, usually sparks a question or two, I’ve usually stumbled through a response, now I can simply pass this page along to anyone who asks.

Part two, written about a year later, lives here. The technology has improved & the cost gone down, and other related thoughts based in part on observations of the data

Since maybe 2018, every now and again I’ll purchase a month-long ‘subscription’ to the Levels service, which is their app paired with a Continuous Blood Glucose Monitor.

It’s a tiny wearable device that uses adhesion to stick to your arm for two weeks. It has a 1cm thin bendable plastic needle that allows it to sample your blood glucose, continuously, store the data onboard, and then when you tap your phone’s NFC reader to it, your phone pulls the data off and… renders it.

A history

A continuous blood glucose monitor is an improved tool on the finger-prick blood-draw glucose monitor technology that will be intimately familiar to anyone with type 1 or type 2 diabetes. I have neither kind of diabetes, but have used the finger prick monitors before.

Unsurprisingly, there’s some books I’d like to interject here, that amount to something like ‘an internally consistent perspective of human metabolism’. Books are just books, anyone can write anything in a book, so I’m not saying these books ought to count as anything like ‘evidence’ to you, simply that they were compelling for me.

Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting (nerdfitness.com) I read this in 2015
Tripping over the Truth: How the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Is Overturning One of Medicine’s Most Entrenched Paradigms I read this in ~2017
The Case against Sugar hilarious and sad, I read it in ~2017
It Starts with the Egg: How the Science of Egg Quality Can Help You Get Pregnant Naturally, Prevent Miscarriage, and Improve Your Odds in IVF Read this in 2020. Turns out ‘egg quality’ at least partially boils down to ‘healthy and available mitochondrial energy generation pathways’, which is completely coherent with the above 3 links.

Tripping Over The Truth is the most impactful book here, to me. It outlines a common feature among all cancers - that the cellular energy generation pathway in normal cells breaks and the mitochondria start to generate energy via fermenting environmentally available sugar (blood glucose). Virtually all cancer cells obtain energy via this alternative energy generation pathway.

There’s ahem several upstream/downstream implications.

These books all are coherent with each other around things like:

Sugar interacts with the body’s endocrine system, thus it has the same effects on the human body as hormones. You know how when children hit puberty, they change in ways unrelated to how much food they are or are not eating? Sugar has a close-enough effect at any chronic level.
half of the dry weight of your body is mitochondria
Mitochondria and one’s gut bacteria all sorta… matter. And can be healthy or unhealthy.

This layers on top of a change I made to my life in 2015 - I read the NerdFitness guide to Intermittent Fasting, and jived with it. I stopped eating breakfast, started doing the 16/8 ‘intermittent fasting’ plan; I stopped eating breakfast, and moved my breakfast omelette + veggies to my lunchtime meal. Everything else stayed the same.

I dropped so much hassle, food prep, cleaning time from my life, and got nothing but upsides. At the time my partner and I were traveling a lot, and there was substantial mental overhead to prepping meals in constantly novel houses, often while trying to do so quietly to avoid waking anyone up. I then could simply wake up, make my coffee, and be fully ready for the day.

I’ve been doing this for ten years, so it’s habit now. When I eat breakfast (very rarely, only when with others who want to eat breakfast) I always think “wow, I couldn’t imagine doing this every day.” and then usually skip lunch and eat again at dinner time.

I still binge eat sometimes. I’ve definitely got a partially disordered relationship with food, always did since childhood. I think many people use food to deal with emotional loneliness, and sometimes that is still a thing for me, but that falls outside this exact article.

I like the idea of semi-regularly doing a 24-36 hour fast, but only occasionally do maybe 22 hour fasts. Dinner one day, don’t eat again until about dinner the next day, these are never planned just sometimes happen. When I’m not eating carbs regularly, i very rarely experience the sensation of hunger.

What the data looks like

That ‘mountain’ happened as I ate a carb-y dinner (and animal crackers) and then did late-night snacking of more pasta and ice cream at ~11pm.

my blood glucose goes from 80 to 175, across perhaps, and returns to baseline the next morning by 10 or 11a. You can almost see my body releasing insulin (to bring the glucose back down) then it climbing again as the food is absorbed. then released again, climbing, and eventually the entire metabolic load of the food finishes and it drops back down.

(remember, ideally I’d eat lower carbs, and not so late at night. My body would get to enjoy many more hours at the lowered blood glucose level)

The above level is what lowish-carb eating might look like on the first day, and here’s partial data on what it might look like after low carb for a few days. (Don’t be put off by the red, this is an app that is trying to keep diabetics from dying)

This is a normal blood sugar reading for a sustained low-carb day. You can see my blood sugar going up throughout the day. This is very normal, obviously the body can manage its glucose levels, can raise them or lower them as needed. It’s not as obvious what and when I am eating - I use the Levels app that ingests this raw data, to record what I eat, if I want.

I simply find it fascinating to see how my body does and does not respond to what I eat. I find it much easier to manage and stay ahead of my desire to binge, because I know I’ll be looking at the effect of it on my glucose for a while.

I really like the feeling of clean eating, and I use the continuous glucose monitor to refine some of my habits around my nutrition. Lots of the most interesting parts of this data, though, is the unfolding, self-observing nature of the data. I encourage you to try it, I imagine you’d find it interesting, with one or two novel, experiential insights that you wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

Why neither of us need the glucose monitor

The devices are quite expensive. This is the ‘gold standard’ of medical care for type 1 diabetes medication, so most people pay for these via insurance. It’s $100 per two week sensor, or $50/week to get minute-by-minute monitoring of your glucose levels.

Certainly doable, but not cheap. Thus why I get these only so often. Mostly I manage my own nutrition via my own head, and will and will not binge regardless of the sensor.

The sensor helps me see how quickly and how much my body responds to the presence and absence of certain foods, and in an extremely real-time way, and I love it.

Strong Defaults Will Win

Three key food defaults:

My first meal of the day is not until after noon, and I usually stop eating by 8p, so I get daily ‘16 hour fasts’. I don’t count the time immediately after eating and while sleeping ‘fasting’, so really I just push my first meal of the day several hours to lunch time or the afternoon, at the ‘cost’ of occasionally being able to detect the physiological sensation of hunger, which passes always in just a few minutes.
That meal, which is one of two I’ll eat that day, is usually: brocoli, mushroom, spinach, eggs, sardines, lots of olive oil, salt, pepper, maybe tumeric. It’s pure healthy fat, enough but not too much protein. No carbs.
I usually eat whatever I want for dinner. Home cooked, or eating out. I love Indian food, all forms of Spanish & Latin American food, Thai, Vietnamese, the various forms of Chinese food, pizza, and more. Ice cream and cookies, bread, pasta. I generally avoid cookies and dessert type things, but sometimes, especially if it’s abundant in the environment, I partake. Sometimes I go no-carb dinners (shrimp, salmon, zucchini, squash, mushrooms, kimchi, brocoli, sauerkraut, hardboiled asian-style eggs, greek yogurt, spinach, olives, pickles, EVOO and coconut oil, almonds. So many options, this would be way too much food to eat all at once, but it shows I can cycle things through while eating abundantly)

I don’t drink anything that has sugar added. Most days the liquids I have are: Water, black coffee/espresso (if I/it needs cream, Almond milk or heavy cream), tea.

I’ve regularly done low-protein mostly vegetarian keto-compliant nutrition profiles before, and very happily. (basically, no carbs, 1/3rd consumed food is protein, 2/3rds fat. Protein comes from many places besides meat, but I’ll usually have a few shrimp, a piece of salmon, or anchovies, at least every other day)

Since my ‘default meal’ has been almost identical for a decade, and I’ve shaped it into a delicious and fully keto compliant meal, the difference between me being ‘fully keto’ and ‘not at all keto’ is just what I do with my dinner, and if I’m choosing to abstain from sugary, carb-y, food.

I used to be fully vegetarian, and for a time when my then-partner was trying to become pregnant, we both added small amounts of high-quality protein to our diets, while going out of our way to avoid endocrine disrupters and any sort of metallic bio-accumulation. I’ve retained the occasional consumption of salmon and shrimp, along with the regular consumption of sardines. I never eat chicken, beef, pork, deer, for reasons of ethics and health. I don’t drink milk (lactOSE, it’s sugar, and contains Animal Growth Hormone (an endocrine disruptor)) and don’t eat much cheese, ideally. If I do, it’ll be (at its best) a hard goat cheese, occasionally.

Who knows if this is working. I’m 35, and have as good of a body composition as I could have, and always have. I’ve been eating mostly this way since 2015.

Maybe I’ll stick a video up here of me making my ‘default meal’. It’s very easy to scale serving sizes up to feed as many as 6 people at once, or making four or five servings for myself (to store as future meals).

Many, many others have eaten this meal with me, and pretty much everyone says “surprisingly delicious, despite it’s unconventional composition & appearance”.

It’s a one-dish meal, of course, and there’s zero cleanup. I have a very refined set of preferences for how I like to use my kitchen

Effortless ease and excellence is all I want. I encourage you to read the books I mentioned above.

How I nudge myself into full-on ‘zero carbs’ when I want

It looks pretty bonkers, the way I eat, when I’m doing something strange, if you were to be there looking over my shoulder the whole time.

But, I’ve nudged my eating profile in this direction for a long time, and I love it. If you were curious for easy places to start experimenting with the best of this way of being. This is how I sorta nudged myself in this direction, and how I outline this to others:

Start maxing out olive oil and coconut oil consumption. It’s possible that coconut oil, swished around your mouth for a few minutes, is good for reducing the nutrients available to the bacteria that contribute to bad breath and cavities. So, once or twice a day, spoon a few grams of coconut oil straight into your mouth, swish it around for a bit, then eat it. Two nice things for the price of 1. Use regular olive oil for cooking, and atop every meal you eat, pour as much olive oil as you can until the amount gets ‘excessive’. Free, delicious, satiating fats. A few heavy drizzles is like 25 g of the good stuff.
Add almonds, olives, and hard cheeses to your kitchen, and start starting snacking with those items. All are very portable, perfectly delicious, satiating. filling. Don’t even stop snacking on other stuff, just when you go for a snack, have at least some of the above. Maybe stop other kinds of snacks eventually.
Add and practice and refine a meal of sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, 3 eggs, LOTS of extra virgin olive oil, and almonds. Get canned sardines and sometimes add them to that meal. Feed a friend or two with the meal, store some in a tupperware for later. This meal will do a lot of heavy lifting for you. Rotate in zucchini, cucumber, riced cauliflower, artichoke hearts. Anything cruciferous, go all in on. And olive oil.
Don’t try to eliminate any food stuffs from your routine! Don’t think about stopping eating anything that you’re regularly eating. At best perhaps be less quick to replenish finished supplies of things like ice cream, crackers, frozen meals, processed stuff. If you’re drinking sugar, though, I think it’s worth cutting that immediately.
See what it’s like to stop eating at 8p, rather than eating late into the night.
Try a single ‘don’t eat anything besides coffee/tea or coconut oil until noon’ day.
Combine the last 2 points. Stop eating at 8, don’t start until the next day at noon, x1. Evaluate. If you managed OK, do it for 2 days.
at this point, you are good at that vegetarian-ish keto meal, and you’re intermittent fasting. If you slip that meal in as the first meal of the day, even if you don’t change anything else about your eating, you’ll now be managing to spend most of your life with very low blood glucose, and will experience small ‘fasting’ moments often-enough. huzzah.

If you wanna do the full keto thing, here’s how I do it, cobbled together from all the various internet sources, reddit, my own experience, proclivities, idiosyncrasies.

vegetarian bullion cubes (have a cup of broth once or twice a day, or more. As much as you want, have the broth, it’s extremely nice.)
Morons lite salt (supposedly electrolyte demands go up when not eating any carbs), add some to water with a Mio b-vitamine electrolyte supplement, mix this with your water
almonds and olives and olive oil and coconut oil will be a perceivable fraction of your nutrition. I have like 100g, combined, of the above w/most meals
Push your lunch meal to a bit later like 1 or 2p, sometimes. Or let it happen. Since I’m very pro-fasting, and low-hunger-queue, often enough I’ll find myself not eating for the day until quite late in the afternoon. I always feel an odd sense of accomplishment when this happens. Sorta patting my nutritional and digestive and metabolic systems on the head. pat pat nice work there, I see what you did. pat pat

I don’t have tips or strategies for eating meals out with others and not completely violating the above norms. So, usually I just eat whatever looks good to me, don’t sweat what happens temporarily to my blood glucose, and then resume my normal nutritional pattern at the next regularly occurring meal. If I eat out for lunch, I eat my big veggie omelette for dinner.

There have been times that I’ll eat TONS of sugary things and snack throughout the day, morning to night, btw. Usually it’s when working in offices that have a strong free snack game, but that happens in the context still of mostly intermittent fasting, that veggie omelette thing, and lots of fats. (Hard cheeses, almonds, olives, etc).

Soooooo experiment! see how things go.

FAQ

Does the little thing in your arm hurt?

No. Not when ‘installing it’, or after. I can sometimes detect a slight tug, if I turn or push in a certain way. I rock climb, even with all that movement I usually don’t feel a thing. Not while sleeping, or showering. I forget I’m wearing it, quickly enough.

You’re so strange. This seems odd.

You don’t know the half of it.

But ✨my✨ body needs…

Great, this is for me, not for you. I still think I’m right, and I can be obnoxious about it, but at least now I can just give you a web page instead of sputtering at you about books and “just because it’s dominant doesn’t mean it’s right” theories of human health. And colonialism, and white supremacy.

Misc Resources

Nerd Fitness, Intermittent Fasting
Tripping Over the Truth
The Case Against Sugar
It Starts With The Egg
Levels Health (the app) the subscription service I used to get the glucose monitors

Bollards: Why & What

2024-04-30T13:00:00+00:00

author’s note: it’s always fun to see your own stuff on the Hacker News front page! This very post sparked >450 comments worth of conversation! I didn’t even know this got posted until days later!

another note: it’s difficult and annoying to view videos embedded from different platforms like tiktok, youtube, so mostly I’ve tried to re-host things on Wistia, so it’s less annoying to try to exit this page and go view that video, then return, etc. It’s still sometimes nice to view the video in the context of the other platform, though, as well.

What are bollards

The what and the why in a single image:

The what and why in a single video:

Over to Monaco🇲🇨 where we have exclusive footage of bollards saving lives.#WorldBollardAssociation
pic.twitter.com/ESfwsI3EId
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) March 12, 2023

The above video is a tweet from @worldbollard, here’s a still from the video. Click to view the original video:

It’s very possible that the person just barely visible at the end of the video would have been struck had the bollard not been there, and it’s obvious how those bollards create a ‘shadow’ or ‘eddy’ of safety, from the passing vehicles. Here’s another look:

A bollard is:

any sort of physical barricade strong enough, shaped in such a way, that if a vehicle tries to overlap with the bollard in location, intentional or not, the vehicle cannot cross. Sometimes they’re built into the physical environment, sometimes not. They can be movable or not. Large and intrusive, or not.

source: @worldbollard twitter account

In the words of a local city engineer’¹, as he was explaining why a bollard placed near where pedestrians congregate to cross a large roadway would be inappropriate:

Barriers (bollards, guardrail, etc.) are considered for installation if the result of a vehicle striking the barrier will be less severe than hitting the unshielded object.

Less severe for who? Like, it totally makes sense to evaluate severity of a vehicle striking a barrier vs there not being a barrier. That’s the whole point of the bollard existing, to protect people/things from vehicles.

A placement like this makes intuitive sense, when run through the lense of protecting a space from cars. Here’s outside of a school, solving the problem of people sometimes parking their cars where they shouldn’t be:

These bollards are also cute. If one could install ten times as many bollards as they otherwise have around them, and make one or two of them cute like a pencil bollard, I think everyone might be pleased.

source: @worldbollard twitter account

You’ll never unsee this:

👉 Take another look at where american municipalities put the guardrail. Quoting the author:

You see guardrail everywhere. It protects drivers from hitting hard objects by bouncing cars back into their proper place. But public works and transportation departments routinely install guardrails on the “wrong” side of a sidewalk.

Guardrails bring good fortune to motorists, but not for the unlucky people using the sidewalks.

Imagine pushing a stroller or walking the dog when an out-of-control vehicle, careening towards an object is saved by the guardrails, but you’re the innocent casualty. This engineering malfeasance is directly related to “clear zones”. The Federal Highway Administration says:

By creating Clear Zones, roadway agencies can increase the likelihood that a roadway departure results in a safe recovery rather than a crash, and mitigate the severity of crashes that do occur. - Federal Highway Administration guidance on ‘clear zones’

Once you’re aware of how engineers misuse the clear zone and put pedestrians at risk, you’ll see it everywhere. Intelligent, credentialed professionals do this all the time all across the country. Not only are they getting away with wildly dangerous behavior, it doesn’t even phase them.

(emphasis added) 🤯

I generally dislike every mile I have to drive on American roads in a car. I don’t perceive the roads to be nearly as safe as some others, but some of those who tell me driving is fine are 1) unsafe drivers themselves, and 2) they seem nearly professionally dissociated from the experience.²

Please, please stop evaluating local transportation administrations as competent. I’ve hung out with these people, gone on walks with them, driven around with them, listened to them get excited about a new pedestrian affordence they’ve installed, and the lack of awareness and close-mindedness (which is obviously necessary to sustain a shitty system creaking into it’s 100th year of existence) is stunning. Someone wrote a book titled Killed By A Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System about this. It’s not defecting from any group to evaluate this as the case.³

I’ve waltzed into city planners offices, the offices of traffic engineers (because I am curious, pushy, opinionated, and can ‘just looking around’/bumble my way into all sorts of interesting places) and my jaw has dropped to hear the things they say, seriously, to someone else. Now I first search for signs of aliveness when interacting with traffic people, and if I cannot find a sign of aliveness, I avoid allowing hope to grow in my heart. ⁴

I get myself in hot water by suggesting they cherry pick different parts of it. If you’re a traffic engineer, know that your own MUTCD allows you to use your own ‘engineering judgement’, and you don’t even have to document it. I wrote a section about why this traffic bean junction concept is MUTCD compliant: the traffic bean -> on mutcd compliance

The main feature of a bollard is stated, by city engineers as a reason they cannot be placed anywhere near roads. “Bollards are not crashworthy” is a strange way to say “bollards reliably stop vehicles”. American road engineers declare that things near roads need to be soft and spongy (like people!) to avoid ‘injuring’ cars. It really hurts oneself to take them seriously, the logic is so convoluted.

Here’s a bollard, bollarding:

Would you say the bollard is ‘crashworthy’? I’d say by definition, yes! Look at how well it stood up to a crash!

American traffic engineering standards, as implemented by supremacists who built urban highway through neighborhoods, with the express goal of displacing the people in that neighborhood, says that ‘crashworthy’ means it wouldn’t hurt the occupant of the car. The original cars were much less cushioned with airbags and crumple zones than they are now, and they were driven by people who were wealthy, nobility-adjacent.

Cars are now driven by people who are not wealthy, but the original patterning still lives onward in the law.

What are not bollards?

It’s tricky to hit the right emotional tone of why bollards matter. Sometimes it seems academic and dry, sometimes its very visceral and raw.

Where there are not bollards, there are careening, speeding vehicles, and often enough death and destruction.

To park a vehicle, one needs to press the correct pedal. When people are driving unfamiliar vehicles, or rushed, or whatever, sometimes the wrong pedal gets pushed. Would you suggest that this small error should result in death of people and the elimination of businesses and buildings?

Here’s a vehicle coming to almost a complete stop, then accelerating into and through an entire building into the parking lot beyond.

Every time I ‘feel’ a vehicle pointed at me, even when I’m inside of a building, I’m aware that if the driver has a heart attack or makes a small mistake, I might be staring at them from the end of their hood, above a crushed pelvis. “Oh well, one espresso please.”

Please watch the following video. click here if the image isn’t loading right - it goes to reddit:

I take issue with the video caption, I’d rather it be:

vehicle operator makes error when parking

The point is clear, though. Vehicles are strong, and can accelerate from a stop into, through, and out of, at least some buildings, if the driver presses firmly on the wrong pedal.

Lets look at another example.

When there are not bollards, in areas where people are promised safety, even if everyone behaves correctly, there are still failures. For example…

A friend/her fiance were walking down a sidewalk, a passing speeding/racing car hit another car, bounced onto the sidewalk, killed her and almost killed her fiance. The city traffic engineer said nothing could be done while the industry openly states that because bollards work, they cannot be used to protect non-car spaces from the mistakes of car drivers. ⁵

Once, a widely respected member of a local software development community and their partner (also a widely respected member of the same community) were walking on a sidewalk in California one night a few years ago. Far from them, a speeding car struck another car of course careened through the sidewalk. Both friends were hit by the car. She was killed instantly, he was knocked unconscious, woke up days later to find out the news. The language in the article is full of ‘this was an unavoidable tragedy’, though i think it’s obvious a local city engineer ought to be held criminally liable for their neglect.

This video below shows a very similar style of ‘car accident’ that killed and injured these friends, but in this video the spaces along the road are rendered safer by the bollards.

Is there anything more wonderful than watching a BMW bounce off bollards and cartwheel down the road?#WorldBollardAssociation
🎥@CrimeLdn
pic.twitter.com/XOD1zQb1Bf
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) May 13, 2024

This blaming the victim narrative is why ‘jaywalking’ is a propagandist legal fiction, by the way.

The concept of jaywalking blames victims of vehicular homicide for their own deaths. Very convenient for a settler-colonialist oppressor class. It’s a lynchpin to the following process. Without the concept of ‘jaywalking’, and the police using violence to enforce it, the following process wouldn’t be able to complete, it would get stuck at step 3.

How to use unsafe roads to clean/cleanse a neighborhood

declare that the road (even an empty road) is more important than anything else.
Demolish neighborhoods to add roads.
Once the road is there, further degrade the people of the neighborhood by declaring/enforcing ‘not only must this road be here, but your physical body cannot be anywhere near this road if someone in a car is within earshot. Even though they started their journey far from here, and are going to continue far from here, they get more priority over your front yard than you do’
Once the neighborhood has stewed in this toxic mess for a while, help shuffle the lots to private developers for cheap, they’ll knock down that housing and replace it with something conforming, with conforming people.

This is the same tactic israeli settlements use to displace palestinians from their lands!

American suburban development and israeli settlement development follow very similar patterns, are rooted in the same energy.

Israeli bulldozers knocking down palestinian homes is very similar to american bulldozers knocking down immigrant neighborhoods for urban highways and parking lots. supremacists called it ‘slum clearance’. I wrote parking minimums as ethnic cleansing and want to write sometime about the way american municipalities pioneered/refined the tactics of bulldozer-led ethnic cleansing, and that gets only slightly modified before being reused in palestine.

Because not only was it entirely preventable, it was also statistically inevitable. Not putting bollards where they need to be is like not only not wearing a seatbelt when driving, but arguing that seatbelts should not be available in cars because usually they’re not needed.

A bollard is something like a seatbelt for someone outside of the vehicle.

When and where there are not bollards, often enough, there are cars.

Injury on 7-Eleven property costs $91 million

So… this is the sort of devastation done to a community that everyone would obviously want to prevent. And this exact pattern plays out many times a day.

Even the american legal system sometimes understand bollards and appreciate that sometimes a need to assign honest blame to someone, the ‘responsible corporate entity with a pocketbook’ has a responsibility to people who are using their spaces, and a perceived failure to provide a measure of structural something.

7-Eleven to pay $91 million to suburban man who lost both legs because they didn’t install bollards at that location.

That title is sensationalized, sort of. Really tragic for the involved person. It could be re-written “in which a vehicle operator pressed the gas instead of the brake, the vehicle pinned-and-maimed man passing between at that exact moment”.

It’s a normal occurrence.

If you watch some of the videos elsewhere on this page, you can understand the ‘accident mechanics’, and can appreciate how if there were bollards in a certain spot, the harmed/maimed passer-by would not have been maimed.

Notice down below how often this kind of thing happens. I hope there’s bollards at every 7/11 now. ⁶

A 57-year-old suburban man who became a double amputee after a car pinned his legs against the front of a Bensenville 7-Eleven will receive a $91 million payout from the convenience store chain

In a moment, you’ll see the kinds of vehicle-strikes-building results this refers to.

The case was the first in which attorneys had access to some 15 years of reports from 7- Eleven, which identified some 6,253 storefront crashes at 7-Eleven stores across the country, Power said. Data from a previous lawsuit against the company identified another 1,525 crashes between 1991 and 1996.

Who in the story do you think uttered the following?

It is important to note that this unfortunate accident was caused by a reckless driver who pled guilty, and this store followed all local building codes and ordinances.

That was the legal representation of 7/11, but you can also hear the local city manager or city engineer saying ‘it was not my fault either!’. (“followed all local building codes and ordinances”)

Lots of people like to suggest flexposts as a ‘useful’ or ‘improved’ effort over nothing. I emphatically disagree, as a flexposts promises something it cannot deliver:

“Bollards are too expensive. Flex posts will be just as good…”#WorldBollardAssociation
pic.twitter.com/P8gnL25aNq
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) October 7, 2023

I would accept flexposts only if ~they were frequent, and~ one out of every ten was a visually-indistinguishable, placed-at-random, real steel bollard, or at least something that would cause some real issue if impacted. a bell bollard made out of concrete, a tree, a fence post.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times…flex posts are SHIT.#WorldBollardAssociation
pic.twitter.com/l0800LpAdv
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) September 23, 2023

Carl was a frequent customer of the Bensenville store, and most days would walk a few blocks from an apartment he shared with his three sons to buy his morning coffee…

[the morning of this tragic-yet-statistically-inevitable systemic failure] Carl’s ride was running late, and a man pulling into a parking space in front of the store stepped on his car’s accelerator instead of the brake. The car lurched over the curb, across a sidewalk and pinned Carl against the storefront, causing injuries that would require the amputation of both his legs above the knees. Another driver had crashed into the front of the same store 16 months earlier, Power said.

What does not bollards look like

In the context of ‘bollards as protecting store-fronts from cars’, sort of akin to a physical insurance policy, here’s what moving vehicles, through stores, can look like.

Holy shit. A car smashed through a cafe while they were recording a podcast. 😳 pic.twitter.com/NBJ6h4cYjl
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) March 6, 2023

I wonder what losses the involved parties were able to recoup. Presumably insurance would make partial financial repairs, but it would all be at great opportunity cost, hassle, sadness, anger.

Even a rock, obtained functionally for free, could have fully prevented this. Again, no one’s fault, but it hurts to see damage accrue.

👉 driver presses wrong peddle when parking outside store

I dislike the caption. ‘[^forgets] [^forgets]: possibly playing into subtle supremacy saying “woman forgets…” Why not person? Or very physically ill driver? or “driver in unfamiliar rental car”? or “driver thinking they were pressing the break unintentionally pressed the gas and…” or “while thinking they were in reverse, the driver pressed the gas and…”

I’m not into punishment energy. For real for real. I need to finish writing https://josh.works/punishment, to explain. for now, “the concept of retributive violence is a gussied up version of nobility and chivalry ethics. Which was a strange group of people’s attempts to justify their own domination of others.

There’s more to be said about punishment regimes. There’s entire modes of thoughts/ways of being/concepts of the world that operate entirely without punishment, in a way that would feel sorta unrecognizable to someone who’s grown up around the american criminal justice system, and believed some of what is said about it.

currently not written but I’m close on a draft of something.

It should say:

vehicle operator makes error when parking

This sort of incident would be perfectly prevented by bollards like this:

source: @worldbollard

As a reminder, flex posts are not bollards, they’re… lies, drafting on the idea of bollards:

Flex posts kill.
Bollards save lives.#WorldBollardAssociation
pic.twitter.com/dHpzlLHbxx
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) September 9, 2023

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times…flex posts are SHIT.#WorldBollardAssociation
pic.twitter.com/l0800LpAdv
— World Bollard Association™ (@WorldBollard) September 23, 2023

“But what I think of as bollards are not pretty”

Great, lets grow our imaginations:

I live in the Cheesman park area in Denver, there’s already plenty of bollards and bollard-passing objects (trees, light poles, boulders) and I’d love for there to be many more, following similar-enough patterns of what is already placed, with some reasonable, obvious iteration.

17th ave intersection fix with bollards and a traffic bean

Bollards are sorta fierce. Or, they can be. In the case of what we’ve been discussing recently, speeds could also be brought down reliably from an occasional max of 70 mph to a lot, lot less.

The traffic bean concept lives here: my substack about poynton, uk

The application of that sorta shape to an intersection I know well, and prototypical of an average, complex intersection:

traffic bean for colefax/park/franklin junction

sound good with you?

Links

Bollards are like icebergs. Some bollards are not placed deep into the ground or very strong, and might deform under a vehicle impact. Some bollards are quite firmly placed.

source: @worldbollard

Footnotes

This was the city engineer of a local municipality, and I’ve had direct, 1:1 conversations with the city engineer in {another municipality in which I lived/owned property} after parents in a local neighborhood demanded a meeting about the dangerous road that their kids were walking to school alongside. The engineer said ‘due to traffic count data, the road does not qualify for any state-funded improvements’, which is obviously a 🖕🏻 to the kids he was failing. There are many cheap was to slow traffic without speed bumps, police, cameras, signs, and half million dollar increments of spending, but people committed to bad plans will use their poor imagination as a reason for why something must not be done. He gave me permission to run my own road experiments, though, which I did, and it worked great. I’ve since put together a page dedicated to some of my ‘coning adventures’ Alternatively, here’s some direct links to some videos of: defining a pedestrian crossing better, causing vehicles to pick a path, cones outside of a coffee shop, reduced noise from passing cars by at least 10 db, maybe more. Safey way up, too - drone footage, first pass on a really, really dangerous, wide, fast junction in northern colorado. ↩
“Driving isn’t that bad, Josh…” Click here to open youtube with the search query car crash compilation. Spend a few minutes looking around. These are relatively tame, permissible on youtube. Still horrifying. Add in some first hand and near-first-hand experiences with other sorts of related car experiences, or first-hand experience with other people’s car-crash related deaths, and one can appreciate trying to minimize exposure to this particular hazard. Especially highways (because of the high speeds) and especially anything where incoming traffic can be just… pointing at you, with everyone hoping it works out, continuously. It’s the oposite of an appreciation that complex systems exist. ↩
To interact with local transportation administrations requires that you 1) self-abandon by allowing oneself to be treated in a de-dignifying manner, and 2) maintain performative allegiance to a pseudo-scientific view of the world. ↩
Engineering type people act like their work is inscrutable, but it’s not. They mostly implement cherry picked sections of this arcane book of religious utterances known as the ‘Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices’. (orange road signs. those are called ‘traffic control devices’. It takes itself so seriously) ↩
Again, I say this, because when talking to more than one ‘city traffic engineer’, they all regurgitate the sentiment that gives us the plastic flex post - they say ‘nothing can be placed near to the path of a vehicle unless it is crashworthy - this means it gets out of the way, or deforms gracefully to a vehicle, in case it’s struck. The entire point of a bollard is that it makes the vehicle deform, while the bollard doesn’t move at all. It’s proximity to the roadway is immaterial. It casts a shadow of safety and comfort behind it, for the people being actively protected by it from the danger of passing traffic. ↩
Since I first wrote this, I’ve seen a few 7/11s, both in my neighborhood near Cheesman park in Denver, and elsewhere when I pass them by, I notice if there’s bollards, what they look like, etc. If they’re pretty, how they’re constructed, what color they’re painted, what particular ‘positive outdoor space’ they create. It’s a mix, but I’ve never seen a bell bollard. ↩

2023 Annual Review

2024-01-27T13:00:00+00:00

It’s that time of the year. I often enjoy reading other people’s annual reviews, and I’ve always found value in writing my own, even as there is a few years I’ve missed, since I started the habit way back in 2015.

for a long time, I did annual reviews. 2020 was late, and then for 2021, and 2022, no annual review, though not for lack of thinking about it.

A three year gap is no better than a two year gap. I’ll possibly back-fill at some point, I have drafts floating around for both years, but for now I’ll just try to get 2023 out the door. If I type/write fast enough, I bet it’ll happen.

My previous reviews: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 , 2016, 2015

It’s been interesting having this website floating around. I can get snapshots of who I was in 2012, and see ways I’ve changed, and stayed the same, from then to now. The ways I’ve used this website have also shifted, dramatically, over the years. It doesn’t feel like it suits me as well as it once did, and I’d like to resolve that tension.

I believe in my bones that publishing early/often, and ‘working in public’, are often the best ways to go. So, onward.

I’ve been both wanting to write this, and putting off writing this, for a long time. There’s also many other things I want to write, so any form of uncorking the bottle and getting things moving feels good-enough.

I’ll be talking about the year from a few different lenses.

I theme through every review I’ve done will be continued here - travel, books, projects, people.

I think in all of my writing, for all of the years I’ve written, I’ve found it easier to talk about the first three than the last.

I’m experimentally publishing some stuff to substack. I won’t rehash it all here, but it’s an example of me trying to get the right handle for expressing something.

I feel an intense need to write some things down, even if only for me, and I’ve felt stymied in this way for a while. To the degree that I write these words, I’m getting what I want. I’m basically promising myself to always write the first draft in as linear, stream-of-consciousness way, though I do permit myself to jump around. I do a lot of lists and headings and links, whatever feels flowy and effortless, I’ll do. I’ll be copy/pasting in from various other documents and notes I’ve got floating around.

Travel & Places

Two months ago, as I was struggling to figure out how to vomit up everything I’d want in an annual review, or in this annual review, a friend suggested starting by bucketing it into the travel I did. I thought that was a great idea, so I started with a travel bucket, then also carved out a ‘books I read’ bucket.

Then I wanted to carve out a ‘people’ bucket.

All these wove together in perfectly normal ways, so lets begin.

In 2023, I feel like I finally caught up (mostly) on some trips I’d been wanting to make for several years. 2023 ended with a climbing trip to Viñales, Cuba with dear friends Mark and Dave. We’d first planned the trip for late March, 2020, after having gone a year earlier in 2019, but it was obviously cancelled by something called Covid, and then the last day of the year was returning from a crack climbing trip to Utah, and it was great, rung in the new year with friends, celebrating one of their weddings. Huzzah.

Before Cuba, I was in denver for only two weeks between arriving from a prior trip, and departing for Viñales. I arrived in Denver from Bangkok, Thailand, after spending every day of my 30-day tourist Visa in Thailand. I’ll write much more about that month later, or below. Thailand was the last of three countries I spent time in for that trip:

Bali: I count it as distinct from Indonesia, in the same way that Okinawa is distinct from Japan. I spent nearly the entire time in Ubud.
Nepal: I spent a few days in Kathmandu, overlapped with a group of ten friends (!!!) passing through Kathmandu to go trekking. How lovely.
Thailand: Started in Bangkok, then Chiang Mai, then Pai and beyond.

This year I’ve also visited Taiwan (en route to Bali), spent a few days in Iceland, and spent a few weeks on the east coast of the USA, visiting friends/family, and spent some time traveling around the Colorado/western USA for climbing.

All of those links open up a strange little web application, the likes of which you’ve never seen before. It grew out of an intersection of software development and mobility networks. When I ride my scooter now, on basically every trip, I track the activity in Strava. I have ideas for fancier visualizations than what the web app currently renders, but even as is it’s interesting to me. I could speak at length about certain dynamics observed/experienced in road networks, using this data to clearly illustrate what I mean.

Eden

She’s a delightful and lovely toddler. Quite enjoyable to observe and share space with. She’s got tons of independence, tons of love for snuggles, and curiosity and skillfulness and attentiveness. I feel privileged to know her, and look forward to many years of friendship and shared experiences.

I’ve never resented her, and I find her very attentive, and easy to attune to. Her eye contact, sign language, attention/focus/use of tone, talking, etc. She’s just fun, and I find so much about her enjoyable.

I could list a bunch of books I’ve read that I think relate well to parenting, I think they’ve helped me, but I’ve listed them elsewhere. I re-read at least two (great) parenting book this year (Parenting from the Inside Out, The Art of Roughhousing) and a few that I probably will not re-read.

I’ve spent dramatically less time with her, at this point, than I would have expected for myself if you asked me about my hopes and dreams for Eden a year and two years ago. A long time ago I read a book title Selfish reasons to have more kids, and it affected me. The author argues, among other things, that the point of ‘having kids’ isn’t to ‘possess children’, but to have a mutual friendship with your adult child. You can have 40 years of friendship with your child, as an adult, relative to the ~15 years you might know them as a child.

To that end, avoid treating them in grievously dehumanizing ways when they’re children, and if you happen to treat them well-enough and with dignity, you might get to have a relationship with your child when they’re grown, and this is a relationship worth celebrating.

Books & Reading

No good annual review would be complete without listing some standout reads. Here’s my year in books from GoodReads.

Noteworthy items:

The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

Bleh. Really good, but painful. I spent a lot of time in Indonesia this year, so when I encountered the book, it was an insteand read. Pairs well with Chalmers Johnson’s stuff

Basically, the US Government has worked hard to support some Bad people who did a lot of bad things, leading to genocides, incalculable harm, hardship, pain, suffering, and an vacuous absence of goodness that otherwise could have existed, for hundreds of thousands of people across south/central America, and Asia. The tragedy is astounding, and but for a book like this, it would be easy to think something like this never happened. Not only for westerners/americans/english speakers, but for the affected survivors.

The author is incredible, the story is told well, skillfully, tragically.

Charles Chaplin: My Autobiography

Speaking of anti-communism, Charlie Chaplin resented that he got caught up in that American jingoistic ferver a few times. I absolutely loved his autobiography. Feels like a nice balance against Robert Moses. He was an interesting person. Always lived between worlds (he was an immigrant in the USA), but also surfed/shaped the state-shift in media from ‘talkies’ to what we’d consider to be modern movies.

I highlighted/marked many sections of the book, and since reading his autobiography have gladly watched a bunch of his movies, as I could find them on Youtube, or torrents.

He’s delightful, feels as earnest, authentic, opinionated, as the Studio Ghibli production studio.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

I’ve spent some time in/around the american South and with Southern Baptists, and, critically, in some places/cultures very different in disposition. Lots of comparing/contrasting data points.

There’s a certain coldness and detachedness that is clearly outlined in this book, that once it’s so clearly enumerated, I think you can see it still persisting into white/southern/feminine/american ways of being today.

Obviously the people who claimed ownership of other people imported their culture/entitlements from somewhere else, so I’m not claiming that anything in the American south is original. Just that there were distinctive bits of slaveholding culture that was visible then, and those bits continue to be visible now. I wish that were not the case.

I have regularly recommended this book as possible promotive of one’s journey to improving their relationship with themselves and others. Clearly labeling unhealthy dynamics within oneself and around oneself is a good step towards harm reduction. White slaveholders loved to pour guilt and game onto those around them, and internalized the harms of

All Who Go Do Not Return

Fascinating autobiographic tale of a guy born into a rather religious Jewish community, located in NYC ends up leaving that community. Enjoyably for me, and maybe for you, software, and learning it and getting a first ‘secular’ job as a programmer, played a key portion of the story. Absolutely shed tears at least once.

Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power

I want ‘emotional labor’ as a thing to be talked about more in society.

There’s a certain forced, non-consensual codependency, societally, when the ‘work’ of things that gets called ‘emotional labor’ gets female-coded, and then tucked away, into the margin and periphery.

There’s ‘gender stuff’, obviously, in this book, but it also all relates to class, ethnicity, supremacy culture, and more. It pairs well with this other book about ‘data bias’ as relates to women and this book about negotiation and this article about salary negotiation.

People

It often-enough feels like the biggest ups and downs can be fully wrapped up around people.

I’ve noticed in myself arising over the last few years a very perceivable, felt sense of a loss of ability to feel secure, in a few ways, in the presence of others. (physical presence, sure, but also something that could be called ‘an emotional presence’.) Like most things like this, a small experience of something salient or evocative in the present can feel tightly, immediately connected to big experiences of the past.

Because I know with familiarity what it feels like, and thus looks like, to be comfortable in the various people-y situations I find myself in today, I think I wander through them sometimes with a high level of anxiety, relative to how I think I experienced them in the past, but I just keep playing the role that I expect/imagine would be authentic if I was being the non-stressed version of me that I sometimes am. Sometimes this feels fine, sometimes it feels tiring.

Obviously, some of this roots in experiences we’ve had as children, or as adults, or both. Anyway, I notice it, and notice myself trying to avoid various forms of pain/discomfort via something that boils down to ‘embodying the behaviors/thought-patterns of avoidance’.

The last few years have involved a pretty heavy re-organization of my sense of self/place in community, vis-a-vis… everything.

I also have noticed my default ‘safest’ stored-in-the-nervous-system response to perceived threat is to try to get small/imperceivable/unobservable, either to minimize the offense I might cause (and thus perhaps avoid inviting harm) or to minimize the exposed surface area if something bad does in fact happen.

When I shrink and contract, to avoid discomfort, I might be satisfying a short-term goal, but it’s not a great pattern to plan on for the rest of my life. It’s not something that I would want for a loved one, or anyone.

Not responding to something unpleasant feels like a much better initial response than a quick response, or a response that forces an issue or invites further discomfort, and sometimes there’s discomfort in simply being perceived. So, to interact with others is to be forced to feel perceived, and if that’s often-enough unenjoyable, meh. (obviously, articulated thusly, this is ‘self-sabotaging’, if you use that kind of language)

This above statement of ‘sometimes interacting with people is unpleasant’ runs head-long into the opposite sentiment of ‘the best portions of the human experience seems inextricably relational’.

I’ve long wanted to meet Alain Bertaud, and Marie-Agnes Bertaud. Sadly, she passed away of cancer before I got to meet her, but we had all been something of internet friends, united by mutuals, and an interest in, broadly, ‘urban economics’. I got to visit him in NYC, and we had a lovely dinner together, spoke much of Marie-Agnes, and in every way that whole brief trip through NYC was full of delight.

I’ve drunk deeply from the upsides of the human experience in the last year, and I’m thankful for it, and the people who’ve shared in that with me, regardless of if they knew how much it meant/means to me.

[TODO add photo with alain bertaud]

Anarchy and co-creation and mutuality

Lots of this year was informed by books, but mostly by books I read in years prior.

In 2017, I first read The Problem of Political Authority, and was insta-wrecked on the institution of ‘political authority’ as a needful given. Political ‘rule’ no more given then the religious ‘rulings’ of the catholic church in France in, say 1590. the best ‘desired outcomes’ of political authority are more available to those that refrain from relying upon the use of of violence and domination, which is intrinsic to political authority. So… reasonable people can simply throw it all out.

Thus, I generally have called myself an anarchist, though semi-reluctantly, and never in a way associated with violence. Spraypainting capital “A”s on stuff is not my vibe.

My favorite tool/weapon is a broom, used as intended.

It’s easy for me to capture a sense of emotional safety while thinking about a low-coercion environment. At least easier then when I envision an environment where coercion is welcomed and used regularly. So, i like spaces that are full of co-creation and mutuality. I usually can be attuned to those dynamics well enough that I can ‘hold’ my end of whatever it is that we’re co-creating.

So, when I encountered the words “relationship anarchy”, I was thrilled. Instantly did the standard google/library book rental/read-the-canon thing, and it feels quite right.

It’s a big tent, and technically fully inclusive of the most male-dominated, authoritarian, controlling monogamous relationship style possible (as long as it’s fully consensual, it would simply be titled a ‘patriarchy kink’), and on the other side, something like the standard polyamorous/decolonizing-interpersonal-relationships crowd. There’s a lot of room for health and peacefulness under that umbrella. I’ve noted that I find the topic painful or difficult to write about, sometimes.

painful or difficult to write about? wym?

For example, I wrote, in 2023, a large piece about my formally updated stance towards evangelicalism.

I keep drafting “part 2” or “updates”, but find it to be difficult, so I avoid it some more.

The topic is inclusive of things that have been both important to me, and occasionally filled with difficulty, so I either don’t like to tread there, or tread there unskillfully, or it sometimes hurts when I tread there. But also like a good stretch when pleasantly sore, it feels better immediately after.

Depression & Sadness

In 2021, I wrote this piece about depression. I’m glad I wrote that! It’s nice to be able to capture snapshots of how things were for me at various times in my life.

In that piece, I say “I’ve possibly been ‘giving depression’ since 2019”, and, well, we can keep on keeping on. I don’t even appreciate so much the phrasing around things like ‘depression’ and ‘mental health’, because of how individualistic and pejorative it is. So much of the depression and ‘mental health’ stuff that is floating around is ‘simply’ the deep, deep malaise that comes from living in something that at least is partially a war zone ¹, and an area full of devastation and sadness ²

There’s plenty of global opportunities to feel a sense of insecurity, hopelessness, powerlessness. (Huzzah, yet another American-sponsored genocide in the middle east.) This also isn’t the first time bad things like genocide have been easily viewable online. When I was young, as a chronically online internet-person, I spent time on reddit and liveleak, have seen plenty of footage of people experiencing horrible things. From industrial accidents to vehicle accidents, all sorts of intentional and accidental, it was all available to the curious internet denizen of the 2010s. It’s not easy to feel disillusioned.

I don’t really view depression as an illness, or something that needs to be medicated away.

It’s actively destructive to everyone’s soul to be trapped in a car. There’s so much literature about how walkable neighborhoods are good, how communal Barcelona’s superblock structure is, how harmful and egregious it is to hear the noise and breath the tail pipe emissions, tire rubber microplastics, and break dust powder for vehicles.

Because it’s ‘convenient’ and ‘connected to GDP’, and ‘an outgrowth of high modernism’, some people think cars in cities are reasonable, or that harm can be ameliorated by electric vehicles.³

The supremacy and domination of cars in cities, like legal bits around this supremacy⁴ is similar to how lead was used in food storage containers for a long time because it was convenient and there was momentum behind it, despite the fact that millions of people were being harmed by that lead. ⁵

Lets talk about where and how many people in America live. I live in a city (Denver) but as of January, not in a particularly walkable neighborhood.⁶ I’ve sometimes lived in walkable places, sometimes not. Sometimes in the USA, sometimes not.

Thus, when I read something like this:

Living in a walkable neighborhood is linked to happiness. Such environments enhance the likelihood that residents feel more healthy and more trusting of others. Note, walkability is a measure of how easily residents can attain their daily needs by walking to key destinations from their home. source

However, the overwhelming impulse and energy for roads in America is endless hostility towards every road user, including road users in full-sized cars. You can feel the entitlement some vehicle drivers feel, just radiating from their body. There’s also obviously many emotionally repressed people driving vehicles, and there’s plenty of violent and abusive people driving cars, all of whom look at everyone outside of their vehicle as an impediment to them experiencing the life they want to live.

Lastly, roads (and the asphalt and steel contained therein) were used, between the 1920s and 1960s, by a variety of actors to accomplish their goals of social control.

They talked openly among themselves about things like “How do we get rid of this neighborhood of mexicans?”, and then the local state DOT would say something like “Lets demolish the neighborhood and build giant huge roads through the whole thing.”

And this happened time and time again, in every municipality in America.

It’s painful and frustrating to witness this, and to feel powerless in doing anything about it. It doesn’t engender a sense of fondness towards evangelicals, knowing that white evangelical churches/congregations/pastors were the biggest 20th century advocates for racial segregation in America, and strenuously (and successfully) worked to bring about various regimes of segregation. The ‘stuff’ of the American political structure is just settler colonialism mixed with head-in-the-sand propaganda fed to those settler populations, so they can act as if the populations that got colonized were somehow improved by it.

Gee, Josh, so you’re saying that part of the reason you’re depressed in 2023 is because of bad political decisions made 50-100 years ago?

Yes, obviously this is/can be true. It’s overwhelmingly sad to see the eternal chewing maw of the American military gulping and consuming the world. It’s sad to see the bullying that America does, financially, to countries around the world. It’s sad to see how children are taught to hate themselves for how they look, because their skin color isn’t as light as it possibly good be. It’s sad to see giant billboards in Asia, telling everyone who looks at them that they’re only beautiful to the degree they look white, smooth, trim. Consume consume consume.

Soooo I guess it feels like the most available mechanisms of relieving tumultuous emotional states in America is consumption. Food, TV (so much TV). sports. shopping. going to a brewery. alcohol. weed. lots of people consume exercise, and then we get gym culture. Or we can get perscribed pills, and take the edge off the angst for a time.

It’s all papering over real holes in the fabric around us. I could say much, much more about all this, but for now I’ll just leave my standard recommendation for a book: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, and an explanation for why the built america of the USA actively accomplishes ethnic cleansing, to the detriment of literally everyone, including those comprised of the oppressor class.

Regularly enough, I’ve experienced the crushing sense of darkness, aloneness, inadequacy, inability to feel connected to community, and failure. I still overall like who I am and don’t begrudge myself too much, but my gosh I certainly have felt like I’m going through the motions, trying to avoid over-burdening anyone else/myself too much, yet being acutely aware of all the various impacts I have on others. I know the standard therapist response to this, how to regain a sense of internal security, evaluating others for safe-enough relating, etc.

Things I’m thinking about for 2024

Scooters

scooters, parking lots and land use. It’s been living in my mind way too much since at least 2020, so i don’t expect to get free of it this year.

Here’s a little app I built to visualize my own mobility data. Think of how it does and does not correspond to a google maps view of a city:

[TODO: Add screenshot from mobility data app]

https://joshs-mobility-data-54dab943ebba.herokuapp.com/?zoom=15&latlng=18.785264,%2098.992305

1920s-1960s-era Ethnic Cleansing in America

See also ‘land use policy’, ‘mobility networks’, ‘auto-dependency/car-culture’, ‘parking minimums’.

This is the real top-level item. If I could charge rent to some entity for the amount of time this topic lives in my head and awareness…

A theme throughout all the time I’ve spent traveling, either around Denver or around Asia, is to observe and perceive the influence of racial supremacists like Robert Moses. People that are eugenicists, supremacists, wielding torrential streams of power.

I started a substack: https://zoningverydifferentthanours.substack.com/p/introduction-land-use-regimes-very

I made a drone video tiktok about an intersection in Thailand bearing his obvious fingerprints:

@josh_exists
such an experiment. the audio was surprisingly annoying to deal with. should I have tried to do the captiona? tbd.
♬ original sound - josh

This feels as pressing of an issue to me as I imagine actual slavery felt to ‘abolitionists’ (why do we label the default mode of existance? I say instead of calling people abolitionists, label the perversion: ‘non-slavers’.)

So, for the regular people who saw and felt nothing but contempt for the hatefulness of slavery, some of what they felt then is what I feel now, watching adults work together, with actual effort, to perpetuate the institutions and norms of the inter-ethnic-group conflict in America of the 1850s-1960s, when ‘white’ people fought tooth and nail to maintain social control over all other ethnic groups, or ‘people of the global majority’.

I see America as nothing more interesting than a mature state whole-heartedly given over to maturing from it’s early days of settler colonialism into a more durable and self-replicating version of the mindset of those colonialists, onto everyone. Their own children, and the colonized. Or, at least, to define the attitudes of those who don’t want to be colonized as ‘deviant’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘anti-progress’, and more.

Related, I’ve read a book titled Legal Systems Very Different Than Ours, and I do not attest that ‘political authority is real’. Even as I feel unbelievably constrained by this highly constraining system we live within, the ‘solution-space’ is enormous, and full of fun.

I hold open contempt for certain policies, norms, practices, powers. This is fine. Quoting myself:

It’s totally appropriate and healthy to feel hate for that which is hateful.

I hate that because immature people continue to run road networks (and much more) in America, it’s considered reasonable that 40,000 people a year die on them, and untold millions more are negatively effected across every dimension of the human experience, because these road networks are basically held hostage by emotionally immature, violent people.

Pay-as-you-go pricing models for parking

Most parking in America is currently either free, fixed-cost per term ($100/mo) or fixed-cost per hour ($10/hr).

Parking pricing is currently impervious to dynamics around usage and congestion, which means a ton of potential value is being completely missed.

Other people’s annual reviews

Dan Wang, 2023

such is my annual review. This touches on a fraction of a life lived, and I know you, the reader, including future versions of me, are experiencing life at the normal, regular speed.

America/ethnic conflict between white people and people of the global majority ↩
Denver, city centers in the USA that have been touched by ‘urban renewal’/state-sponsored inter-ethnic-group violence. ↩
this is no different than proclaiming “the sun orbits the earth” because it’s politically expedient. ↩
For example, that carless drivers always must yield/submit to car-ed drivers, and must bear the indignities that come with that submission, is downstream of this supremacy thinking. In some cases, persons on both sides of the equation willingly and expectantly play the role of dominator and submitter. (hah. Sounds kinky.) ↩
NIH says:

We estimate that over 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high-lead levels in early childhood, several million of whom were exposed to five-plus times the current reference level.

If your next google is ‘symptoms of lead poisoning’:

Symptoms of lead poisoning include headaches, stomach cramps, constipation, muscle/joint pain, trouble sleeping, fatigue, irritability, and loss of sex drive. Most adults with lead poisoning don’t look or feel sick.

That looks a lot like what might get mis-diagnosed as ‘depression’. I don’t think I have lead poisoning, based on the age of the paint and the sources of drinking water I had growing up, but… meh, I think there’s explanatory power for ‘lead poisoning driving some of the irritability visible in the world today’.

Millions of tons of lead were added to gasoline worldwide beginning in 1922, and leaded gasoline has been a major source of population lead exposure. In 1960s, lead began to be removed from automotive gasoline. Removal was completed in 2021, with most of that removal being completed in the 1970s.

↩
it’s residents tout their neighborhood as walkable, and as far as walkability in America goes, it is above-average, but on an absolute scale, it’s trash. I WAS living a few blocks east of Cheeseman Park, right here. There was nothing that wasn’t single-family-houses within a short walk. A long and unpleasant and dangerous walk separated me from a grocery store, but I almost never actually did the walk, usually rode my scooter, and driving would have been hellish. ↩

Trader Joe's Parking Lot

2023-12-13T13:00:00+00:00

Hey Trader Joe’s,

This is a bit of an open letter, inspired by a recent visit to the local Trader Joe’s. I just moved to this part of Denver, and now for the first time am living within like a 3 minute scoot of a Trader Joe’s.

I know that some people like to complain about parking at TJs. (Can I call it that? Trader Joe’s -> TJ’s?)

Here’s a sampling from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/traderjoes/search/?q=parking

Lots of people mis-understand parking lots, and so no matter what happens, someone’s going to complain about something. I sort of love that Trader Joe’s has smallish parking lots, and would love to scheme to make them even smaller, while making the users of the parking lot and visitor’s to TJ way happier.

This is something that can be done. It is already done in certain ways around the world. Different countries have common, accepted solutions to different portions of this “parking lot problem”. I’d like to work with TJ’s to cobble together an off-the-shelf solution to all/most of the issues.

Obviously, there’s a lot of money to save, hassle to reduce, delight to be had, money to be made, by better managing business-critical capital, and parking lots are critical to the functioning of businesses.

Lets talk about it.

Email me, we can email/phone/IRL discuss it. joshthompson@hey.com

❤️,

- Josh

Tiktok footage of a local TJ’s parking lot

Here’s footage to whet the appetite.

Sometimes embeds show up strangely, so here’s direct links. I recommend clicking both:

@josh_exists lots to appreciate here. the audio is great I have thoughts on parking lots. I see them as hidden sources of abundance, currently not allowed to function as well as they might. a little love goes a long way. #fyp #dji #traderjoes #toyota #ford #denver #colorado #timelapse #carlessdriver #driverlesscar ♬ Final Speech - From "The Great Dictator" - Charlie Chaplin

@josh_exists I'm gonna send this to someone at trader Joe's. I'll explain the book 'the high cost of free parking'. #traderjoes #parking #drone #dji #timelapse #denver #colorado #freeparkingisnt ♬ original sound - josh

Online comments about Trader Joe’s parking lots

Here’s what some online commentors have said about the parking lot:

I stopped going to Trader Joe’s weekly because of the parking lot situation. I knew it was only a matter of time that I would forced to murder someone in a Prius over a parking spot.

I drive past mine somewhat often and only go about once a month when I see it’s emptyish. Tend to buy more and go less frequently

I live equal distance from two Trader Joe’s. The parking lots are decent compared to the one in Sherman Oaks. One of the local Trader Joe’s has a security guard who will assist the elderly getting out of the parking spots. That makes me return to that specific location.

I drive to a TJ further away because that one has more parking. The closer one is in an extremely dense neighborhood, and there is no guarantee you will ever park anywhere close to it.

source, reddit

what managing a parking lot skillfully looks like

Properly managed, a parking lot will always have about 10% capacity available. This means someone wanting to quickly enter, dash inside, and leave, will be able to do so.

Ensuring availability means using price/cost to mediate demand.

Donald Shoup wrote a book The High Cost of Free Parking, and has a standard recommendation for fixing parking. It would be preferable of american municipal planners properly managed on-street parking, but they don’t, so you, TJ’s, with a bit of my help, have to make up the difference.

Donald Shoup says:

charge appropriately for on-street and off-street parking
Spend the collected money exactly where it’s being collected
Remove parking minimums

TJ’s is obviously operating with different constraints than municipal planners, and I appreciate and can accommodate that. There’s plenty of improvement to be had, and TJ’s is in a better position to make this change than nearly anyone, because:

car-heavy user base
very busy stores
limited parking

The Power Broker, Chapter 30: Robert Moses and Mayor Vincent R. Impellitteri

2023-08-05T13:00:00+00:00

Note from Josh: The following is an excerpt of chapter 34 of the Power Broker, called “Moses and the Mayors”. The chapter is about Moses’ relationship with all of the mayors of NYC that overlapped with Moses’ “rule” over NYC.

This excerpt covers just one of the mayors’ overlap with Moses’ rule, but the way Moses wields his power over the mayor is absolute, and defies summarization.

The mayor did nothing for several years but give Moses everything Moses asked for.

The following is an 11-page execerpt from The Power Broker, pages 787-798.

I’m cleaning the text up and adding some footnotes where it feels appropriate

I first drafted this in 2020!

IMPY

All during August, Moses had been in South America, drawing up a Rockefeller-financed plan of improvements for São Paulo, utterly unaware of the events crushing in on O’Dwyer. But O’Dwyer’s resignation was to place the city in his power more completely than ever before.

By law, the successor to a retiring mayor is the President of the City Council. By fate, the Council presidency was held in 1950 by an individual who, during the entire forty-five utterly undistinguished years of his life prior to his nomination to that $25,000-per-year post, had never been deemed worthy of holding any job more responsible than that of secretary, at $6,500 per year, to a judge named Schmuck.

The nomination of this totally unknown minor Tammany ward heeler to the city’s second-highest elective office, the position of succession to the mayoralty, had “staggered,” in Warren Moscow’s words, “even the most imaginative among political reporters.” And so had the explanation of how he had obtained the nomination. At a last-minute reshuffling of the 1945 Democratic ticket, the leaders finally agreed on Lazarus Joseph for Comptroller, and then realized that since O’Dwyer was Irish and from Brooklyn, while Joseph was Jewish and from the Bronx, the slate could have ethnic and geographic balance only if its third member was an Italian from Manhattan-and were unable to think of a single Manhattan Italian official they could trust. After hours of impasse, one leader reasoned that since legal secretaryships to State Supreme Court justices carried a respectable salary for which little or no work was required, they would have been given oply “safest” of Democratic workers.

Pulling out a little “Green Book,” the official directory of city employees, he turned to the list of legal secretaries, ran his finger down it looking for a name that even the dumbest voter be able to tell was Italian-and came to Vincent R. Impellitteri, “No one knew who the hell he was,” Reuben Lazarus was to recall, but, looking up Impellitteri’s address, the leaders determined that he lived in Manhattan, telephoned his district leader and were assured: “You don’t have to worry about him. He’s a good boy.”

Although attested to privately by members of Tammany’s hierarchy (and by Moses, whose presence at the crucial ticket-making session - he was the only “outsider” there - reveals his standing with that hierarchy), this explanation seemed almost unbelievable - until one met Impellitteri.

If he had a single qualification for the job other than the length of his name and the fact that it ended in a vowel, he kept it carefully hidden during his five-year tenure (he was re-elected with O’Dwyer in 1949) as Council President. “The perfect Throttlebottom,” Moscow called him. “He voted as the mayor told him to, on matters he did not necessarily understand, and spent most of his waking hours shaking hands at public dinners, political clambakes, and cornerstone layings too unimportant to merit the mayor’s presence.”

Amiable but slow-witted, he was a joke among political insiders. But now he was mayor - and the joke was on the city.

Impellitteri’s wits may have been slow, but he had two fast wits - ex-O’Dwyer aide Bill Donoghue and a young sharpie named Sydney S. Baron - as PR men.

Impellitteri had to run in a special election in November if he wanted to hold the office he had fallen into, which meant that he had less than ten weeks in which to create an image and a record, and his PR men quickly hit on two ways to do it:

first, take advantage of the fact that no one knew him, that he was therefore not identified with any political bosses, that his opponent, Ferdinand Pecora, was backed by Tammany boss DeSapio and that unable to get Impellitteri the Democratic nomination, the clique in Tammany that pulled his strings had him running as an independent, and portray him as the “anti-boss,” “anti-politician,” “anti-corrupttion” candidate (one of Baron’s better lines: “If Pecora is elected, Frank Costello will be your mayor. But the voice will be that of Pecora”);
second, identify him with Robert Moses.

The price of that identification came high, both in specifics - Moses made Impellitteri pledge publicly that if he was elected, he would not re-appoint Finkelstein - and in generalities: Impellitteri privately promised Moses even more of a free hand than he had enjoyed under O’Dwyer in setting all city construction policies. But Impellitteri paid it. He got full value in return. Refusing an offer of the Republican nomination (time had dimmed at least some GOP leaders’ memories of 1934), Moses gave him his endorsement. “Even I, who thought that by this time I knew Bob and the lengths to which he would go, never thought he would go that far,” says Lazarus. Remonstrating, he said, “But, Bob, he hasn’t any capacity for the job at all!”

Moses’ response? “He laughed at that.”

Publicly, the Coordinator declared that Impellitteri “has shown extraordinary courage and independence.” And, as always, a Moses endorsement made almost every front page in town. (The Herald Tribune article stated: “It was not a political endorsement, Mr. Moses basing his support on his opinion that the Impellitteri administration was carrying out the city construction program as planned.”)

Moses led Impellitteri around to officiate at openings of – and share in the credit and front-page pictures for – highways and housing projects with which he had had nothing to do except to affix his signature as Council President to documents his aides say he often had not even bothered to read.

Most observers, noting that the campaign consisted mainly of charges and counter-charges of bossism and corruption, felt that the endorsement from an official characterized as “independent” and believed above corruption was an important factor almost as important as the decision by newspaper headline writers to call him “Impy” and thus give him a lovable public image-in Impellitteri’s victory, the first in the city’s history by a candidate running on an independent line without the support of either major party. And after his election, Impellitteri continued to pay the price eagerly.

Thanks to his PR men and his physical appearance - his addiction to the blue suit and the boutonniere, combined with his iron-gray hair, deeply earnest mien and stolidity that during the campaign was mistaken for dignity, made him the very model of a modern mayor; at the approach of a camera his brow would furrow, his lips would purse, his jaw would jut and his eyes would focus on whatever piece of paper happened to be handy just as intently as if he understood the words written on it - Impy had run a great race, but once in possession of the prize he had won, he proved to have not the slightest idea of what to do with it.

He disclaimed any influence over the Board of Estimate, telling reporters, “All I have is three votes on it, you know.” Mayors were always telling reporters that but City Hall insiders soon realized, to their astonish- ment, that this mayor believed it. Says one of his aides, Victor F. Condello: “Impy never understood that he had any power at all.” Once Condello suggested that the Mayor call the five borough presidents to an executive session to discuss a thorny issue. “Yeah,” the Mayor said, “that’s a good idea.” Pause. “You think they’ll come?”

He was too timid to confront even his own subordinates. Once, a newspaper leveled detailed charges against one. The next time they met, the Mayor asked him if the charges were true. Of course not, the appointee said

more to come

Let Me Fix [some of] Your Parking Problems

2023-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

Hi there! I’m Josh, and I’m your local neighborhood advocate for overlooked spaces.

Today, we’ll be focusing on parking lots.

Your parking lot has a job to do, and every day, every night, rain or shine, hot or cold, clear, rainy, or snowy, your parking lot does the best it can at it’s job.

But how well does it do it’s job? What is the job of a parking lot, exactly, anyway?

The jobs of a parking lot

Like any potential representative of your business, at minimum, you want your parking lot to serve a certain function, around:

storing vehicles
finding empty spaces
leaving the parking lot after finishing up at the facility
moving people from where they parked their vehicle to an entrance to your facility

And, again, like a representative of your business, you don’t want it to look dirty, unclean, slovenly, or dangerous.

Signs your parking lot might be broken

There’s a few ways you could determine if your parking lot is doing it’s job well or poorly. For example, are any of the following true for you?

customers sometimes have difficulty finding open parking spaces, and instead “cruise” past many occupied spaces before finding an available space
heavy use of ‘desire paths’¹
it feels ‘creepy’ under certain conditions/times of day, especially at night
first-time guests sometimes have a hard time finding where to park, and then quickly/confidently making their way to the entrance of your facility
at peak times of day, members/guests/customers know that if they wanted to visit your facility, they’d have a hard time finding a parking spot
you sometimes have conflict with other businesses that make use of nearby parking areas. Their customers park in your parking, or your customers sometimes park in their parking, and this causes friction
your parking lot doesn’t generate any 💰💰💰 , which pays for it’s own improvements.[^pay-for-itself]
if your parking lot does generate revenue, it leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the users who have to pay. most paid parking in America is not managed at a competent level.

Remember - people are creatures of habit and convenience. When we find parking lots difficult to deal with, we’re vastly less likely to frequent the business attached to that parking lot. people will subconsiously avoid parking lots completely. ²

The cost of your parking lot being broken

There are real costs to your parking lot not doing it’s job well enough. The most obvious cost is the waste of customer good-will. While most people know that any issues with a parking lot isn’t necessarily the fault of the business they’re frequenting, not everyone knows this. Lots of people take their frustration on parking out directly on the business they’re trying to visit, and a ‘challenging’ parking lot costs you customers.

To repeat a quote:

[That parking lot] is literally the worst, and is 10,000,000% why I’ll never go there again.

So, in some cases, your parking lot costs you customers directly.

Even if customers still push through the discomfort, though, clunking parking now costs your customers time, and frustration. It’s extremely annoying to ‘cruise’ around for parking.

The ROI of fixing your parking lot

More Customers

A well-managed parking lot is an efficient parking lot. Would you like it more if every time someone came to your facility, they drove alone, or if they came as a group or two or three?

If your parking is anywhere close to being full, you would want to see your visitors share cars. That takes the vehicle space consumption per person go from 300sqft of your parking lot to 150 sqft, or 100sq ft.

@josh_exists lots to appreciate here. the audio is great I have thoughts on parking lots. I see them as hidden sources of abundance, currently not allowed to function as well as they might. a little love goes a long way. #fyp #dji #traderjoes #toyota #ford #denver #colorado #timelapse #carlessdriver #driverlesscar ♬ Final Speech - From "The Great Dictator" - Charlie Chaplin

Nudge towards walkability

Parking lots are never the destination - it’s the place that drivers go once they’ve parked their vehicle.

If we work together, we’ll make sure to make certain appropriate places of your parking lot start to feel like the destination instead of the forgettable part. Converting a small portion of your lot from a revenue drain to a revenue generator could be, as you can imagine, meaningful.

Let’s look at some parking lots together

Your parking lots do much more than hold parked cars.

Here’s some of the parking lots I’ve looked at lately. Let’s talk about some of what we see.

First, here’s the things I tend to notice, on first blush:

How big is the parking lot. how many spaces?
how cozy is it? Is there shade anywhere during the day? How is it illuminated at night?
What part of the parking lot is closest to the main entrance? This portion of your parking lot will be the busiest and most important part.
How wide are the driving lanes? How easy is it to find available spots?
Do people ‘cruise’ a lot when looking for parking?
What kind of situations and dynamics exist around the junction between your parking lot and adjoining roads? Do customers have an easy and safe and protect way to get into your parking lot, without having to wait a long time for a gap in traffic?
When leaving your parking lot, is it easy-enough to get going the desired direction on the local roads?

Here’s some other data-based questions that can be answered with observation or conversations:

How long is the longest time it took someone to find a parking spot in the last week?
how common are break-ins? is there an issue of safety in the parking lot, either from people in cars, or people not in cars?

@josh_exists #mobility_networks ♬ Tropical, summer-like reggaeton beats(1127821) - Mushuz

I’ve been getting better at getting good footage from my drone:

@josh_exists #CapCut ♬ original sound - josh

@josh_exists Denver traffic drone timelapse, again.#drone #timelapse #fyp #denver #mobility_network ♬ Stuck In The Middle - Tai Verdes

Now, lets’s stop thinking about your parking lot for a minute, and think of what a parking lot can represent at it’s best.

Sometimes some of the space in or around a parking lot might serve as a third space, or a pathway for your customers from one place (where they parked) to another (your business) and back, or for non-customers or future customers to pass by your business. Third spaces are best when they are beautiful, so a defining question you can ask of your parking lot is - is it beautiful?

If it isn’t beautiful, or at least there are not spots of beauty, then there ISN’T ‘third space’ vibes in your parking lot, this is one of the things I can eventually fix, but only in parallel with making it feel clean and safe.

How I’d start improving your parking lot

You might be intrigued, now, and inclined to investigate more.

The easiest next step would be to pop your email address into this form below, and you’ll automatically get a few emails over the next two weeks that will make you an even more sophisticated observer and evaluator of your parking lot.

TODO for Josh: add email collection form here

in the meantime send me an email

Here’s what we’ll do, when we start working on your parking lot together:

Step 1: Evaluation of what it’s “job to be done” is, and how well it’s doing it

As you can imagine, there’s lots of similarities between parking lots across America, but every parking lot is a little distinctive. Step one will be opening up the parking lot on Google maps/google earth, and seeing how it looks.

Step 2: Modify the ‘flow’ of vehicles to make the most dangerous parts of the parking lot safe

First, we’d aim to make safer spots where cars and people have dangerous interactions. In the USA, incidents involving cars striking pedestrians continue to climb, and whichever part of your parking lot feels dangerous is what we’ll fix first.

Here’s some videos about how I’ve improved the safety and convenience of certain spots, with far more time spent recording the video than I spent modifying the space.

@josh_exists part 2? or 15? gosh it's a long and boring story I could tell #traffic ♬ original sound - josh

@josh_exists turns out I'm really into traffic cones on the (real or imaginary) center lines of roads. reduces all three sources of vehicle pollution (tailpipe emissions, brake dust, tire microplastics). #mobilitynetwork #networkanalysis #showdonttell I have at least some explicit permission from the city engineer, the mayor, and the police! This is all for demonstration. is love to make it permanent and beautiful eventually.@josh_exists ♬ original sound - josh

Step 3: Make some affordances for the people walking back and forth through your parking lot

Next, we’ll decide what part of your parking lot is already the most heavily used by people, closest to gathering points, and naturally comfortable.

We’ll make it more comfortable, and add small/cheap bits of ‘street furnature’ to create some outdoor spaces, by creating the feeling of semi-enclosed spaces.

For example, we could add some outdoor string lights on a timer to cozy up the space on those dark winter evenings.

This can be accomplished by an easy arrangement of something no more fancy than a few medium-sized metal planters and some thin wood posts, but can instantly change the vibe and shape of the space.

Rinse, and repeat.

Ready to get in touch? send me an email

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you work directly with businesses to provide this service instead of talking to {local municipality}?

I actually have spoken to many local municipalities, and that’s what led me to this current service!

I’ve found many ‘local municipal traffic & right-of-way people’ to be quite amenable to what I’m working on, and anytime I’ve brought a sensible plan to them and the resources to implement it, they’ve supported it, no matter how resource-constrained they are in terms of calendar, budget, etc.

I’ve worked with city engineers, planning staff, public works officials, political leaders (mayors, city council people) and more, and in every case have walked away with a solution everyone’s happy with.

That all said, I’ve found that there’s quite a lot of ‘work that can be done’ before any of that work escalates to something that would make sense to loop the city in on. So, I’ll do the work for you that doesn’t involve the local municipality, and then when it becomes needful to include them, i can handle much of that work as well.

Why do you talk so much about the ‘flow’ of traffic? What’s the difference between hiring you and ‘just’ adding some seating outside myself?

It is easy to imagine making changes to your parking lot, but it would be harmful to your business to make any changes that didn’t make the experience b

Because traffic cones are the first tool I use for changing how traffic flows through an area. Cars, bikes, and people ‘flow’ a bit like water, a bit like a gas.

Traffic cones are like placing a rock in a stream - it changes the flow of the water, even as it doesn’t change how much water flows through the space.

This concept is the core of how I start making fixes in a given area. I look at it, watch it for a while, see how people use it, and then start making experimental changes. As few as one or two cones can make a big difference in very specific ways.

How do you price this?

First, we schedule a roadmapping session - in person, if possible, via zoom if not. This is a fixed fee, and is no more onerous to you than us participating in a zoom call where I present my initial findings, gathered from google earth, street view, and any photos or videos you and I can get.

This is a fixed, one-time fee. From it you’ll get a report outlining what I think should be done, in a way that minimizes effort on everyone’s behalf.

Next, if you’d like to oversee the implementation yourself, I can be available on a retainer to help navigate the project.

If you want me to oversee it directly, that is also available on something of a consulting model. In some circumstances, I might do at least some of the work directly, and where it makes sense, I’ll be on-sight to directly guide the project.

I price by a flat fee for the initial consult. A small parking area is $500, a large one (200 spaces +) will cost $3000.

the optional retainer, consulting, and implementation options will all be shared in the roadmapping document.

What kind of improvements will you bring about?

I’ll help your parking lot fit more vehicles, i’ll help your visitors spend less time looking for parking, and overall, they will all appreciate how intentional you are about tending well to your whole lot.

There’s behavior change baked into all of this, but primarily by creating attractive paths and patterns that we most want your customers to use. I’m rather opposed to coercion, and even see the existence of some written signs and notifications as a possible failure of good design.

What sort of ideas/people/ideas are you implementing?

I endeavor to appropriately channel four people: Christopher Alexander, Donald Shoup, and Alain Bertaud, and Caroline Criado Perez.

Christopher Alexander wrote A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.

Donald Shoup wrote The High Cost of Free Parking.

Alain Bertaud, urban economist, wrote Order Without Design.

Caroline Criado Perez wrote Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

There are many additional layers of constraints, unique to, say, Denver. There’s DOTI, the right-of-way office, planning, snow removal, event coordination, enforcement.

A ‘desire path’ is an ‘unofficial’ path, usually made by people choosing to walk where there isn’t an official path. Generally, if you want to help people get to where they want to go, a good rule of thumb is to identify all desire paths as they appear, and add some ‘dressing’ to the path to make it official, and safe. Desire paths often start as dirt paths, and these get muddy in the rain, dangerous in the snow, and are rarely ploughed. ↩
For example, here’s a passionate complaint about a Trader Joe’s parking lot. Trader Joe’s is losing business because the parking lot is so bad at it’s job:

I Am a Trader Joe’s Parking Lot and I am Here to Destroy You (finish this copy/paste from WA, add fb comment screenshots)

Here’s the kinds of things people say:

Can we all agree that [this parking lot] is the most terrible one in Boise (I mean it’s like a pit of hell)?

When I want to go to Trader Joe’s I always think… ‘do I really want to park in there?’

[That parking lot] is literally the worst, and is 10,000,000% why I’ll never go there again.

It’s horrible. I avoid Trader Joe’s just because of the parking lot.

add screenshots/google maps/google earth/street view data ↩

On Leaving Evangelicalism And Opposing It

2023-05-18T13:00:00+00:00

Content warning & summary

This paper talks about ethics, ethical behavior, violence, abuse, complicacy, complicity, being complicit/unwilling complicity, domination and oppression. Nobility ethics, colonialism, chattel slavery, supremacy.

I’m sorta writing this towards a younger me - maybe if I’d found some of these books floating around when I was in high school, I’d have dodged some of the harm. I found myself raised by evangelicals, and I sometimes felt that something was not quite right about it. Sometimes I was gung-ho about it all. I never vibed with many of the political tenets of evangelicalism, and early in my life I remember shedding other tenets (like the evangelical love of war), but it wasn’t until more recently that this particular lense of evangelicalism clicked into view.

Here’s a brief summary of some of the information i’ll present below about the intellectual origin of modern evangelicalism:

The theological underpinnings of modern evangelicalism are two-fold:

First, a guy named Anselm, around 1100 AD, invented/theorized the satisfaction theory of atonement. It was a theological justification for and support of nobility ethics/norms and chivalry ethics/norms.

Second, the puritans (john calvin, martin luther, others of that 1500s ilk) openly advocated actual genocide against certain other groups of sorta-christians (‘the anabaptists’) who didn’t consider themselves to be part of a particular church, because they didn’t consider themselves to be part of a particular church.

Since Calvin and people like him are big in Evangelicalism, this “poisoned the well”, in my mind, of all the resources associated with them, or downstream of them. It also has sensitised me a bit to the smell of people who think/talk like Calvin. ¹

if you want it to get worse, it can. The southern baptist denomination split off from the baptist denomination because _despite the baptists being pro-slavery, they were not pro-slavery enough for the southerners, so they split off into the southern baptists.

Therefore, everything associated with the puritans AND/OR the satisfaction view of atonement is completely polluted with murder, violence, and domination.² The evangelical church in america, and the southern baptists in particular, openly modified their theology to best accommodate the ethics of chattel slavery., and those modifications persist today.

“Modern christians” don’t resort to physical violence quite as quickly as their intellectual forbearers (slavers), but they instantly reach for tools of psychological and verbal coercion as soon as they see something that looks “out of line”.

Those willing to use verbal and psychological coercion, in justifying that coercion, find themselves as bedfellows with those who use physical violence, and the spawn of that union is demonic. America’s global military empire (and its domestic military empire) is firmly rooted in the logical extension of this verbal and psychological coercion. Police yelling at a black man to “stop resisting!” and the US military’s message to brown people of “accept our democracy” lives close to the message parents coerce on their children, which is “you will do whatever I tell you, and i will psychologically torture you until you comply.”

Who this post is for/who might find this interesting

I’ve always enjoyed a good house party, and any good party is more fun when there’s more people. So, in honor of me ‘leaving evangelicalism’, I’m sorta throwing myself a party, and trying to get a few more people to show up. ³

If it seems I’ve arrived at a ‘theologically novel spot’, my honor requires me to push back and say “this is neither novel, nor difficult to arrive at”.

This is love letter to an earlier and younger version of myself.

I experienced difficulty of many shades, because I was trying hard to fit into, and live according to, a system and regime that I thought was capable of absorbing my energy and giving me back something worthwhile, something that would justify what I was giving it.

I eagerly pursued safety for myself, relative to caretakers around me, and with the naïvety only children can embody, tried (unsuccessfully) to obtain safety from them while maintaining an individuated sense of self. I clung to this regime of thought through much of my early adulthood.

I relied on this regime of religiosity to intermediate all sorts of relationships. Relationships with my family, friends, and myself. This religiosity wasn’t capable of intermediating these relationships healthfully, and I experienced pain and harm as a result, without ever understanding why the pain was so poignant, the hurt so profound, the loneliness and abandonment so bottomless.⁴

The world needs soulful, lively people. Some of you have been raised in toxic and abusive environments and don’t yet know it. Your soul may have been crushed, repeatedly, until you relented and consented to whatever regime you were under, and you don’t even remember that this ever happened.

I’m basically writing this document as a mix of an “impassioned open letter”, and “a list of resources and concepts that I wish I’d encountered years earlier in my life.”

From birth, my parents had me firmly ensconced in the evangelical church traditions.

I was raised in an abusive and neglectful household. I call it a cult, in several ways. Because I was surrounded by others from the same group/cult, it took a long time to get far enough from it that I could see it clearly.

This post is an explanation of how, without ever intending to, I found myself to have walked out of that camp of evangelicalism, and from their point of view I’m now firmly planted in “heretical theological hinterlands”, and vastly better off for it.⁵

From my own point of view of myself on my own change, there is a coherent line of thought, way of being, intellectual purity, a clear adherence to a firm ethical standard, and a reasonable causal chain from “there” (thinking evangelicalism was true, and a source of good in the world) to “here” (viewing evangelicalism and adjacent structures as simple propaganda to support harmful power structures, and viewing it as a primary source of historical and ongoing violence and abuse in the world).

I’ve recovered a much more actionable, robust, and firm understanding of the person of Jesus Christ (and the things he said and did, and why) than I ever had in the decades leading up to now. ⁶

I don’t use the labels ‘deconstruction’ or ‘exvangelical’. I simply matured and refined my understanding of a certain religious tradition (cult) that I was once a part of, and have ‘grown’ into a much more comfortable, peaceful, enjoyable version of a different religious tradition, which shares some interesting similarities and differences.

Despite my justified anger about my experiences of abuse and neglect as a child, adolescent, and adult, related to evangelicalism (and abuse and neglect sanctioned by ‘evangelical intellectual traditions’), I warmly extend an invite to this greener side of the fence, to anyone who currently finds themselves still a member of any religious tradition that looks like evangelicalism. It’s way, way more peaceful and enjoyable ‘out here’.

While my current “place” would horrify some from the religious communities in which I was raised, I’ve actually internalized (some of) the words they spoke over me, like “love others, act justly, walk humbly.” (they said, as they poured violence, anger, shame, condemnation, and credible threats of abandonment into me and others, to control us.) This is why I’ve cut them out of my life, and why I have been freely encouraging other children of emotionally immature parents to consider doing the same, if it would be protective\healing.

I sometimes manage to find words that are extremely offensive, which in some ways I’m proud of, and in other ways I am disappointed and saddened by. I also am inclined to hide explosive intellectual ideas behind a veil of words, to screen out those who hide behind the veil of functional illiteracy.

So, I’m writing this as a first pass towards an open display of what I feel, which is at times certainly tinged with emotions like anger and rage and grief, but at other times, I wish I could soften my disposition and be a bit more warm, winsome, and “reasonable”.

Hate is closer to love than apathy, so if you hate what I say, I don’t mind you communicating that to me. In some ways, it’s an honor. I am apathetic about none of this. Any expression of anger here is motivated by love for that which has been polluted and degraded by inhumane thoughts and actions.

I’ve been shunned⁷ by some, and I have withdrawn from others. Here’s no more or less than an explanation, mixed with a defense. Say what you will about me, but “Josh has not given thought or intellectual brain-sweat to his life” will not be accepted.

Where I started

I was raised in ‘the church’, in a variety of ‘baptist’, ‘evangelical’, ‘southern baptist’, ‘presbyterian’, ‘episcopal’, non-denominational churches, from age zero, through perhaps age 31. I went to a nominally christian four-year university.

At the beginning, I went to church because my parents would have committed acts of soul murder upon me if I strenuously resisted going to church, so eager church attendance was simple safety-seeking behavior, and then at a later time, I was fully onboard with churchishness, ostensibly of my own volition. For example, my family did sunday morning church, sunday evening church, wednesday evening church, i think often church on Thursdays, and lots of ‘church stuff’ at home.

Kristi and I were married in “the church” over a decade ago, and at that point I considered my involvement to be fully voluntary.

When this gestures broadly first started happening, I didn’t really think it would lead to where it actually led me. Some of these things ‘i did’, others ‘were done to me’. There’s horror and sadness and grief throughout.

I am no longer married, and as far as how well divorces and co/parallel parenting can go, it feels like it’s been pretty bad.
I am no longer on speaking terms with a rather large percentage of my birth family, and with the family I married into.⁸ :(
Some friendships/relationships I’d hoped to rely upon have ended. Others have deepened dramatically, which has provided energy and support in a way that one might find a life preserver to provide energy and support when floating down a turbulent river.⁹

Then, 2019 happened. these words are that story. The troubles that would affect my life in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 were completely absent from my consciousness. Lets roll back the clock to 2019.

You and I had not even heard the words ‘covid 19’.

I was climbing well, finally getting some breakthroughs in my bouldering and sport climbing.

Friends, family, climbing, I was doing well in my career, doing cool things, giving cool talks at meetups, had a great podcast appearance, and was helping others in ways that were good and emotionally satisfying.

I was getting unsolicited job offers, got recognized by a stranger in an airport because of a talk I had given (!!!), had external and internal trappings of success. My birth family and Kristi’s birth family gave me a resounding ‘thumbs up’, based on the life I was living.

Money was abundant, free time was abundant, emotional energy and engagement and agency was, overall, abundant.

Things seemed good.

When i try to think of the beginning of the story of my exit from evangelicalism, the best focal point I can pick is a book I got gifted on my Kindle, for my birthday.

I read an unassuming, short little book titled Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism. It ruined me. Changed the trajectory of my life.

The Dangerous Books I Read

So, lets just discuss the books directly.

Warning: Don’t read any of the books I reference in this article, even if ‘just’ out of spite, to prove that the book won’t impact you. Any single book might wreck you. They’re dangerous.

I’ve always been intuitively attracted to “banned books”. On principle, when hearing of a book that’s been banned, I’ll seek it out, read it, and luxuriate in whatever subversive or anti-establishment views it espouses.

These books that I recommend could easily be banned. Banning a book directly is a small-brained solution to a problem, from the establishment point of view, because of the Streisand Effect.

If the evangelical church (and it’s consorts from the state) got together and said:

We’re banning The Politics of Jesus, The Non-Violent Atonement, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey and The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

everyone who had access to a library, a credit card, or the internet would go out and see what spicy words were contained in the text. Even children. In the era of the internet, the best defense against 🌶️ ideas is projecting an attitude of apathy.

Feel free to skim the rest of this article. It’s long, meandering, and weaves together my own thoughts with those of the books I read. I’ve written a few articles already around this topic, and I’ll link them in, but if you’re at all inclined to read the books I suggest, I think your time would be well-spent, though you’ll pay far more for reading these books than just time and money.

A warning - I’m nearly autistic and will gleefully wade through text of any difficulty and length if I feel like there’s something useful at the other end. These books are not “easy”.

People change when the cost of not-changing is greater than the cost of changing.

Here’s the books (and a paper), in the order in which I read them:

Boom. That was it. At the end of these books, and the paper, I was firmly outside of the evangelical tradition, and never able to be brought back.

I’m absolutely not identified at all with anabaptism, either. I simply noticed that in appreciating why the anabaptists became a target for that-day’s evangelicals is to see something one can not un-see. it’s all icky, and mixes so freely with ‘banal’ strains of supremacy. Lots in common with the supremacy visible in japanese supremacy towards china ¹⁰. In the Hutu/Tutsi conflict. The Tutsi ethnic group was created/defined/empowered by the europeans from Belgium, supremacy begets bad things, there was a horrible event in 1991. The chain of islands sometimes called ‘indonesia’ was horrifically treated by mostly the government of the usa. ¹¹

where i finished

I was “an evangelical”, despite how much I disliked the political conservatism that tends to come with it.¹²

While there are absolutely black evangelicals (the divide between black and white evangelicals is the topic of a wonderful book titled The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia, in general, white evangelicalism is/was an embodiment of “historic whiteness”. In my early years, I was “christian”, “white”, “republican”, and more. I’m not proud of the views I once espoused, but as they were coerced onto me with an overwhelming pressure, I don’t see myself as having had too much of a choice. (seeking safety from caretakers as a child and such)

If I chose to, I could blend in with a crowd of any political flavor, but my upbringing was extremely politically conservative. I was raised on messages like “gay people are what is wrong with America” and “the military of the government of the USA makes the world safe” and “american democracy is the best/last form of organization needed in the world” and “black people are overall inferior to white people” and “china and russia represent existential threats to ‘world peace’.”

I was also raised functionally divorced from any of the ethnic heritage I had, despite how close I could have been to certain latin american cultural origins.

In other words, I was raised White, though the closest I’ll identify now with whiteness is “white-passing”. ¹³

Where I am now

After reading those books, some of them more than once, and much conversation (and painful lack of conversation) with others, I strongly and clearly de-identified with Christianity, christians, america/americanism, and all forms of evangelicalism and christendom.

When traveling, when asked “where I’m from”, I’ll say “Denver, Colorado”, rather than “the United States of America”, and I’ll sometimes add “my family is from Paraguay”.

I identify with attribute tags like anarchism and anabaptistm (loosely), but mostly I’ve dropped all the labels I used to voluntarily use. I’ll talk about my daughter, rock climbing, my love of friends and friendship, ‘intellectual pursuits’, my distaste for american forms of ethnic cleansing, and more. These are the ways I choose to define myself.

This article isn’t only about why I de-identified with evangelicalism, though.

I did that quietly, without really telling anyone, and I kept going to church on Sundays, and since I wasn’t saying/writing much about what I’d encountered, except for in trusted 1:1 conversations, no one in my family or the church had any reason to think things had changed for me.

Anyone who knew me and this came up in conversation, I’d quickly explain where I’d been, theologically, and they could track with me, but again, in the terms of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, I exited, quietly.

This article is about why I now strongly associate evangelicalism with an active creation of spaces safe for, and full of, abusive behaviors, oppression, and violence. As someone who’s ethically opposed to abuse, oppression, and violence

These books are quite dangerous, in some of the same way that Jesus was dangerous. (And representative of the same sort of threats to the powers of his time, which is why he was killed. Remember, he was killed as a fairly mundane ‘religious and political criminal’.)

To recap, between 2019 and 2020, I read:

After these books, especially the last one, I saw core components of what I’d been given in a wholly different light.

For example, here’s a “take” that I’d literally never considered, but is intellectually coherent:

Jesus was not “murdered by God to atone for the sins of mankind” (the satisfaction atonement motif) - he was murdered by angry and immature people at the behest of the religious and political leaders, because he represented a credible threat to the established political and religious regimes of the day, and that threat was legible to the people who ran the regimes, so they killed him. No more and no less.

To me, it’s now vastly more interesting to understand and apprectiate why his words and actions were so egregiously offensive to the establishment.

Given that he also encouraged his followers to embody his way of being, if one can see why his words and actions were so dangerous to the status quo, one becomes different, and…

oops. There goes the status quo.

Next, after reading the three books above about anabaptism, I kept reading ‘the canon’, and a rather interesting-and-provocative paper.

Book 1: Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism

So, this all started with my brother-in-law’s Christmas gift to me. I read a lot¹⁴, and every Christmas and birthday, tend to be given at least a few books. (Thank you, everyone who’s ever gotten me a book!)

Someone will gift me a kindle book, and I’ll read it at some point. I really love this tradition.

This book is admittedly rather boring, but I often read ‘boring’ books. It’s an academic text about the history of an obscure religious group in the 16th century. My brother-in-law bought me the book, because the group had come up in conversation, and he thought it might be interesting to me.

He was right. It wrecked me.

I opened it up on my kindle, and started the preface, and was rocked. So much so that I copied the text down, and made this little blog post about it: What’s up with the Anabaptists (josh.works)

That was the beginning of the end.

I invite you to read it:

👉 What’s up with the Anabaptists

The preface of the book was excellent, and then the last chapter and appendix was also exceptional. I touch on all of those things in the blog post.

At the time, I knew nothing about the anabaptists.

I didn’t realize that they were targeted for extermination/ethnic cleansing by the religious and secular authorities of the day, like John Calvin, not unlike the polemics that HITLER HIMESELF went on against the Jews.

Critically, I felt a sense of indignation and betrayal that no one had told me that the same John Calvin that shaped much of modern protestantism was also an advocate for genocide.

The modern take on Anabaptists often says it’s a disagreement about minor theological points, like ‘how many times is the right number of times to be baptized’ and ‘who, really, is allowed to interpret scripture.’

The book said, basically:

when one group is killing [literally, burning at the stake] another group, perhaps we in the modern world should assume that both sides of the party knew what was at stake (pun intended), instead of saying they were committing acts of ethnic cleansing over a misunderstanding.

Also:

any earnest effort to get to the bottom of the disagreement should focus on the core differences between the groups, rather than over-focusing on commonalities.

This last sentence ruined me, especially as my marriage was slowly disintegrating, and I was trying to hold it together.

I kept finding this conversational tactic around me everywhere, for the next two years of my life. I would want to focus conversations on core, critical differences, and those around me would respond with:

sure, but look at the things you agree about each other, surely that difference you say is critical is immaterial.

So, that book kicked off my normal ‘reading of the canon’.¹⁵

I ordered another five or six books on the topic from Amazon, and read through them all.

Book 2: The Politics of Jesus

I ended up reading The Politics of Jesus, and… that was it.

That was the end. That was when I officially renounced vestiges of evangelicalism, and decided I might never attend a church again. I didn’t stop going to church when I read it, but I instantly felt like an outsider, and was content in this new status. A sense of self had coalesced, and I could put my finger on what felt so wrong about many experiences I’d had throughout my life.

I began feeling uncomfortable with the songs that were sung, the constant repeating of certain ‘creeds’, and more.

After reading The Politics of Jesus, I shared some personal context, a summary of the introduction, and reproduced a few pages from the first chapter here: Was Jesus’ Social Ethic Normative? (josh.works).

Yoder, in the first chapter, eviscerated “the church” (really, any vestige of Christendom) by showing the ways that modern biblical ethicists (of which pastors and clergy are a sub-group) explicitly (and erroneously) teach that the things Jesus said and did are irrelevant in modern times, and must be discarded.

At this point in the story, I’d encourage you to click through the above link, and read it. It’ll take a while. I’ll wait.

👉 Was Jesus’ Social Ethic Normative? (josh.works)

if you’re not ‘in the church’, you might not recognize that the page slug, ‘was Jesus’ ethic normative’, is an absolute broadside against ‘the church’. It’s saying “does jesus words and actions matter?” and that’s a bit of a dog-whistle, because evangelicals will say of course jesus words and actions matter. As they live out a belief of the opposite.

I kept trying to get friends to read this book.

Some did, and found it as compelling as I did.

Some of you looked at it, saw that it was loosely academic and had a lot of footnotes, and chose to embrace functional illiteracy.

The author of the book makes a compelling case that

the Jesus that is preached about in churches across America is explicitly made irrelevant to today, and replaced with basically an ethic of theological naturalism.

This is fine - if you wanna believe in theological naturalism, IDGAF, but don’t also then try to tell me it’s’s rooted in the story of Jesus Christ.

The book makes a great point - to all the people showing up to the execution of the person known as Jesus, most of them recognized him as nothing more interesting then a legitimate threat to the established order of the church and the state, because of the things that he said and did. He was a politically dangerous person, and the powers that be do what they’ve always done - maneuvered the world to eliminate a threat. Plain and simple.

Justification & the Atonement

Here’s a copy of most of chapter 11 from The Politics of Jesus

Quotes from The Politics of Jesus: CHAPTER 11: Justification by Grace through Faith

If you go to a church, they’ll talk about ‘the atonement’, which is broadly addressed anytime you hear about “the work Jesus did on the cross” or “being saved by the blood of christ”, or “forgiveness of your sins”, and more. It’s kinda the core tenant of christianity.

You’ll hear the text “justified by faith”. Briefly, Yoder argues that this could be better understood. First, “justified” doesn’t mean “forgiven”, it is to be understood in the word-document text-formatting way. To “justify” a block of text is to align the ends of the lines. Ruby (the programming language) has methods like rjust and ljust, short for “right justify” and “left justify”. It adds padding to strings to make them line up.

The “justification” of which this text speaks is to be “rightly aligned” relative to others. Do you have conflict between you and someone else? Then you’re not “rightly aligned” to each other. To be “rightly aligned” would be akin to resolving and repairing the block.

so lets let the first word of “justified by faith” to “rightly aligned to others”. By what? How do we get rightly aligned?

“by faith…fulness”

Faithfulness? What does that mean?

You can be “faithful” to a creed, an ethic, a set of norms. The faithfulness being referenced is faithfulness to Jesus’ specific social ethic, in which he talked a lot about interpersonal relations, within groups, across groups, and across power differentials.

So “justified by faith” becomes “rightly aligned to others by faithfulness to Jesus’’ specific social ethic.”

Some of you might not realize that making this assertion takes me into the realm of heresy. Live on the edge, huh?

Also, if you’re not faithful to Jesus’ ethic, you’re not ‘justified’. A willingness to violence is sufficient to make one ineligible for justification. All forms of interpersonal violence (physical, verbal, emotional) destroy the availability of ‘justification’.

Romans 13 - “the state”

My journey was still unfolding. I didn’t realize I was moving into the ‘outer darkness’ relative to my religious community. I was just following interesting threads. Printing out papers, reading reading reading. Satisfying my special interests. I was feeling such progress and conceptual compressions coalescing out of the woodwork.

Romans 13 is this big text that’s referenced today to explain why ‘good people’ are supposed to do what the secular authorities tell them to do. the interpretation goes something like this:

the state, and it’s self-claimed legal monopoly on violence, is ordained by God to be over us, because the world runs on authority and domination, and the state is something like our intellectual father, just as the heavenly father is over us, so we should obey it.

I want to scare quote nearly every word in that statement, but here’s how Yoder re-works that statement:

The state, to the degree that it cares well for the least-privileged person under it’s ‘dominion’ , has legitimacy to care well for those persons.

Oops. Heresy part two. Did you feel it? Least privileged? Like immigrants, ethnic minorities, women, non-capitalists, children, people of various religious flavors, the poor, etc.

There are plenty more bombs carefully contained in that text. I’d encourage you to read it. These two examples serve as sufficient explanation.

Modern evangelicalsm is… well, basically politically powerful white people coopting language of moral authority to justify a regime of domination. This is all in the context of Americanism, or westernism. The intellectual thought that emerged in Europe after the advent of the printing press, related to Calvin, Luther, catholicism, and more, is basically all the same.

Book 3: The Non-Violent Atonement

As soon as I read the title of this book, I smashed the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon, as quickly as I could navigate to the page on my phone.

I’ve been raised in ‘the church’, and heard ALL THE TIME about the atonement. Say it with me - those of you in the church, you’ve heard these phrases, sprinkled liberally throughout spiritual words and texts, like salt and pepper on a dish:

Christ’s work on the cross

The blood of Christ

Christ bearing the sins of mankind

He was punished for our sin

Because we couldn’t be perfect, he was perfect, and incurred the wrath of god because of it

I’ll share a few long quotes from the introduction of the book. I’d encourage you to pick up your own copy, if you want, but these quotes are sufficient at explaining what is obviously implied in the title - that there exists this thing called ‘the violent atonement’, and it is, in fact, what all of evangelicalism (and the west) is founded upon. If you recognize violence as the crappy problem-solving ‘tool’ used by emotionally immature people that it is, you’ll quickly traverse from “the atonement theology you’ve been taught is dripping in violence and blood” to “the satisfaction atonement motif is heareby discarded”

Everything below is a quote from the first few pages of The Nonviolent Atonement, by J. Denny Weaver. It’s a theological ‘child’ of The Politics of Jesus, which I strongly recommend. I’ve added a few linebreaks here and there, because this is the internet.

First, he paints some words about the ‘satisfaction’ motif of atonement, also known as ‘the violent atonement’ or ‘anselmian atonement’, named after the noble who invented the whole thing in 1100AD.

A brief sketch of the violent atonement

Quoting the author, J. Denny Weaver, below:

Atonement theology starts with violence, namely, the killing of Jesus. The commonplace assumption is that something good happened, namely, the salvation of sinners, when or because Jesus was killed. It follows that the doctrine of atonement then explains how and why Christians believe that the death of Jesus the killing of Jesus - resulted in the salvation of sinful humankind.

In much of the world generally and in the United States in particular, the prevailing assumption behind the criminal justice system is that to “do justice” means to punish criminal perpetrators appropriately. “Appropriately” means that the more serious the offense, the greater the penalty (punishment) to be imposed, with death as the ultimate penalty for the most serious crimes.

There is a pervasive use of violence in the criminal justice system when it operates on this belief that justice is accomplished by inflicting punishment. Called “retributive justice”, this system assumes that doing justice consists of administering quid pro quo violence an evil deed involving some level of violence on one side, balanced by an equivalent violence of punishment on the other.

The level of violence in the punishment corresponds to the level of violence in the criminal act.

Satisfaction atonement assumes that the sin of humankind against God has earned the penalty of death but that Jesus satisfied the offended honor of God on their behalf or took the place of sinful humankind and bore their punishment or satisfied the required penalty on their behalf.

Sin was atoned for because it was punished - punished vicariously through the death of Jesus, which saved sinful humankind from the punishment of death that they deserved - or because the voluntary death of Jesus paid or satisfied a debt to God’s honor that sinful humans had no way of paying themselves. That is, sinful humankind can enjoy salvation because Jesus was killed in their place, satisfying the requirement of divine justice on their behalf.

While the discussion of satisfaction atonement involves much more than this exceedingly brief account, this description is sufficient to portray how satisfaction atonement, which assumes that God’s justice requires compensatory violence or punishment for evil deeds committed, can seem self-evident in the context of contemporary understandings of retributive justice in North American as well as worldwide system of criminal justice.

The link between satisfaction atonement and systems of retributive justice cannot be denied. Timothy Gorringe’s God’s Just Vengeance provides a thorough analysis of satisfaction atonement’s foundation assumptions of retributive violence as well as an extended discussion of the mutual interrelations between theories of satisfaction atonement and understandings of punishment and criminal justice in the western world since the time of Anselm.

[…]

A different kind of challenge to satisfaction atonement comes from a Catholic writer who works out of the theory of mimetic violence and the scapegoat mechanism developed by René Girard. As an alternative to the assumption that God orchestrates evil that punishes Jesus for the sins of humankind, Raymund Schwager developed a dramatistic understanding of the New Testament’s depiction of Jesus, which shows that punishment is what sinful humanity does to itself through rejection of the reign of God.

[…]

I had concluded that Anselmian atonement was an abstract legal transaction that enabled the Christian believers of Christendom to claim salvation via the death of Christ while actively accommodating the violence of the sword. With that insight already in mind, encountering the critique of Anselm in Cone’s God of the Oppressed was startling. Where I had been arguing that the abstract legal formula allowed accommodation of the sword, Cone was arguing that it had accommodated chattel slavery and racism. Rapidly I saw that critique of Anselm was an agenda item that extended well beyond the pacifist perspective from which I had been working.

[…]

Definition of Narrative Christus Victor

as an answer to the question ‘if not the atonement/satisfection motif, what?’

It’s the/an alternative to the Anselmian/violent atonement/satisfaction motif, from the next page of the introduction, still quoting j denny weaver:

I have called the resulting model of the life and work of Christ narrative Christus Victor.

While narrative Christus Victor displays continuity with classic Christus Victor, it differs from the classic view in many important ways, and it deals with a number of issues not usually included in the discussion of atonement.

The working assumption in development of this model is that the rejection of violence, whether the direct violence of the sword or the systemic violence of racism or sexism, should be visible in expressions of Christology and atonement.

Developing an understanding shaped by nonviolence then lays bare the extent to which satisfaction atonement is founded on violent assumptions. Thus proposing narrative Christus Victor as a nonviolent atonement motif also poses a fundamental challenge to and ultimately a rejection of satisfaction atonement.

Since violence covers a multitude of sins and issues, examining biblical and historical material from a “nonviolent perspective” requires definitions for both violence and nonviolence.

I am using “violence” to mean harm or damage, a definition given more specificity by Glen Stassen and Michael Westmoreland-White.

They describe two dimensions of violence:

“(1) destruction to a victim and (2) by overpowering means. Violence is destruction to a victim by means that overpower the victim’s consent.”

This definition obviously includes killing in war, in murder, and in capital punishment.

Violence as harm or damage includes physical harm or injury to bodily integrity. It incorporates a range of acts and conditions that include damage to a person’s dignity or self-esteem.

Abuse comes in psychological and sociological as well as physical forms: parents who belittle a child and thus nurture a person without self-worth, teachers who brand a child a failure and destroy confidence to learn, a husband who continually puts down his wife, and more.

Killing is not the sole instance of violence but one of its more extreme forms.

The system of chattel slavery that existed in colonial America and in the United States for two and a half centuries was most certainly violence. But the continuation of racist practices today under other names is also violence.

Social practices which proscribe set roles for women and limit their opportunities are examples of violence.

Social structures that impose poverty are violent.

Such forms as racism, sexism, and poverty are frequently referred to as systemic violence. It is necessary to keep all these forms of violence in mind, from direct violence of bodily injury and killing through psychological abuse and the multiple forms of systemic violence.

Each of these forms of violence appears at some point in the discussion of atonement images to follow.

One important dimension of violence is the way it is assumed and used in the criminal justice system. As was already noted, the prevailing assumption behind the criminal justice system is that to do justice means to inflict punishment, with the intensity of punishment dependent on the seriousness of the misdeed.

In theory then, the death penalty differs quantitatively but not qualitatively from lesser punishments. But recognizing the assumption that justice means punishment shows that a very pervasive use of violence surrounds us in the criminal justice system, a use of violence whose commonness renders it virtually invisible.

The assumed violence of justice as punishment will appear at several stages in the discussion of atonement, particularly in the context of feminist and womanist arguments and in the arguments of the defenders of Anselm in Chapter 7

If “violence” covers a variety of issues, “nonviolence” also covers a spectrum of stances and actions ranging from passive nonresistance at one end to active nonviolent resistance at the other.

In this regard, it is very important to distinguish violence defined as harm or damage from nonviolence as force or social coercion that respects bodily integrity.

Since we have no term that carries the specific meaning of coercion used positively, I will describe it here as identifying a spectrum or continuum of acts stretching from persuasion to physical coercion. Persuasion attempts to affect and guide the action of others without denying their freedom or harming their person. At a low level of intensity, it includes the gentle coercion of parents who restrain children from disruptive behavior and teachers who require pupils to raise their hands and wait for permission to speak in class.

At a high level of intensity at the other end of the spectrum, positive coercion that constrains or compels the acts of others through pressure would include such actions as social ostracism, public marches and protests, and eventually strikes and economic boycotts.

Examples of physical force used positively or in a way to prevent an act that an individual wants to perform might include some forms of punishment for children, physically restraining children from running into the street, knocking a person out of the path of a vehicle, and physically restraining a person attempting suicide.’

One specific point to make clear about nonviolence is that it does resist violence in any of its forms. ¹⁶

The question is not whether nonviolent Christians should resist.

It is rather how Christians should resist. And the answer is to resist nonviolently. As the treatment of the story of Jesus in the following chapter demonstrates, Jesus engaged in nonviolent resistance.

[…]

It also engages in conversation with other critics of violent atonement theology. The final conclusion is that, even at its best, Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement cannot escape its foundation in the idea of retributive violence. It can be kept and defended, I conclude, only if one is willing to defend the compatibility of violence and retribution with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion

Please, please engage with this, if you have any inclination.

My email inbox is open, and I’d be thrilled to hop on a WhatsApp call to discuss more! (Whatsapp is preferred to phone call, for a few reasons, but I could be swayed to do a phone call.)

Just a warning, though - there’s this thread of coercion and domination that exists in the church, and when someone tries to invoke a claim of “authority” over me, I have to laugh inside a little. Here’s why:

I’ve been so brutalized by authority my whole life, and I’ve seen what happens to others when they have been brutalized by ‘authority’, i’ve had an instinct to rebel, on principle, when someone tries to force me to do something. Please consider engaging from a place of mutuality and curiosity, rather than trying to push me to a specific, pre-determined outcome.

Invoked claims of authority now lands as an intellectual crutch, the tools of those who don’t have the awareness or maturity to use adult tools. Authority is for children. Don’t threaten me like I am an easy-to-intimidate child.

I’ve got good books that I could refer one to, if you wanted to know why I so reject your claims of authority, and why I would advise your children to stop giving it any heed, as soon as they’re out of the range of your threats of physical and emotional violence.

I’m not here really for the people that want to argue. I’m here for the people like me, that when they smelled the possibility of an alternative they jumped on it. I heard rumblings on the distance of ideas contained in these books, and ordered them and read them immediately. Between library books, and books I purchased or found for free online, I probably read about 1000 pages in pursuit of this, and I consider it to be time well spent.

I found it. I’m out. The books are there for anyone else to read. The path has been laid.

The entire intellectual and moral self-justification of Christendom just… collapses. The screaming rage of evangelicalism dies with a whimper, collapses in a heap.

I kept going to friends in the church with my findings, and they kept matching my eager interest with derision, disinterest, and dismissiveness. I can’t control others, but I was and am now willing to ahem burn any bridge required to protect myself, and those that I love, from abusive institutions.

I have a vast capacity to love. I am deeply compassionate. I dislike conflict to my core, and in the same way as some will go off to war to commit acts of violence against a specific ethnic group, I will strenuously exert myself to reduce conflict for myself, those I love, and anyone I can reduce conflict for.

One of the ways one can resist actual violence is with words.

Violence is a terrible problem-solving solution. It invariably creates far more problems than it’s advocates claims it solves, as it’s contingent upon fear, intimidation. Those who use violence don’t want to solve problems, they want to assert dominance in such an overwhelming way that the victim stops strenuously resisting, and this is certainly an available option to those willing to use violence.

The antidote to violence is an attitude of mutuality and co-creation, mixed with an acceptance of healthy, non-abusive anger.

The way I resist violence now is to attend more to the victims. It’s to grow the awareness, skills, capacity, and strength of those who are being victimized by those willing to use violence, or who those who use complacency, privilege, and unawareness allow bad things to keep happening.

So, if you read the books mentioned above, you’ll possibly join me on the outside of evangelicalism.

Despite what your parents may have told you, there’s a lot of fun to be had out here, and freedom. Dramatically less shame. Sometimes laughter. Space held for grief and sadness and mourning. Things don’t need to be so serious all the time. We have potlucks, home-cooked meals, mutuality, and co-creation, and a lot less shame and repressed sadness.

When someone is sad, we hold space for them. When they’re stuck, we help un-stick them. When someone has a sense of malaise, we malaise with them. We don’t arbitrarily denigrate whole groups of people.¹⁷

OK, so we’re gonna go another layer deeper. Here’s why:

It would be one thing to throw your hands up, say “yep, ‘the church’ is effed, not gonna touch it with a ten-foot pole”, and walk away and never come back.

Nothing wrong with that.

It’s like walking away from white supremacy. You don’t need to prove to the white supremacists, as they cling to their white supremacy, that they’re wrong. It’s sorta de-dignifying to debate them from their own ‘frame’, because the frame makes so many assumptions that it cannot really be wrestled with fairly. They’ll “no true scottsman” you to death. ¹⁸

Undoubtedly you’re better off, leaving this whole pile of crock behind, and nothing meaningful is lost. It’s walking away from a cult, or no longer speaking the language of geocentrism. All you ‘lose’ is a mental model that causes the world to make less sense, or getting mysteriously lost when navigating by the stars.

You can change your thinking and leave an intellectually bankrupt idea behind, and having nothing but improvement, and there’s no need to engage intellectually with those you leave.

unless, of course, you think you might be able to get more of them to leave with you.

Full list of recommended readings

Here’s some books, and some academic essays, if you read them, you might feel like you’ve gotten your life and your soul back.

Misc reading

https://josh.works/quotes-from-complex-ptsd#chapter-5-what-if-i-was-never-hit

Footnotes

for instance, I now identify all talk of ‘punishment’ as a dogwhistle of abuse. Mutuals do not arbitrarily assault each other. After writing this piece about evangelicalism, I did a separate piece about ‘spanking’, or as I call it, ‘adults assaulting kids and blaming the kids for it’. ↩
Some readers will understandably protest this ‘discard’ I’m advocating for. Throwing away “the puritans” and the satisfaction view of atonement? Yes, that’s what I’m advocating for, and the burden of proof is on you for why something so odious as a theological justification for nobility, or a theological justification for domination and violence, shouldn’t be discarded. ↩
I’m willing to do to evangelicals what they so willingly (and annoyingly) do to others. I’m sorta… evangelizing them.

But the best/worst thing about me is I’m so screamingly stupid I can only take baby steps from one spot to another, and I like to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind me.

I can start at one spot and end up at a starkly different spot that is very surprising to someone else. something that I like about myself is that nothing I’ve ever done is difficult or undoable by someone else. Everything/anything I’ve done is easy and simple, given certain contexts and environments. ↩
Some of you might find yourself with something like a hole in the bottom of your heart, a pervasive sense of emptiness, alienation from others and yourself, purposelessness, and a sense of feeling deeply, desperately alone, or desperately unfit for relationships with others, especially in situations where you feel like you shouldn’t feel alone, like when you’re with family.

Listen to yourself, attend to your inner state. It is full of rich and valuable signal. The message of toxic family dynamics is one of numbness and self-abandonment and dissociation from the inner world. It is soul-murderous to exist in such a noxious environment. ↩
To borrow from James C. Scott’s Against the Grain, I sorta chose heresy, which is the religious version of calling someone a barbarian, or uncivilized, from at least one point of view. I vastly prefer this version of myself than who I was several years ago. ↩
Since we’re throwing out the ‘satisfaction atonement’ and ‘christendom’, it’s reasonable to ask “what else is there?”. The answer is ‘narrative christus victor’ and ‘being rightly aligned to others by faithfully embodying Jesus’ specific social ethic.’ Read the books I recommend below for a fuller understanding, specifically The Politics of Jesus and The Non-Violent Atonement ↩
shun (definition): persistently avoid, ignore, or reject (someone or something) through antipathy or caution. Where shunning exists, it’s a form of punishment that a group can apply to individuals. I was naïve and well-intentioned, earlier on in my “journey” out of evangelicalism, and kept expecting other evangelicals to engage seriously with me, and got met with shunning. “Don’t say that!” “Don’t think that!” “You can’t be serious!” “You might be right, but I don’t think others will want to hear about it.” “Does that really matter?”

My views on shunning had been shifting for a while, particularly after reading Legal Systems Very Different than Ours, and especially after reading Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair.

Shunning is a response that is no longer acceptable to me.

I now view shunning as the violence and assertion of dominance that it is. My family, my ex-wife’s family, and many from evangelical traditions have shunned me, and that I was collectively shunned from “my” religious tradition (and, critically, from no one else) was ultimately what inspired this polemic. I would have loved to discuss this all privately, rather than dragging it into the public realm. Alas. ↩
Possibly, depending on who you talk to, I either cut them off, or they shunned me. A bit of both. I endorse Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty to Repair as a useful ethical framework for how a community might normally intervene in misdeeds among its members. I’ve been brought aggressive and demanding and probing questions. Some, I’ve asked to consider reading one or two books to better understand the dynamics at root, and they’ve declined. ↩
We’ll talk about the dynamics of “shunning behavior” as a way of asserting dominance of a group over individuals later, and I’ve also been in recent times screamingly depressed, physically injured, emotionally wounded, and have withdrawn, at times, from most of the world, so I have hidden.

So, between me not being proactive in relationships, and being in hiding from the overtures of others, the narrative around ‘where I’m at’ has been entertaining to watch it evolve. Remember - conflict is not abuse, and the overstatement of harm is a threat.

Josh, why are you hiding from the overtures of others?

Some have reached out with a message like ‘pull your head out of your ass and man up’, which, besides not really meaning anything, earned a quick ‘block this contact’ response. (If I’ve not spoken at all or openly to you in several years, I’m not going to dignify a condemning overture with a response.)

Enough of ‘my people’ verbally assaulted me when I was already in a pretty low place, so cutting off contact with most people of a certain ilk (broadly, evangelical, or emotionally immature) was safety-seeking behavior on my behalf. ↩
there is a book approximately titled ‘the slaughter of nanking’ that is too painful to even think of, I don’t even want to get the goodreads url or write the title. ↩
the book The Jakarta Method ought to be understood. The stories in that book is a story of the supremacy of that distinctly greater-united-states-flavored supremacy. This director and producer from Texas, Joshua Oppenheimer, has made several documentaries about the slaughters of one group by a few others. [I wrote the entire following two sentences in all caps with exclamation marks then toned it down]

He interviews the people who did it, who talk openly and joyfully about it. I have never seen anything like this before. Specifically The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. I watched them in the order they were created. ↩
I’m anarchist, have been for a while, but that’s neither here nor there. Just don’t read The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey, even if it’s just to appreciate the author’s simple writing style, and how he’s nearly apologetic as he gently destroys argument after argument for state-sponsored violence. I’m not the ‘moltov cocktail’ anarchist, I’m simply opposed to trying to put the lipstick of legitimacy upon the pig of state-sponsored violence. I’m a consentualist, not more, not less. Hilariously, it’s guaranteed that almost anyone reading these words is, practically, an anarchist in most of their ‘normal’ relationships. (I could also be considered a ‘consentualist’, or ‘a anti-state-sponsored-violence-ist’) ↩
I now view ‘whiteness’ as a stand-in for ‘culturally alienated from any meaningful roots’. Whiteness tends to look like a mix of consumption, colonialism, imperialism, emotional numbness, and cultural vacuousness. Or at least, even if some white people don’t explicitly embody those values, they are comfortable in ecosystems hospitable to those values. I don’t find ‘race’ to be a useful construct, and am suspicious of those who do. That said, I am a privileged white-passing male from America, and would have to be stupid to pretend that this doesn’t drag behind it a lot of potential power. It’s been fun to see what this power gains me access to. If you call me ‘white’, I’ll correct you and say something like “I reject the label, but I forgive you for thinking it. I’m ‘White-passing’.” edit from the future: I’ve never liked the concept of ‘whiteness’ in a bunch of ways. After reading [the origins of pro-slavery christianity] I see it as how supremacists create a group to then act entitled to dominating. Or ‘the concept of race as one of the key pieces of supremacy thinking, and calling something ‘white’ is tacitly supportive of that piece of supremacy thinking’. To avoid using ‘white’, I now mentally/verbally substitute ‘european-american immigrant nobility/chivalry ethics & norms’ or ‘physical/intellectual/emotional descendants of european american immigrants’ instead of ‘white’. ↩
I sometimes over-intellectualize things. It’s a trauma response. I seek safety in books, intellectual frameworks, improved conceptual compressions of the world. I often do gain incremental improvements in safety and peace, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. There’s a right amount of book reading, and an excessive amount of book reading. I don’t know where I am within this, but I’ve read dramatically fewer books-per-year lately than I used to. ↩
The best/worst thing about being ‘hyper literate’, and having used reading as a dissociative activity much of my life is a stack of books one or two feet tall doesn’t intimidate me in the slightest, as long as they’re all in english. If I find a topic I want to learn about, I will read, a lot, many different sources. I struggle to respect people who choose to not read books on topics they claim are important to them. ↩
I de-identified with a belief in political authority, along the way. I think using force to prevent more presently-happening violence from continuing to happen in the future seems fine. But reaching for violence as a problem solving solution is disappointing to me. an acceptable alternative to violence: ‘has everyone involved had a good meal recently? what about last week? next week? is it reliable? okay, lets fix that first, and then move on from there. If that ‘feed someone(s) reliably’ thing is/seems to be/needs to be unsolvable, perhaps nothing more complex should be undertaken until it no longer needs to be/seems to be/is unsolvable. I wish there was some sort of tradition that before physical violence could occur, both parties (or the initiator of the violence) had to personally fill up a crock pot or instant pot worth of soup, to be evaluated by other parties, including the party with which the conflict is happening with. Only then can the violence occur. ↩
sigh. My weakness in this regard is to denigrate evangelicals, white supremacists, and imperialists/colonialists, and yes, I know that hurt people hurt people. It’s been a year or so since I’ve exited the world I was raised in for three decades. Working on it. ↩
a refusal to leave a certain frame and try on a different one is a tactic of abuse, or at least emotional immaturity. It’s a blatant refusal to try on a theory of mind of someone else. Of course white supremacists are right, if you play by their rules, because their starting assumption of the world is that ‘the white race’ is superior, and non-white races are inferior. If they say “prove to me that non-white people are not inferior”, it’s embarrassing and self-abandoning to even treat that statement with seriousness.

More on frame control: https://knowingless.com/2021/11/27/frame-control/ ↩

Quotes from 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving', by Pete Walker

2022-08-11T13:00:00+00:00

I’ve found Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving to be deeply helpful.

Some of you, many of you, have blessed me and cared for me in kind ways, sometimes with very little knowledge of what was going on, or why I was the way that I was. Thank you. I’ve been invited into homes and hearts, and write these words from a place in Seattle that has come to represent respite, friendship, and brotherhood. No one is an island, and any time I have been able to lean into good-enough friendships¹, I feel viscerally restored and repaired, as Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language understands repair to exist.

I chanced across this book in a very serendipitous way. A dear friend happened to have just gotten it from Amazon, hadn’t even read it yet, but had it on hand, so I did what I often do, especially with books with such an interesting title. (I’d never heard the combination of phrases ‘complex’ and ‘ptsd’)

I flipped open the index, skimmed it, and started paging around the whole book².

Anyway, the section that first jumped out at me was chapter 5. I read it ravenously, threads connecting in my head at a quite rapid clip.³

I will re-print chapter 5 below. I eventually quickly skimmed around other portions of the book, under the hearty endorsement of the author, hop-scotching around a well-organized and well-internally-linked book. I use my phone to take photos of pages, and fairly easily turn those pictures into text that I can quote below. These words have brought me tremendous relief and peace and help.

The purpose of printing these words below is to possibly prick your own curiosity, in the same way mine was. I had ordered a copy of this book for myself within an hour, and have now read the book, and listened to the audiobook.

Enjoy these long quotes, from Pete Walker himself:

Chapter 5: What if I was Never Hit?

Physical and sexual abuse are the most obvious traumas that a child can experience, especially when they are ongoing. However, much that is also traumatic goes unnoticed in Cptsd-engendering families. This often occurs because parental acts of physical abuse are more blatant than acts of verbal and emotional abuse and neglect. It appears to me that just as many children acquire Cptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.

Denial about the traumatic effects of childhood abandonment can seriously hamper your ability to recover. In childhood, ongoing emotional neglect typically creates overwhelming feelings of fear, shame and emptiness. As an adult survivor, you may continuously flashback into this abandonment mélange. Recovering depends on realizing that fear, shame and depression are the lingering effects of a loveless childhood. Without such understanding, your crucial, unmet needs for comforting human connection can strand you in a great deal of unnecessary suffering.

Denial and Minimization

Confronting denial is no small task. Children so need to believe that their parents love and care for them, that they will deny and minimize away evidence of the most egregious neglect and abuse.

De-minimization is a crucial aspect of confronting denial. It is the process by which a person deconstructs the defense of “making light” of his childhood trauma. The lifelong process of de-minimizing the impact of childhood trauma is like peeling a very slippery and caustic onion. The outer layer for some is the stark physical evidence of abuse, e.g., sexual abuse or excessive corporal punishment. Subsequent layers involve verbal, spiritual and emotional abuse. Core layers have to do with verbal, spiritual and emotional neglect.

In a perversely ironic way, my parents’ physical abuse of me was a blessing, for it was so blatant that my attempts to suppress, rationalize, make light of and laugh it off lost their power in adolescence, and I was able to see my father for the bully that he was. [Seeing my idealized mother’s abusiveness came much later].

Identifying my father’s behavior as abusive eventually helped me become aware of less blatant aspects of my parents’ oppression, and I subsequently discovered the verbal and emotional abuse layer of the onion of my childhood abandonment.

Verbal and Emotional Abuse

The fact that verbal and emotional abuse can be traumatic is lost on many childhood trauma victims, though it is rarely lost on recovering victims of cult brainwashing.

Many survivors of verbal and emotional abuse never learn to validate its soul-damaging effects. They never accurately assign current time suffering to it. Attempts to acknowledge it are typically blindsided with thoughts that it was nothing compared to kids who were repeatedly beaten - who “had it so much worse.” As a child, I minimized my father’s frequent face-slapping by comparing who were it to my friend’s father who used to punch him.

Much later, however, I finally realized that for me, and many of my clients, verbal and emotional abuse damaged us much more than our physical abuse.⁴

Ongoing assault with critical words systematically destroys our self-esteem and replaces it with a toxic inner critic that incessantly judges us as defective. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt infuse the child with fear and toxic shame. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention. Before long, he learns to refrain from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.

Theoretical Neurobiology of the Critic

Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain.

Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who eventually repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of thick neural pathways of self hate and self-disgust. Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing. The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes the equivalent of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated.

With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity. The inner critic’s negative perspective creates many programs of self-rejecting perfectionism. At the same time, it obsesses about danger and catastrophizes incessantly. Chapters 9 and 10 expand on shrinking and deconstructing these life-ruining programs. Until this is accomplished, the survivor typically lives in varying degrees of emotional flashback much of the time.

The verbal and emotional layer of the abuse onion has sub-layers of minimization. I have heard clients jokingly repeat numerous versions of this over and over: “I know I’m hard on myself, but if I don’t constantly kick my own ass, I’ll be more of a loser than I already am. In fact, I really need you to come down on me if I try to get away with anything!” A childhood rife with verbal and emotional abuse forces the child to so thoroughly identify with the critic, that it is as if the critic is his whole identity.

Disidentification from the critic is the fight of a lifetime. To liberate your identity from the toxic critic, you will have to repetitively confront it for a long time. You will have greater success if you are prepared to forgive yourself for repeatedly collapsing back into the old habit of self-blame. Progress is always a gradual back and forth process. Ironically, a pernicious type of self-hate can constellate around the self-judgment that one is especially defective because she cannot simply banish the critic. This is the typical toxic, all-or none thinking of the critic.

Sadly, many survivors give up on fighting the critic before recognizing the myriad subtle ways it tortures them. Yet, there is no more noble recovery battle than that which gradually frees the psyche from critic dominance. Until this happens to a significant degree, there is minimal development of the healthy, user-friendly ego. Let us look now at how emotional neglect alone can create a psyche-dominating critic.

Emotional Neglect: The Core Wound in Complex PTSD

Minimization about the damage caused by extensive emotional neglect is at the core of the Cptsd denial onion. Our journey of recovery takes a quantum leap when we really feel and understand how devastating it was to be emotionally abandoned. An absence of parental loving interest and engagement, especially in the first few years, creates an overwhelming emptiness. Life feels harrowingly frightening to the infant or toddler who is left for long periods without comfort and care. Children are helpless and powerless for a long time, and when they sense that no one has their back, they feel scared, miserable and disheartened. Much of the constant anxiety that adult survivors live in is this still aching fear that comes from having been so frighteningly abandoned.

Many survivors never discover and work through the wounds that correlate with this level. This happens because they over assign their suffering to overt abuse and never get to the core issue of their emotional abandonment. As stated above, this is especially likely to occur with survivors who dismissively compare their trauma to those who were abused more noticeably and more dramatically. I find this painfully ironic because some people suffer significant active abuse without developing Cptsd. Typically, they are “spared” because there is one caretaker who does not emotionally neglect them.⁵

Traumatic emotional neglect occurs when a child does not have a single caretaker to whom she can turn in times of need or danger. Cptsd then sets in to the degree that there is no alternative adult [relative, older sibling, neighbor, or teacher] to turn to for comfort and protection. This is especially true when the abandonment occurs 24/7, 365 days a year for the first few years.

Growing up emotionally neglected is like nearly dying of thirst outside the fenced off fountain of a parent’s warmth and interest. Emotional neglect makes children feel worthless, unlovable and excruciatingly empty. It leaves them with a hunger that deeply at the center of their being. They starve for human and comfort.

The Failure to Thrive Syndrome

When a child is continuously deprived of a nurturing caretaker, love-starvation steadily increases and sometimes devolves into the Failure to Thrive Syndrome.

Failure to thrive is a term coined in the mid twentieth century to describe the epidemic of baby deaths that occurred when new germ phobic practices were introduced into hospitals. The new standard was that nurses were prohibited from holding babies for fear of contaminating them. Infant mortality immediately began to climb.

Modern medical practice has abandoned this heartless approach because of the Failure to thrive research. This research has since been corroborated by data from Eastern European orphanages where there are insufficient staff to meet the contact-comfort needs of babies. Modern medicine now accepts as scientific fact the principle that babies need a great deal of physical touch and nurturing in order to thrive.

In my experience, failure to thrive is not an all-or-none phenomenon, but rather a continuum that stretches from the abandonment depression to death. Many Cptsd survivors never thrived as babies. I believe that many suffered painful bouts of lingering the end of the continuum that feels death-like. Several of my clients commonly have quipped that they “feel like death warmed over” when they are in a flashback.

Moreover, I suspect that some traumatized children do die from their abandonment. Perhaps, their immune systems weaken and make them more susceptible to diseases. Perhaps, as David Kalshed hints, they unconsciously gravitate toward lethal “accidents” to terminate their misery.

One of my clients reported this painful memory when we were processing a flashback that she was trapped in. She was ten, in a daze, and walked out between two parked cars into traffic. She was hit by a truck and it took months of hospitalization to save her leg. Her most tearful re-experiencing of this event was remembering how she woke up in the hospital and felt tremendous disappointment that she was still alive.

Emotional Hunger and Addiction

The emotional hunger that comes from parental abandonment often morphs over time into an insatiable appetite for substances and/ or addictive processes. Minimization of early abandonment often transforms later in life into the minimizing that some survivors use to rationalize their substance and process addictions. Fortunately, many survivors eventually come to see their substance or process addictions as problematic. But many also minimize the deleterious effects of their addiction and jokingly dismiss their need to end or reduce their reliance on them.

When the survivor has no understanding of the effects of trauma or no memory of being traumatized, addictions are often understandable, misplaced attempts to regulate painful emotional flashbacks. However many survivors are now in a position to see how self-destructive their addictions are. They are now old enough to learn healthier ways of self-soothing

Accordingly, substance and process addictions can be seen as misguided attempts to distract from inner pain. The desire to reduce such habits can therefore be used as motivation to learn the more sophisticated forms of self-soothing that Cptsd recovery work has to offer.

As we will see in chapter 11, grieving work offers us irreplaceable tools for working through inner pain. This then helps obviate the need to harmfully distract ourselves from our pain.

The Evolutionary Basis of Attachment Needs

The human brain evolved during the Hunter-Gatherer era that represents 99.8% of our time on this planet. For a child, safety from predators during these times depended on being in very close proximity to an adult. Even the briefest loss of contact with a parental figure could trigger panicky feelings as beasts of prey only needed seconds to snatch away an unprotected child.

Fear hard-wired in the child as a healthy response to separation from a protective adult. Fear also linked automatically with the fight response so that the infant and toddler would automatically cry angrily for attention, help, and cessation of abandonment.

Cptsd-inducing families however loathe angry crying, and many can find professionals to back them up for routinely leaving babies and very young children to “cry it out” on their own.

In most dysfunctional families, parents disdain children for needing any kind of help or attention at all. Moreover, even the most well-intentioned parent can seriously neglect their children by subscribing to the egregious 20th century “wisdom” that “Kids need quality time - quantity does not matter.”

When children experience long periods of being powerless to obtain needed connection with a parent, they become increasingly anxious, upset and depressed. In Cptsd-engendering families, the absence of care and concern is extreme. A caretaker is rarely or never available for support, comfort or protection.

If this is what you suffered, you then grew up feeling that no one likes you. No one ever listened to you or seemed to want you. No one had empathy for you, showed you warmth, or invited closeness. No one cared about what you thought, felt, did, wanted of dreamed of. You learned early that, no matter how hurt, alienated, or terrified you were, turning to a parent would do nothing than exacerbate your experience of rejection.

When caretakers turn their backs on a child’s need for help and support, her inner world becomes an increasingly nightmarish amalgam of fear, shame and depression. The child who is abandoned in this way experiences the world as a terrifying place.

Over time the child’s dominant experience of herself is so replete with emotional pain and so unmanageable that that she has to dissociate, self-medicate, act out [aggression against others] or act in [aggression against the self] to distract from it.

The situation of the abandoned child further deteriorates as an extended absence of warmth and protection gives rise to the cancerous growth of the inner critic as described above. The child projects his hope for being accepted onto self-perfection. By the time the child is becoming self-reflective, cognitions start to arise that sound like this: “I’m so despicable, worthless, unlovable, and ugly; maybe my parents would love me if I could make myself like those perfect kids I see on TV.”

In this way, the child becomes hyperaware of imperfections and strives to become flawless. Eventually she roots out the ultimate flaw - the mortal sin of wanting or asking for her parents’ time or energy. Intrinsic to this process is noticing - more and more hyper vigilantly - how her parents turn their back or become angry or disgusted whenever she needs anything, whether it be attention, listening, interest, or affection.

Emotional neglect, alone, causes children to abandon them selves, and to give up on the formation of a self. They do so to preserve an illusion of connection with the parent and to protect themselves from the danger of losing that tenuous connection. This typically requires a great deal of self-abdication, e.g., the forfeiture of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-care, self-interest, and self-protection.

Moreover, endangerment programs proliferate in the critic as the child learns that he cannot ask his parent to protect him from dangers and injustices in the outside world, never mind in the home.

His only recourse is to become hypervigilant about things that can go wrong. His critic compiles lists of possible calamities, especially those that are graphically portrayed in the media.

The media gives the critic of the abandoned child much fodder to play with. She may be exposed daily to hours of that glorify sarcasm, backbiting and bullying. Moreover news programs, with a ninety percent content of bad news, fill her head with impressions that the world is predominantly hostile and dangerous, Even worse, emotionally neglectful parents commonly abandon their children to their favorite babysitter - the TV. ⁶

Through such neglect the child’s consciousness eventually becomes overwhelmed with the processes of drasticizing and catastrophizing. Drasticizing and catastrophizing are critic processes that lead the child to constantly rehearse fearful scenarios in a vain attempt to prepare himself for the worst. This is the process by which Cptsd with its overdeveloped stress and toxic shame programs sets in and becomes triggerable by a plethora of normally innocuous stimuli.

Most notable of these stimuli are other people, especially unknown people or people even vaguely reminiscent of the parents. Over time, the critic comes to assume that all other people are dangerous and automatically triggers the fight, flight, freeze or fawn response whenever a stranger or unproven other comes into view.⁷

Unfortunately, there’s a difference of opinion. The onus has been on me to prove that anyone can be safe, repeatedly, daily, and I cannot. Firstly, it’s not true, but secondly, acting like everyone is dangerous makes your world more dangerous, so the ‘perception’ is, in fact, a reality that cannot be unwillingly experientially altered. in good ways and bad, we can ‘get what we give’, for many very basic and reasonable reasons. (example: smiling is a public statement of peace. Sneering is a public statement of contempt. If you habitually chose one over the other, your lived experience will differ than if you choose the other.)

This people-are-dangerous process typically devolves into the social anxiety that is frequently a symptom of Cptsd. In worst case scenarios it manifests as social phobia and agoraphobia. In my opinion, agoraphobia is rarely the fear of open spaces. It is instead a disguised form of social phobia. It is the fear of going out lest you run into someone or anyone.

Abandonment Stultifies Emotional and Relational Intelligence

As stated above, emotionally abandoned children often devolve into experiencing all people as dangerous, no matter how benign or generous they may in fact be. Even love, coming their way, reverberates threateningly on a subliminal level. Unconsciously, they fear that if they momentarily “trick” someone into liking them, the forbidden prize will vanish once their social perfectionism inevitably fails and exposes their unworthiness. Moreover, when this occurs, they will be triggered even more deeply into the abandonment mélange.

Emotional intelligence and its cohort, relational intelligence, are forced into developmental arrest by abandoning parents. Children never learn that a relationship with a healthy person can be com forting and enriching. The ability to open to and benefit from love and caring from others often lays dormant and undeveloped.

Moreover, the appropriate management of the normal emotions that recurrently arise in significant relationships is never modeled for them. Emotional intelligence about the healthy and functional aspects of anger, sadness, and fear lies fallow.

De-Minimizing Emotional Abandonment

As with physical abuse, effective work on the wounds of verbal and emotional abuse can sometimes open the door to de-minimizing the awful impact of emotional neglect. I sometimes feel the most for my clients who were “only” neglected, because it is so difficult to see neglect as hard core evidence. Most people remember little before they were four years old. And by that time, much of this kind of damage is done. It typically takes some very deep introspective work, to realize that current time flashback pain is a re-creation of how bad it felt to be emotionally abandoned.

The remembering and de-minimizing of the impact of emotional neglect can take a long time. It is typically an intuitive piecing together of a lot of clues. The puzzle is often solved when a critical mass of childhood reconstruction is reached. Sometimes this fosters an epiphany that neglect is indeed at the core of present time suffering. Sometimes this epiphany brings a great relieving certainty that fragile self-esteem, frequent flashbacks, and recurring reenactments of unsupportive relationships were caused by the closed hearts of your parents.

I sometimes regret that I did not know what I now know about this kind of neglect when I wrote my first book. I wish I had not over-focused on the role of abuse in my childhood trauma. It is so hard to convey this to a client whose critic minimizes and shames them for their plight by comparing them unfavorably to me: “I didn’t have it anywhere near as bad as you. My mother never hit me!”

How ironic that this typically invokes a feeling-sense in me that the worst thing that happened to me, by far, was growing up so emotionally abandoned. In fact, it was not until I learned to assign the pain of numerous current time emotional flashbacks to the abject loneliness of my childhood, that I was able to work effectively on the repetition compulsion that lead me into so many neglectful relationships. And once again this is not to deny or minimize the C-ptsd inducing traumatization that does come from each and every type of abuse; physical, sexual, verbal and emotional.

Practicing Vulnerability

Emotional abandonment is healed by the type of real intimacy that we have been discussing. And once again real intimacy depends on us showing up in times of vulnerability. Deep-level recovering occurs when we successfully connect with a safe-enough other during the flashbacked-times of feeling trapped in the fear, shame and depression of the abandonment mélange.

In this vein, I had to painstakingly practice showing up in my pain for years. At first I could only do this infrequently. I was too habituated to my childhood default positions of hiding or camouflaging with substances whenever I was in the grip of the abandonment mélange. Yet I drew strength to increase my practice from a growing distaste for the social perfectionism of my people-pleasing codependence. I somehow knew my loneliness would never decrease unless I took the risk to see if certain well chosen others would accept me in all aspects of my experience, not just the shiny ones.

And of course, like most survivors, I was ignorant at first that I was even experiencing the emotional pain of the abandonment mélange. How could I help but conceal it?

Moreover, even after considerable de-minimization of my child hood abuse/neglect picture, I was still convinced that everyone but my therapist would find me abhorrent if I shared about my flashback feelings. Furthermore, my trust of my therapist also wavered quite a bit at first, especially during my deepest flashbacks.

Gratefully, sufficient positive experiences with my therapist eventually emboldened me to bring my authentic vulnerability to other select and gradually proven relationships, where I found the acceptance, safety and support that, previously, I would not have known to wish for.

There are limitations of the analogy of the onion. Later recovery does typically involve working at various levels at the same time. De-minimization is a lifetime process. Revisiting a central issue of our abandonment picture sometimes impacts us even more deeply than it did at first.

One such occasion left me reeling with the certain knowledge that getting hit felt preferable to being abandoned for long hours outside my depressed mother’s locked bedroom door. I would pound on the door even though I knew she would explode because I just could not bear the isolation. I have known about the latter for quite some time now and yet writing about it brings up some new bitter-sweet tears.

Bitter-sweet tears are not uncommon in the ongoing work of peeling the layers of the denial onion. The tears are bitter because we realize the abandonment was even more devastating than we previously realized. And then the tears are sweet because they validate the truth of the recollection and put the blame where it truly belongs. And then they may be bitter again because the horrible abandonments happened over and over again when we were so young and legitimately needed so much help. And then they can turn sweet again, as in tears of gratitude, because a person often comes through this kind of depth work with an enhanced compassion for what she suffered and a healthy pride about having survived.

In my latest experience of this type of grieving my sweet tears came from realizing that I do regularly experience good enough love and safety in relationship. And then my tears were bitter again because I can still emotionally flashback to that bereft state of feeling stranded from the comfort of others, even occasionally from my wife and son. And then my tears were sweet again because my flashbacks are so much easier to handle these days, especially as I increasingly master the use of the tools I describe in chapter 8.

The Power of Narrative

There is also growing evidence that recovery from Complex PTSD is reflected in the narrative a person tells about her life.⁸

The degree of recovery matches the degree to which a survivor’s story is complete, coherent, and emotionally congruent and told from a self sympathetic perspective.

In my experience, deep level recovery is often reflected in a narrative that highlights the role of emotional neglect in describing what one has suffered and what one continues to deal with.

My client, Matt, peeled a large layer off his onion of denial and minimization two days before Mother’s Day. He came into his session in a terrible flashback. “Life sucks and I suck even more. I couldn’t even do something as simple as pick out a Mother’s Day card.”

Fortunately, Matt had achieved a great deal of de-minimization since the previous Mother’s Day when he thought his mother was a good mother because she had never hit him. Now however, he was heavily triggered by spending an hour in a card shop unable to find a card that he could send to his mother. As we explored this further, we discovered that the sentiments written in every card made him feel like he would be betraying his inner child if he sent it.

“I tell you, Pete, not one of those cards describes something that I could be grateful for. I don’t have one memory of anything nice she ever said or did for me!” Before long, he was deep into grieving about how little mothering he had received from his mother.

He cried and angered about the scornful look and the sarcastic tone of voice that so characterized his interactions with her. “Why did I have to get such a bad deal from the mothering deck?!”

Towards the end of the session, as often happens with healthy grieving, he felt his flashback resolve and was restored to feeling like he was once again on his own side. The relief of being out of the flashback also allowed his healthy sense of humor to return.

He started riffing: “I’m going to start a greeting card business for people like me. I’m going to make a line of cards for people with dysfunctional mothers. How about this? Thanks Mom for never knowing what grade I was in’; or “Thanks Mom for all the memories of you walking away whenever I was hurting’; or “Thanks Mom for teaching me how to only notice what was wrong me’; or “Thanks Mom for teaching me how to frown at myself in self-disgust.””

Understanding how profoundly derelict your parents were in their duty to nurture and protect you is a master key to your recovery. You will benefit greatly from seeing emotional flashbacks as direct messages from your child-self about how much your parents rejected you. When denial is significantly deconstructed, you will typically feel genuine compassion for the child that you were. This self-compassion assuages emotional neglect by providing you with the missed childhood experience of receiving empathy in painful emotional states instead of contempt or abandonment. This, then, helps you to reverse the childhood-survival habit of automatic self abandonment. In turn, this can further motivate you to identify and address the many ways you were abused and/or neglected. Chapter 8 of my book, The Tao of Fully Feeling, provides detailed guidelines for assessing and remediating your abuse/neglect picture.

Finally, it is an empowering accomplishment to really get the profound significance of childhood emotional neglect. It is often flashback-resolving to realize in the moment that a flashback into bewilderment and hopelessness is an emotional reliving of your childhood trauma. Like nothing else, this can generate a self-protective impulse toward your child-self and your present-time self, kick-starting the process of resolving any given flashback.

Interlude from Josh

So, I skimmed the above chapter. That’s all of chapter 5. I found lots of interesting ideas. It was more than enough to justify skipping around to a few other sections, which I did. I don’t remember the exact order I moved, but here’s a bit of a skatter-shot smattering of portions of the book that have been interesting to me. Again, I’d encourage you to simply pick up your own copy: Amazon, Audible

Chapter 1 The Journey of Recovering from CPTSD

[…]

What You may have been Misdiagnosed with

I once heard renowned traumatologist, John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet. In other words, the role of traumatized child hoods in most adult psychological disorders is enormous.

I have witnessed many clients with Cptsd misdiagnosed with various anxiety and depressive disorders. Moreover, many are also unfairly and inaccurately labeled with bipolar, narcissistic, codependent, autistic spectrum and borderline disorders. [This is not to say that Cptsd does not sometimes co-occur with these disorders.]

Further confusion also arises in the case of ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder], as well as obsessive/compulsive disorder, both of which are sometimes more accurately described as fixated flight responses to trauma [see the 4F’s below]. This is also true of ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] and some depressive and dissociative disorders which similarly can more accurately be described as fixated freeze responses to trauma.

Furthermore, this is not to say that those so misdiagnosed do not have issues that are similar and correlative with the disorders above. The key point is that these labels are incomplete and unnecessarily shaming descriptions of what the survivor is actually afflicted with.

Reducing Cptsd to “panic disorder” is like calling food allergies chronically itchy eyes. Over-focusing treatment on the symptoms of panic in the former case and eye health in the latter does little to get at root causes. Feelings of panic or itchiness in the eyes can be masked with medication, but all the associated problems that cause these symptoms will remain untreated.

Moreover, most of the diagnoses mentioned above are typically treated as innate characterological defects rather than as learned maladaptations to stress - adaptations that survivors were forced to learn as traumatized children. And, most importantly, because these adaptations were learned, they can often be extinguished or significantly diminished, and replaced with more functional adaptations to stress.

In this vein, I believe that many substance and process addictions also begin as misguided, maladaptations to parental abuse and abandonment. They are early adaptations that are attempts to soothe and distract from the mental, emotional and physical pain of Cptsd.

Origins of Cptsd

How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it.

[Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult.]

Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment.

Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self esteem. Slaves and children who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Furthermore, Cptsd can also be caused by emotional neglect alone. This key theme is explored at length in chapter 5. If you notice that you are berating yourself because your trauma seems insignificant compared to others, please skip ahead to this chapter and resume reading here upon completion.

Emotional neglect also typically underlies most traumatizations that are more glaringly evident. Parents who routinely ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear, and the child eventually gives up and succumbs to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

These types of rejection simultaneously magnify the child’s fear, and eventually add a coating of shame to it. Over time this fear and shame begets a toxic inner critic that holds the child, and later the adult, totally responsible for his parents’ abandonment, until he becomes his own worst enemy and descends into the bowels of Cptsd.

More about Trauma

Trauma occurs when attack or abandonment triggers a fight/ flight response so intensely that the person cannot turn it off once the threat is over. He becomes stuck in an adrenalized state. His sympathetic nervous system is locked “on” and he cannot toggle into the relaxation function of the parasympathetic ner vous system.

One common instance of this occurs when a child is attacked and hurt by a bully after school. He may remain in a hypervigilant, fearful state until someone takes action to insure him that he will not be revictimized, and until someone helps him release the hyperactivation in his nervous system.

If the child has learned through experience that he can come to at least one of his parents when he is hurting, frightened or need ing help, he will tell mom or dad about it. With them, he will grieve the temporary death of his sense of safety in the world by verbally ventilating, crying and angering about it [chapter 11 expands these processes of grieving]. Moreover, his parent will report the bully and take steps to assure that it will not happen again, and the child will typically be released from the trauma. He will naturally relax back into the safety of parasympathetic nervous system functioning.

“Simple”, one incident traumas can often be resolved relatively easily if Cptsd is not already present.

If however the bullying happens on numerous occasions and the child does not seek help, or if the child lives in an environment so dangerous that the parent is powerless to ensure a modicum of safety, it may take more than parental comforting to release the trauma. If the trauma is not too continuous over too long a time, a short course of therapy may be all that is needed to resolve the trauma, provided of course the danger in the environment can effectively be remediated.

When the trauma however is repetitive and ongoing and no help is available, the child may become so frozen in trauma that the symptoms of “simple” ptsd begin to set in. This can also occur during the prolonged trauma of combat or entrapment in a cult or domestic violence situation.

If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully.

The Four F’s: Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn

Earlier, I mentioned the fight/flight response that is an innate automatic response to danger in all human beings. A more complete and accurate description of this instinct is the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response. The complex nervous system wiring of this response allows a person in danger to react in four different ways.

A fight response is triggered when a person suddenly responds aggressively to something threatening. A flight response is triggered when a person responds to a perceived threat by fleeing, or symbolically, by launching into hyperactivity. A freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt. A fawn response is triggered when a person responds to threat by try ing to be pleasing or helpful in order to appease and forestall an attacker. This fourfold response potential will heretofore be referred to as the 4Fs.

Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.

These structures help children survive their horrific childhoods, but leave them very limited and narrow in how they respond to life. Even worse, they remain locked in these patterns in adult hood when they no longer need to rely so heavily on one primary response pattern.

It is important to understand that variances in the childhood abuse/neglect patterns, birth order, and genetic predispositions result in people polarizing to their particular 4F type.

In the next section we will explore examples of how children are driven into these defenses by traumatizing parents. The four children in the vignette below match the four basic types of trauma survivors:

Bob = Fight - Narcissistic
Carol = Flight - Obsessive/Compulsive
Maude = Freeze - Dissociative
Sean = Fawn - Codependent

[…]

Footnotes

This is a bar of exceptional quality, despite how it might first read, and is explained in detail on chapter 13 of this book I’m talking about. The chapter is titled A Relational Approach to Healing Abandonment ↩
I’ve read How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, after all, and when I perceive a book to possibly have value to me, I interrogate the book for it’s secrets and value. I have a fairly specific process. (Index, skim beginning/end of first/last chapter, skip around a bit, dig into a single chapter, skim the chapter, then read beginning/end of chapter, then read the whole chapter in depth, skip around some more, etc.) ↩
I freely give in to curiosity and interestingness. Many others that I’ve spoken to about this book have intuitively grokked some of the learnings I’ve shared, and I wanted an easy-to-share-and-reference spot for more references for this book. ↩
As is common in certain slices of the American population, hitting one’s children for retributive vengeance of a perceived slight (“spanking”) was common in my house. I don’t remember ever being supportive of the institution, but only recently have I begun to label it as ‘simple’ physical abuse. ↩
in the book “The Verbally Abusive Relationship”, perhaps in an appendix, the author proposes an explanation for why similar mistreatment of two people might lead to one of them later engaging compulsively in emotionally abusive behaviors, and the other engaging in the world from a position of kindness, compassion, and care. The answer boils down to

The presence of a person who plays the role of witness; who reflects back to the mistreated person the message ‘this is mistreatment, what is being done to you is wrong, and you are right to feel deeply disturbed and upset, because it is deeply disturbing and upsetting.’ That “witness” is a kind-hearted third-party observer. Another parent, a sibling, adult friend, etc.

This phenomena and assessment tracks well to some key conversations I’ve had over the years. ↩
This combination of ‘celebration/modeling of toxic behavior’ and ‘overwhelming despair of the news on TV’ has been a threat to me and my family for a long time, I long ago (like, before I got married in 2012) intuited the danger, but couldn’t actually successfully defend against it and prevent great damage from being done. ↩
Kristi and I have repeatedly had conflict over her demonstrated perceived fear of strangers. I believe(d) that a generalized attitude of fear and/or contempt was so obviously contrary to the gospel and Jesus’s words and actions and wisdom that the onus to ‘fix ones approach’ was obviously on the person experiencing said contempt, though my gosh I was/am down to gameplan how to kindly, compassionately, and gently find experiences that allow the psyche to accept an alternative way of being. ↩
I believe so strongly in the theme of this section. A therapist who’s services I once retained, as I was reflecting before our first session on how to talk about “what brought me in”, and what I needed, dropped the ball in this way. I mentioned repeatedly that I was seeking “coherence in narrative” and needed help understanding “the story” of the last few years of my life, so I could tell myself a coherent narrative of what I’d experienced, what I was responsible for, proper responses to challenging situations, lessons learned, etc. (let alone be able to explain my life coherently to others). This never happened, I eventually lost trust too many times in the relationship, especially when I felt that I was being pushed into SSRIs in premature, inappropriate, de-dignifiying ways. ↩

Notes on, and quotes from: The Politics of Jesus (Yoder, 1972, 1994)

2022-07-24T13:00:00+00:00

As I’ve done many times before, compiling some notes about some long quotes from some books.

In the modern world, we’re loath to read long, complicated passeges of text. I hope to get some of you to eventually order your own copy of The Politics of Jesus. On my website you can find the full text of three of the 12 chapters, so it feels needless to say this book has affected me.

I had to do this transcription laboriusly, via optical character recognition apps on my phone, hand-fixing the errors. I undoubtedly missed some.

I’m not bringing over the footnotes from the book, at least not most of them. I find there to be lots of fascinating portions of this chapter - I want to share it around, to see if others feel nerd sniped. Chapter 11 sets up lots of context for chapter 12, the final chapter of the book.

I’ve copied down all of chapter 1 in Was Jesus’ behavior normative?, and shared context around it.

CHAPTER 11: Justification by Grace through Faith

I have followed up my reading of the story of Jesus with several sample soundings in the thought of the apostolic church. I have observed the prevalence of the language of discipleship, imitation, and participation, and seen how this characterized not only the motivation but also the shape of early Christian behavior. I have observed a parallel expression in the cosmology of the apostle where the “principalities and powers” language, which might be called “mythological,” nonetheless has a very precise and fruitful burden of meaning with regard to understanding the church’s faithfulness within the structured power relationships of society. I have observed that the willingness of the apostles (sometimes embarrassing for moderns) to live within the limits of a society marked by slavery and radical social stratification also has a meaningful foundation in their understanding of the work of Christ and the place of the church in the continuation of that work.

If the reader has followed thus far, it may not be too much to claim that what we have been observing are several significant strands of corroborative evidence for the survival of the social stance of Jesus into the church of the Apostolic Age. But, the critic may well say, this still leaves aside one fundamental observation. The apostle may well have retained within his thought the vestiges of the Jesus kind of ethos, after all, he did not claim to be uniquely pioneering on every subject. But was not his major original contribution to the life of the early church the position he took with regard to justification and the law? Is not the center of Pauline theology the argument, called forth by “Judaizers” and stated in different ways, especially in Romans and Galatians, that a person may be made righteous before God only on the grounds of faith, with no correlation to his keeping of the law?

Just as a guilty thief or murderer is still a thief or a murderer after a declaration of amnesty has freed him from his punishment, the argument runs, so a guilty sinner is still a sinner when God declares, on the ground of the work of Christ which no person could have accomplished for himself or herself, that he or she shall henceforth be considered a new person, forgiven and restored to fellowship. But this “being considered” is, spiritually speaking, a legal fiction. It is valid only on the grounds of the sovereign authority of the judge who declared it to be so. The act of justification or the status of being just or righteous before God is therefore radically disconnected from any objective or empirical achievement of goodness by the believer.

This “disconnection” is only a part of the wider phenomenon of separation between body and soul, objective and subjective realities, outward and inward history, which are the key, are they not, to all the specific emphases of the apostle Paul?

Was not the central message of the apostle Paul his rejection of any objective dimension to the work of God which could be focused in piety, religious practices, or ethical behavior in such a way as to turn the believer’s attention toward the human works instead of toward the gift of God? Does not the insistence that justification is by faith alone and through grace alone, apart from any correlation with works of any kind, undercut any radical ethical and social concern by implication, even if Paul himself might not have been rigorous enough to push that implication all the way? If we truly join with classic Protestantism in considering the proclamation of justification by grace through faith to be the point at which the gospel stands or falls, must we not then interpret the ethical tradition which Paul took over from Jewish Christianity and shared with his Gentile churches as a vestige of another system, destined to fade away? Was it not, after all, at the cost of forgetting Paul’s emphasis upon grace that a later generation again made good works and a certain social stance very important in the preaching of the church?

Paul and the Question of the Modern Reader

This sweeping set of assumptions about what the apostle Paul must certainly have meant when he spoke about the righteousness of God becoming effective in making people righteous was so self-evident for centuries of Protestant thought, and seemed so necessary as a corrective over against certain tendencies attributed to Catholic piety, that it scarcely could occur to anyone to think that it might be otherwise. It rhymed so well with the heritage of Augustine, and fit so neatly into Protestant preaching patterns, that there was no chink in the armor of self-evidence through which a doubt could insinuate itself.

Or so it seemed, at least, until the advent of the biblical scholarship of this century, which found more freedom to distinguish between the initial cultural context of a biblical passage on one hand and the contribution it makes to contemporary thought on the other.’ If we may be freed by self-critical scholarly objectivity no longer to have to assume that the authority of the Bible resides in its saying things that we agree with, we may be free as well to hear more clearly what it really says instead of giving it credit for saying what we already think.

Once the entering wedge of this capacity for critical self-awareness had made possible a freer and less apologetic reading of the ancient documents, it became possible to call into question the far-reaching assumption that the apostle Paul was preoccupied with personal self acceptance. It is understandable that Martin Luther could have found this preoccupation in the apostolic message since it was his own question. Luther had been taught by his monastic training to be personally in need of knowing that he had found a God who would be gracious personally to him. Thus it was perfectly natural for Luther to assume that this was also the preoccupation of the apostle. It was also perfectly natural for a John Wesley, a Kierkegaard, or today for an existentialist or a conservative evangelical reader to make the same assumption and find the same message for all of these are in their variegated ways children of Luther, still asking the same question of personal guilt and righteousness.

But let us set aside for purposes of discussion the assumption that the righteousness of God and the righteousness of humanity are most fundamentally located on the individual level. Let us make this, instead of an axiom, a hypothesis to be tested. Let us posit as at least thinkable the alternate hypothesis that for Paul righteousness, either in God or in human beings, might more appropriately be conceived of as having cosmic or social dimensions Such larger dimensions would not negate the personal character of the righteousness God imputes to those who believe; but by englobing the personal salvation in a fuller reality they would negate the individualism with which we understand such reconciliation.

Krister Stendahl set about to call this axiom into question in his article “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.” ‘¹

Stendahl demonstrates one by one that all the constitutive elements of the classic “Luther-type experience” are missing in both the experience and the thought of the apostle. Paul was not preoccupied with his guilt and seeking the assurance of a gracious God; he was rather robust of conscience and untroubled about whether God was gracious or not. He never pleads either with Jews or Gentiles to feel an anguished conscience and then receive release from that anguish in a message of forgiveness.

Second, Paul’s understanding of the meaning of Hebrew law as taught is not that its function was to make people know their guilt, to prepare listeners for the message of forgiveness by deepening their awareness of their sinfulness. The law was rather a gracious arrangement the arrival of the Messiah. It is true that, once present, law makes its made by God for ordering the life of his people while they were awaiting opposite, sin, more visible; but that is not its first purpose nor its primary effect for the believer.

Third, faith was for Paul not a particular spiritual exercise of moving from self-trust through despair to confidence in the paradoxical goodness of the judgment of God; faith is at its core the affirmation which separated Jewish Christians from other Jews, that in Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah had come. A Jew did not become a Christian by coming to see God as a righteous judge and a gracious, forgiving protector. The Jew believed that already, being a Jew. What it took for him or her, to become a Christian was not some new idea about his or her sinfulness or God’s righteousness, but one about Jesus. The subjective meanings of faith for the self-aware person, and its doctrinal meanings for the believing intellect, build upon this prior messianist affirmation. They cannot precede or replace it.

The heresy Paul was struggling against was not that the Jewish Christians continued to be committed to keeping the law; Paul was quite tolerant of those who held to such a conviction. He taught respect for their dietary scruples. He went out of his way to share their ritual faithfulness when in Jerusalem. Nor was it their thinking that by keeping the law they would be saved, for Jewish Christians did not believe that. The basic heresy he exposed was the failure of those Jewish Christians to recognize that since the Messiah had come the covenant of God had been broken open to include the Gentiles. In sum: the fundamental issue was that of the social form of the church. Was it to be a new and inexplicable kind of community of both Jews and Gentiles, or was it going to be a confederation of a Jewish Christian sect and a Gentile one? Or would all the Gentiles have first to become Jews according to the conditions of pre-messianic proselytism?

Stendahl exemplifies this difference with one of the classic texts, Galatians 3:24, which states that the law was a “custodian” to order the life of the Jewish community until the Messiah should come. The point of Paul’s explanation is that now that the Messiah has come, the Gentiles do not need to pass by way of the law, but can be incorporated directly into the new community. For Luther, on the other hand, “custodian” was interpreted as “schoolmaster,” as representing a necessary step which even now the Gentiles must go through. They do not need to be educated by way of the details of the Jewish legislation, but in order to be able to receive grace one must first be broken under the yoke of some kind of law. All must pass by the usus elenchticus, by the way of the judging impact of the righteousness of God.

What then was Paul’s understanding of sin? When he does speak of himself as a serious sinner at all, this is not because of his existential anguish under the righteousness of God in general, but very specifically because, not having recognized that Messiah had come in Jesus, he had persecuted the church and fought the opening of God’s covenant to the Gentiles. What is now set right in his life is not that he has overcome his inner resistances and has become able to trust in God for his right status before God; it is rather that through the inexplicable intervention of God on the Damascus Road and in later experiences, Paul has become the agent of the action of God for the right cause. He has become the privileged bearer of the cause of the ingathering of the Gentiles. This was perfectly clear not only to Paul but also to his readers.

What was at stake in the “proclamation of the righteousness of God to both Jew and Gentile” was precisely that it was to be proclaimed to both and that both were to become parts of the new believing community, some having come by way of the law and some not. It was only when in later generations the Jew-Gentile relationship was partly forgotten and partly distorted into a polemic one that the Pauline language of justification could be reinterpreted, especially in the heritage of Augustine, and translated into the terms of Western self-examination and concern for authenticity. Since this transformation stated the justifying purpose of God in terms translatable for and accessible to every individual, it could be considered somehow eternally or universally relevant, whereas the reconciling of Jew and Gentile can be understood and celebrated only particularly in the uniqueness of salvation history in given times and places.

Stendahl is quite tolerant. He does not reject outright the possible claim that the new “Western” meaning might be, by certain criteria which we might consider useful, more “valid” or more “relevant” than the original one. The further “development of doctrine” may in some way be a good thing. But he nevertheless closes with the suggestion that perhaps the meaning enshrined in the salvation-history concern of the early church as a social reality might also be relevant for modern Christians, in addition to doing more justice to the biblical documents and the thought which they report.

The New Person

The most presumptuous and the clearest statement of the particular apostolic ministry of Paul is stated in the letter to the Ephesians. Here the apostle makes claims to a knowledge and to a ministry that is not merely on the level of the other apostles but unique among the apostles. It is a particular grace which was given just to him to steward for the churches (Eph. 3:2), a “mystery” which was made known to him (3:3). “Mystery” is to be understood not as a spooky secret forever hidden from view, but rather as the strategic purpose of God, which was not widely known until the point of its execution.5

The “plan of the mystery” was hidden for ages in God, but now it is known and in fact it is being made known beyond the church by the church, proclaimed even to the “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (3:9-10).

Just what is this divine purpose, hidden for a time and made known by revelation to Paul? It is precisely that Jew and Gentile are now reconciled in one community.

At one time you Gentiles in the flesh alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenant of promise … were separated from Christ, …but now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law… that he might create in himself the one humanity instead of two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. (Eph. 2:11-26)

The hostility brought to an end in Christ is first and foremost in passage not the hostility between a righteous God and the creature who has trespassed against his rules, but the hostility between Jew and Greek. The overcoming of this hostility, the making of peace by eliminating the wall that had separated them, namely the Jewish law to which Jews were committed and which Gentiles ignored, is itself the creation of a new humanity. This is why the unique ministry of Paul as “prisoner for Jesus Christ on behalf of you Gentiles” (3:1) is insep arable from his own unique revealed insight into the “mystery” of God’s purpose. The work of Christ is not only that he saves the soul of individuals and henceforth they can love each other better; the work of Christ, the making of peace, the breaking down of the wall, is itself the constituting of a new community made up of two kinds of people, those who had lived under the law and those who had not. (emphasis mine) The events the book of Acts narrates as the recent initiative of the Holy Spirit in opening up the churches, first at Jerusalem and then in Samaria, then in Damascus and Antioch, to the fellowship of believing Jews and believing Gentiles, are here interpreted by Paul, a major actor in that drama and its accredited interpreter, as being the extended meaning of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.6

We have identified this message in the book of Ephesians, a relatively late document, where the word “justification” actually is not central, only in order to be able to perceive more readily its presence in the earlier writings where it is not equally developed. As elsewhere, we lean heavily upon a few contemporary scholars, testifying again to the fact that the thrust of the present book is not original except perhaps in the consistency with which it attempts to draw ethical conclusions from what more specialized scholars have already found.

The New Righteousness That Is Valid Before God

Markus Barth plunges right to the heart of the classic discussion in Galatians (2:14ff.).

We have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one shall be justified.

What does “justified” mean here? Can it really mean, as Protestant tradition assumes (Lutheranism most sweepingly, but the Anglican and Reformed liturgies give the same testimony), that it refers only to the quasi-judicial status of the sinner’s guilt before God, which is annulled or amnestied by a declaration of the judge in response to the act of faith?

Through very careful analysis of this classic passage, clarifies that the particular issue at stake, carried on unbroken from the earlier part Markus Barth of chapter 2, was whether Jewish and Gentile Christians were to live together acceptingly in one fellowship. To be “justified” is to be set right in and for that relationship. “Justification” is, in other words, in the language of Galatians the same as “making peace” or “breaking down the wall” in the language of Ephesians.

Sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the means of justification: only in Christ’s death and resurrection is the new man created from at least two, a Jew and a Greek, a man and a woman, a slave and a free man, etc…. The new man is present i actuality where two previously alien and hostile men come t before God. Justification in Christ is thus not an individual miracle happening to this person or that person, which each may seek or possess for himself. Rather justification by grace is a joining together of this person and that person, of the near and far; … it is a social event.

Barth has thus confirmed, beginning his analysis from another direction and dealing with another text, what we have already seen to have been demonstrated by Stendahl and in Ephesians: that the relationship between divine justification) and the reconciliation of persons and groups to one another is not a sequential relationship. It is not that “faith” occurs first as an inner existential leap of the individual past concern for his or her finitude, and then God operates a change in the person who becomes able to love others. Barth characterizes Albrecht Ritschl as having “considered forgiveness and justification as sort of psychic release which enabled the individual member of the church to participate in an ethical process,” whereas for Paul this relationship of prelude and sequence cannot thus be distinguished.”

If there is any one biblical text that focuses for lay understanding the individualism of the Pietist heritage it is the statement of 2 Corinthians 5:17:

If anyone be in Christ he is a new creature” (AV).

It has seemed self-evident that we were being promised here, overlapping with the language of a new birth (John 3:5-6), a metaphysical or ontological transformation of the individual person.

The miracle of being made a new person has been promised in evangelistic proclamation and has served in turn to illuminate traditional understandings of the roots of Christian social concern.

[they say that] it is because “only a transformed individual will behave differently” that some kinds of social activism are fruitless; it is because “a transformed individual will definitely behave differently” that the preaching of the gospel to individuals is the surest way to change society.

It is not the concern of the present study to deny that such a thrust has had a wholesome, corrective impact in certain contexts in the history of Protestant thought and Protestant church life.

Like Stendahl, we may concede a certain usefulness to nonbiblical thought patterns. Nor are we setting aside the “new birth” imagery of John 3 or parallel themes elsewhere.

Our question is only whether this is what Paul is saying in this text. This becomes extremely doubtful when we look more carefully at the text itself.

As the italics in the AV indicate, the words “he is” are not in the original text. Now it can regularly be necessary to add the English “is” in order to make clear a predication which in the Greek requires no copulative verb. But to add “he” (or “she”), thereby identifying an antecedent in the previous clause, is quite another matter.

It is grammatically not impossible to reach back to the “anyone” earlier in the verse as the understood subject of this predication; but that is not the only interpretation, and others should be tried first.

A second shortcoming of this traditional interpretation of “the new creature” as the transformed individual personality is that the word ketisis, here translated “creature” or “creation,” is not used elsewhere in the New Testament to designate the individual person. It in fact most often is used to designate not the object of creation but rather the act of creating (e.g., Rom. 1:20), “from the creation of the world.”

Secondarily it may mean the entire universe (Mark 16:15; Col. 1:15, 24; Rom. 8:19-22; Heb. 9:11).

The single reference to “human creation refers to social institutions (1 Pet. 2:13).

In the one other place where the phrase “new creation” is used, it is quite parallel to the “new humanity” of Ephesians 2:15, not a renewed individual but a new social reality, marked by the overcoming of the Jew/Greek barrier; “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision but a new creation” (Gal. 6:15).10

Putting together these strictly linguistic observations, it becomes enormously more probable that we should lean to the kind of translation favored by the more recent translators; literally, “if anyone is in Christ, new is creation,” or more smoothly, “there is a whole new world” (NEB). ‘[^money-shot] [^money-shot]: this particular sentence hit hard when I first read it.

The accent lies not on transforming the ontology of the person (to say nothing of transforming his or her psychological or neurological equipment) but on transforming the perspective of one who has accepted Christ as life context.

This is certainly the point of the rest of the passage in question. Paul is explaining why he no longer regards anyone from the human point of view; why he does not regard Jew as Jew or Greek as Greek, but rather looks at every person in the light of the new world which begins in Christ. “The old has passed away, behold the new has come,” is a social or historical statement, not an introspective or emotional one.

To the Jew First but Also to the Greek

A quite different segment of Paul’s writings is the framework of introduction and conclusion around his letter to the Christians at Rome. Hans Werner Bartsch points out that Paul never calls the total Roman community a “church” and that the issue of the polarity of Jew and Gentile is present at major turning points throughout the argument of the book, as well as in the introduction and conclusion. The foreground meaning of the issue of the place of the law was not systematic theological speculation about how human beings are to be made acceptable to God, but rather the very concrete Roman situation in which Jew and Greek, legalistic Christian and pagan Christian needed to accept one another. “Law” is written about neither as a means of soul salvation, nor as a hindrance thereto, but as the historically concrete identity of the Jewish separateness which made the problem that justification resolves.

We could in fact most properly say that the word “justification” (like the word “creation” examined above) should be thought of in its root meaning, as a verbal noun, an action, “setting things right,” rather than as an abstract noun defining a person’s quasi-legal status as a result of a judge’s decree. To proclaim divine righteousness means to proclaim that God sets things right; it is characteristic of the God who makes a covenant with us to be a right-setting kind of God.

Bartsch supports this interpretation of the concern of Romans with a wealth of detailed textual observations. That the Christians in Rome are not referred to as a “church,” in view of Paul’s is presumed to indicate that the insufficient unity of that group con susage elsewhere, stitutes a problem to them and to him. Bartsch emphasizes the recur rence of reference to Jew and Greek at all the turning points of the document, to say nothing of the special significance of chapters 9-11, whose entire concern is the place of Jewish identity in view of God’s having created the church. From the obedience of faith (1:5) through the “accepting one another” (14:1; 15:7) to Paul’s concern for collecting funds for Jerusalem (15:28), his desire is that there should come into being in Rome this kind of new community where the brokenness of humankind is set right and where persons who were not born under the law obey it from the heart.

If the reader can grant that in the company of Stendahl, Barth, Bartsch, and Minear we may properly understand Paul’s concept of justification as a social phenomenon centering in the reconciliation of different kinds of people, what has that to do with the problem with which our study began, namely the ethic of revolutionary nonviolence which Jesus offers to his disciples?

Perhaps most evident is a kind of double negative impact upon the state of the debate in theological ethics. This debate has been dominated by a negation, which appealed in its support to what was supposed to be unique about the message of Paul. Because Paul is different from Jesus or because justification is different from social ethics, therefore the way of Jesus, it was classically held, has lost its bindingness for our age. It is this negation which a more open reading of the apostles in turn negates. The negation of this negation is all the more significant because the scholars I have been quoting were simply going about their erudite business, with no predisposition to support my reading of Jesus’ or of Paul’s ethics.

But the proclamation that God reconciles classes of people is in itself far more than a double negative. To proclaim it as Paul did in his writings years and even decades after Pentecost is to confirm that such reconciliation is a real experience and therefore a real invitation. Paul is saying, somewhere toward the end of the evolution of apostolic Christianity, what Jesus had said somewhere near the beginning. That he can still say it now is proof that, at least to some modest degree, experience had confirmed it. Paul says that it characterizes the victory of God’s creation-sustaining love that insider and outsider, friend and enemy are equally blessed, in such manner that the genuineness (Jesus said, “perfection”)² of our love is also made real at the point of its application to the enemy, the Gentile, the sinner. There is a sense in which the ethics of marriage and the prohibition of adultery, or the ethics of work and the regulation of attitudes toward slavery, or the opening up of communication and the prohibition of falsehood are all part of the promise of a new humanity enabled and created by God, and already being received by men and women of faith. But it par excellence with reference to enmity between peoples, the extension of neighbor love to the enemy, and the renunciation of violence even in the most righteous cause, that this promise takes on flesh in the most original, the most authentic, the most frightening and scandalous, and therefore in the most evangelical way. It is the Good News that my enemy and I are united, through no merit or work of our own, in a new humanity that forbids henceforth my ever taking his or her life in my hands.

Perhaps a retrospective word should extend to all of this section on the thought of Paul what was said with regard to “justification.” My presentation, in order to correct for the one-sided social ethic which has been dominant in the past, emphasizes what was denied before: Jesus as teacher and example, not only as sacrifice; God as the shaker of the foundations, not only as guarantor of the orders of creation; faith as discipleship, not only as subjectivity. The element of debate in the presentation may make it seem that the “other” or “traditional” element in each case -Jesus as sacrifice, God as creator, faith as subjectivity is being rejected. It should therefore be restated that - as perusal of the structure of our presentation will confirm - no such disjunction is intended. I am rather defending the New Testament against the exclusion of the “messianic” element. The disjunction must be laid to the account of the traditional view, not of mine. It is those other views that say that because Jesus is seen as sacrifice he may not be seen as sovereign, or that because he is seen as Word made flesh he cannot be seen as normative person.

Chapter 12: The War of the Lamb

Jesus and Paul have been the foci of our exposition. They must J represent the centers of any New Testament theological synthesis, due both to their originality and to the amount of the material that makes them knowable to us. But there are other figures, other minds at work. A thorough treatment would demand that we test there as well the reading we have taken already. There would be the thought of the author of Matthew or of the writer to the Hebrews; there would be the mind of Peter, of John, of Jude, or of the seer of the Apocalypse. There is reason to trust that the reading there would confirm the orientation already sketched. Here, however, I must renounce the further cross-referencing and leap ahead to a summary, rooted none the less especially in the last-named Apocalypse. I shall seek briefly to characterize the stance of that book, as it might by contrast throw some light on our contemporary agenda and at the same time draw together the argument of the entire book.

One way to characterize thinking about social ethics in our time is to say that Christians in our age are obsessed with the meaning and direction of history. Social ethical concern is moved by a deep desire to make things move in the right direction. Whether a given action is right or not seems to be inseparable from the question of what effects it will cause Thus part if not all of social concern has to do with looking for the right “handle” by which one can “get a hold on” the course of history and move it in the right direction. For the movement called Moral Rearmament, ideology was this handle; “ideas have legs,” so that if we can get a contagious new thought moving, it will make its own way. For others, it is the process of education that ultimately determines the character and course of the civilization; whoever rules the teachers’ colleges rules the world.

Rambunctious students believe that the office of the dean or the president is the center of the university and therefore they occupy that office. Che Guevara believed the peasant to be the backbone of the coming Latin American revolution, so he went to the hills of Bolivia. The Black Economic Development Conference directed its Manifesto to the administrators of denominations because it believed that the point of decision making for white racist American society was there. Conservative evangelicalism focuses its call for change upon the will of the individual because it believes that when the individual heart is turned in another direction the rest is sure to follow. For still others it is the proletariat or geopolitics that explains everything.

Whichever the favored “handle” may be, the structure of this approach is logically the same. One seeks to lift up one focal point in the midst of the course of human relations, one thread of meaning and causality which is more important than individual persons, their lives and well-being, because it in itself determines wherein their well-being consists. Therefore it is justified to sacrifice to this one “cause” other subordinate values, including the life and welfare of one’s self, one’s neighbor, and (of course!) of the enemy. We pull this one strategic thread in order to save the whole fabric. We can see this kind of reasoning with Constantine saving the Roman Empire, with Luther saving the Reformation by making an alliance with the princes, or with Khrushchev and his successors saving Marxism by making it somewhat more capitalistic, or with the United States saving democracy by alliances with military dictatorships and by the threatened use of the bomb. If we look more analytically at this way of deriving social and political ethics from an overview of the course of history and the choice of the thread within history that is thought to be the most powerful, we find that it involves at least three distinguishable assumptions:

It is assumed that the relationship of cause and effect is visible, understandable, and manageable, so that if we make our choices on the basis of how we hope society will be moved, it will be moved in that direction.
It is assumed that we are informed to be able to set for ourselves and for all society the goal toward which we seek to move it.
Interlocked with these two assumptions and dependent upon them for its applicability is the further postulate that effectiveness in moving toward these goals which have been set is itself a moral yard stick.

If we look critically at these assumptions we discover that they are by no means as self-evident as they seem to be at first. There is for one thing the phenomenon Reinhold Niebuhr has called “irony”: that when people try to manage history, it almost always turns out to have taken another direction than that in which they thought they were guiding it. This may mean that we are not morally qualified to set the goals toward which we would move history. At least it must mean that we are not capable of discerning and managing its course when there are in the same theater of operation a host of other free agents, each of them in their own way also acting under the same assumptions as to their capacity to move history in their direction. Thus even apart from other more spiritual considerations, the strategic calculus is subject to a very serious internal question. It has yet to be demonstrated that history can be moved in the direction in which one claims the duty to cause it to go.

The other question we must raise at the outset about the logic of the “strategic” attitude toward ethical decisions is its acceptance of effectiveness itself as a goal. Even if we know how effectiveness is to be measured that is, even if we could get a clear definition of the goal we are trying to reach and how to ascertain whether we had reached it is there not in Christ’s teaching on meekness, or in the attitude of Jesus toward power and servanthood, a deeper question being raised about whether it is our business at all to guide our action by the course we wish history to take?

It is, however, not the concern of our present study to deal logically or systematically with this kind of question within the traditional or contemporary idioms of theological debate. In recent centuries debate around the question of the meaning of history, and the place of Christian decision within that meaningfulness, has generally been a conversation of the deaf, with some so committed to pre-Enlightenment understandings of the stability of the proper social order that any sense

Footnotes

I found this paper (The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West (pdf)) to be excellent, I’ve read it four or five times over the years, it has changed my soul, would strongly endorse. ↩
The “perfection” to which Jesus calls his hearers in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:48; cf. Luke 6:35-36) is not flawlessness not impeccability, but precisely the refusal to discriminate between friend and enemy, the in and the out, the good and the evil. It is revealed in the indiscriminateness in which God loves the good and the evil alike (cf. above, p. 116). (this footnote is in the original text) ↩

Context Setting for certain patterns & classes of relationship difficulties

2022-07-03T13:00:00+00:00

I’ve been “catching up” a lot in my life lately. Some of that catching up involves bringing up to speed various people I’ve not spoken too (or spoken too much, or openly, or recently, or ever, or some combination thereof).

I am strongly biased towards written/editable/consistent versions of “what’s going on”, because then:

everyone has some confidence in at least some shared context
Thinking how this reads for the various audiences has a useful clarifying effect on the writing.
I believe in writing things when they’re being experienced, especially as a tool to capture insights, learnings, etc.
the act of writing tends to have a great ordering effect on the meaning we assign to our own stories.
I’ve historically written a lot, trying to “unblock the writing blockages”, so taking a stab at writing about “the most important things”, ordered DESC.
I could imagine that some of what I might write could be helpful to someone else. There’s analogous writings that software developers perceive as very conventional for their craft. Incident reports, retrospectives, etc.

TL;DR Depression & Decline

For several years, from an “overall health-and-wellbeing of Josh & Kristi Thompson”, things have been sliding, in different ways, downhill.

Sometimes the decline was fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes in terms of physical health, sometimes in terms of mental health. Sometimes both!

There’s been a tough mix of totally unavoidable, and totally avoidable, tragedy.

I historically would have self-assessed my marriage as in many real ways once as “quite good” and lately would self-assess as “quite bad”.¹

Things are trending upwards again², but there have been a lot of changes or deviations from what would have once been normal for us.

Contributing circumstances

I believe “systems” and “dynamics” are closely related to “complex reactive systems”, and thus any discussion of failure or errors is best informed by approaching the issue with the 18 questions/statements of How Complex Systems Fail: Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety.³

Every one of these has a huge story behind it, but I don’t have the time or desire to talk about them right now.

it’s hard to get pregnant. we had two miscarriages along the way.
I got a bad back injury. It was bad, and affected me for a long time in profound ways.
we bought an old house, moved into it.
Kristi’s dad unexpectedly passed away in January 2020
Covid blew holes in our normal group of relationships and friendships
I tried to do like three different hard things at the same time ⁴
I was also trying to do a few less-hard things

Throughout all of this, a theme of “emotional abandonment” kept surfacing. Tension and silence dominated my life, in a way that caused active, on-going pain.

Nature and nurture (genetics and environment) matter, for both of us.

Kristi’s family, and Kristi, have displayed depressive and avoidant tendencies, across generations. Kristi’s tended towards depressive states, especially as a reaction to increased stress and difficulty. For a long time, I was motivated to move in opposite directions as a reaction to stress and difficulty. This divide (which relates to substantial trauma we both experienced as children and more recently) eventually led to Kristi becoming systemically verbally and emotionally abusive towards me.

For many reasons it took a very long time for me to recognize this, and eventually start protecting myself and adjusting expectations to better care for myself. It was deeply damaging and felt like repeated, horrific betrayals, for a long time.

There’s plenty of environmental factors that contributed to this, but they’re not really that important.

I observed in myself a slow-but-persistent decline on so many levels. I kept having exchanges with Kristi where I’d be met with hostility, negativity, anger, frustration. There would be “relationship ruptures” but no “relationship repairs”. John Gottman writes extensively about some of the dynamics, like the four horseman of the marriage apocalypse.

Last year, I kept asking myself questions like:

why do I feel this incredible decrease in quality of my relationship with myself and others, mostly marked by a massive increase in feelings of alienation from others and self, and feelings of deep and pervasive shame, of a kind I’d not experienced in many, many years?

There were many factors that contributed to my own personal decline in wellbeing. The primary component of the abuse I’ve experienced is best summarized as “abusive anger”, coupled with a lack of attempts/willingness to repair.

I examined the changes I was seeing in my own personality. These were very unliked and unappreciated changes - I was conscious and resisting the change, even as I was watching the changes happen. The changes reminded me of ways I felt (but had dramatically less ability to vocalize) when I was a child and young adult.

Historically I’ve sought (and engaged in) relationships and friendships full of shared experiences, mutual support, some adventure, some appreciation of beauty, going new places and having new experiences, doing things worth doing, long-term and short-term goals, positive emotional energy, and more. I care a lot about my friendships. I prefer to spend energy and time in relationships where that energy is seen and appreciated.

So, I got walloped by a flood of unremitting negative energy, broken only by silence or tense withdrawal, never punctuated with periods of closeness, kindness, compassion, or empathy, but was generally blamed for all of it, even as I kept acting as someone who had good reason to expect future periods of closeness, kindness, compassion, empathy, mutuality, and co-creation in this relationship.

I was told (essentially) that me expecting and demanding change in these aspects was not necessarily appropriate, that I needed to be patient for weeks/months/years of incremental progress towards a future ideal state of treating me with slightly less meanness than yesterday, and even if this isn’t necessarily earned/justified by my behavior, it is at least not that wrong.

Plainly, this is abuse, and at minimum, can be traumatizing.⁵

This pattern of behavior is not a difference in personality or preference, or a cosmetic problem that can be managed, or a situation where one can ‘agree to disagree’. There are many ameliorative responses to harmful behavior, but denial and minimization is not within the range of those appropriate responses.

It was frustrating to me, in early, uncertain conversations with others, as I was trying to figure out why things felt so wrong, it felt like key areas of what I was trying to express were particularly difficult to express, and therefore I wasn’t making progress on the salient aspects of the pain.

I kept getting unexpected reactions when I brought my evidence and observations and experiences to very close friends, and I think a string of these fumbled conversations made things worse for everyone, not better.⁶

Incidentally, I don’t think people who’s behavior patterns best roll up as “verbally/emotionally abusive” are ‘bad people’, I believe it’s “simply” a trauma-induced series of perceived-problem:safety-seeking-response pairs. I am sure you’ve experienced bad things, done to you or those you love, and in some ways it affects you. The world is full of the kind of trauma that hearing about could break your heart ten different ways.⁷

Even assuming the sadness of tragedy and heartbreak and bad behavior and tragic circumstances, the world around us conforms to structure and power dynamics and certain patterns invite/dissuade certain classes of interactions.

I no longer want to participate in patterns of conflict and verbal abuse. I’ve not quite figured out how to step off the train, but am working on it.

Memetics

Memetics describe how an idea spreads, not necessarily if it’s correct or incorrect, but how effective it is, relative to many different factors. The map is not the territory and all that, and neither does one framework/conceptual compression of a situation/problem cover all relevant details.

Ideas matter. Words matter. Ideas can be both good and bad, and effective or ineffective. To that end, below this section, I’ve got a a smattering of links that felt relevant. These might be the kinds of links I’d text a friend with a question like “what do you think?” or “this reminded me of that thing we were talking about”.

These ideas all approach the world from different perspectives, or frames. There’s this book, Worth The Candle, that is quite good. It smashes some interesting concepts together, in a bit of a fantasy universe, that lead to really thought-provoking ideas around ways we see the world around us. Different ways of seeing things can be

Frame control might be a topic for a larger conversation some day, but here’s a good overview: Frame Control, by @aella. I assert that abusive people engage in unfair aspects of ‘frame control’, and for many reasons, and in many ways, refuse to evaluate the situation from a different frame.

Part of the therapy we’ve been doing (together and individually) has made use of written notes, and I’ve always been an aggregator of ‘useful ideas’. It’s like a smattering of software development notes. They might help others, they certainly help me. (This document obviously reflects this approach to life.)

So, memes and frames matter. Reality is complex, we’re always compressing data-streams according to available heuristics.

I view my marriage (and all of the many relationships that of course spring up around a marriage) through a variety of perspectives and conceptual compressions. To that end, sometimes I see something that says/expresses a concept in a meaningful/illuminating way. To the degree a concept or idea is difficult to convey, approaching it from many different directions can help shed light on “the thing” we’re trying to talk about. Books. “Frameworks”. Poems. Thought provoking TikToks.

Books

What follows is a list of some books, all of which I’d read earlier in my life than I actually did. I believe they shed light/signal on what’s been going on in my marriage.

My marriage has historically been a source/center for/inspiration of all the good things that tend to circulate people who enjoy each other’s company and way of being. I’ve grown more sophisticated in the last two years, in how I perceive relationships (my own and other people’s), so the version of me (and Kristi) at 24 years old is very different than me today, at 33, but I can effortlessly see threads of similarity and reasonable evolution in how we’d engaged in the world around us ten years and five years ago, and how we seem to be doing this now.

First, an explanation for the books you’re about to see listed: I’ve always been book-oriented. Even as a ten year old, I read, a lot. It was with a small sense of pride that I learned, when I was perhaps 13, that on at least the standardized tests I took as a homeschooler, I read at or above a college level.[^skilled-at-sportscs] Since then, I’ve often used reading to reliably solve many classes of problems in my life.

The list below are some books that, as I’ve lived the last few years, have come to have particularly high explanatory power for the relationship between external events and internal experiences in my life.

I read at a high enough rate that it’s relatively painless (especially related to the potential reward) to ‘read the canon’⁸ in any given domain. I start with one book, and then branch out from there, either thematically or via citations/references. Of course I often digest related podcasts and topical digital content.

Here’s some of the books I’ve read lately. There’s a theme:

“At it’s simplest”: Attachment Styles

The involved parties have had a variety of experiences, some of which roll up to verbal/emotional abuse & neglect, through formative years and life circumstances.

We’ve accumulated trauma.

We have nature/nurture proclivities towards anxious attachment styles (me) and avoidant (her). Things are trending towards ‘disorganized’.

There’s lots on the internet and in books about “Attachment Styles”, but for a good primer, scroll through @thesecurerelationship’s instagram. Great stuff there, about how to have a “secure attachment”. My definition probably butchers a ‘real’ definition, but here it is:

A ‘secure attachment’ means one is capable of trusting the self and others, in healthy ways, engaging in emotionally intimate relationships, and has an embodied confidence in the value of one’s own needs and preferences.

There’s this account on instagram, @thesecurerelationship, who is wonderful. Here’s some prototypical posts:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Secure Relationship (@thesecurerelationship)

Tiktok links

Tiktok is complicated to me. It’s undeniable that it has an affect on the world. Don’t know how I feel about it, but it’s deff good for “feeling seen” sometimes. To that end, here’s a smattering of videos I’ve felt some kinship with. I’ll explain each, eventually. For now, just consider skimming:

https://www.tiktok.com/@dancingfordesire/video/7114800097510182186?_t=8TdHsx8ZDOU&_r=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReJ65qj/?k=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReJLcnQ/?k=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReJDdGj/?k=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReJWVX3/?k=1

This story by the book author struck me as poignant and relevant:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReNV2KA/?k=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReYJkWL/?k=1

This next one is on manipulation. I was raised in an environment full of manipulation, toxic masculinity, and more.

I did a lot of manipulation “to survive”, and learned it as a tool to solve the problems I was facing. I have few memories of my own childhood, but I clearly remember being unwillfully manipulated into things all the time. By people who then said they loved me.⁹

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTReq9Eao/?k=1

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRe1xrex/?k=1

Quotes around power and abuse

The more someone has spent time dealing with issues of individual/organizational misbehavior (like issues leading to, and stemming from, abuse and neglect), the more they seem to have intuitive mental models that fit the frames of the above books I’ve listed.

There’s two general polarities at play. Focusing on what is most wrong and focusing on what could be most right. It’s important to focus on what’s gone wrong, but I think in any situation of mistreatment (and systemic mistreatment that reads as abuse or neglect) the correct response invites and makes space for evaluating what could be best-case-scenario outcomes, not just reflecting on the past.

Power adheres and follows the structures of the way we move through the world.¹⁰ For example, check out https://www.liberatingstructures.com/. The tagline is increase relational coordination and trust. This concepts relates to that of a caucus score. People who have certain forms of power can mistreat people who might be deficient of power in related ways.¹¹

Anyway, here’s some quotes:

There are two kinds of power. One kills the spirit. The other nourishes the spirit. The first is Power Over. The other is Personal Power.

Power Over shows up as control and dominance. Personal Power shows up as mutuality and co-creation.

Mutuality is a way of being with another person which promotes the growth and well-being of one’s self and the other person by means of clear communication and empathetic understanding.

Co-creation is a consciously shared participation in life which helps one reach one’s goals.

C.S. Lewis said:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Substacks and blogs

Epistemic Legibility relates to ‘being able to be proven wrong’, how important that is in high-stakes conversation/conflict
Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man — Index
My Recent Divorce, and/or Dior Homme Intense
Divorce Brain
emotional neglect is a monster of a thing

So what? Now what?

I’ve worked on this post off and on for a while. I’ve recognized an absolutely real difficulty in knowing how to ask for help. In some cases, I’m at least decent at asking for help, but on the whole, in ways that have mattered more than usual, I would not yet self-identify as one who’s skilled at making needs/requests visible in “normal/cool ways”. (These requests for help have gone poorly a high percentage of the times I’ve made them in the last few years)

So, knowing that this page summarizes my best understanding of the world. you can imagine how frustrated and beat down I feel. Generally, things that line up well with “caring for depressed people” works for me. I enjoy time with others, so email me, text me, call me, visit with me. Feel free to plainly discuss anything you’ve read on this website, or discuss it with others.

If you wanna help me with a random project I happen to be working on around the house, or hang out with me while I work on one, that’s always very bolstering to my spirits. Talk with me about things you’re enthusiastic about, or things I’m enthusiastic about. That’s generally the best balm and salve for my soul.

The hardest thing for me, around spending time with other people, has been feeling like this (the above context-setting) is something I couldn’t talk about without placing others in an uncomfortable place (I.E. shameful, which is a very difficult place to operate from).

I generally delight in and yearn for weighty conversations of meaningful things, and am happy to bear witness/hold space for whatever comes up, as needed, so it has been hard for me to endure not talking about how the most important thing in my life was withering and dying, the effects it was having on me, and how it impacted me to have a partner would pretend (to me and others) that “everything is fine”.

So, things are not fine. Even in that, I’m finding ways to be okay. I put a lot of eggs in one basket, with a certain expectation of how things would go, and I’ve been consistently, catastophically wrong in how things would go.

It’s been deeply difficult to wrap my mind around this. I’ve plumbed the depths of what ‘bad mental health’ looks like, and I would like to never do that again. I’m deeply aware of instances now of verbal abuse, or coercion, and on principle call it out when I see it. (For example, I now comment upon self deprecating humor. If a friend says something about him/herself that would be rude to say about someone else, I say something to the extent of: ‘I witness that criticism of yourself and do not accept it.’)

I’ve gotten dramatically more comfortable with the idea of divorce than I once was, and as things continue to go unresolved, I continue to move in that direction.

FAQ

OMG you’re considering divorce why???

It’s complicated. Please see above.

OMG you’re still married why have you not gotten a divorce yet???

It’s complicated. I’m finding boundaries. I have extensive confidence in people’s abilities to learn and change. It’s a blessing and a curse.

Footnotes

I believe in general a third-party observer would agree with both assessments - and third parties have agreed. I’m generally leery of using third parties to bolster arguments, in the off chance it’s a rhetorical device instead something genuinely helpful to contribute, but there are situations where it could be construed as relevant. ↩
I know, that’s nebulous. Feel free to circle around with an IRL conversation/email/WhatsApp voice message/whatever. As I’m getting a better handle on what’s going on (this write-up is a piece of that) I’m getting a better grasp on a peaceful disposition. And perhaps as I get more of a peaceful disposition, I get a better handle on what’s going on. ↩
Here’s some of the bullet points from how complex systems fail but first, know that ‘marriages’ or ‘relationships’ share lots of commonalities with ‘complex systems’, so any of the principles for ‘more common complex systems’, like a factory or power generation facility are not completely dissimilar to a marriage/family unit. Here’s some quotes. As you read ‘systems’, in your mind, hear ‘relationships’:

Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.

Catastrophe is always just around the corner.

Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.

Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.

Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity.

Change introduces new forms of failure.

People continuously create safety.

↩
Here’s the hard things:
1. climbing (I finally had been making gains in pushing climbing grades (not unimportant to me)) 2: caring a lot about ‘the nighborhood’/Golden 3: starting a software consulting business.
2. getting significantly injured: I kept saying “oh, it’s just back pain”, and then commenting “and that’s why I cannot walk without a big limp” or “I’ve not stood up straight in months!” and often was met with horror. I ran the Leadville Marathon in 2019. Even after months of rehab, I couldn’t “run” 10 steps without pain, and I wasn’t able to just… walk, indefinately, without discomfort. Everything started hurting. (Back, neck, knees). I was depressed, and couldn’t find the enthusiasm to work out. This was one of the ways I was asking Kristi for help, and felt more or less ‘emotionally abandoned’ in it. 5.
, and it feels like we “adopted” Golden/Iowa St as ‘our’ neighborhood. I really wanted to see it thrive, and thought that with our efforts, we could build some real community. (We did! Threw a few parties, invited the neighborhood, and had many gatherings, large and small. These remain the high point of my time in this house.) ↩
“Abuse” is the flip side of “neglect”, both of which can be harmful to those who experience it, and can induce aggregate emotional damage, which can be called “trauma”. Please note that I’m defining abuse expansively, and in this context, throughout this document, I define it exclusively in emotional and verbal domains. ↩
I will absolutely write about “The church” and “institutionalized abusive behavior” soon. It’s bad. Shame is such a wide-spread tool for behavior control, isn’t it? I don’t mean this to imply “Josh was failed by the church in this specific situation” but “the people who comprise the church/it’s institutions/Christendom/ are so habituated to certain patterns that boil down to ‘verbal/emotional abuse’, that their ‘abuse radar’ that normally would be operating is weak/malfunctioning”. Shame is sometimes the appropriate response to an event/action, but if one starts using it as a tool on others for behavior control, all sorts of things go wrong with whatever it is one is trying to control. If you don’t have a mental model for ‘in certain ways, humans seem to often use shame for behavior control’ it makes it harder to debug problems that might be rooted in shaming people for behavior control. 🙊 ↩
There’s a variety of responses to experiencing trauma/bad things, and those responses are shaped by many factors. Not worth getting into here. ↩
I mean this in the sense of ‘literary/scene-setting canon’ and ‘accepted high-culture canon’, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon. It’s analogous to looking at an issue intentionally from several different frames. I’m competent at identifying some instances of internal (in)consistency within frames, and between frames. It might be obvious, but me reading a book (and referencing it) certainly ought not to be treated as an endorsement of the book or the ideas espoused within. I’ve watched “Birth of a Nation” and read Mein Kampf. I am down for reading/understanding propaganda and/or the views of very bad people. It’ll be up to you to infer from context if I’m recommending something, or holding it up as an example of a bad thing. ↩
Like I’ve mentioned, this is about verbal and emotional abuse. I’m not saying nothing good ever happened, or that things were exclusively bad all the time. Consider reading Parenting from the Inside Out, and contrast it with various regimes of behavioral control. ↩
Oh I cannot wait to expand on this thought. It’ll get its own blog post, and it’s implications extend far beyond the extent of my marriage, or marriage in general. My marriage is a “downstream effect” of the reality of power, and power structures. ↩
Lots of people have expressed shock when I’ve alleged that I’ve found myself in an emotionally abusive relationship. They say something like “if it’s actually abusive, you should leave, full stop, but because I don’t think you have to leave, it must not be abusive.” They don’t say it exactly like that, but it’s something close. I can feel them pattern matching on verbal abuse being something that tends to be done by men towards women, and includes a variety of other power dynamics. It’s nice being a strong fit young white guy - I can physically defend myself, so even though I know that all physical abuse is proceeded by verbal abuse, and even though Kristi has made veiled threats of physical violence, I don’t fear physical violence. It’s the emotional and verbal component that’s been so devastating. It feels like this component is illegible to others. ↩

2020 Annual Review

2022-06-27T13:00:00+00:00

please note: i’m publishing this far after it was drafted, which was in January 2021. It’s being published in June 2022 - I’m trying to back-fill ‘annual reviews’, I never finished this one or published it, until now.

Is it even possible to mention a 2020 review without somehow giving a nod to the experiences lived by all of us this year?

For a variety of reasons, we’ve all had a variety of experiences inducing sadness, despair, hopelessness, but also joy, laughter, and sweet time with friends.

So, lets have that all out of the way.

I’ve done annual reviews a few times now:

2019
2017 review: 2017 In Review & Thoughts on 2018
2016 review: 2016 - Biggest Lesson, Most Dangerous Books
2015 review: 2015: The year I didn’t think much?

I normally publish my ‘year in review’ posts in January. I just checked my 2019 reivew to see when I published it vs. when I wrote it.

I published it Feb 2nd, but the last time I edited the content of the file in a meaningful way was Dec 30th, 2019.

My father-in-law passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack on January 12th. My wife and I spent almost two months back in NJ, helping pick up the pieces.

My last time on a plane before Covid hit was a work trip back to Pittsburgh, where I gave my notice, agreed to three more weeks of work.

So, I quit my job (and cancelled a climbing trip to Cuba) while the lockdowns were starting up. I was given a number of opportunities to keep the job, due to the uncertainty ahead.

A lot has changed in the last week, Josh - are you still sure you want to leave?

Me, who was quitting with no work prospects in sight (but enormously privileged to be married to a woman who makes great money and has a secure job) quit my six-figure dev job heading into the biggest recession we’ve seen in a while.

And I’d do it all over again.

I picked up contract work (at Turing!) and spent a few months doing software development work, and teaching work, at the same time.

I learned many useful lessons.

I came away disappointed, however, even more, with the state of the software development industry to “train itself”. I consistently feel like a vastly-inferior developer, who hardly earns the right to sit at a table of Real Software Developers who do Important Things At Scale!

As a counterfactual: a month or so ago, I tested the job market, to see if I could still get a job. At the time, it was looking like me working full-time might have been the best use of time to my wife and I.

Having been “on sabbatical” for the better part of a year didn’t hurt my prospects. I quickly got two job offers, both offering substantial improvements on my prior job’s total comp. More on that later.

This is a year defined by profound brokenness. I felt far more personally affected, and I felt that brokenness compounding over prior years was piling up, exacerbated in many ways by the rapid arrival of the future, Covid.

Themes I’ve spent time on this year. I could write 5,000 words on any one of these:

Work, satisfaction, corporate pathologies
Meaning-making, helping others, large-scale
software development
teaching software development
teaching software development to others as a way of righting some wrongs around systemic issues
democratizing the tools of software development as social change???
Jesus Christ. Not an expletive, the man. Feels like this year I finally learned what had felt so wrong about nearly all of my experiences with Christians.
On that note, I sorted out substantial improvements in my relationships with nearly everyone else in my life, too. (That all happened very late in 2020, I’ll get there eventually)

I wrote more substantial and important things than I’ve ever written before. Almost no one has read most of what I’ve written, by design. I spent 60+ hours on a document read by precisely four people besides myself.

I published a lot on this website, and very little of it is easily findable, by design.

things I read this year:

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

link, arxiv.org

I’ve been thinking of this paper a lot lately. I’ve re-read it since mid-2019, too, April and Sept, 2020.

Specifically as I’ve observed phenomena that appear to surprise other people (or, at least, they act surprised) and in doing so, gained an understanding about their view of the world, or what they desire to telegraph about their view of the world.

In short, based on the premise of The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future, coupled with the gist of the above paper, I’ve got a more accurate mental model of the world than most people.¹

This is a bold, bold claim.

Here’s the paper abstract, lightly reformatted by me for readability:

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful.

Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known.

This curiosity drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve.

It motivates exploratory infants, mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial intelligence.

I wrote more about this here: https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-humor-interestingness-curiosity-creativity

We Bought A House

My wife and I bought a house. Oh boy.

The process led to a lot of writing on the intersection of racism and modern housing policy.

Some Twitter threads, like Thoughts on Denver’s zoning and systemic racism and a few others.

This topic has been near and dear to my heart for a long time. It’s actually far more important to me than nearly anything else I’ve written about on this website, but it’s hard to express coherently.

I’m starting to figure out what I’m trying to do, and how to do it. More on that later.

Misc

I wrote [https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/12/19/cultivate-the-skill-of-undivided-attention-or-deep-work/], which briefly went to the top of hacker news. Here’s the crosspost.
I did a few different contract roles.

Reading

I read a lot of books, and a lot of papers, in 2020. More papers than in any other year. It was a difficult year, and writing about what I read didn’t make it high enough on the priority list.

Footnotes

For example, My Thoughts on Eric Weinstein’s Thoughts on Pia Kalani’s Thoughts. As I listened to what he said, I could generally anticipate where he was going, and I appreciated the brevity and concise conceptual expression of something I’d also tried to express. ↩

An Open Letter about Golden

2022-05-24T13:00:00+00:00

2022-06-15 Update

I wrote this document the first time in a very small number of minutes, three weeks ago, on my way out the door on a particularly busy day. I follow “write it now”. I’ve gotten to discuss this letter with a few different people, because I mentioned it in email. Some of you asked, essentially “what are you actually asking for, josh?”._

I thought about it for a moment, and said something like “I’d like to see euclidean zoning abolished”, and now, as I’ve thought about it more, the simplest ask I’m requesting is thus:

Replace Golden’s zoning code with Japanese-style zoning

So, from a legislative perspective, thats almost the only outcome I would consider to be ‘possibly ethical’¹

you, maybe:

what is this stuff of ethics, Josh, we’re talking about zoning!

I know.

Open Letter to Golden City Council

I wrote this on May 24th, after that day’s update from http://goldentoday.com/ announced two big entries on the docket. Reviewing a CoorsTek PUD (it was apporoved) and ‘voting’ on the rezoning thing that’s been underway for two years. Those two topics in mind, I wrote some thoughts about zoning in Golden

I wrote the following in an email to publiccomment@cityofgolden.net, but I have no idea if/where it will be made public, so re-posting here.²

Email Subject: I’m generally disappointed with the discourse I’ve observed to date

Hi there, city council and staff,

I’ve lived in Golden since 2014, my wife and I managed to buy a house in 2020, on Iowa St. ³.

I’ve attended many meetings, and noticed that for people who live in the city, there is an obsession with what the city staff or council are doing/not doing, for understandable reasons. The entire city is dependent upon the decisions of city staff, planning commission, and council.

The city is extremely expensive to live in, and the road networks don’t function very well or safely for anyone.

The way the city solicits ‘public input’ is hilariously biased, full of micromanagement, and obviously doesn’t lead to useful outcomes.⁴

The city staff perpetuate issues that harm everyone by failing to recognize the origins of bad policies that cripple progress and real growth. I don’t expect the average resident to be an expert in municipal zoning codes, and the complicated histories therein, but I expect the staff and city council to know these things.

Zoning is far more complicated and insidious and harmful than generally appreciated

Zoning, for example, as exists in America, was created by politically powerful ethnic groups to maintain social control and physical separation over other ethnic groups; “urban renewal” was the excuse cities used to enact regimes of ethnic cleansing against ‘undesirable’ ethnic minorities.¹

Here’s a quote from an article, the whole thing is worth reading:

The zone plan drafted by Whitten and unpublished by the Atlanta City Planning Commission in 1922 explained that “race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.” The zoning law divided the city into an “R-I white district” and “R-2 colored district” with additional neighborhoods undetermined (Rothstein 2017) source

This zone plan the document references is intense. I’ve written extensively about Whitten’s plan here.

Golden still has R1 and R2 neighborhoods. They’re not labeled “white” and “colored”, anymore, but the original intent lives on. I live in an R2 neighborhood. There’s a bunch of distinctive features that make it obviously a ‘traditional’ R-2 neighborhood.

Most people have not even heard of R1 or R2 zoning, and yet it’s the dominant visible feature of most (maybe all?) cities in America today.

Incidentally, everyone is hurt by the R1 and R2 distinction. The entire “zone plan” laid down by Whitten dicated not only to poor ethnic groups how they were going to live, but also how the lives of the “privileged”/powerful ethnic groups would be. For t he same reasons I wouldn’t want to go to a theme park built by a genocidal dictator, I don’t want to live in a built environment governed by the worldview of someone who was scared of certain ethnic groups and thought they were not even people.

R-2 neighborhoods

Lets talk about R-2 neighborhoods.

I live in an R2 neighborhood. Some (maybe most) of you don’t live in an R2-designated spot, but some of you do, and all of you are heavily negatively affected by the existence of R-2 zoning.

I invite you to look at page 10 of this document, to read the race zoning language directly, as it was written in 1922.

… did you look at it? It’s on page 10 of the document, page 12 of the PDF itself. Worth reading, in all its old-timey glory. The above link takes you to the correct page.

I desire for the city to move into the modern world when it comes to managing “itself”.

During the rezoning meetings, when the city was telling the residents of my R2 north-golden neighborhood what the new ‘form-based zoning’ rules were going to be, I couldn’t help but notice that most of the attendees of the meeting where from r1 neighborhoods, there to make sure that the new zoning plan wouldn’t apply to their homes.

I asked Rick if he was aware of the race-based heritage of zoning in the USA, and he seemed uncertain.

Let’s talk about ethnic cleansing

is it getting hot in here? anyone sweating, or feeling uncomfortable? Not yet? Ok, lets carry on

Furthermore, road networks (and minimum parking requirements) are the primary justification/tool for urban renewal, which was used in American in the 50s, 60s, and 70s for ethnic cleansing.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines ethnic cleansing:

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.

So, to say that urban renewal has been used for ethnic cleansing in America, I’m making the charge that institutions in America have engaged in actions synonymous with rape, genocide, starvation, and war.

I invite anyone to obtain a copy of The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing by E Michael Jones, or borrow my copy.

I won’t be party to ongoing perpetuation of the injustices that decimated Denver, Golden, Lakewood, and every city in America in the 20th century.

I’d rather participate in a system that unwinds the evil plans worked by powerful people who embedded their views of the world in systems which hum along long after these evil people have died.

It’s too late to undo the evil acts that befell millions across the country, at the hands of politically powerful, racially-motivated ethnic groups. But we can start making a new path.

Incidentally, the new path will bring about a more pleasant, beautiful, well-running city. It will be a home to more people, and will hum with more life. There will be less “bad things” and more “good things”, for all involved persons, both now and years from now.

The things the city seems to be spending its time on are not related to the things the city should be spending its time on. The easiest/correct set of next steps would be to legislatively remove every piece of municipal code and statute that relates to regimes of ethnic cleansing and social control.

The people who perpetuated ethnic cleansing had deeply broken and warped views of the world (duh! They believed in things like phrenology and other forms of scientific racism. They were just as sophisticated in their understanding of how cities worked and functioned and existed as an ecosystem.

It’s really bad to continue allowing these people’s bad estimations of the world to be guiding decisions made across the city today.

These pro-ethnic-cleansing people couldn’t quite come out and say:

we want to pass laws that allow us to use heavy equipment to tear down ethnic neighborhoods

they had to say things like

in pursuit of maintenance of property values, we will make illegal many things associated with the ways of life of ethnic minorities, preventing them from consolidating any power or stability around them

and then later said:

if we deny city services to certain areas, we can make them look bad/scary

and then said:

To protect our citizens and GDP, we will tear down old-looking buildings and replace them with parking lots, and use federal highway administration dollars/documents to build highways through minority neighborhoods.

because these groups of evil people had access to more wealth and political power than the ethnic groups they targeted. Once they made tools to hurt certain groups, those tools kept hurting every person who is involved. Like https://www.codot.gov/projects/i70east. It’s not wealthy people who get their homes taken for highway expansion, because wealthy people don’t live near highways, generally.

For example, since car ownership was associated with income, and income is/was a proxy for wealth, any legislation/regulation that prioritized cars, or any federal dollars obtained to build car infrastructure, supported their goals of advancing the way of life of people who drive cars, which was people who had a little more money to begin with, or at least who looked like “safe” people to lend money to.

This is why I have very little patience for urban planning experts who don’t instantly recognize the vast harm wrought by ‘minimum parking requirements’ and an unwillingness to make the streets safe/efficient/effective for all users.[^most-vulnerable-first]

OK, whats the alternative?

The good news is as soon as we drop the crappy old paradigm, (and the rules that are a form of metaphysical handcuffs), really good things can happen, quickly, for nearly everyone:

More parks
more pleasant places to walk

Ask for trees in your city 🌳 pic.twitter.com/GT2QcoAPb7
— Diego Saez Gil (@dsaezgil) June 15, 2022

quieter, safer, exercise-ier,
more kids playing outside
more socializing
more shade from trees
more park benches and playgrounds and pickleball courts
more schools and daycare places
more housing (that’s close to cool things!)
more places that will pay for labor (so you’re not so tied to a job if it’s not a good fit for you anymore, or you hate it)
more bus stations and train tracks
more deer, birds, rabbits, butterflies and bees

I don’t really know how to end this.

[most-vulnerable-first]: Current road networks are inadequate, even for drivers. That’s the topic of another blog post, but the roads are bad. Jonathan Stalls lives in Denver, and talks about inadequate road networks regularly. Here’s a profile of him in Mashable. “safe enough” roads can be used safely by children, or disabled people, or the elderly, in all conditions, like: at night, in the rain, in the snow. We could go on a walk around Golden, following a cargo bike full of traffic cones, and could start laying out improvements to improve traffic flow, reduce intersection complexity, and reduce the need for vehicles to do as much stopping and hard accelerating. Everyone could just cruise around at a constant 20 mph. Golden’s only a few miles across the long way, so it would take no time at all to go nearly anywhere.

I know this was phrased really strongly. Please, again, read my write it now piece. ↩ ↩²
I think the email went to the whole city council. It’s just a microsoft office alias for them, or something. I’m sure it goes to others/someone keeps an eye on it for spam. ↩
My wife and I have “good” jobs, so banks were happy to lend us horrific amounts of money to afford our 70 year old house that’s literally falling to pieces. It “cost” over half a million dollars. That’s far more than we ever wanted to spend on a house, but this was all that was available, and we have “good jobs”, so even at that cost, it’s within a reasonable income/rent ratio, at least to a bank. It’s hard to talk about without assuming all parties have at least read a book review of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America or read some of the goodreads comments. ↩
If you find this to be a not-credible statement, consider reading Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. I’m not casting aspersions at any particular group, per se. Good people with good intentions are everywhere. It’s the implementation that gets messy, for a few solvable reasons. ↩

Back in the saddle (of writing)

2022-04-26T13:00:00+00:00

Background

It’s been a hell of a year. I’ve got about 10,000 things I’ve wanted to write about, and have not gotten around to any of them. Here’s my various top-level reasons for not writing:

what I want to write about feels too complicated to express easily/coherently
I feel like I’d have too do too much context-setting to get to what I really wanna write about
I’m too sad/depressed/numb to care about writing
when feeling sad/depressed/numb, it feels deeply wrong to draw attention to oneself
feels like anything I’d write would need a million footnotes, asterisks, and qualifying statements to say anything interesting/true enough

Incidentally, however, writing is deeply cathartic for me. Also, this is my website. I can say whatever I want.

So, here’s my reasons for why I am going to start writing:

I owe no one anything, so if I want to write a piece that assumes background knowledge about, say, the history of how zoning was ‘invented’ in the USA, I can write it. If it’s too spicy of a take, and someone takes issue with it, well, welcome to the internet,
I desperately need to get some projects i’m working on out of my head and on paper
I’m juggling big projects and small projects. writing always clarifies my thinking and next steps.

What is coming next

Big projects, and small. A podcast (maybe), backyard outdoor movie nights, home-made pizza, friends and family, work, training hard for climbing, enabling others to get more of what they want, making things beautiful. Being odd, and reveling in it.

Reading, repair, rest, capacity-building. Riding my vespa around Denver, and soon, a motorcycle around the continent.

Nudging systems.

Things That Are Surprisingly Good For The Cost (AKA How I want to build my tiny house)

2022-03-11T13:00:00+00:00

Working title: “My Dream Backyard House/ADU/round-one-of-building-experiment”

I’m trying to build a kinda cool, quirky, sensitive-to-supply-chain-disruption, cheap, functional, emotionally healing home in my back yard. We love to host friends and family, guests, maybe AirBnB sometimes, have extra space for a growing family, etc.

I hope that this document might someday get shared with various persons who are helping us execute on aspects of the plan, or just folks I’ve talked to IRL who want to know some of the books I’ve mentioned to them¹.

I’ll probably reference this page when working with the city for permits and approvals, because some of what I do falls outside of the International Building Code, and thus isn’t really on the radars of local municipalities.

Basically, I’ve had A Pattern Language floating around my head for two years, and patterns of home, and finally have taken an interesting plunge into object-oriented design principles for my new job. Did you know that the author of A Pattern Language is like… the Godfather of OO design?

and and just a few days ago² the last big piece clicked into place in my head - masonry heaters!

I’ve long been interested in earthships, but was always put off by how strange they look, and how much labor they took. You kinda had to commit to the earthship lifestyle. I don’t want that - I want to build a house that my mother-in-law will live in for a long time, and learn some useful skills along the way.

This desire (and how it connects to ‘repair’) came full-circle as I was thinking through how to improving/understanding/being-effective-in the parts of the codebase my work has me interacting with.

I’ve been working a bit with Szezbi, @Solarchitects, on figuring out some of these patterns, and how they might be applied on a simple ‘house’ in my back yard.

Informing Ideas

Here’s a list of the concepts I’m working into my plans, and I think could be worked into other plans. Per A Pattern Language I’ve committed to no specific layout, but I’ve got some components of this house I am building.

Rammed Earth Walls

Rammed Earth is a very old, traditional style of building that can look surprisingly modern.

Building envelopes can be built out of dirt, about 18” thick, in a huge variety of shapes. So, by building a square, or something close to it, one can have an extremely solid, basic structure that stays warm in the winter, cool in the summer, keeps the interior quiet, and is super cheap.

“built out of dirt” is a provocative way to say it, though. Clay and bricks are “mud and water and straw”, and obviously one can build beautiful brick buildings.

Example pictures

Take a look at these rammed earth structures!

They can be built quickly, with surprisingly basic pieces of equipment.

They can be beautiful on the inside.

I love kitchens.

The kitchen would be the location of the masonry heater, more on that below.

Specific drawbacks/challenges to rammed earth walls in a sometimes-quite-cold environment: it’s an inherently cold/cool structure

I recently came to more clearly understand some of the challenges to rammed earth walls and moderating low temperatures.

I like the ideas of passive cooling, and rammed earth is great at that kind of thing.

It’s a bit trickier in cold environments, because of the intersection of thermal mass and ‘radient heat’, etc. The masonry heater book discussed below is a great starting point into the science.

Anyway, rammed earth walls would need to be insulated. There’s different ways/amounts of insulation you’ll need. Working on sorting that out right now.

Embedded in kitchens can be the house’s source of heat, which is powered in very smooth cycles by a once-or-twice act of putting logs in a small fire:

Masonry Heaters

I just finished reading Masonry Heaters: Designing, Building, and Living with a Piece of the Sun and think they’re the best.

I could go on and on, and will when I can pull the book notes (and photos) assembled soon. Here’s a few pictures:

In the meantime, I’ve checked in on local masonry heater companies, and one could get a small/basic heater installed for <$10k right now. (http://www.greenstoneheat.com/ has offices in Denver, they’ve been great in email back-and-forth)

Pick something you care about, and masonry heaters make more of it in the world.

They are: environmentally healthy, cheap, quiet to build and install, long-lasting, low-maintenance, community-encouraging, high-availability, high-resiliency pleasant heat for life, even if the power goes out and the sun goes in.

Rammed Earth walls + good use of sun and shade and well-insulating windows + masonry heaters = an absolutely lovely place to live.

Plants & Food

I love plants. So much. I love so much of the metaphor of gardening, and patient, long-term investment in slowly improving a specific place.

My wife and I are mostly vegetarian, and eat lots of greens and veggies. I

Watch the documentary Fantastic Fungi, and read The Hidden Life of Trees. I could list another ten books, a few more documentaries. I’m not skilled with plants at all, yet, but that will change.

Plants and food grow really well, and are made more resistant to dryness, pests/insects, etc.

“Improved depth of high-quality soil in my yard”

Our lot is 6,881 sq ft, or 639 sq. meters. Obviously not all meters are the same, or equally valuable, but overall I’d rather decrease the amount of my lot covered with concrete and asphalt, and increase the amount of my lot covered with mulch, grass, plants, shrubs, small trees, and large trees. When we moved in, a lot of the lot was bare dirt, and a lot of it had asphalt or concrete on it.

This article about soil (https://t.co/Rs2FW2BeMB) touches on issues of *great* significance. Composting, recycling, "regenerative ag", increasing depth and square meters of "healthy soil" ties directly to capital-w Wellbeing.
— Josh (@josh_works) May 11, 2022

It’s easier to point all this stuff out than write thousands of words about.

Home Composting All Recyclables

A friend nerd-sniped me with this book and I cannot unread it. Solves a few interesting problems, but critically, generates enough compost to fertilize quite a lot of soil which can then support quite a bit of plant life. Have you heard anything about fertilizer prices recently?

Also, near-endless convenience upgrades. Least-smelly option of all food waste disposal options I’ve ever used. Our trash containers are now racoon-proof.

Also, naturally supports above goals.

Other goals

I’m trying to pilot what a personal back-yard version of micro housing could be like.

I care a lot about having well-informed thinking. I also dislike overly-analytical approaches, so… i’m trying to find a good line for explaining myself: a pattern language, poodr, owd, hpmor, wtc. ↩
I wrote this line (and much of this page) back in feb 2022. ↩

Bootstrapping streetcars in Golden

2022-03-10T13:00:00+00:00

I was describing this two or three stage plan to a friend the other day. They almost understood it, but since they don’t live in Golden, and have not spent a lot of their life nerding out on “urban mobility infrastructure”, they didn’t quite get it.

Since I’m trying to write things quickly, or at least now, I’m doing a quick little visual of what I wanted to propose to the involved parties.

The involved parties

I think there are three institutions that, if working together in interesting ways, could build a very interesting piece of infrastructure:

School of Mines
CoorsTek
Coors

School of Mines could create a streetcar/urban-mobility-infrastructure addition to their curriculum, and start getting students involved with (and, as soon as possible, in charge of) planning, designing, building, and operating a growing streetcar network.

Some more context here

Some of the second-order effects of a streetcar network

With streetcars starting to fill the city, Golden could relax their minimum housing consumption standards while also expecting a decrease in inter-city vehicle miles travelled, AND while seeing an increase in inter-city trips.

I’ll make that a graph at some point.

Read How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing, and imagine how well streetcars in Golden would pair with micro housing.

It’s impossible to say that housing would remain unaffordable. It would let the children of long-time Golden residents live in Golden, etc.

Step 0

First, emotionally, I think it helps to recognize that Denver (and Golden) used to have TONS of streetcar and rail travel. For example:

Here’s a picture of a streetcar in Denver about 100 years ago, from this excellent article about The History of Denver’s Streetcars and Their Routes:

Step 1

The steps. None of these are small steps, but are within the capacities of one or two people to manage each of the primary constituent steps, and the on-the-ground-help of no more than a dozen workers at a single time.

Here’s what could be the first streetcar line, connecting an existing heavy rail line

Here’s another possible vision, which would get some streetcar running back through downtown:

sub-tasks:

start pricing/buying narrow-gauge railway.

I have a friend that was the #1 steel-seller in Colorado, he’ll get us where we need to go.

Narrow-gauge, because (from wikipedia):

Since narrow-gauge railways are usually built with tighter curves, smaller structure gauges, and lighter rails, they can be less costly to build, equip, and operate than standard- or broad-gauge railways (particularly in mountainous or difficult terrain).[1] Lower-cost narrow-gauge railways are often used in mountainous terrain, where engineering savings can be substantial. Lower-cost narrow-gauge railways are often built to serve industries as well as sparsely populated communities where the traffic potential would not justify the cost of a standard- or broad-gauge line. Narrow-gauge railways have specialised use in mines and other environments where a small structure gauge necessitates a small loading gauge.

while the steel is shipping, start building the trolleys that would be used to move materials and supplies and equipment along the line as it’s being built. They could be fairly cheap, but again, this is about rapid iteration and experimentation.

Obtain that facility at 809 East St for School of Mines

rumor has it the owner wants to get rid of it/might be declaring bankruptcy already, because Coors doesn’t need the railcar maintenance facility anymore. Here’s what exists there right now:

Start getting equipment and letting interested people self-select into the project.

Step 2

Now to start getting the street car network sorta “mixed into” school of mines space:

Here’s some ideas of where some new lines might be added:

Step 3

If step 2 looked impossibly huge to you, and like 10x what seems reasonable, I get it. Lets actually dramatically shrink step 2, and instead get Mines to treat it’s entire campus as a bit of a laboratory for this streetcar thing, learning how to operate it, put them up for the night, get them ready for the day, run them, etc.

Maybe Mines will figure out how to make autonomous streetcars, similar to the autonomous busses it drives around. I bet someone there could.

Here’s a much smaller version of building some rail. Obviously these are just ideas, but hopefully you can start seeing how this could lead to a growing body of knowledge and understanding.

How to fund it

For starters, the first test line for school of mines students could probably be had quite cheap - school of mines students will provide much of the design and experimentation and labor, as they build out their streetcar-building curriculum.

What to buy

Off the top of the head:

struts, electrical, concrete, trollies, repair equipment infrastructure, powerhouse buildings, PedX materials, paints, etc

It’s not cheap, but I think one could arrange to purchase the raw materials, turn them over to School of Mines students, support them as much as possible from Coors’ staff (to teach all sorts of stuff), and, in letting the students plan it out and execute it, it would be possible to end up with a functioning screetcar line.

For starters, steel railway. Steel isn’t insanely expensive. I asked a friend who used to do commercial steel sales in Colorado - he would sell the rolls of steel that would be fabricated/worked into other forms, but he’s got lots of good information. Copy/pasting from some emails:

Looks like ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) recommend a specific rail for light rail applications after a quick search. The steel is a 900A/1100 steel grade.

There’s lots of different groups that purport to sell this kind of rail. Examples:

One could get the steel and start laying it, while a different group works on the trolleys or the cars that will go on top.

I feel like building it as cheaply as possible, with a goal of maximizing speed-of-learning, would be the prudent option.

Streetcar Inspiration

Here’s some inspiration.

Romanian Mocănița railways on 735mm gauge running Ford Transit (?) minivans are cool but here's a Myanmar 610mm gauge mining rail running a converted 1955 Hino diesel buss. #TrainTwitter https://t.co/AaeaFW9Z70 https://t.co/XYmkFCK91y
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) March 17, 2022

I finally downloaded TikTok specifically so I could share this pic.twitter.com/wHZGorDwdp
— Jane Lyons (@janeplyons) March 11, 2022

Like many things, it’s best to click around and load your mind up on examples of this kind of thing done well, and how streetcars might interact with their environment (and vice versa).

For example, because of how accessible streetcars make distances previously considered far away, a certain style of human relationships tend to spring up adjacent to the streetcar line.

These relationships tend to result in a built environment that makes a more ‘intensive’ use of the land.

The I Am A Mayor Who Is Serious About Reducing My Town's Dependence on Fossil Fuels Starter Pack. Inquire within for more details. pic.twitter.com/MaQTSdkmTp
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) March 13, 2022

Andy Gammon's view of Lewe's Priory in 1520. Even if you don't build the priory itself it would make a beautiful starting point for a human scaled no-car settlement for a hundred families of craftsmen, food producers and teleworkers. With ample wifi. pic.twitter.com/pU9qvTRaKV
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) March 15, 2022

Questions

what is the correct increment/size of rail line one buys? I imagine it’s a certain quantity of steel in a given track gauge.
What is the equipment required to install narrow-gauge railway
to avoid having to pre-commit to where stations will be, we make sure it’s easy to get on and off the rail even from just next to it, with no station, as long as the streetcar is stopped.
What about the effect of removing lanes (or complete streets) from free, fast-speed through-traffic? It’s a good thing

Next Steps

Submit this project for Capstone (Senior) Design Engineering project at Mines

Fixing Ford and Washington

2022-03-09T13:00:00+00:00

Do all of these, in the right order/way/buy-in. btw, i’m pretending it’s easy. it’s not trivial, but it is doable:

Step 1: Install car-friendly roundabouts targeting a ~20 mph throughput speed throughout the city and eliminate all stopsigns and stoplights

Please see about roundabouts.

It might not be possible to eliminate every stop sign and light, but I think a 90% reduction is very reasonable.

You’ll know it’s working when vehicles, with very minimal signage, comfortably and casually move through the city at a speed of about about 20 miles per hour, no matter where they’re starting and finishing their journey.

Critically, the turns/roundabouts need to function adequately in the following ways:

automobile drivers making left and right turns
automobile drivers going straight through the intersection
bicyclists making turns
bicyclists going straight
one should never have to stop completely
at night
in rush hour
in rain/heavy rain/snow/heavy snow

Here’s the complete guide to roundabouts. It’s from the Netherlands, who have refined mobility networks:

Step 2: increase friction to drivers trying to cut through Golden

Here’s how google maps “views” the primary roads through some of Golden:

And here’s Ford, which you can see very clearly is also many other big roads:

Step 4: Fix the average throughput problem on rt 6

Block off Washington over the bridge and through downtown, completely. (please see below “after” )

That’s it!

Golden before:

Golden after:

The green line would be made easy for cars to move along.

The yellow lines would indicate where “people first” road design would be used, ultimately, though it’ll take a variety of treatments to get it all safe/pleasant/usable in all conditions, but at minimum all intersections would be roundabouts.

It’s not that big of a change, to the cars. This won’t fix all the bad traffic, but it will help.

Critically, if you can naturally keep cars (and other vehicles) moving in a close-to-free-flow way, now you can loop streetcars back into the picture, because they can keep up with traffic and such

Resources worth reading

A New Old Financial Product

2022-03-06T13:00:00+00:00

I’m going to weave together talk of land value, and financing, and some of the primitives¹ around financial products.

How much would you pay for a box that lives in your mailbox and delivers $1000 on the first of every month?

Would you pay at least $5000, if you felt really confident that it worked, as expected, as advertised?

If so, you understand amortized earnings, and something called their “present value”.

Here’s the talk abstract: RailsConf CFP Draft Notes

Here’s some footnote demos. [^like-this]

Multiline footnote: ²

There’s many objections or questions that you could raise, right now, as you are reading these words. Possibly on your phone³

Useful Resources

Footnotes

I’ll be using in the sense of ‘constituent, base components’ rather than ‘backwards or colonial’ sense. ↩
This is a multi-line footnote. I can have a long single line of text cross the page and it still renders correctly. I need to hit [tab][tab] when starting another line.

feel free to include a quote!
```
{ pizza_status: :not_enough }
```
It can include all sorts of formatting! And images! ↩
I would never, ever, admit to using the bathroom and browsing my phone, saying “yeah, I’ll come back to that” and never do. ↩

About Roundabouts

2022-03-05T13:00:00+00:00

I’m desperately trying to work through a giant back-log of writings. Please see write it now for more. I’m spending only a few minutes on this, forgive my errors.

Of late, I’ve had a lot of conversations about roundabouts. I’m basically trying to explain the ways that a mobility network could be much improved, in terms of how well it does it’s job of providing various place-connecting services.

In some cases, I’m learning interesting things about them (or news about how they’re interacting with the world today, in March 2022.)

What I think should be done, from an “ecosystem” perspective

Aim to replace stop signs and traffic lights with traffic circles. This reduces the rushing and hard acceleration stuff that’s common with stop lights and the vehicle dynamics around them.

Aim to deliver a “consistent experience” for drivers navigating around Golden. A more-or-less 20-mph drive, once you’re in your car, to a near-by highway¹.

Robert Moses tried to build highways from everywhere to everywhere. He was right to pursue convenient travel, he just didn’t have a good grasp of for whom.

We’re so, so far from this reality right now.

But Josh the highways are not perfect either…

You’re right! I’ve got thoughts on fixing the highway, but might as well do this one step at a time. When there is congestion (and oh, there is congestion) roundabouts are not at fault. Roundabouts are great solutions to part of this complicated puzzle we’ve got here.

I’ll talk about congestion at some point. Read Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking until then.

News and articles

These Americans Are Just Going Around in Circles. It Helps the Climate. An Indiana city has the most roundabouts in the country. They’ve saved lives and reduced injuries from crashes — and lowered carbon emissions.

The above NYT article. This is how I read the occasional NYT article:

curl -L https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/climate/roundabouts-climate-emissions-driving.html -o nyt.html 
open nyt.html

My own mapping projects

Rails, Leaflet, GIS stuff

Mostly, these are so I can get kick the tires on some software-related challenge, but here’s a link to an intersection that would be well served by a tiny traffic circle:

https://leaflet-gis-rails-practice.herokuapp.com/point_of_interests/4

OpenStreetMaps, Strava API, polylines

Examples of “good” and “bad” traffic circles

There are MANY kinds of traffic circles, they have tradeoffs in size, cost, speed, experience, etc.

There’s also a lot about traffic circles that isn’t really “the job” of the traffic circle, like “how fast is the vehicle going when it approaches a traffic circle”. If a car is going “too fast”, the traffic circle might not be great, so the stuff that kinda… “connects” traffic circles to each other (and to other non-traffic-circle-things) matters.

Examples of some nice traffic circles

I’ll get pictures at some point

examples of not-nice traffic circles

i’ll get pictures at some point

Traffic circles can be very low-key, or intense

low

as simple as a tire on the ground, or a rock, or a tree, in the middle of a small intersection
https://www.strava.com/activities/6759764602

Medium

a “square” of at least a few feet, or maybe a casual larger circle

High

something intense, multiple lanes for vehicle traffic. The throughput-per-minute probably isn’t very good, the rest of the network is strained, it’s a bandaid.

Anything with two+ lanes counts as intense, IMO. I don’t really like “intense” traffic circles that much, or, at least, you and I probably agree about things that are not great about them:

Acoustic benefits

Traffic circles, embedded in healthy networks, don’t require much breaking or accelerating, and they do it in a “gentle” way. Much less vehicle noise, because stop lights and stop signs invite a LOT of aggressive acceleration.

Anyone that lives within a few hundred yards of that intersection is affected by it. Anyone who lives near ANY intersection like this, it invites constant noise, and when the noise isn’t constant, it’s punctuated by a distinctive sound of vehicle acceleration. Again, personally, might not be you in your vehicle, but someone with a loud car is accelerating hard out of that intersection, it’s ever-present.

The volume and interruption far exceeds any noise coming from people. (Sound system, crowds) and I wish I could petition for “noise treatment” around roads that caused excessive DB readings alongside the road.

Safety and urgency and rushing

I think that when people look at these pictures, they see what’s in the screenshot. Concrete, lots of space, lots of clutter with this “traffic circle” idea.

What I’d rather you think about is what it is like using this intersection in the following permutations. There are at least nine:

At all times of day
In the normal varieties of local weather
In the normal patterns of seasonal use
with a normal distribution of ages, abilities, incomes, etc

For example, each of these red lines indicates a turning direction someone has to do that is at least occasionally dangerous, given sight-lines and traffic speeds. The green boxes represent where we could consider adding traffic circles:

Some of these ‘simpler’ intersections could be mostly ‘fixed’ with a small-to-medium temporary/home-made-but-beautiful traffic circle.

Here’s a system-wide example of what the “feel” of a system-wide rollout of traffic circles could be. Remember, aiming for really fast, consistent, smooth travel-times, for everyone. Never coming to a full stop, never feeling like they have to rush².

Well-designed and well-varied traffic circles (and things around traffic circles) make for pleasant and smooth driving for drivers. It’s really important to hear, clearly, that this is an improvement for drivers!

Tactical Urbanism Adjacent Concepts/news

invisible-women-inspired data collection

If ever there was a canon for a modern, earnest-effort desire to participate well in the conversation, I feel like Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is a good choice.

I’m happy to hear your comments and criticisms, and if you tell me you’ve read the book or something like that, I’ll be thrilled.

FAQs

What about commercial businesses serving downtown businesses?

Lots of good solutions. I don’t really think it’s necessary to have a semi truck driving down washington, and guess what? The semi truck drivers hate being there too!

I bet we could hang out, catch the semi truck drivers as they come in, and find good ways to help them get where they need to for deliveries, in a quick and easy way. Eventually figure out how to “publish” it to other future truckers. Also, it’s hard to build a pleasant city exclusively around the needs of semitrucks, so lets wait to hear from them before making a big deal out of this.

There’s this roundabout near here that I don’t like…

That’s not a question, but I agree. I’m not sure exactly which one you’re talking about, but there are a few around here that are not great. I think it’s tricky to have two-lane roundabouts, and in general, the VAST majority would look way more low-key, like a sign in the middle of the intersection.

But what about [my neighborhood]

Good question. I live in “north Golden”, so here’s the direction I’d like my ‘hood’ to go:

I’ve lived here for a year, these roads are VERY DANGEROUS for lots of the people who use them, in many very normal conditions during the year. Roundabouts are what make things safer, smoother, more interesting, more pretty, quieter, calmer.

But what about [other thing]

Like I’ve said before, roundabouts are just one piece of the puzzle.

In summary

Everything is tradeoffs, and when things work well, a thoughtful, well-crafted traffic circle is a great way to solve a real problem, and generally everyone who uses it feels good about it.

When embedded in a healthy mobility network, a well-designed traffic circle casually allows safe travel in all directions, from all directions, for all participants, in a way that is high-throughput and low-wait-time for all users, in all conditions, at all times of day.

Safely.

I believe some of the benefits of traffic circles are illegible, but enough are legible and i’ll bet money that we’ll have a failure to disagree in any way, shape, or form, on traffic circles.

Email me if you’d like to put that to the test in a public or private way.

I’ve got thoughts on how to calculate trip-time. It’s something like: When you say "I need eggs, broccoli, and a bottle of wine", how long until you're back with those things? ↩
This ‘never fully stopping, never rushing’ rule is lovely. ↩

Write It Now

2021-10-05T13:00:00+00:00

The original post

note from October 5, 2021: This was typed up/published in about 20 minutes, took 2x as long as I wish it had. I could make it 10x better with another hour of work, but I only have 20 minutes.

I’m a fan of “conceptual frameworks”

This concept has been important to me:

I’ve referenced it, almost apologetically, in a few other things I’ve written recently.

Usually I’ve just slapped it into an email or linked from another blog post, as a bit of an “i’m sorry” for how much work I might demand from the reader, or how unpleasant or confusing what I’m writing might be.

I feel like I often self-censure in an attempt to make something “better” than it is, and in doing so, fall off the back of this curve. (or I let vague concerns about quality/execution/time delay me from writing anything, ever)

I will reference this page regularly, in some ways to act as a defense against some very obvious criticisms. IMO, I’d rather throw 10 things as the wall quickly in a week, instead of 1 thing every other week.

If I propose something that sparks “controversy”, however that is defined, I’ll gladly cross that bridge (or burn it, if need be) when I get there.

If you’re a software developer, and use Github, you are welcome to leave a comment below (the link takes you to a comment on a dedicated Github Issue page: https://github.com/josh-works/josh-works.github.io/issues/49), or on any page around here with this link. I added this comments thing only recently, and still have not scripted an API call to auto-generate a new github issue when I write a new post. So… I just don’t bother, at least some of the time.

Here’s other things I’ve written along this vein:

Read around the internet, viewed as permission/empathy:

Updates to this post

2022-06-15

I periodically re-visit and update things I’ve written in the past. This post is one of them. Sometimes I modify my writing substantially - it’s simply text files in a git repository, therefore all of what you see around here could be considered in some various form of draft.

I’ve considered adding links to every page on my website that say “click here to see prior versions of this file”. I perceive a feeling of some obligation to the reader to note every time there’s been an edit, or at least some of the time when I might edit things. But obviously fixing typos doesn’t need to be called out in detail.

Additionally, it’s sometimes fun to bury hot takes in walls of text. For example, does the following text seem sort of dry, and academic to you? It’s intentional, if it does:

In The Slaughter of Cities, the author tells a compelling tale of how one ethnic group sucessfully perpetuated ethnic cleansing upon other ethnic groups.

It’s passive voice, it’s just a link to a goodreads page for a book. It doesn’t sound as provocative as it otherwise could. So if it does/does not get the intended result, one could turn it up or down a bit. For example, how does this phrasing compare?

In The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing we read the many ways American urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 60’s were run to create ghettos and perpetuate acts of ethnic cleansing. Those people attacked essentially every non-white ethnic group they encountered, and the relevence of all this is very much in the room with us right now, in most ways that matter.’

I find writing to be trivially easy, I find writing well, however defined, to be hard. Does it spark joy? Does it record something in a way that allows someone to save time in the future? A friend recently sent me a whatsapp message that they were googling something and the top google result was an article I wrote, which indeed contained something useful to them Testing Rake Tasks in Rails. Lots around here is technical, I lean hard on ‘software norms’ for all that I do.

Jan 2024

Write Faster (sashachapin.substack.com)

Humans are naturally sense-making, story-telling creatures. We’re wired to explain ourselves and the universe, to ourselves and to each other. We’re naturally ingenious fabulists, shrewd reporters, idiosyncratic word-painters. Basically all of us have this facility.

But this ability disappears when it’s subjected to excessive scrutiny. When we start reflecting at length on what kind of story we should tell, or what kind of writer we should be, we become lost in the sea of data our senses provide us, and lose the brio of playfulness. It’s like how when you think about how you’re walking, you start walking stupid. You’ve just got to trust that you know what you’re doing: that, as a sense-making creature, you will largely make sense.

We can also be our own ‘excessive scrutinizers’. Something like this undoubtedly influences those who describe themselves as perfectionistic.

Something I love hanging out with kids is how easily they embody ‘uninhibited self-expression’. I find it healing and enthusiasm-engendering, because you can take delight in someone else taking delight and interest in their environment, experience, activity.

I’ve noticed, at times, when I simply would imagine an act of spontaneous self-expression, I would pre-emptively shut it down by imagining either vocalizable reactionary criticism or a non-response, a shun, withdrawal. The topics would span from technical (feeling embarrassed about asking something, admitting that I don’t know/couldn’t figure out something) or casual/mundane. (a comment about something in the environment, etc)

So, some of the ‘write it now’ energy I propose you/me capture is something that moves towards a healthy form of ‘uninhibited self-expression’.

Ironically, I can ‘hear’ a criticsm in my mind:

But doesn’t some of the worst parts of the internet seem to typify ‘uninhibited self-expression’?

I think of a quote I’ve heard on the expression of anger. It can be paraphrased as:

Anger is fully ‘valid’, to feel, full stop. Suppressing it, or expecting others to suppress it, is foolish. It’s as natural and healthy as sadness, or joy, or any of the other many things that we feel as people. ‘anger’ becomes a problem if it’s expressed abusively or harmfully towards others, and even in this case the issue isn’t the anger, it’s the abusive expression of it.

Someone who hits when angry doesn’t have an anger problem, they have a hitting/violence problem.

So, if one person is being cruel to someone else, via ‘uninhibited self-expression’, the problem is not the uninhibited self-expression, it’s the cruelty.

Here’s the last thing - I think good uninhibited self-expression is best experienced when you know whoever you’re expressing to feels similarly about such things. Someone needs to point towards you something that feels like a steady-enough message of ‘you are fundamentally acceptable to me, as are the ways you move through the world’. This feels like a high bar, but I don’t really think it is that hard to achieve.

Links and additional reading

There were some very lovely comments in the hackernews thread. Here’s a portion of this comment:

It’s hard because it probably won’t change the world, but it becomes much harder when shouting.

It’s entirely OK to sit and write without fanfare, we’re not wizards or witches any longer, just plain people with the same plain obligation towards the mind as towards the body: tend, feed, and regularly empty out.

If today you really gotta go write, go ahead, knock yourself out.

If tomorrow you just scribble in the margins of empty pages but nothing comes, have a bath or a nap or both, and sit again the day after.

I also find it very helpful to remember that I’m not addressing others when writing, I’m not in a possibly empty auditorium talking into the void, instead I’m reaching across time and continue a discussion I started with myself earlier, and may pick up again later.

↩

Collateralizing Mortgages and Loans With the Present Value of Rent Flow

2021-10-02T13:00:00+00:00

this is a draft document, it pairs with this Planned Unit Development application draft document

Inspiration comes from many places, but most strongly it draws heavily from Order Without Design. I’ve quoted in depth two pages below, but there is many other sections of the book germane to the topic of this page.

Summary of how a financial institution could use rent-generating property to collateralize a loan

Assess the value of a land parcel by evaluating the present value of the flow of rents generated by what ever structure they can build on this parcel.¹

A property could plausibly generate $6,000/mo in rent? (say, with six small units at $1000/mo in rent?)

That $6,000/mo or $72,000/yr could easily collateralize a $600,000 loan/mortgage/financial product especially if there is reason to think even more rent could be generated from the structures.

At this point, collateralization discussions would require a plot-by-plot evaluation of the likelihood a given structure on a given plot could generate such income streams.

A financial product “crossing the distance” between the net present value of cash, and guaranteed future income flows

The FIRE community (r/fire) has the 4% rule, which can be expressed a few different ways, but broadly it’s the expression of a relationship between the value of a given lump of cash on hand, and future risk-adjusted income flows that said lump of cash can generate.

Because of math, a guaranteed $1000/mo income is “as valuable as” a $12k/yr income, which is 4% of $300,000.

So, if I wanted to borrow $100k to do something that would have a strong probability of being capable of generating $2000/mo in rent, that is a “safe” mortgage, because even if I’m way off on the amount of rent I generate, I still will have something that is worth far more than was spent creating it. It’s an asset.

This notion all comes from the text expressed below, and other text in the same book, and other books. More on it soon.

Example 4: China’s Urban Villages (p. 293)

The following comes from page 293 of Alain Bertraud’s Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities Lightly formatted for readability.²

Legal Status of Land in Chinese Villages

As in Indonesia, many cities in China are absorbing large numbers of villages as they expand. I will use the term “urban villages” to indicate the villages surrounded by an urban area administered by a municipality.

The land occupied by these villages has a special status by law. The use of village land is controlled by a village collective, not by the municipality, although according to the constitution of China, all land belongs “to the people” (i.e., the central government).

But there is a difference between full ownership, which involves the ability to sell property, and ownership of land use rights only, which is limited to the right to develop land and to rent floor space or land to a third party.

Villagers in China are free to set their own building standards and land use; they can rent land and whatever structure they build to a third party, but they cannot sell either the structure or the land.

Only the government can acquire land from farmers by expropriation with compensation.

For Chinese farmers living in urban villages, therefore, the value of their land parcel is represented by the present value of the flow of rents generated by what ever structure they can build on this parcel.¹

Contrary to farmers living in traditional market economies, they do not have any incentive to sell their land to a developer, as the compensation price they would receive from the government is likely to be less than the capitalized value of the flow of rents. This explains why villagers in China resist selling land to the government whenever they can, and many protest forcible acquisition.³

When the built-up area of an expanding city reaches a village, the municipal government expropriates the fields around it but usually abstains from expropriating the village itself, as the compensation paid to villagers is based on a “replacement value” of the floor space demolished, while the fields are compensated based on the value of crops.

Expropriating the village and providing alternative housing units is therefore much more expensive for government than expropriating open fields.

As a result, villages are often initially spared demolition and become an enclaved urban village with a special status over the control of land use.

As a city expands, the land value increases in the villages that were initially at the fringe of urbanization, to the point of becoming higher than the compensation to be paid to farmers for whatever structures they have built.

The municipal government then tends to evict farmers after compensation or relocation and sell the land to developers. However, the process is long and cumbersome, and many urban villages survive a long time before redevelopment occurs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are you proposing a new “financial product”?

More or less, yes. Eventually something like this could be construed as an alternative to a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.

The reasons could be stated by meandering through the current state of affairs, the historical contexts and structures that made the current state of affairs most likely, and a scintillating discussion of who’s visions for the future show the most merit.

For example, I just read https://www.netinterest.co/p/financing-the-american-home. The way things are right now is strange, to say the least, and pressure is building for a good alternative that isn’t “just” a 1:1 replacement.⁴

Something much bigger needs to give, but this is a big piece of it.

I could speak at length of the intersection of Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles and lending institutions.

How would you propose ‘getting the most out of the land’?

Great question! By applying established processes to your specific bit of land.

I propose:

The Bertraud Model

Notes for myself, that I bet others will find interesting.

I have a paper, crafted a few years ago, by Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertaud.

I'll be adding many more notes in this thread, but for starters, here's the title and abstract. pic.twitter.com/FKnTvYiHtW
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 14, 2021

I need to write up an article about that, but until then, the twitter thread will have to do.

Skip straight to this page:

https://twitter.com/josh_works/status/1426952509088845830/photo/1

And this flow of rents represents an equivalent present cash value. At least one interpretation is the 4% rule in the FIRE community - “you can take, annually, 4% of your current nest egg for the rest of your life. If you’re able to live on that 4% for a year, you can quit your job tomorrow.” $2.6 million “generates” $100k/yr. A stable $1000/mo is “as valuable as” a $312,000 cash account. ↩ ↩²
AKA I shotgunned line-breaks through the document because half of us are going to read this on our phones at least twice. ↩
‘having no incentive to sell to a developer’ is why everyone interested in historic preservation will be a massive supporter of this model. This model preserves the city. ↩
To quote from that article:

This reluctance of private capital to backstop the mortgage market would recur again. It stems partly from the risk involved (30 years is a long time) and partly because having established a foothold in the market, the government’s presence makes it difficult for private capital to compete. The same issues give the the government such a dominant share of the market today. (emphasis mine) ↩

Planned Unit Design Document (work-in-progress)

2021-10-01T13:00:00+00:00

This is a draft document, meant for circulation, will evolve with time and eventually be something we bring to the City of Golden for ratification, or whatever needs to happen to get this done in this zone. This document relates to Collateralizing Mortgages and Loans With the Present Value of Rent Flow

I, Josh Thompson, owner of 621 Iowa St, with my wife and the owners and rentors of the below properties, hereby request a Planned Unit Designation from the City of Golden, in accordence to the following terms.

Dimensions/Boundaries of the PUD

Addresses included in the PUD, representing a contiguous territory and boundary.

648 Iowa St.
621 Iowa St.
623 Iowa St.
619 Iowa St.
617 Iowa St.

Here’s the specific properties, all owners and tenants of which desire to be included in the PUD:

Property Owners of the lots inside of and around the PUD

For the rest of the document, the collection of properties will be “The PUD boundary zone” or some otherwise collected group.

The owners of these included lots desire for their land to be included in this PUD, and will sign contracts or testaments to this fact if it would be helpful for obtaining this PUD.

All property owners and tenants are strongly invested in seeing this general plan be accomplished.

Zone 1: Immediately-Impacted Property Owners (Adjacent)

Nearly everyone adjacent to the designated area, and 100% of the people I’ve spoken to about this, approve of this PUD and would not take actions to prevent it from being designated as such.

Zone 2: Impacted Property Owners/Residents (nearby)

Obviously, PUDs affect far more than just the immediately-adjacent properties. If we were to take an expansionist view of affected parties, we’d need to fill in the corners of the “space”, so it would be inclusive of everyone who lived within a certain distance of a boundary of the PUD. Here is that expansionist view:

Zone 3: Affected by usage patterns

Finally, since roads are mobility networks, and neighborhoods are a common unit of analysis, not just individual lots, here’s the neighborhood inclusivity of persons who would have some vested interest in this project:

PUD Code Provisions

This PUD “application” will contain several sections, modeled roughly after the other PUD applications I could find on the City of Golden’s website:

The role of the city

The role of the City and of its Agents is limited to providing connections to the trunk city networks for transport, water, sewer, and storm drainage.

City easements

Existing city infrastructure within the boundaries of the PUD will be maintained, broadly, by a coalition between the PUD and the city. Easements currently owned by the city that extend beyond the physical boundaries of the road, sewer, and water network will be deemed unexercisable, and full possession will be remitted to the property owners.

Rights of way

The owners representing the PUD will maintain the existing roads to ensure safe and adequate mobility network through-put.

Non-vehicular rights-of-way will be decided upon and maintained by the property owners.

Summarized language, initial draft:

All language copy-pasted from Alain Bertraud, Order Without Design, pasted below.

In specific, I want to model this PUD on the Indonesian Kampung. I’ll copy-paste from the long quote, translating the described phenomina to a set of zoning rules legible to a local municipality.

As I have discussed this with neighbors (in all zones), and explained the genesis of where this language comes from, they have all eagerly endorsed the plan. To emphasize, this general approach and language has broad community support.

Below are sentences, as encountered in order, in their original form from the long quote shared below.

In these two countries, the government allowed low-income households to use the standards they could afford and to make their own trade-offs between location, road space, lot space, and floor space. The government role was limited to providing connections from these settlements to the trunk city networks for transport, water, sewer, and storm drainage.

Lots were subdivided, but always on the initiative of the original owner

adjustments can be made to plot size, width of access to individual lots, and drainage of waste water

standards were adjusted to increasing land values

A network of small roads, footpaths, and passages was maintained, reflecting the former village structure.

while the government concentrates its efforts not on housing construction but on gradually improving residential infrastructure and services to all residential settlements

Long quote from Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities, p. 287

[…]

Finally, housing supply could be greatly increased by improving the urban transport system. Areas with low demand because of poor accessibility to jobs have necessarily a low density. Improving accessibility to jobs by increasing trans port speed or introducing new transport technology should increase the de facto land supply of cities. Unless the regulatory and infrastructure housing supply constraints are removed, adding new subsidies to housing, whether supply side or demand side, would have very little effect on the welfare of the city’s lowest income households.

The above example of inclusionary zoning is not just an anecdotal illustration of a poorly designed housing policy. It represents a trend in many of the most economically successful cities in the world. The increasing regulatory frenzy that characterizes some cities like New York imposes large economic costs on the entire country. In a paper published in 2015, the economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti found that, between 1964 and 2009, the high cost of housing in some US cities relative to wages had lowered aggregate US GDP by 13.5 percent:

Most of the loss was likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Lowering regulatory constraints in these cities to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%

Many of the regulations recently introduced in cities around the world that aim to improve the housing consumption of low-income households, not only do not deliver the number of housing units promised, but also contribute to lowering the economic opportunity of the very people they are supposed to help. It is time to audit these regulations and policies, taking into account the increasingly valuable economic literature on the subject.

Cities Are Reluctant to Accept Housing Standards That Are Affordable for the Poor: The Exceptions

Cities in low-income countries, where urban migration annually adds a large number of unskilled people, cannot afford to subsidize the housing of the large number of poor. However, cities in Indonesia, using an “integration” approach to low income settlements, have been successful in absorbing new migrants into the urban labor force while maintaining an acceptable level of environmental health in the poorest neighborhoods.

In many Asian countries, large numbers of people migrating to cities have been creating dense urban villages in an urban setting but without any urban infrastructure. These small, simple structures provided the shelter these people needed at a price they could afford. It also allowed them to participate in the urban economy. However, the lack of connection to the city infrastructure soon created unacceptable sanitary conditions when these urban villages aggregated in large contiguous neighborhoods of several hundred thousand people. In addition, the lack of schools and health facilities contributed to slowing down or even prevent ing the integration of younger generations into urban society.

The predictable first reaction of governments has usually been to set minimum urbanization standards to prevent the legal construction of these unsanitary urban villages. The regulations made the situation worse, as they prevented these informal settlements from obtaining normal urban services from the municipality. They also created a risk of future demolition, which discouraged housing improvement that the households would have naturally done themselves. Eventually, many governments slowly regularized the older informal settlements in a piecemeal fashion, as is the practice in India, for instance. But the regularization of informal settlements usually had been conducted with a provision that after a set date, no more informal settlements would be regularized.

The outcome of these successive policies – first ostracism, then benign neglect followed by reluctant integration – has been disastrous. A significant share of the urban labor force, otherwise gainfully employed, live in large “informal” settlements often with unsafe water supplies, deficient sanitation, and sporadic solid waste collection. In Mumbai, one of the economic powerhouses of Asia, 60 percent of the population lives in slums.

I discuss below two case studies in Indonesia and China. **These countries, for different reasons and in different ways, took a different approach to integrating affordable low housing standards into the city infrastructure. The outcome for the poor migrant households was significantly better than in the countries where a strict regulatory approach had been followed. In these two countries, the government allowed low-income households to use the standards they could afford and to make their own trade-offs between location, road space, lot space, and floor space. The government role was limited to providing connections from these settlements to the trunk city networks for transport, water, sewer, and storm drainage.

Example 3: Indonesia’s Urban Enclaves with No Minimum Standards

In the densely populated island of Java, expanding cities absorb large existing villages, called “kampungs,” whose population then integrates rapidly into the urban labor force. The former agricultural fields are soon built on by formal developers, while new informal constructions are added in the kampungs that have been absorbed into the city. So far, this is not too different from what happens in the rest of Asia, where countries are urbanizing rapidly. There is one important difference. Indonesian kampungs always had a formal robust administrative structure based on traditional laws, and that administrative structure has been able to survive their absorption into a larger urban municipality.

Confronted with urbanization, the kampung traditional leadership organized themselves to absorb newcomers. Lots were subdivided, but always on the initiative of the original owner, and within the kampung traditional regulatory constraints and social norms. To use modern terminology, we could compare kampungs to a form of condominium association: They have their own internal regulations and norms, forming a sort of local authority at the lower level than a municipality or a ward.

One difference from a condominium is that the kampung local microgovernment also has jurisdiction over land use. Therefore, adjustments can be made to plot size, width of access to individual lots, and drainage of waste water by using traditional norms developed over centuries of practice of good neighbor rules while overruling the development standards imposed by the municipality that surrounds the kampung. Formal developers building on adjacent greenfield land, however, had to follow the municipal land use standards rules concerning land development and subdivisions.

Because the income and preferences of new settlers were well known to the original kampung inhabitants, land use standards evolved to adjust to the new economic reality facing kampungs; standards were adjusted to increasing land values, so that plots would remain affordable to newcomers, who were usually poor migrants. Because the local traditional norms were respected, it did not result in an anarchic aggregation of houses that would be wasteful of land, as often happens in spontaneous squatter settlements where migrants aggregate without forming an organized community. A network of small roads, footpaths, and passages was maintained, reflecting the former village structure.

As Indonesian cities developed, the kampungs located closer to city centers densified more rapidly, as expected by their favorable locations closer to employment. The low income of their inhabitants, the lack of access to finance, the frag mentation of properties into small lots, and the lack of access to infrastructure prevented the construction of multistory buildings. However, the subdivision of existing village lots and the narrowness of internal access streets reflected the opportunity cost of land and soon resulted in much higher densities than that of the original villages, often resulting in densities of more than 500 people per hectare.

However, this increased density has a downside. The traditional source of water and means of sanitation – consisting of shallow wells and seepage pits – became grossly inadequate to serve the new higher densities. The low absorption capacity of the traditional sanitary system transformed the kampungs into dense unsanitary slums. The traditional storm drainage network, built around former irrigation canals, was insufficient to prevent flooding during the monsoon because of enhanced impermeability of the area caused by urbanization.

Innovative Housing Policy Concentrating Subsidies on Infrastructure, Not on Housing Structure

So far the history of the Indonesian kampungs does not appear to be very different from that of informal settlements in many other developing countries. What made a difference was a decision taken in 1969 by the government of Indonesia to concentrate its resources on the improvement of the kampungs’ infrastructure without trying to remove or restructure the existing housing, however small or inadequate it was. The provision of urban infrastructure and services to kampungs was called the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP). Compared to the prevailing housing policies of developing countries in the 1960s, which consisted mostly of bulldozing informal settlements to relocate their inhabitants in public housing flats, this approach was revolutionary.

And, even more exceptional, since 1969 to this day, the Indonesian government’s support for KIP has been unwavering, in spite of political upheaval and constitutional changes. The government housing policy objective consists of allowing the poor to settle in and around existing villages at the standards of their choice, while the government concentrates its efforts not on housing construction but on gradually improving residential infrastructure and services to all residential settlements. The policy has proved largely successful. The living and sanitary standards in most kampungs of Indonesia are far above what is found in informal settlements in countries with similar GDPs.

No kampung was ever bulldozed. No large groups of households were promised free housing. No large central government institution has tried to replace the many small KIP contracts for civil work on infrastructure in kampungs with larger contracts involving the construction of a massive program of public housing.

Operationally, the KIP continues to provide financial and technical assistance to the existing kampungs’ traditional administrative structure to build connections to the municipal water supply network, to pave foot paths, to build drains using existing rights-of-way, to establish a system of solid waste collection that feeds into main collection bins that are part of the municipal solid waste collection system. The maintenance of the internal network and waste collection was and to this day is managed by the kampung community itself, with some financial assistance from the municipal government. The decentralization of decision making and the participation of the communities were embedded in the KIP from the beginning.

The KIP has been complemented with citywide investments in transport and most importantly for Southeast Asia, in storm drainage networks to prevent periodic flooding in residential areas

Indonesia, with a GDP per capita of US$10,500 in 2015, remains a lower-middle-income country, according to the World Bank. The overall standards of living reflect this income category. However, because the government concentrated its scarce resources on providing urban infrastructure to all urban residents, instead of increasing the housing consumption of a few poor households selected by lottery for public housing, every poor Indonesian received benefits. And these benefits increase over time. The government focus on infrastructure assistance allowed households to use their own resources to invest in their own housing, either as self-occupied dwellings or as investment in rental housing. The housing standards, defined as the size and quality of the structure, may therefore vary from very low to good in the same neighborhood, but access to safe water, sanitation, education, and health is ensured for all.

The demand-driven land use standards allowed by regulations in Indonesia are illustrated by the site plans of two neighborhoods in Surabaya, Indonesia, as surveyed in 2010 (figure 6.24). On the left in the figure, a kampung site plan shows the variety of plot and housing sizes that are possible in the same neighborhood. Some structures located in the back of lots facing the main passageways are very small and of poor quality, but they have access to safe water and sanitation. They have also access to the same schools and health facilities as their more affluent neighbors.

TODO: ADD PICTURES FROM BOOK

The road system allows only emergency and construction vehicles but is adequate for local motorcycle and pedestrian traffic. On the right in the figure, a site plan designed by a formal developer, which shows a different, more standard type of residential layout with much less variety in lot size and more house area, reflecting middle-class standards. homogeneity in house area, reflecting middle-class standards.

Kampung Integration Policy Has Successfully Provided a Flow of Low-Income Housing

Because the kampung boundaries have always been protected since Indonesia started its rapid urbanization, kampungs are found in every neighborhood of Indonesian cities. Consequently, kampungs are always located side by side with commercial areas and higher-income areas, providing a socially desirable income mix at the neighborhood level. Because kampungs and middle-class areas share the same trunk infrastructure for water and sanitation, little discrimination is possible in public investment.

I have observed kampungs’ evolution and improvement on a regular basis, since my first work trip to Indonesia in 1977. Many housing units in kampung areas look more middle class than low income. This reflects the increase in house hold incomes in Indonesia over this period. The inability to use a car as a means of transport in kampungs (because of the narrowness of the streets) prevents any large displacement of the poor from the best-located kampungs. The low road standards are the best guarantee against massive gentrification.

Some households that have reached sufficiently high incomes are likely to leave the kampung and move into formal development neighborhoods. This movement creates vacancies in the kampungs that are immediately filled with holds who rent or buy a dwelling. Low-income households do not need to be on poorer a waiting list and do not have to submit a proof of their income to buy or rent in house a kampung. Expansion zoning plans are reserving land around existing kampungs located in the periphery to ensure a flow of new low-income housing in the future.

The Indonesia kampungs and the KIP program demonstrate that it is possible for a government to provide large benefits to its large low-income population without creating long waiting lists. It shows that allowing standards to adjust and, consequently, population densities to float, not only provides affordable housing but also improves the city structure by allowing higher densities in areas accessible to jobs.

Alain Bertraud’s specific feedback on this document

I (Josh) am friends with Alain and Marie-Agnes Bertraud, the authors of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.

When I sent him a draft of this document, Alain said:

Your proposed PUD is an imaginative adaptation to a Colorado subdivision of the Kampung and Chinese urban village concept described in my book.

I hope that it gets approved under Colorado law!

I hope that other people will also imitate the idea with some variations, ensuring constant adaptation to changing socio-economic conditions.

This new way of changing land use initiated by current occupiers would be a wonderful escape from the arbitrary rigidity of existing zoning laws, which prevent demand-driven land use adaption.

Your preliminary financial calculation also demonstrates that it is possible to have an excellent financial return by unit of land while creating affordable housing units at standards that are acceptable to the end-user.

emphasis mine

FAQ

This document prompts many questions. If you have any, consider leaving a comment below, or shoot me an email about it, or text me, or whatever. I’ll update it accordingly.

What exactly is a PUD again?

TL;DR: A “Planned Unit Development District” is a legal document, enacted via a political process¹ by which the City approves of modifications to the existing rules and regulations, as applied to a specific piece of land.

The Planning and Zoning Office of Golden defines a PUD as:

(1) The PUD district permits the community and economic development of land which is suitable in location and character for the uses proposed as unified and integrated developments in accordance with detailed development plans. The PUD district also provides for specific land uses not permitted in other zone districts. The PUD district is intended to provide a means of accomplishing the following objectives:

(a) To provide for development concepts not otherwise permitted within standard zone districts.

(b) To provide flexibility, unity and diversity in land community and economic development, resulting in convenient and harmonious groupings of uses, structures and common facilities; varied type design and layout of housing and other buildings; and appropriate relationships of open spaces to intended uses and structures.

(c) To provide for the public health, safety, integrity and general welfare, and otherwise achieve the purposes as provided for within the Planned Unit Development Act of 1972, Title 24, Article 67, Colorado Revised Statutes 1973, as amended.

(d) To provide for phased development, the more efficient use of land and the public and private services needed therefor, and reflect changes in the technology of land development.

(e) To provide for land development flexibility in dwelling type, bulk, density, intensity and open space, as a policy which Golden wishes to encourage; and, as a corollary, regulate certain proposed land development which would distort the objective of Golden’s zoning.

(f) To encourage integrated planning in order to achieve the above purposes.

(2) Uses within a PUD development may be multiple in nature and may include uses not otherwise permitted within the same zone district. The location and relationship of these uses shall be as established in and conform to the policies and standards contained within the comprehensive plan and other appropriate adopted and approved plans, including but not limited to locational criteria within that comprehensive plan.

So why do you want to get this collection of lots declared a PUD?

Look at reason 18.28.300.1.a:

The PUD district is intended to provide a means of accomplishing the following objectives:

To provide for development concepts not otherwise permitted within standard zone districts.

I’ve got some development concepts not otherwise permitted within standard zone districts. Full stop. That’s why I want the PUD. I choose to not give up on what I want to accomplish because it’s not currently permitted on my lot.

For example - I’d love for there to be a vegetable stand that is sometimes operating on my street. I’d gladly build a space for someone, and let them operate it out of my lot. That structure, and that business, would be so illegal under current rules people laugh at me for even wanting to do this. I’m not afraid to look stupid, so here I am.

Who’s involved? Are you trying to get other people’s property rezoned out from under them?

Nope. Everyone involved is strongly supportive. That means, at minimum:

The owners of all involved lots
If there are tenants/renters, the renters are strongly supportive
Many, many neighbors adjacent to the PUD, along Iowa St, Ford St, Washington St, and more

Once I know what sort of formal attestations of support I need to be able to demonstrate, and who I need it from, I’ll obtain it.

If it’s people signing a document, they’ll sign a document.

If it’s people showing up at a hearing, they’ll show up at a hearing.

If, for political reasons, from the perspective of Zonning, Planning, or City Council, it is advantageous for more or less people/lots to be included within the zone of the PUD, I’ll adjust accordingly.

There are many, many good things that will come about for the residents within and adjacent to the PUD, when this goes through.

Why are you trying to get a PUD? Why not build to the existing code?

I desire flexibility more than almost anything else, so I (and my neighbors) can iterate and experiment with things, and unlock traditional financing opportunities based off our land.

We cannot finance development projects in a reasonable way, because we cannot use fractions of our land as collateral, which is a deviation from how land has traditionally been used.

I spoke with a land-use lawyer at Fox Rothschild about this, she agreed that a PUD made the most sense for the overall direction I’m trying to go.

Part of the problem with building to the current code is that the first step of every building project is to get permission for the project from the city, which requires that you submit a plan for the finished project.

I’m a software developer. Modern zoning forces all development projects into a “waterfall” project management strategy.² This PUD basically allows for a property owner to adapt an agile project management approach³.

What do you want to eventually build?

Critically, I am not quite sure. Once the City approves of the PUD, I’ll start building out projects. Nearly everything I’ll do, I plan on doing myself or with just a small group of people. I’ll GC my own projects, I’ll QA my own projects, and I’ll manage everything I build.

I want to aid the neighborhood in implementing best-practices from:

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
The Timeless Way of Building
the vast “sustainable architecture” resources out there

Sequential approval starting with: planning department, then going to planning commission, and finally to city council ↩
AKA “the linear sequential lifecycle model”. The entire software development industry jokes about the insanity of having the finished product spec’d out, and then building that, regardless of what you learn/uncover/discover along the way. “Agile” is what everyone tries to do today, and I refuse to apply known-bad planning processes to my own property. ↩
“Agile” software development is… complicated. There’s a famous and rather nostalgia-inducing website that outlines the principles behind the agile manifesto. Check it out. ↩

Migrating my Jekyll site to Netlify

2021-09-26T13:00:00+00:00

Troubleshooting Netilify deploy

Ugggh I moved intermediateruby.com to Netlify a few months ago in like 10 minutes, so my primary site, josh.works, should take maybe 20, right?

I’m a few hours deep. Here’s what I get when Netlify tries to build:

I should have done the following first, instead of last:

58:21 AM:   1. Build command from Netlify app                             
58:21 AM: ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
58:21 AM: ​
58:21 AM: $ bundle exec jekyll build
58:22 AM: Configuration file: /opt/build/repo/_config.yml
58:22 AM:             Source: /opt/build/repo
58:22 AM:        Destination: /opt/build/repo/_site
58:22 AM:  Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
58:22 AM:       Generating...
58:23 AM:                     ------------------------------------------------
58:23 AM:       Jekyll 4.2.0   Please append `--trace` to the `build` command 
58:23 AM:                      for any additional information or backtrace. 
58:23 AM:                     ------------------------------------------------
58:23 AM: ​
58:23 AM: ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
58:23 AM:   "build.command" failed                                        
58:23 AM: ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
58:23 AM: ​
58:23 AM:   Error message
58:23 AM:   Command failed with exit code 1: bundle exec jekyll build
58:23 AM: ​
58:23 AM:   Error location
58:23 AM:   In Build command from Netlify app:
58:23 AM:   bundle exec jekyll build
58:23 AM: ​
58:23 AM:   Resolved config
58:23 AM:   build:
58:23 AM:     command: bundle exec jekyll build
58:23 AM:     commandOrigin: ui
58:23 AM:     publish: /opt/build/repo/_site
58:23 AM:     publishOrigin: ui

So, first thing I did was go into the build settings and update the build command, to append --trace to it:

Now I get:

10:18:23 AM: $ bundle exec jekyll build --trace
10:18:23 AM: Configuration file: /opt/build/repo/_config.yml
10:18:23 AM:             Source: /opt/build/repo
10:18:23 AM:        Destination: /opt/build/repo/_site
10:18:23 AM:  Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
10:18:23 AM:       Generating...
10:18:24 AM: /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-crosspost-to-medium-0.1.16/lib/jekyll-crosspost-to-medium.rb:44:in `generate': MediumCrossPostGenerator: Environment variables not found (ArgumentError)
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:193:in `block in generate'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:191:in `each'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:191:in `generate'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/site.rb:79:in `process'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/command.rb:28:in `process_site'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb:65:in `build'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb:36:in `process'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/command.rb:91:in `block in process_with_graceful_fail'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/command.rb:91:in `each'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/command.rb:91:in `process_with_graceful_fail'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/lib/jekyll/commands/build.rb:18:in `block (2 levels) in init_with_program'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/mercenary-0.4.0/lib/mercenary/command.rb:221:in `block in execute'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/mercenary-0.4.0/lib/mercenary/command.rb:221:in `each'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/mercenary-0.4.0/lib/mercenary/command.rb:221:in `execute'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/mercenary-0.4.0/lib/mercenary/program.rb:44:in `go'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/mercenary-0.4.0/lib/mercenary.rb:21:in `program'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/gems/jekyll-4.2.0/exe/jekyll:15:in `<top (required)>'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/bin/jekyll:23:in `load'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/bin/jekyll:23:in `<main>'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/bin/ruby_executable_hooks:22:in `eval'
	from /opt/build/cache/bundle/ruby/2.5.0/bin/ruby_executable_hooks:22:in `<main>'

Nailed it - a gem I hardly use is missing an environment variable. I’m just going to delete it for now, and re-try.

[…]

Not worth trying to clean out the gem, I did git rebase -i HEAD~~ to delete the last commit (deleting the crosspost-to-medium gem), and instead added the environment variables to Netlify.

I just copied/pasted from my .evn (A hidden file, it’s not tracked in Git, but I copied/obfuscated the values into env.sample in this commit)

…

Huzzah! The site builds. We’re good to go.

Parking in Golden

2021-08-22T13:00:00+00:00

Parking in Golden is broken.

This deeply broken parking situation causes vehicle and pedestrian traffic in Golden to break, in the same way that if a machine on a manufacturing line breaks, adjacent components need to stop, or it will also malfunction.

The topic of parking (at least in the way I’ll be talking about it) cannot be detangled from other components of physical and social characteristics of our lives. The system of parking, and the system in which parking is only a component, is a complex, reactive system. ¹

As is true for many complex, reactive systems, it’s important to obtain a general understanding of the “ground truth”, and if possible a wide understanding of the topic.

I’m defining parking as:

That which relates to the storage of vehicles

And it relates to the following “kinds” of parking:

short-term parking like how you park your private vehicle when you travel to a grocery store or a park, or a nice restaurant in a big city
long-term parking like how you might park your vehicle in a garage, driveway, or street, at night or for a day, week, or month
commercial parking like how commercial vehicles (semi-trailers, heavy commercial vehicles, light commercial vehicles, company cars, company trucks, delivery vehicles, and more) fulfill their purpose, be it transporting materials, tools, people, parcels to any specific place for any particular purpose for any particular length of time

Parking has different degrees of urgency across different degrees of time. More on that later.

Wait. Who are you? Why are you talking about parking?

I’m Josh. I live in Golden, Colorado, and my life, and the lives of everyone who lives in Golden, Denver, the front range, a city, the country, and the world, are being ruined by mismanaged parking.²

I talk about parking (and other things related to cities) a lot. If you’ve spent any time with me, you’ve probably heard me talk (or rant. Sorry.) about things related to cities. I’m also extremely invested in the city of Golden, and am figuring out how to invest even more in the city.

Golden’s mismanagement of parking is ruining the lives of the entire city, and everyone who travels to the city, and affects not just persons who drive, but persons who cannot drive, even if they wished to, be they too young (children), too elderly, and persons who would rather not drive, for any particular reason.

If you summed up all the people who could fit into each of the above categories, there would be tens of thousands of people who’s wellbeing has been diminished in just the last year by the City of Golden failing for another year to manage parking correctly.

I’ve wanted a spot where I could direct people to get several things:

a broad overview of how parking should be approached (from an academic & operational point of view)
a broad overview of evidence that parking is indeed being quite mishandled
A few heuristics you can take forward to evaluate the parking situation in your own day-to-day (warning, you might not be able to un-read any of what you’re about to read)
an explanation of how to fix it

Eventually I’m going to be adding a TON of pictures, videos, timelapses, and more. For now, know that “parking” (that complex, reactive system) is one of the largest differences between the following pictures:

Compare these two images:

What’s true in Charleston, South Carolina is true in Golden, Colorado.

The Fix For Parking Problems

These two books contain 100% of the solution to the following problems in Golden:

The parking problems
the traffic problems
the “unaffordable housing” problems
the “unaffordable commercial space” problems
the homelessness problems
and more

Here’s the summary of The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup.

Donald Shoup is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research has focused on how parking policies affect cities, the economy, and the environment.

In The High Cost of Free Parking, published in 2005 and updated in 2011, Shoup recommends that cities should:

Charge fair market prices for on-street parking

Spend the revenue to benefit the metered neighborhoods

Remove off-street parking requirements.

Examining Golden-specific parking problems

Golden proudly proclaims that it has lots of free parking. Look at Golden in Google Earth. Look at how much parking it has!

open google earth (in your web browser) to Golden

Here’s what you might see:

Multiple parking garages
multiple surface parking lots
lots of curb space

MOST of the time, this parking is empty.

Then, on weekends, (and often during the week) Golden gets tons of visitors. I love that Golden gets visitors. Except it sucks for everyone (visitor and resident alike) when the parking is a disaster.

One downtown neighborhood puts “closed to non-resident” signs up, and has employees of a security company sitting in their cars at the vehicle entrances.

The remaining parking is full. stuffed to the gills.

Golden’s parking minimums (and all sorts of other anti-economic, anti-poor, originally anti-ethnic-group ‘housing minimum’ standards) kill, before pen hits paper, the concept of cheap housing.

It’s illegal to build a space for a human without building a space for a car alongside! Like, you’ll actually go to jail if you tried to do that!

If we didn’t have parking minimums, we could have small dense development, that’s cheap, and small, unlike the hulking monstrosities required to house cars.

👉 How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing: One bad policy at a time, Seattle outlawed a smart, affordable housing option for thousands of its residents.

Golden’s “housing problems” and “parking problems” comes from authoritarian high modernists who believe that political control of parking and housing is acceptable or adequate. It’s jointly some of ‘the people’ and ‘the planners’ who, if enough of them are pro-authoritarian high modernism, ensure this particular outcome.

Resources around the harms of parking minimums

Parking minimums, a thread.

Why? Because this is something many continue to approach from the perspective of "well I drive and so everywhere I go needs to have parking."

Warning: This was the subject of my master's thesis, so...
(1/16) pic.twitter.com/scC4PqW3oD
— Luke Klipp 🏳️‍🌈 (@lukehklipp) December 17, 2020

The Violence of God and the Hermeneutics of Paul

2021-08-08T13:00:00+00:00

Sometimes I (Josh) want to share around certain academic works. Sometimes its a PDF that I want someone to download and read, sometimes it’s text from a book I’ve read, and cannot otherwise get a sharable format of. So, I laboriously take photos of pages, use an optical character recognition tool to copy-paste the text from the image to my computer, clean it up, and repost it here.

What follows is an excerpt from The Work of Jesus Christ in Anabaptist Perspective: Essays in Honor of J. Denny Weaver

The Violence of God and the Hermeneutics of Paul

By Christopher D. Marshall

The jarring dissonance between the God of vengeance and violence in certain parts of the Old Testament and the God of indiscriminate love and mercy proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospels has long perplexed Christian interpreters. Echoing the verdict of many, Paul Anderson maintains that reconciling these contrasting portraits of God constitutes “the greatest theological and hermeneutical problem in the Bible.” ¹ It is a theological problem because it challenges the notion of a unitary and self-consistent divine will. It is a hermeneutical problem because it forces the question of how apparently contradictory views of God can exercise authority as equally part of sacred Scripture. It is also a moral problem, for the way believers resolve this ten sion will have implications for how they live their lives as servants of God, even if the common assertion today that violent religious texts lead directly to violent behavior must be dismissed as simplistic.²

These difficulties are not unique to Christians, of course. Jewish interpreters, too, have long wrestled with how the compassionate God of, say, Ezekiel 33 is to be reconciled with the punitive God of, for example, Numbers 16.3 But these problems of interpretation confront Christian readers in a particularly acute way in light of the theological, moral, and hermeneutical privilege which Christianity accords, at least in theory, to the Jesus tradition.

One early solution to the dilemma, proposed by Marcion and the Gnostics, was to unhook Jesus entirely from the God of the Jewish Scriptures, who was deemed to be a lesser deity. This option was roundly rejected by the early church. The heresy of ditheism not only leads to theological oblivion, it actually inscribes competitive violence in the nature of ultimate reality, something which biblical monotheism avoids. Christian orthodoxy has therefore always insisted that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ must be none other than the one true God of Israel, the Creator of all that exists.

But what does this identification tell us about God? Has God changed? Did God give up his violent ways with the advent of Christ in favor of nonviolent love? Is God’s fearsome career as a warrior over? Or does God remain fundamentally unchanged? Is God, by definition, unchangeable: the same yesterday, today, and forever? If so, what does that tell us about God’s involvement in violence? Is lethal coercion still an important part of God’s repertoire of methods for achieving saving and judging purposes in human affairs as it was in biblical times?

If the testimony of Christian history and doctrine are indicative, the latter appears to be the most common conclusion Christians have reached, since God’s use of violence has continued to be as notable a feature of the Christian story of God as it was in the earlier Israelite story of God. Much atonement theology, for instance, as Denny Weaver spells out so clearly, envisages a patriarchal God who visits punitive violence on his only son to defend his personal dignity or uphold his superior justice. Similarly the post-Constantinian church’s majority endorsement of Christian participation in war has disclosed a willingness, if not an eagerness, to equate the violent shedding of human blood with the work and will of God.

Then there is the projected violence of final judgment. Even those who feel squeamish about the idea of God using human agents to visit wrath on his enemies in present history still often espouse a concept of eschatological judgment where God, patience finally exhausted, violently destroys the wicked-or worse, callously consigns them to the everlasting violence of eternal torment. It is not uncommon even for Christian pacifists, who conscientiously renounce lethal violence themselves, keenly to anticipate God’s retribution on the un godly at the end of time. Some even argue that Christian renunciation of violence is materially dependent on the reality of God’s ultimate retributive justice on evildoers, for only an absolute confidence in God’s perfect judgment can free believers from the need to take matters into their own hands in the interim.5 Put crudely, from this perspective Christian nonviolence is sustainable only if there is a violent God giving ultimate backup.

So Christian belief and practice have not, by and large, done away with the concept of divine violence. Even peace theology has not felt the need to posit a nonviolent God. Of course, retention of a militant deity eases the hermeneutical dilemma mentioned earlier, in that the violent God of early Israel does not cease to be violent in the Christian era but merely becomes less blatantly so. Instead of regularly deputizing human agents to slay the wicked, God now largely reserves that task for God’s self at the end of time (although exceptions may apply in the event of justifiable war).

Yet arguably a theology that substitutes a conspicuously violent God with a cautiously violent God remains mired in what Walter Wink famously calls the myth of redemptive violence-the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. As long as God is understood to rely on lethal force to achieve redemptive goals, whether in present history through appointed human instruments or at the end of time by God’s own clenched fist, disturbing implications follow, and especially for Anabaptist peace theology.

One such implication is the absolutizing or deifying of violence. To reserve to God the right to use overwhelming violence is to pay violence the ultimate compliment. Violence is dignified by its association with God, and God is diminished by dependence on violence. In deed, the more violence is reserved as God’s prerogative alone, the more uniquely and terrifyingly violent God appears. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” But if frail humans are expected to feel angry without resorting to violence, why should not the same be expected of God? Is God unable to withstand the temptation to hit back? Is crushing the opposition God’s only solution?

Again, a willingness to exempt God from the normative requirement of nonviolence sustains the kind of exceptionalism that always leaves the door open for human beings to perpetrate violence on God’s behalf or approve of it when done in God’s name. As long as killing is sanctioned by God-whether now in times of war or during some future apocalyptic maelstrom – no moral condemnation can apply to those who carry out the killing.

Note, however, that whenever exceptions are permitted, there is a human propensity to expand the loophole endlessly. Each and every act of violence can be defended as a legitimate exception to the rule. Not surprisingly, it is always the perpetrators of violence, not its victims, who appeal to exceptional circumstances to legitimate their actions. Something similar happens with respect to those who cherish the expectation of God’s final destruction of sinners. They exempt themselves and their loved ones from the awaited firestorm while insisting that God’s justice requires others to be consumed by it. ³

The grounding of Christian non-retaliation on trust in God’s eschatological vengeance also has troubling corollaries. The more one waits for God’s violent intervention to rectify the world, the less incentive there is to work for peaceful change now. Indeed, it could be argued (and often has been historically) that since God is clearly not yet riled enough by sin and injustice to intervene to overturn it, the unjust status quo ought to be accepted as something God permits to exist. Christians should not then actively oppose it, for that would be to usurp God’s work. Pacifism then slides into a passivism that leaves it over to God to sort out the mess while keeping one’s own hands clean. Although John Howard Yoder rejects such quietism, this could be one way of construing (or misconstruing) his contention that Christian nonviolence bears witness to Christians relinquishing control of history. Their call is to be faithful to the slain lamb, not to be “effective” in directing historical processes, a goal which is frequently taken to justify violence and is an illusory ambition at the best of times. ⁴

Does this then mean that assuming responsibility for the direction of human history necessarily requires violence, even for God? Is violence an inescapable corollary of exercising supreme authority? Perhaps a better grounding for Christian pacifism would be the recognition that, in a real sense, humans are in charge of this world, and that it is only by emulating the nonviolent rule of God that we have any real chance of undoing the yokes of oppression and recover ing the true purpose of our existence. After noting the vast literature written on theodicy and on whether God can ever be forgiven for the atrocities permitted on his watch, such as the incineration of a five year old girl called Esther before the eyes of her parents, or the random assassination carried out by a Palestinian gunman called Omar, J. Harold Ellens comments:

I have figured out that the question is erroneous. It is not a question of justifying God or of bringing God to justice. It is not a question of forgiving God or holding God accountable. It is a matter of recognizing the limitations of God. God is not in charge of this world. We are. We should have gotten that clue at a more profound level of awareness than we seem to have done, from Genesis 1:28, where the ancient Israelite narrative informs us that God assigned us the task of dominion in this world, to bring it to its potential fruitfulness. If we do not take care of beautiful blond and blue-eyed Esther, God cannot. If we do not find reconciliation with Omar, God cannot stop the mass murders. If we do not reach beyond the alienations and transcend the terror of the terrorists, God cannot save us. ⁵

But perhaps the biggest problem with continuing to imagine a God who employs violence to advance his cause in the world is that it leads to an incoherent Christian monotheism. On the one hand, Jesus Christ is held to be the perfect revelation of the one true God. On the other hand, the God whom Jesus is said to reveal bears little resemblance to Jesus.

JESUS AS THE NONVIOLENT ICON OF GOD

The Christian story rests on two fundamental truth claims which set it apart from all other religious and ideological systems. First, it claims that the Creator God is made most fully known in the human person of Jesus Christ. If we want to know what God is really like, the New Testament authors submit, we must look at Jesus. He is the supreme benchmark for our understanding of Deity, “He is the image of the invisible God,” the apostle Paul writes, the one in whom “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” “He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.” Hebrews declares. He is also the one “through whom God created the worlds.” ⁶ “ All things came into being through him,” John’s Gospel begins, “and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” ⁷ “For in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and in visible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-all things have been created through him and for him.” Jesus, then, is both the human embodiment of God’s very being and the one through whom and for whom God created the universe.

This conviction invests the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth with unparalleled revelatory significance. When Jesus teaches and practices nonviolence, therefore, it is not enough to see it as a tactical expedient he employs because revolutionary violence against the Roman superpower was not a viable option at that time. It must be understood more profoundly as an articulation of what God is like and of how God exercises divine rule. That is why Jesus explicitly grounds his summons to enemy love and non-retaliation in the imitation of the heavenly Father, who “makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Jesus instructs his followers to conduct themselves as “children of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” They are to be merciful “just as your Father is merciful.”⁸ Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence, in other words, is predicated on the premise of a nonviolent God, a God who, as Raymund Schwager puts it, is “exactly the opposite of violence,” a God whose “limitless forgiveness and boundless love are distinct in every respect from the mechanism of violence and the vicious cycle of mutual destructiveness.”⁹ Those who claim to follow this God must therefore be nonviolent too.¹⁰

The second truth claim Christianity makes is that God has acted uniquely in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to restore the world to its originally intended state of freedom. In Jesus, God has entered fully into the human condition, shackled as it is to the power of sin and subject to the scourge of suffering and death, and has acted through him to defeat the power of evil and reconcile its victims to himself. “He has rescued us from the power of darkness,” Paul rejoices, “and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins…. For through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. “¹¹

Not only is “the blood of his cross,” by which Paul means his violent death on a Roman gallows, the decisive event that defeats evil and brings about peace, it is also the definitive revelation of what God is really like. Christian faith asserts that God is never more truly God than he is in the dying of Jesus. In the cross, as the gospel writers put it, the veil of the temple is torn in two and God stands revealed. God’s justice also stands revealed,¹² The cross shows that God’s justice is a peacemaking justice,¹³ a reconciling, restoring, and healing justice. The God who is made climactically known in the cross of Christ is a God who secures justice not by violent imposition of his will on his enemies but by freely subjecting himself in suffering love to the violent impulses of humanity to liberate creation from its bondage to violence and to restore people to relationship with God and with each other.

These, then, are the two mind-boggling assertions the New Testament authors make. They dare to propose that Jesus of Nazareth is the human face of God, “the flesh and blood embodiment of the perfections of God, and that the true character and the justice of this God are nowhere more evident than in his death and resurrection. But this is not all. From these two claims they arrive at a critically important deduction that what we learn of God in the story of Jesus is the key to understanding the meaning, inter-connectedness, and destiny of all created reality. As Ephesians states, “All things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. In him God has made known his “plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heave and things on earth. “¹⁴

What an astonishing assertion this is! All things have been created for, they are sustained by, and they find their ultimate meaning in Jesus Christ. All things are eternally imprinted with the moral character and career of the crucified and risen Lord. From this it follows that the central principle of creation is not naked power, or control, or order, or balance, but vulnerable, passionate, reconciling, self giving love, a love which subverts evil, not by an overwhelming dis play of coercive force, but by acting in amazing grace to redeem of fenders and to heal sin’s victims, and at great cost to itself. In short, the Jesus story reveals that God’s nonviolent love is the ground of the universe.

This is not a wholly new revelation, however. It is already evident in the creation narratives of Genesis. It is hugely significant that, notwithstanding the violence ascribed to God in the pages of the Bible, the canonical record opens and closes with surprisingly peaceful scenes – the two accounts of creation (Gen. 1-2) and the presentation of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21-22). Peace is both ontologically anterior to violence and eschatologically posterior to it. it. Violence has no role in God’s work of creation; it only enters into the picture later as a result of human sin and will eventually come to an end. This is quite different from other ancient Near Eastern creation myths, such as the Babylonian Emuna Elish, where creation is the result of a violent act of deicide and humans are created from the blood of the murdered god. There evil precedes good, chaos is conquered by violence, and the king serves as Marduk’s representative on earth, ruling by means of holy war. By contrast, as Walter Wink observe:

The Bible portrays a good God who creates a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is before evil. Neither evil nor violence is a part of the creation, but enter later as a result of the first couple’s sin and the connivance of the serpent (Gen. 3). A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, violence emerges for the first time as a problem requiring a solution. ¹⁵

The creation narratives, in other words, presuppose a divine ontology of peace. They portray a nonviolent God who speaks the world into existence and who makes human beings in the divine image and likeness to cultivate creation as devoted gardeners, not to pillage it as rapacious warriors. Things go badly wrong, however, and violence invades this peaceable reality. This is no minor problem that can be easily fixed. It not only escalates out of all control in the human community, it even provokes God to an act of massive counterviolence, something God apparently later regrets. Thus begins the long canonical story of divinely induced violence, a story which stands in stark contrast to what we have seen of God in the story of Jesus and cries out for some theological explanation

It is important that this explanation is theological in character, not just traditio-historical or psycho-cultural or phenomenological, be cause the canonical text is principally intended to exercise a theological role in the community that created and preserves it. The biblical traditions, for all their diversity, once gathered together as canonical Scripture, combine to tell a single overarching story about Israel, God, and the world. The texts constitute a narrative world into which readers enter, with its own plot, its own cast of characters (including God), and its own universe of meanings, a story which serves authoritatively to interpret God to Israel and Israel to itself.”In this connection it matters little whether the biblical accounts are historically reliable in all their details; of primary importance is the theological claim they make to narrate the story of God. This means that the problem of divine violence cannot be dealt with adequately simply by deeming this or that episode to be legendary or fictitious. Whether or not God actually killed the children of Egypt, the biblical story says God did. This is how the biblical writers understand the involvement of God, and it is their interpretation of God that has normatively shaped and conditioned how the subsequent community of faith (including Jesus) has apprehended God.

What is needed, then, is some explanation for God’s violence that both accords with the inner logic of the plotted narrative and that ac counts for why it is that God is characterized in this way, especially when there are strong indications at the outset of the story that the Creator God works by peaceable means. Given the many incidents of divine violence that follow, it is also worth pondering how Jesus could possibly have conceived of God as being unfailingly kind to the ungrateful and wicked when he knew full well that within the biblical drama God discriminates in favor of friends, bears grudges against opponents for generations, and visits retribution on sinners.

THE VIOLENCE OF GOD IN SCRIPTURE

The Hebrew Bible has a reputation for being one of the bloodiest works in existence, Firmly fixed in the popular mind is the image of the “Old Testament God” as a God of war and destruction, a brutal, reactive, and ruthless deity who brooks no rivals and leaves no infraction unpunished. Whether this menacing reputation is fully deserved is debatable. Patricia M. McDonald argues that there is far less violence in the Hebrew Scriptures than is generally supposed and that the deepest concern of the biblical authors is to encourage ways of living that overcome violence and foster compassion. The problem with any textual portrayal of violence, she suggests, is that it tends to have a disproportionate impact on readers. Violent language and imagery take over our imagination and absorb our interest, so that we “find” more violence than is actually there.

This rhetorical impact of the violence also diverts attention away from other themes in the text that are often of more fundamental importance to the author. The peripheral thus becomes central and the central peripheral. Nor, McDonald adds, does all the violent imagery used in the Bible function to endorse actual violence. The specifically military imagery for God, for example, is plainly metaphorical. God’s defeat of Egypt may be spoken of as a triumph of war,33 but in practice it was achieved by non-military terms. Although Yahweh uses “weapons” to overthrow his enemies, his weapons are the forces of the natural order. The language is analogical, not literal, although, as McDonald concedes, this choice of military analogies did encourage dangerous perceptions about God to emerge.

As helpful as these considerations are, the fact remains that the biblical narrative attests to a deep and pervasive association between God and deadly violence. The connection between them is varied and complex. Sometimes God resolutely opposes the use of violence and identifies wholly with the victim. At other times God is portrayed as the perpetrator of violence, either by direct fiat or by organizing and sanctioning others to visit judgment on a disobedient people. Often it is precisely God’s capacity for superior violence that serves to establish Yahweh’s credentials as the only true God. Violence thus emerges as the most frequently mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible. Schwager has counted some 600 passages in which violence is recorded and at least 1,000 verses in which God’s violence is de scribed. In some 100 passages God expressly commands people to kill others, and in some stories God tries to kill people for no apparent reason.4 God’s violence is particularly evident in the wilderness stories. It has been calculated that in the forty year period between Israel’s exodus from Egypt and their entry to Canaan, the Lord executes at least 30,000 of his own people. 35 Three times Yahweh threatens to annihilate them entirely, and on a number of occasions strikes them with plagues as he did the Egyptians,37 Even greater in number than such narrative acts of violence are the potential acts of violence commanded in the enforcement of the laws of the Sinai covenant.38

The blood of Israel’s enemies runs even more freely. Yahweh smites innocent Egyptian children in Exodus 12, drowns the Egyptian army in the sea in Exodus 14-15, opens up the ground to swallow the Korahites in Numbers 16, orders the impaling of Baal worshippers in Numbers 25, calls for reprisal on the Midianites in Numbers 31, and orders the conquest of Canaan in Joshua 1. The most chilling of all biblical texts to do with war and violence are those that refer to the herem or “ban,” under which all human beings among the defeated are “de voted to destruction,” sometimes at God’s explicit command.39 Emotions of pity are expressly forbidden in such cases.40 Susan Niditch identifies two main ideologies undergirding and justifying this practice of genocide. In one, the ban is understood as a sacrificial offering to God, which presupposes a God who appreciates human sacrifice. In the other, the ban is viewed as an act of divine justice upon idolatry, which was thought to threaten Israel’s own purity and survival. In both cases mass slaughter is a means of gaining God’s favor.

It is possible to identify certain ameliorating features in the institution of herem. McDonald mentions, for example, its role in discouraging the use of war purely for plunder, since all captured possessions were to be destroyed.42 Niditch detects a paradoxically high view of human dignity implicit in the ban. The “terrifying complete ness and fairness” of the ban’s indiscriminate massacre “may be viewed as admitting more respect for the value of human life than other war ideologies that allow for arbitrary killing of soldiers and God is still cast in the role as author or condoner of immense brutality, civilians. “43This sounds like special pleading. But even if it were true, the instigator of repeated episodes of ethnic cleansing, the perpetrator of what today would be termed crimes against humanity. Accord ing to one critic, the God of Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Joshua is little better than a violent, murderous, genocidal land thief. “Troubling images of God cascade from biblical texts like waterfalls after a violent storm. God’s repugnant words and pathological behavior are so widespread as to be considered normative behavior for God!”44 This judgment may be one-sided. But the fact that it can seriously be made at all is testimony to the extent to which God is deeply embroiled in gut-wrenching brutality in many parts of the biblical narrative.

The most graphic accounts of divinely approved violence are set in the context of Israel’s early history, even if they were composed at a later stage. With the establishment of the monarchy, the pure ideal of holy war comes to an end and Israel learns to rely on conventional military might. War still carries a sacral element to some extent, but, as Mark McEntire explains “God is removed from the battlefield and eventually closed off in the temple along with the ark… the of God is no longer an essential element of a battle.” 45 In later presence prophetic and apocalyptic literature, emphasis shifts from the mediation of divine violence through historical agents to the expectation of God’s eschatological victory, which is portrayed in language no less violent than is found in Deuteronomy and Joshua. The Psalms also celebrate and anticipate the coming of the “God of salvation” who will “shatter the heads of his enemies” and will enable his own people to “bathe their feet in blood” and to feed their enemies to their dogs.46

Not that God ever deserts the cut and thrust of present history. McEntire points out that the Hebrew canon (unlike the Greek canon and Christian Old Testament canon) closes with 2 Chronicles 36, which tells of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Although the term herem is not used, the many parallels between 2 Chronicles 36 and Joshua 6 give the unmistakable impression that the city has fallen because God has instituted a ban on Israel. The classical prophets toyed with the possibility of Yahweh turning against Israel for breaking covenant,47 now it has happened. Yahweh disowns his people and brings devastation upon the holy city. No mercy is shown to its inhabitants; the chosen people are either killed or carried off into exile. “Yahweh begins the story as the compassionate, patient God of a disobedient people. As the story progresses, Yahweh becomes a wrathful avenger whose actions are confused with and indistinguishable from those of an earthly tyrant.” 48

To be sure, bringing such episodes of divine violence into the limelight in this way is potentially misleading, for there is quite another side to God’s character in the biblical accounts as well. Hosea 11, for example, depicts Yahweh in emotional turmoil, torn apart by conflicting feelings of outrage at his people’s sin and tender compassion for their plight, contemplating terrible punishment but recoiling in horror from the prospect of executing fierce anger against them and promising never again to destroy Ephraim. Elsewhere too God is revealed as a God of mercy, forgiveness, and love, a God who displays a special concern for the most vulnerable members of the covenant community, a God who liberates the poor from oppression and who heals and restores the victims of violence. Indeed, this biblical notion of a God who sides with the weak and the downtrodden is radically different from that which prevailed in the ancient Near East, where the gods inaugurated and upheld the hierarchical structures of wealth and power.50

Even so, God’s concrete actions at times belie God’s words. Yahweh appears not only as the God of victims but also as the God who devours victims. How the head-smashing God of the historical narratives, the psalms, and the prophets can be reconciled with the nonviolent God disclosed by Jesus still needs to be answered.

HERMENEUTICAL STRATEGIES

Many different interpretive strategies have been employed to try to resolve this problem. One common tactic is to refuse to question anything God does, as a matter of principle, for God’s ways are higher than our ways and God’s thoughts higher than ours (Isa. 55:9). God is sovereign and holy; it is simply wrong for human beings as mere creatures to subject God’s actions to moral scrutiny.

But this pious concern to save God from criticism ducks the problem. Even Abraham was prepared to challenge God’s projected violence against the inhabitants of Sodom on the ground that the judge of all the earth has a moral obligation to abide by the principle of justice. If God’s deeds are beyond all moral valuation, so that nothing God ever does can be called bad, then it is equally true that nothing God does can ever be called good, and no way finally exists to differentiate between God and the Devil. There is also no ground for challenging religious zealots today who cast themselves in the role of human agents of divine wrath on the basis that whatever God is said to have done in sacred Scripture must be inherently good.

Another common strategy is to offer pleas of mitigation on God’s behalf, to find in each episode of bloodletting a justifiable reason for divine judgment. The dispossession and extermination of the Canaanites, for example, is seen as fitting punishment for their idol try and wickedness. It is also often observed that given Israel’s precarious predicament in a hostile world, God simply had to employ lethal violence to safeguard the chosen instrument of salvation for the benefit of us all. God’s violence is an example of “good violence rather than “bad violence” because it is a redemptive or salvific violence 52

Such appeals to mitigating circumstances, however, come perilously close to an ends-justifies-the-means style of moral reasoning It is true that the conquest of Canaan is sometimes defended in the biblical text as deserved retribution for the idolatry of the inhabitants. But the justice of the penalty is by no means self-evident. As McEntire points out, “The inhabitants of Jericho, and Canaan in general, are never accused of anything other than two dubious transgressions. They happen to live in the land Yahweh promised to Abraham and they do not exclusively worship a god, Yahweh, who has never been revealed to them.” McEntire notes that “As punishment for these transgressions, they become victims of destructive violence.” The net result is “people minding their own business becoming dead so that nomads can become farmers.”54

It is also true that the continued existence of Israel as a holy people is of overriding importance to the story of salvation and that God favored their interests for the ultimate good of all humanity. But it is extremely doubtful that every episode of divinely sanctioned blood shed was critical to the maintenance of Israel’s national and religious integrity. Sometimes relatively minor infractions attract massive retribution while at other times mercy is extended to serious breaches of covenantal boundaries. It also needs saying that the ease with which some interpreters defend the necessity and morality of the “redemptive violence” employed in biblical history attests to an imaginative failure on their part to recognize the hideous suffering endured by its victims. Christian readers recoil in horror at the Christmas story of Herod’s slaughter of the infant boys in Bethlehem, yet often barely flinch when reading of God ordering the massacre of the Amalekite infants, and some two centuries after the offense for which the people were allegedly being punished.” Readers may delight in the sparing of Rahab and her family when Joshua “fit de battle of Jericho” but spare no thought for all the other inhabitants of the city who were devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys” (Josh. 6:21).

A third interpretive strategy is to sanitize the real-life violence of the biblical text by allegorizing or spiritualizing it. There is a long and venerable approach to biblical interpretation that is so convinced of the text’s divine origins that where the literal sense of the words pro duces impossible results, one must look for a deeper allegorical meaning, a meaning, as Origen put it, that is “worthy of God.” By this method stories of war and mayhem are transposed into uplifting moral and spiritual truths. But despite its impressive pedigree, allegorization is hardly a viable method in the modern world for dealing with offensive texts. Moreover, even if the allegorical meaning may be counted as worthy of God, the literal historical meaning remains deeply problematic.57 Allegorists and Sunday school teachers may find comforting spiritual messages disclosed by violent texts, but the texts themselves were initially intended to portray and validate actual bodily suffering and death.

Yet another hermeneutical strategy is to dismiss the violent portrayals of God in the biblical text as historically and theologically false. They are the product of the biblical authors projecting onto God their own violent fantasies and vengeful impulses, seeking to justify human atrocities by claiming God decreed them. God thus gets the blame for what in reality were acts of human malice. This means that rather than blithely accepting the truthfulness of everything the text says about God as guaranteed by divine revelation, it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish the voice of divine truth from the voice of human self-deception.58 Nelson-Pallmeyer makes this point with uncompromising clarity:

The Bible tells us more about human beings than it does about God, and it does so even when it claims to be talking about God. Revelation within the biblical story, in my view, is rare, and often overwhelmed by distorted human projections. The Bible is both sacred and dangerous. It is sacred because God is revealed partly within the experiences of those responsible for its pages. That is why many of us return to it day after day and year after year in search of meaning and guidance. It is also a dangerous book because we often ascribe divine will to the many human distortions it contains. We undermine the sacredness of the Bible and fuel its dangers whenever we fail to discern the difference between distortion and revelation…. Stated simply, the Bible can inform our religious experience, but it is often wrong about God.99

The Work of Jesus Christ in Anabaptist Perspective For Nelson-Pallmeyer it is not enough just to recognize the metaphorical character of the violent images used for God. Violent metaphors must be utterly repudiated as false and abusive. They distort the truth of God and should be expunged from the language of theology and worship. Other scholars, however, warn against discarding such morally offensive material, for, as John Collins suggests, violent texts still possesses revelatory power insofar as they give “an unvarnished picture of human nature and of the dynamics of history, and also of religion and the things that people do in its name.” 60

This fourth hermeneutical strategy is helpful in alerting us to the complexity of the interface between divine revelation and human reception. Comprehending God’s self-disclosure in the biblical narrative is like following a fine silver thread woven into a dense and colourful tapestry, a tapestry embroidered from a wide range of human reflections and actions that are always culturally conditioned and ideologically slanted. Accordingly, just because God’s permission is frequently evoked by biblical figures does not necessarily mean that God has spoken in every one of those instances. Yet how do we make allowance for this possibility without remaking God in our own image? How do we avoid simply favoring those parts of Scripture that suit our own prejudices and biases and discarding the rest as false projections, thus reducing the text to an echo-chamber of modern liberal values and preconceptions? And how is the canonical status of the text sustained if we accept only the nice bits?

The violence of God material is not easily separable from other more peaceful conceptions of divine activity. In one form or another, divine violence is woven into warp and woof of almost the entire biblical tradition. The self-same texts that extol God’s graciousness and mercy and forgiveness and slowness to anger, also warn of God visiting the iniquity of the parents on their children for three or four generations.61 No wonder Nelson-Pallmeyer is forced to conclude that revelation is rare in the Bible.

This brings us to a final, and more promising, hermeneutical strategy, one that allows for a substantial change in God’s relation ship to violence in the course of the biblical story. In this approach the violent texts are not to be rejected as a simple distortion of divine reality. They are a reliable reflection of how God was experienced at this time. Amid the violence that pervaded human life and society, people encountered God as someone directly involved in the messiness of human life and conflict. They knew that God abhorred the squander ing of human life, for it was invested it with sacred significance. Yet they also wanted a God who would employ coercive power in great measure to punish, protect, and correct. Elijah, for instance, invited God to cast fire down from heaven to consume his opponents, for this was how any self-respecting deity should prove his superiority when challenged by competitors. 62

With the coming of Jesus, a fresh experience of God is afforded. When Jesus’ disciples wanted to emulate Elijah by calling down fire on a Samaritan village, Jesus “turned and rebuked them. He did so not simply because such an extreme reprisal would be unfair in this particular circumstance, but because he considered violent vengeance to be wrong in principle and because he knew that God should no longer be understood to work in this way. God has disarmed! God’s perceived involvement in the infliction of violence is over. God no longer fights fire with fire. God has changed – or, perhaps more accurately, the human experience of God’s association with violence has changed. God will no longer permit his identity to be defined by violence; God actively repudiates the violent behavior which has hitherto clouded his character so that the duplicity of violence itself may be exposed and defeated.

GOD’S CHANGED RELATIONSHIP TO VIOLENCE

I noted earlier that the creation narratives presuppose a divine ontology of peace. Violence is neither part of God’s creative activity nor of God’s internal being. Violence appears only after the human community has fallen into sin. Interestingly the subsequent account depicts an initial reluctance on God’s part to employ violence, then a decision to do so, followed by a recoiling from its drastic consequences. This imaginative portrayal of divine ambivalence toward violence in the early scenes of the human story is, I suggest, an important key for understanding what follows. It dramatizes a profound insight into the perversity of violence, namely, that once violence is entrenched in human society, even the sacred is captured by its allure. Once “the earth is filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11,13), humanity’s apprehension of the divine is inescapably framed by its desire to have a deity whose power is greater than that of human violence and whose greatness is shown precisely in a heightened capacity for violence. The violence-of-God material that pervades the biblical narratives is thus symptomatic of this capture while also disclosive of it.

God’s reply to Adam and Eve’s disobedience is not, at first, a violent one. Along with other consequences they are banished from the Garden to prevent their fallen condition from becoming everlasting (Gen. 3:22-24). When in the second generation the problem of sibling rivalry arises, God tries to warn Cain off from succumbing to his feelings of jealousy and resentment, but without success. Sin is personified as a hungry animal lying at the door ready to spring (4:6-7). It is so powerful that it overcomes the will of God and overtakes the passions of Cain, and he turns to violence. After Cain murders his brother, God still does not respond violently; instead the Lord acts to protect the life of the killer, though now threatening sevenfold vengeance against any who disregards the protective mark on Cain (4:15). God’s next response to human sinfulness is to impose a 120 year limit on the human life span (6:3) and to express regret over the decision to create human beings in the first place (6:6). But as violence spins out of control and fills the land, God plans, for the first time, an act of violent retribution in which “everything that is on the earth shall die” (6:17). In due course God carries out the plan, blotting out all but a tiny handful of creatures (7:21-24).

Afterward, however, God is deeply disturbed by the indiscriminate nature of the punishment employed. Non-human creation has been made to bear the brunt of humanity’s sin. At the same time, God recognizes that wiping out sinful people still has not actually removed the problem of sin, “for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth” (8:21, cf. 6:5). God therefore promises never again to curse the ground and destroy all living creatures because of human evil (8:21-22; 9:11, 15). As McDonald observes, “God tried violence once and now knows better.”God then makes two telling concessions to the descendants of Noah: humans may now kill animals for food (9:3-4), and those who take human life will face the death sentence (9-5-6), an attempt to use judicially circumscribed violence to break the spirit of vendetta displayed earlier by Lamech (4:23-24). In a sense, God makes a compromise with violence. Lethal violence in the human community is forbidden, but those who resort to it can expect God to respond in like manner.

The patriarchal narratives that follow are remarkably peaceful. There is very little violence described at all, although God is often involved in what does occur, such as the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and God’s long-term plan to dispossess the Canaanites of their land is frequently alluded to. Violence only becomes more pronounced during and after the deliverance from Egypt, and especially during the conquest of Canaan where, as we have seen, genocide is commanded. Thereafter in the waxing and waning of Israel’s fortunes, God is frequently depicted as the author and instrument of violence, ranging from incidents of individual retribution to episodes of large-scale war-making.

God’s actual responsibility for authorizing this violence is, of course, doubtful, if not impossible. It is a standard feature of biblical idiom to ascribe a causative role to God for almost everything that happens, both good and bad, as well for narrators to assume a God’s eye perspective in interpreting events. It is crucial to recognize this interpretive technique. Raymund Schwager divides the texts that speak of God’s violence in the Old Testament into four categories: those where Yahweh strikes out irrationally for no apparent reason (which are extremely rare), those where God personally takes revenge on human wrongdoing, those where God uses other human beings to punish evildoers, and those where the wicked are punished by their deeds rebounding back on them under God’s supervision.”1

But the distinction between these categories is more rhetorical than real, for the narrative texts show that even where God’s direct retribution is talked of, it is almost always mediated through human instruments.72 Both direct and indirect divine violence amount to the same thing; “it is always a question of human power interpreted as God’s action.”73 Direct heavenly intervention is rare, though it does happen (and presumably here natural calamities are being attributed to God).74 Much the same applies to those texts which speak of self punishment. The penalty may be conceptualized as the inherent con sequence of a wrongful deed boomeranging back on the doer, but in practice the penalty might still be inflicted by another person or be initiated by God.75 While violence, then, is explicitly ascribed to God in the biblical text, it is almost always committed by human beings. Texts on Yahweh’s violence normally refer to human deeds that are thought in some way to be related to God’s will, so that we may safely assume that “human violence is meant when there is talk of divine anger and retribution.”76

But why is it that human violence is so naturally identified with the action of God? Why is God conceived as the author of so much carnage? Why are harmful human experiences viewed as the punishments of God? Part of the answer lies in the desire to affirm God’s transcendent immanence in all of historical experience, and part of it lies in the corrupting impact of violence itself. Such is the intrinsic nature of violence that once unleashed it changes everything, including humanity’s experience of God. In the Genesis story God is initially portrayed as one who resists and opposes violence, albeit without success. But as violence grows and spreads God is driven to counter-violence. Once this step is taken however, God is enmeshed in the very problem that needs addressing.77

Redemptive violence takes on an irresistible logic of its own, that even the knowledge of God falls victim to it. It is almost as if it is imagined that God compromises with violence, God ends up being compromised. Consistently in the Bible the experience of violence changes people’s identity, the way individuals are perceived and known and relate to one another. The same happens to God’s identity, as the peaceable God of creation is inexorably defined in militant and aggressive ways. Counter-themes of love and mercy and forgiveness and restraint are always present, but the larger conceptual framework fundamentally remains one of redemptive violence.

Once conceived as violent, God’s only option is to tarry with humanity in its misconceptions to win redemption by other means. God is forced to accommodate revelation to the limitations of human perception, not least so that the ultimate futility of redemptive violence – already intimated in Genesis 8:21 – might become apparent. 79 In the process horrendous acts of violence are attributed, or misattributed, to God. But God’s apparent capture by the categories of sacred violence becomes the precondition for exposing violence for what it is – an enslaving and self-perpetuating deception that contaminates all that it touches, including knowledge of God. With the coming of Jesus however, God finally casts off the illusions surrounding righteous violence to disclose “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things” (Eph. 3.9) – to reconcile all things by an act of self-giving, nonviolent, victorious love. Significantly this requires God-in-Christ personally to fall victim to divinely sanctioned lethal violence, making it plain once and for all that God-authored violence is a falsity, that “whenever sacred violence is mentioned, it is always human beings attacking one another.” 82

It is God’s definitive renunciation of redemptive violence in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that requires us to re-read the earlier biblical narratives of divine violence in such a way that God can no longer be seen as the ultimate author of the cruelty and killing they record. Certainly these bloody narratives attest to God’s providential presence amid human degradation. But insofar as they ascribe to God responsibility for acts of barbarism, they attest only to the veil of violence through which the experience of God has been filtered since the days of Cain. In Christ, however, the veil is taken away and God stands fully revealed.

I am suggesting then that the biblical accounts of divine violence are both true to how God was experienced following the entry of sin, yet ultimately untrue to God’s real character. In this respect they are hermeneutically complex. It could be objected that allowing for such misrepresentation of God’s initiative in violence by the biblical authors undermines the authority and trustworthiness of the scriptural text. But this is not necessarily so. The text remains trustworthy in that it reliably discloses how God has been apprehended in history and how God perseveres with human fallibility. Those passages that ascribe violence to God should not be censored or sanitized or discarded; instead they should be read with a “critical charity” that embraces them, for all their gruesomeness, as a gift of God to aid in our instruction and formation. But neither should such passages be absolutized as an unassailable revelation of God’s true being; that role belongs to Christ alone.

Objections might also be raised to the notion of God being “captured” by the mythology of violence, of God allowing the divine identity to be clouded by images of vengeance and viciousness. But this phenomenon can be seen as testimony to the seriousness of the cognitive and moral distortions created by the entry of sin and the irruption of violence (cf. Rom. 1:18-23). Also there are precedents within Scripture itself for questioning whether established understandings of God’s behavior are truly consonant with the character of God. Jeremiah, for example, despite repeated affirmations in sacred tradition that God employs the practice of collective punishment, extending down through many generations,85 looks forward to the day when this will no longer be so,86 and Ezekiel is rebuked by God for failing to see that the principle no longer applies.87

An even more instructive analogy is the way in which the apostle Paul rethinks the role of the law in salvation. Paul faces a hermeneutical dilemma similar to the one explored above. He discovered that when God played his trump card in Jesus Christ, it looked disconcertingly different from what God’s hand had hitherto looked like. Until that point, God had insisted that obedience to the Torah was the in dispensable source of righteousness for the chosen people and the ground of hope for Israel’s redemption. The law was central to God’s saving purposes. But then something unexpected happened. When God finally intervened to secure salvation for Israel, it took place “apart from the law,”88 in some respects even contrary to the law.

Paul was therefore forced to think his way through how and why God’s familiar ways in the past had altered so dramatically. The zealous young Pharisee, who himself had been prepared to use righteous violence to defend and uphold the law, 89 was compelled to read the Scriptures afresh, to interpret them from a new perspective, to discern in them a new understanding of God hitherto hidden from sight but now revealed through his son. In doing so Paul suggests a relation ship between God, sin, death, and the law that parallels, in broad outline, the relationship between God and violence I have sketched above.

PAUL’S TREATMENT OF THE LAW AS A HERMENEUTICAL PRECEDENT

The meaning and self-consistency of Paul’s extensive reflections on the place of the Mosaic law in the Christian era is a storm center in current Pauline scholarship. Over the last twenty-five years, the so called “New Perspective on Paul” has thrown up a series of objections to the traditional or “Lutheran” understanding that has dominated the interpretation of Paul since the time of the Reformation. Yet the New Perspective is itself coming under sustained criticism, with some scholars claiming that it lacks the theological depth and exegetical precision of the traditional model. No consensus has yet emerged, although there is a growing feeling that some mediating position is required that combines the insights of both older and the newer perspectives. There is no room here to explore this further. Suffice it to say that any satisfactory explanation of Paul’s critique of the law must, in my opinion, do justice to three main realities: the diversity of views on the Torah in first-century Judaism, Paul’s radical commitment to Gentile inclusion in the messianic community, and the apostle’s darkly pessimistic view of the human condition. All three inform and shape his reconsideration of the role of the law in God’s purposes, now that the Messiah has appeared.¹⁶

It is noteworthy that Paul approaches the issue within a narrative framework. That is to say, he reads Scripture primarily as a story, with an overarching plot, a set of characters, and a forward-reaching momentum that climaxes in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Paul recognizes that there are different ways of interpreting this story. As a Pharisee, he read the biblical story through the lens of the Torah, with Moses being the key actor in the drama and Israel’s holiness being its central concern. Now as a Christian, Paul has learned to read the story through the lens of Jesus Christ, with Abraham being the key figure and the eschatological uniting of Jew and Gentile in a new covenant community being its true message. Of course, for Paul, these two readings of the biblical narrative are not equally valid. The former is the product of viewing Scripture through a “veil” of ignorance, of lacking true enlightenment about the real import of God’s saving righteousness. Only in Christ is this veil removed; only in him do the lights come on. Only then does the true meaning of God’s activity in preceding history come clearly into view.

From this hermeneutical vantage point, Paul is able to see the Torah in a completely new light. Once he viewed the law as God’s answer to Adam’s sin, the gracious means by which Israel could recover humanity’s true role in the world and secure admission to the world to come. Now, however, Paul considers the law to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Paul faults the law on three main counts. First, the law has proven powerless to free God’s people from the grip of sin. Far from controlling sin, as God intended, the law actually makes the situation worse, because it simultaneously highlights Israel’s accountability to God’s requirements (Rom. 2:12; 3:19) and her impotence to achieve genuine righteousness no matter how sincerely she strives for it (9:31, cf. 2:17-29). Consequently the law cannot deliver the hoped for vindication; on the contrary it brings “the knowledge of sin” (3:20; 5:13; 7:7), the weight of God’s wrath (4:15), and the inevitability of God’s curse (Gal. 3:10). More than that, it actually exacerbates human sinfulness. The law functions to stir up the very passions it condemns (Rom. 7:5), so that the coming of the law resulted in trespasses being multiplied rather than being reduced (5:20).

The reason for this sorry state of affairs is that the law, for all its divine qualities, is unable to overcome the indwelling and all-pervasive power of sin (3:9-18; 7:14-25; Gal. 3:22). The law is fatally “weakened by the flesh” (Rom. 8:3; 7:14, 25); it is stymied by that fallen human condition that “does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot” (8:7). The law has even become a weapon in the hands of sin (7:7-13), so much so that Paul can boldly declare that “the power of sin is the law” (1 Cor. 15:56, cf. Rom. 7:22-23). What God intended for life has become a vehicle of death. The source of the problem is not the law itself, which Paul considers to be “holy, just and good” (Rom. 7:12, 14, 16). The problem is the deep-rootedness of sin, which lies beyond the reach of any external legal code, even one given by God.

The second problem Paul finds with the law is that it is limited to one ethnic community. Notwithstanding the ironical tone of his comments, Paul accepts the premise that the law was given uniquely to Israel to enable her to be “a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth” (Rom 2:19-20). But this mission has been subverted by Israel’s failure to practice what she preaches, so much so that Paul can even charge the covenant people with causing God’s name to be blasphemed among the Gentiles (2:24). What Israel’s track record proves, Paul argues, is that sin is no respecter of ethnic boundaries. Nor, conversely, is the capacity to perceive and obey God’s will. Paul believes that it is quite possible for uncircumcised Gentiles, who do not possess the Torah, “instinctively to do what the law requires” since “what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience bears witness” (2:14-15, 27).

So law and righteousness are not co-extensive realities; there is no necessary overlap. If there were, justification could legitimately come through the law and Gentiles would need to become observant Jews to appropriate it. But Israel’s own servitude to sin proves that this is not the case. In any event, even if it were the case, an additional problem would arise, for God would then be reduced to the status of a tribal deity rather than universal lord, and God’s promise to bless all the nations of the world through Abraham would be null and void (4:9-16; Gal. 3:15-22). If the unity, sovereignty, and justice of God – to which the law itself bears witness – are to be vouchsafed, justification must come by some means other than the law. It must potentially be open to every member of the human family.

For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith. Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law. (Rom. 3:28-31, cf. 10:11-13)

The third problem Paul has with the law is that an overriding emphasis on law-keeping shifts the spotlight from God’s empowering grace to autonomous human achievement, Paul is adamant that justification cannot come from reliance on the works of the law. Now it is true that by this phrase Paul most likely has in mind ceremonial practices such as circumcision, food laws, purity regulations, and Sabbath observance which served visibly to demarcate the boundary between the law-keeping covenant community and the Gentile world. He is not thinking of legalism in a moral sense but of proud reliance on badges of ethnic distinction. He is not accusing Judaism of advocating an individualistic works-righteousness whereby people can earn their own salvation by merit. He is more likely targeting some conception of national-righteousness, whereby adoption of certain Jewish distinctives was thought essential to securing final vindication. Even so, Paul still recognizes the potential for a law-centered spirituality to over-emphasize human capability and to underestimate the insidiousness of sin and the necessity of grace.

Viewed from the perspective of law-keeping, sin tends to get equated with a set of external behaviors that can be avoided with sufficient vigilance, rather than being recognized for what it really is – a deadly poison that permeates the entire life-system of humanity, a cosmic power that enslaves all humanity by habituating everyone to self-centeredness and idolatry.93 A certain kind of complacency can therefore emerge that is so assured of its own sincerity that it underrates the unmerited nature of grace (cf. Phil. 3:4-16). This is partly why Paul sets law and grace in such stark opposition.

The only solution to this predicament, Paul argues, is the rupturing of sin’s lordship and the radical renewal of human nature from the inside out so that God’s law is written on the human heart by means of the indwelling of the Spirit. This is exactly what Christ achieves through his death and resurrection on behalf of all humanity, as a kind of second Adam.95 Those who participate through baptism in Christ’s victory (Rom. 6:1-14) are empowered by the eschatological Spirit to fulfil the true intention of God’s law (8:1-4). That intention is a life of freedom wholly devoted to the love of God and the love of neighbor, including even the love of enemies (12:9-21). Paul saw his own life experience as proof of this. Once supremely zealous for God’s law, he perpetrated violence on God’s behalf. Now graciously freed from the grip of sin through faith in Christ, he proclaims the peace of God, even taking up the cause of his former opponents in the interests of universal reconciliation.

In light of this analysis, Paul concludes that the regime of law was only ever intended by God as a temporary holding measure, until Christ should come (Gal. 3:19-26). It served negatively to imprison all under sin (Gal. 3:22; Rom. 10:32) in preparation for the great liberation which Christ would win through his vicarious death and resurrection. Those united with Christ in this way are no longer “under law but under grace” (6:15). They have “died to the law” (7:4; Gal. 2:19), they are “discharged from the law” (7:6), they are “freed” and “redeemed” from the law (Gal. 3:13; 4:5;5:1), they are “no longer subject” to the law’s rule (Gal. 3:25) or its condemnation (Rom. 8:1). “For Christ is the end-goal [telos] of the law” (10:5). Things have changed!

In none of this, of course, is Paul wrestling with the problem of divine violence (he is actually struggling to make sense of the prodigiousness of God’s mercy!) But there are several features of Paul’s approach to the law that constitute a kind of hermeneutical template for the type of approach to divine violence I have advocated above. To begin with, in both cases, the presenting problem is a substantial shift in God’s modus operandi from what was apparent in previous tradition. Paul openly acknowledges that God’s methods have changed. This is implicit in the ringing adversative declaration “But now, apart from law…” that commences his account of the revelation of saving justice in Christ in Romans 3:21-26. It is also evident in the way he divides Israel’s story into sequential phases (Adam to Abraham, Abraham to Moses, Moses to Christ), with the law entering 430 years after the promise to Abraham and serving as a disciplinarian “until Christ came,” after which time “we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian” (Gal. 3:15-26). Paul thus allows for real change in God’s ways.

The sheer radicalism of this change ought not to be underestimated. It required for Paul a thoroughgoing revision of understanding of what had hitherto been the most fundamental ingredients of covenantal faithfulness-circumcision, Sabbath observance, food laws, and separation from all sources of impurity, including Gentiles. That the apostle can boldly declare that “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself” (Rom. 14:14) and that “neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything but a new creation is everything” (Gal. 6:15), is a measure of the extent to which he reckoned on a major revolution having occurred in God’s way of working.

Second, in problematizing the law Paul seeks an explanation that both accords with the plot of the canonical story and explains why God appears to act differently than previously thought, which is exactly what I have said is needed to deal with the issue of divine violence. Paul accepts that radical changes have taken place in God’s priorities, but he is equally emphatic that there is a profound consistency between the realities of the present and the revelation of the past. The “new creation” afforded in Christ is not arbitrary or capricious; it accords with the deepest themes of the previous story. It is both “at tested by the law and the prophets” (Rom. 3:21, 31) and compatible with God’s own being (3:29). That authentic righteousness can come “apart from the law,” Paul argues, is already evident in the story of Abraham as a foreshadowing of what was to come (4:1-25), and it is only by transcending the limitations of Mosaic law that the promise of universal blessing to Abraham can possibly be realized (Gal. 3:6-17).

The negative role of the law is thus balanced by its positive role in anticipating and illuminating eschatological events.” Even Moses can now be heard to speak of “the word of faith that we proclaim” (Rom 10:8): It is the fulfillment of eschatological hope in Christ and the Spirit that accounts for why God’s activity now seems so different. It is also what impels Paul to read the canonical story afresh to discern in it a meaning and dynamic once hidden from view. A similar strategy is needed, I have suggested, with respect to the narratives of divine violence.

Finally, and most tellingly, Paul does not shrink from depicting God’s law as having been captured by the power of sin and becoming a source of enslavement and death. The law itself, Paul is clear, is imbued with the very attributes of God; it is “holy, just, and good,” it is even “spiritual” (Rom. 7:12, 14, 16). But regardless of its divine credentials the law has been bamboozled by sin. Seizing the opportunity created by the revelation of God’s will, sin commandeered the law to deceive and kill its adherents (7:11). Consequently, despite its intrinsic goodness, and despite its promise of life to those who observe its commandments, the law has in effect functioned to lock in, as it were, Israel’s servitude to sin and death.

This is an incredibly daring claim for Paul to make! He asserts that not only has Gentile humanity’s knowledge of God been corrupted by the tyranny of sin (1:18-23, cf. 1 Cor 1:20-25), even Israel’s apprehension of God’s intentions in the law has fallen victim to sin’s death-dealing deception. It is only by taking this insight with full seriousness that we can begin to make sense of the attribution of violence to God in the biblical record. Arguably part of sin’s deception is the identification of human violence with the will of God. Jesus Christ explodes this deception, and in him a new humanity emerges that is now in the process of “being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:10).

In these ways, then, Paul’s grappling with the ambiguities of the law in salvation history furnishes something of a hermeneutical analogy for the approach to divine violence sketched out in this chapter. To be absolutely clear: I am not suggesting that Paul’s ruminations on the law in themselves relate to the issue of God’s recorded violence, only that he models a style of hermeneutical engagement with Scripture that can be usefully reapplied to this question. Whether the biblical stories of violence caused any discomfort for the apostle is hard to say. Certainly he never explicitly disavows a violent God. If anything, the real scandal for Paul was not the violent exclusivity of God’s past actions but the gratuitous inclusiveness of God’s saving activity in the present. When Paul takes refuge in the inscrutability of God’s ways it is not to justify divine violence but to underscore the mystery of God’s indefatigable mercy, a mercy displayed equally toward disobedient Israel and toward wider Gentile humanity (Rom. 11:28-36).

Paul may never have consciously reflected on how best to reconcile this present experience of God’s mercy with past episodes of grotesque violence. But it was his apprehension of the crucified and risen Christ as the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) that trans formed Paul from a violent religious zealot into a peacemaker extraordinaire. It was this that led him to speak distinctively of God as “the God of peace, “100 the God who has reconciled the entire world to God’s self not by violent conquest but by self-giving sacrifice. This crucified God is the same God who made the world and everything in it, the same God who called Abraham and chose Israel, the same God that Jesus called Father, and the same God to whom Jesus pointed his followers as the supreme paradigm for the way of nonviolent discipleship.

ENDNOTES

3. As Dale C. Allison Jr. notes,”… the problem of conflicting theologies was not born with Christianity. The problem was already internal to Judaism …. If, after Marcion, the issue for Christians became which God to a edge, this was only a later variant of the earlier question, Which texts should we sanction?” “Rejecting Violent Judgment: Luke 9:52-56 and its Journal of Biblical Literature 121/3 (2002): 459-78 (at 478).

4. See J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2001). I am in general sympathy with the direction of Weaver’s argument, though I depart substantially from his reading of the New Testament evidence. See my “Atonement, Violence, and the Will of God,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 76/1 (2003):67-90.

5. See for instance. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Ex planation of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), esp. 275-306. Cf. also Kenneth R. Chase, “Christian Discourse and the Humility of Peace,” in Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflections on History, Practice, and Theology, ed. Kenneth R. Chase and Alan Jacobs (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2003), 119-34 (esp. 128-31); Dan McKanan, “Is God Violent? Theological Options in the Antislavery Movement,” in Must Christianity Be Violent?, 50-68

6. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 1-31; idem, The Powers That Be Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 63-81. 7. Heb 10:31

7. Heb 10:31

11. Col. 1:15, 19, cf. 2 Cor. 4:4

14. Col. 1:16

15. N.T. Wright offers a powerful presentation of Jesus’ nonviolent opposition to Rome in Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996). But he stops short of grounding it in any distinctive apprehension of God’s character by Jesus.

16. Matt. 5:44-48

23. John C. Haughey, “Jesus as the Justice of God,” in The Faith that Does Justice: Examining the Christian Sources for Social Change, ed. J.C. Haughey (New York: Paulist Press, 1922), 279. See also Marshall, Beyond Retribution, 259-63.

24. Col. 1:16-17

26. Gen. 4:8; Rev. 21:3-4,24; 22:2

28. Gen. 4:1-16

29. Gen. 4:23-24;65-7, 11-13

30. Gen. 7:1-24;8:21-22:9:11-17

31. This is not to deny that the canonical tradition is full of tensions, disagreements, contradictions, and revisions. Later biblical authors and tradents felt free to disagree with the perspective of their predecessors on certain theological positions even while accepting the authority of the tradition they bequeathed. Indeed, the authority of the tradition is shown precisely in the commitment of later recipients to engage in radical rethinking of its meaning and implications. See further Ellen F. Davis, “Critical Traditioning: Seeking an Inner Biblical Hermeneutic,” Anglican Theological Review 82/4 (2000): 733 51.

32. Of course, legendary elements may well exist in the tradition. As Simon De Vries notes, “Battle and war passages in the Old Testament range from the legendary to the mythical, to the realistic and immediate, from the schematic and ideological, to the bizarre and apocalyptic.” – “Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament: in Ritual and Warfare,” in Destructive Power of Religion, ed. Ellens, 1:99-121 (at 120).

33. Exod. 15:1-3

34. Schwager, Must There be Scapegoats?, 47-71.

35. Jack Miles, “The Disarmament of God,” in Destructive Power of Religion ed Elkins, 1:123-167 (at 147).

36. Num. 11:1-6; 14:10-12; Deut. 1:34-40

37. Num. 12:1-16; 14:10-12; 16:41-50, 25:6-9, cf. Exod. 11:4-5; 12:12,13, 23, 37

38. Mark McEntire, The Blood of Abel: The Violent Plot of the Hebrew Bible (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1999), 61-62.

39. Relevant texts include Exod. 17:8-13; Num. 21:1-3, 23-24; Deut. 2:30-35; 7:2-6; Josh. 6: 1-16,7:1, 24-26a; Judg. 3:16-25; 4:6-7,9-10, 13-15, 17, 21-22; 15:4 8,1 Sam. 17:12-18:2; 31:1-13; 2 Sam. 18-6-9, 14-15; 1 Kings 22:31-38; 2 Kings 9:30-35; Isa. 2:4; Mic. 4:3; Ezek. 38:14-23; Joel 3:9-10; 2 Chron. 149-15

40. For example, Deut. 7:2: Josh. 11:20.

41. Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28-89. See also John J. Collins, “The Zeal of Phineas, the Bible and the Legitimation of Violence,” in Destructive Power of Religion 1: 12-33, ed. Ellens (at 13-17).

42. McDonald, God and Violence, 123, 126, cf. 127, 128, 131.

43. Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 50. Collins is unconvinced. “Rather than respect for human life, the practice bespeaks a totalistic attitude, which is common to armies and warfare, where the individual is completely subordinated to the interests of the group.” – “Zeal of Phineas,”

44. Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity, 37,

45. McEntire, Blood of Abel, 90.

46. Ps. 68:20-23, cf. Habakkuk 3:13-16,

47. Amos 2:4-16; 5:127; Isa. 43:28. See Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible, 78.

48. McEntire, Blood of Abel, 114.

49. See my Crowned with Glory and Honor: Human Rights in the Biblical Tradition (Telford/Scottdale, Pa.: Pandora Press U.S./Herald Press, 2001).

50. McEntire, Blood of Abel, 44.

51. Gen. 18:16-33

52. In Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), Hans Boersma argues that in a sinful world violence is necessary to defend the boundaries which enable hospitality to function. In such a world, God employs “redemptive” violence, which is a “good violence” because it serves to uphold monotheism, to punish immorality, and to protect the poor and underprivileged. But Boersma makes little attempt to measure this sweeping defense of divine violence against the concrete suffering endured by its victims. See my critical review in Stimulus 13/3 (2005), 51-52, which includes my own attempt to spell out the semantic parameters of the term violence.

53. For example, Gen. 13:13; 15:16; Deut. 9:5; 20:17-18. The general perfidy of the Canaanites is pervasive in the biblical tradition, although the purported wickedness of the Canaanites is never actually substantiated within the conquest accounts.

54. McEntire, Blood of Abel, 118

55. Matt. 2:16-18

56. 1 Sam. 15:2-3, cf. Exod. 17:14,16; Num. 24:20; Deut. 25:17-19

57. So Collins, “Zeal of Phineas,” 24-25.

58. So Anderson, “Genocide or Jesus,” 51.

59. Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity, 16.

60. Collins, “Zeal of Phineas,” 25.

61. Exod. 34:6-7; Num. 14:18-19, Deut. 5:9-10

62. 2 Kings 1:11-12, cf. Gen. 19:24; Lev. 10:1-2; Job 1:16; Ps. 97:3

63. Luke 9:54-55

64. So rightly Allison, “Rejecting Violent Judgment,” 476.

65. McDonald, God and Violence, 54, cf. 57.

66. Gen. 12:3, 17; 14:20; 15:14-16; 18:20; 19:15-29; 22:1-19;

67. Gen. 12:7; 13:14-17; 15:16; 17:8; 22:17; 28:3-4, 13-15; 35:12; 48:4;50:24

68. For example, Exod. 4:24-26; 2 Sam. 6:6-7. Ezek. 38:10

69. See Lev. 26: 14-39; Exod. 12:29; Ezek, 21:3-4, 9-15; Jer. 25:32-33.

70. For example, Deut. 20:16-17; 1 Sam. 15:2-3; Isa. 19:2; Jer. 51:20-24; 21:31; Ps. 44:11-12; Zech. 8:10.

71. For example, Isa. 50:11; Jer. 44:8; Ps. 7:13-17; Prov. 8:36; 26:27

72. See, 22:25-26; Isa. 19:2; 13:17 for example, Ezek. 21:31; Jer.

73. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 63.

74. For example, Gen. 19:24; Num. 16:29-32.

75. See, for example, Isa. 64:6-7; Ps. 81:11-12.

76. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 63 (emphasis mine).

77. Whether some actual primeval act of violence by God is the reason for God’s subsequent identification with violence, or whether the flood story it self is the product of prior projection of violence onto heaven, is open to discussion.

78. This is one of the major findings in McEntire’s study Blood of Abel

79. Cf. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 146-47.

80. God’s sovereign self-disclosure is the necessary presupposition for all and any knowledge of God. But divine revelation is also necessarily filtered through fallible human language and categories, which can distort as well as report God’s truth, and often both at the same time. For a helpful discussion of the relationship between revelation and Scripture, see William C. Placher The Domestication of Transcendence (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 181-200.

81. Jesus is condemned to death on the charge of blasphemy (Mark 14-55 64), a capital crime in Mosaic law (Lev. 24:15-16).

82. Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats?, 67.

83. Collins is clear that what makes violent religious texts dangerous is not their violent content but the certitude with which they are received by readers as divine revelation, “Zeal of Phineas,” 23-26. So too Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus Against Christianity, 277,

84. 1 borrow this term from Ellen Davis, “Critical Traditioning.”

85. Exod. 34:6-7; Num. 14:18-19; Deut. 5:9-10

86. Jer. 31:29-30

87. Ezek. 18:1-4

88. Rom. 3:21; 8:1-4

89. Gal. 1:13; Phil. 3:6; 1 Cor. 15:9; cf. Acts 9:1-2; 22:4; 26:9-11. On the violent implications of “zeal,” see Terence L. Donaldson, “Zealot and Convert: The Origins of Paul’s Christ-Torah Antithesis,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 51/4 (1989): 655-82; Vincent M. Smiles, “The Concept of ‘Zeal’ in Second-Temple Judaism and Paul’s Critique of It in Romans 10:2,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 64/2 (2002): 282-99; Mark R. Fairchild, “Paul’s Pre-Christian Zealot Associations: A Re-Examination of Gal 1:14 and Acts 22:3,” New Testament Studies 45/4 (1999): 514-32. For a thematizing of the place of zeal in the biblical tradition and American self-understanding, see Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2003).

90. See 2 Cor. 3:12-18; Rom. 10:2-4.

91. Rom. 7:5,9-10; 10:5; Gal. 2:19, cf. 3:12, 21; 1 Cor. 15:56; 2 Cor. 3:6-7

92. Rom. 3:20, 27-28; Gal. 2:16; 32,5,10, 12, cf. Rom. 3:27:4:2,6;9:12, 32; 11:6; Eph. 29

93. Rom. 1:18-32; 3:9-20; 5:12-21; 612-14, 20-21;7:7-25; etc.

94. Rom. 4:16; 5:20-21; 6:1,14; 11:5; 1 Cor. 15:10; Gal. 1:6; 2:21; 5:4; cf. Eph. 2.5-6.

95. Rom. 5:6-21; 1 Cor. 15:42-49; Col. 1:10; 3:10

96. Rom. 5:5; 13:8-10; 14:15; Gal. 5:6, 13-14, 22-23; Phil. 1:9; 1 Cor. 8:1; 13:1-8; 16:14; Col. 3:14, cf. Eph. 4:32-35.

97. Gal. 1:13; Phil. 3:5-6; 1 Cor. 15:9; cf. Acts 9:1-2; 22:4; 26:5, 9-11.

98. See Rom. 11:28-36.

99. Cf. Rom. 4:23-24; 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11; 9:10.

100. The phrase God of peace is a favorite of Paul’s (Rom. 15:33; 16:20; 2 Cor. 13:11; Phil. 4:9; 1 Thess. 5:23; 2 Thess. 3:16, cf. Eph. 2:14), though he did not in vent it (Heb. 13:20). In early Jewish literature the phrase occurs only once (Test. Daniel 5:2).

Footnotes

Paul N. Anderson, “Genocide or Jesus: A God of Conquest or Pacifism,” in The Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. J. H. Ellens (Westport, Connecticut & London, Praeger 2004), 4:31-52 (at 31). ↩
See D. Andrew Kille, “The Bible Made Me Do It’: Text, Interpretation, and Violence,” in Destructive Power of Religion, ed. Ellens, 1:55-73. See also Charles Mabee, “Reflections on Monotheism and Violence,” in Destructive Power of Religion, ed. Ellens, 4:111-18. Cf. also Karen Armstrong, “Unholy Strictures,” Guardian Weekly (Aug. 19-25, 2005): 13. ↩
I attempt to construct a non-retributive view of final judgment in my Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime and Punishment (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2001). ↩
John H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1994), 228-47. ↩
J. Harold Ellens, “Revenge, Justice and Hope: Laura Blumenfeld’s Journey,” in idem, Destructive Power of Religion 4:227-235 (at 235). ↩
Heb. 1:2-3 ↩
John 1:3-4 ↩
Luke 6:35-36 ↩
Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible (New York: Harper & Row, Gracewing & Crossroad Publishing Company, 1987), 207. So too Wink, Powers that Be, 89. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer observes that “Jesus was not the first Jew to promote or use nonviolence when resisting injustice…. Jesus may have been the first, however, to specifically reject the violence of God as the foundation for nonviolent resistance. Rather than rooting nonviolence in the assurance of God’s ultimate and re deeming violence, Jesus saw nonviolent action as a faithful embodiment of a nonviolent God, that is, as reflective of the very Spirit that is God.” – Jesus against Christianity: Reclaiming the Missing Jesus (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2001), 320. ↩
Cf. Ulrich Mauser, The Gospel of Peace: A Scriptural Message for Today’s World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 183-84. ↩
Col. 1:15, 20 ↩
Rom. 1:16-17;3:20 ↩
Rom. 5:1 ↩
Eph. 1:10 ↩
Wink, The Powers That Be, 44-48, at 46. Also Patricia M. McDonald, God and Violence: Biblical Resources for Living in a Small World (Scottdale, Pa. and Waterloo, Ont.: Herald Press, 2004), 35-49. ↩
Or, to slightly reformat the prior sentences:
Suffice it to say that any satisfactory explanation of Paul’s critique of the law must, in my opinion, do justice to three main realities:
1. the diversity of views on the Torah in first-century Judaism
2. Paul’s radical commitment to Gentile inclusion in the messianic community
3. the apostle’s darkly pessimistic view of the human condition.
All three inform and shape his reconsideration of the role of the law in God’s purposes, now that the Messiah has appeared.
↩

Depression

2021-07-28T13:00:00+00:00

I’m starting to write more regularly these days. For a long time, I’ve hardly written anything, or only written when external circumstances required me to write something. For example, when I give a talk, I always create a page to “support” the talk, that I can link to in slides, like https://josh.works/railsconf and https://josh.works/gasb.

I don’t apologize (usually) when replying to email “slowly”, and when others apologize to me for their own “slow response”, I send them this article: Let’s All Stop Apologizing for the Delayed Response in Our Emails.

I’ve always written primarily for myself (current and future versions of me) and this post is no exception. It’s about depression, and my experience with it.

A year ago, I began noticing unavoidable signs of depression in myself, and noticed that those things had been going on for about a year.

There were a range of trying circumstances I found myself dealing with. The standard kit of “downsides of the human experience”: Death, injury, sickness, strife, despair. Obviously these unwanted influences were affecting the entire world in very public and well-discussed ways, but in specific ways (and in ways unrelated to Covid), these ill winds made intrusions into my own life.

I also found that it felt like my depression was choosing for me certain pathways that made it harder for me to do the kinds of self-care things I usually do. As this happened, my capacity to absorb difficulty diminished, and my ability to provide care for others also diminished. These phenomena were working together in ways that caused a negative feedback cycle.

A few months ago, this thought started passing through my head:

Hey, I should take a stab at writing about this depression thing.

Then, immediately after that, I’d think:

Ew, I don’t want to do that. That’s uncomfortable.

And of course, as is true in many situations, it’s healthy to do that which is uncomfortable.

My depression is/was, in many ways, a reasonable response to certain circumstances (death in family, acute and chronic health problems). But my depression also has explanatory power for other visible phenomena. It is a response to some things, and it has caused other things.

I’ve always found difficult problems to be made more manageable by writing them down. Many other people, much wiser than I am, underscore the same phenomena.

Why I am writing about depression: Current and future me will benefit (and maybe others will too)

I’ve not written very much in the last four years, and I’ve written almost nothing at all for the last year and a half. I’ve written 23 posts since 2020, and most of them were things that I “had” to write, to support conference talks I gave, presentations, or “explainers” for papers, tutorials, etc. Nothing where I wrote for the sake of making sense of my own life or the world around me.

For contrast, I wrote over 50 posts in the prior two-year period; many of those posts were contributing to me making sense of the world around me.¹

There’s other trends and concepts I want to write about, but the “story” doesn’t make sense until I can explain “Oh, yeah, I was super depressed for a long time, and that’s why I did these things, and didn’t do these other things.”

I write these words primarily for myself, right now, while knowing that because of how the internet works, a future version of me might benefit when I re-read these words, or others will benefit.

I’ve read a few posts on the topic, where people have expressed some degree of surprise, or they’ll have an “ahah” moment, when they realize they’ve been depressed (or exhibiting signs of depression) for an extended period of time.

I’ve felt a sense of kinship to how others have talked about their own experiences with depression. For example: https://zellwk.com/, https://twitter.com/patio11/, and many others. Most of the articles, talks, conversations I’ve read on the topic of experiencing depression, I don’t even remember many specific details. Just a sense of “Hm, this resonates”.

Their words have been of benefit to me. In recent conversations with dear friends about depression, I’ve been finding the benefit and power of establishing a clear narrative, or a correlatory/causal chain.

For example:

{circumstances} primed the pump for me experiencing depression. That depression was a reasonable response to those circumstances. It also has caused other changes in my life. Some of those changes are benign, some changes are self-sabotaging.

Also, there is a “right time” to capture certain thoughts:

Anyway, all this said, I’m spending some time writing this all out. I’ve now started/edited this post a half-dozen or dozen times, and am finding my own thoughts around this topic to be getting clarified and improved as I try to make them legible and coherent. I’m already reaping benefit!

Causal Arrows

It’s hard for me to offer enough qualifying statements about everything I’m writing here. Certain circumstances contributed to my depression. My depression, in turn, contributed to other circumstances. What follows is a bit of me free-associating through a narrative response to:

what led to my depression

how did it manifest in my life?

how did I come to eventually observe it

now what?

January 2020

A few days after we got back to Colorado from spending Christmas working in the family bakery in NJ, Kristi’s dad died suddenly and unexpectedly.

It was a tremendous loss, both in obvious ways, and in ways that are difficult to enumerate. Kristi was 30. We’d expected and hoped for many more years with her dad. He and his wife were a few months away from retiring. It’s a painful loss, and will always be painful.

Her dad (who was a 3rd-generation baker, and had run a bakery in the town his entire life) was a fixture of his town; there was well over 500 people at his funeral. He (and by extension the bakery, and his entire family) positively impacted thousands of people.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on my own life and my eventual death.

Kristi and I were able to spend two months back east, in NJ, to help her mom and family pick up the pieces. An advantage of working in the tech industry: we’ve both worked remotely for many years, we have near infinite location flexibility.

February-March 2020

Shortly after spending those two months in NJ, which was a rather trying time, and after getting my annual performance bonus for 2019, I gave my notice at Proofpoint.

There are always many reasons people change jobs, or in this case, quit jobs with no explicit plans to go back to full-time, W2 work, and this was no exception. I loved the team I was on, but it was the right time to move on to something else.

Shortly after I gave my notice, but before my last day, Covid started being a thing, and the lockdowns started. (I was given many opportunities to not quit, and instead ride out Covid with a well-paying engineering job. Proofpoint was in a strong spot, and was one of the companies that grew because of the pandemic)

April-June, 2020

My last day of work was the last day of March; I’d had a climbing trip to Cuba with good friends planned, returning to Viñales, and that didn’t happen.

I did some contract work for Turing, the software development program I went to in 2017. I have been mentoring students in the backend program for years, and I reached out to see if they were open to more of help, since I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, and I always really enjoy helping others be successful in the industry. Turing was eager for help.

I also did some engineering work on internal Turing school applications, like their enrollment and payments applications.

I always take detailed notes, like when I added Rubocop to two of their applications. These notes will help anyone else who needs to do something similar.

There were huge ups and downs doing this work. I had a material impact on both the short-term and long-term success of quite a few students. (Their words, not mine.)

This kind of work has always been the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. Despite extensive conversations with the leadership at Turing, I wasn’t able to make the small, meaningful, systematic improvements I’d wanted to make to some spots of the curriculum that I had strong visibility into, but no one else did.

In the course of providing free, scalable help to Turing students, I’d made many video walk-throughs (example, example, example), received dozens of thankful messages from students, who said things like

These videos are why I made it through mod 1 and Turing. Thank you!

And I was consistently rebuffed by Turing leadership in attempts to formalize and upgrade these resources. This was discouraging, and has led to me stopping providing any aid to Turing students. All my work has been deleted from Turing repositories, and it continues to suffer from an extremely high dropout rate of enrolled students. I wish them the best, I think they were very close to being a reliably excellent software development training program.

July 2020

I remember training on a Tension block in Ocean City, NJ, early July 2020, using a very specific right hand grip, working on rehearsing one of the last hard moves on Apocalypse in Rifle, CO.

I’d casually done hard-for-me boulder problems that spring², and was excited/hopeful to see some of the bouldering power I’d obtained get me up some harder routes.

And then in July, I got home, and just… stopped. I’ve been climbing for over 15 years now, and never have I ever taken and unforced break from climbing, other than a few weeks here and there, with some “active rest” to keep the tendons from thinking they’re not needed anymore, usually worked in between some training/performance cycles.

My depression was particularly bad then, but I didn’t even realize I was depressed; I just felt extremely anxious and sad most of my waking hours.

August-October 2020

When the pandemic started, Kristi and I had hoped for a small (or large) correction to the price of property in Golden.

This did not happen. Golden continues to remain extremely unaffordable, for clear, obvious reasons, mostly related to continuing to have laws on the books that were written by actual racists, with the intent of keeping black people out of neighborhoods populated by white people.

In 1922, politically powerful racists introduced ‘The Atlanta Zone Plan’.

This “Atlanta Zone Plan” is the template for all modern zoning regulations, and zoning regulations are one of the most powerful forces shaping cities (and all that happens within cities) today.

The folks that created the Atlanta Zone Plan had been trying for a while to create some means of segregation that wouldn’t get struck down by the supreme court. Slavery was made illegal, a lot of Jim Crowe laws were eventually made illegal, redlining was made illegal, and this zoning thing was the first attempt by white supremacists to preserve their cultural and economic dominance that wasn’t struck down by the supreme court.

And this zoning paradigm exists today, perfectly preserved, across the entire country. (And the US has exported this paradigm to the rest of the world. Yaaaaayyyyy).

Why do I talk about all this in a post about depression?

Because Denver is hideously unaffordable, has zero good public transit, and most of the urban infrastructure is extremely hostile to individuals. All of this is a result of following racist laws.

It’s demoralizing to have ones life and wellbeing so affected by such immoral and evil laws. Kristi and I eventually ended up paying almost $600k for a house in terrible condition in downtown Golden. I’ll be spending much time and money getting it to a tolerable condition.

November 2020

I injured my back in a significant way. I was unable to stand up straight for at least two months. My normal means of self-care and mood repair were taken from me, replaced with a painful reminder of the frailty of the human experience.

Everyone kept saying “oh, back injuries suck, but you’ll be better soon.”. Almost no one had an encouraging word about simply being injured. It was an extremely alienating and isolating time.

Since I couldn’t do work around the house (for example, I struggled to move a frying pan around the cooktop), I figured I’d go back to work.

I really couldn’t get excited about most of the opportunities that I was encountering. Hiring is so damn broken.

Unfortunately, because we’d just moved, I didn’t have an office set up, or even a desk or monitor. So, I was doing interviews, sitting on a couch, propping the laptop on a pillow, in near-constant pain from an injured back, in a period of substantial emotional ill-health. I’m proud to stay I still got job offers, and turned down a very compelling full-time offer in favor of a high-risk, high-potential-reward role with Pashi, a manufacturing startup.³

Soham, the founder, splits his time between India and the US. A brilliant, hard-working, driven person. I very much enjoyed the work we did together, but the 12 hour timezone difference, coupled with most of the work being done in India/Europe in a synchronous way, made it difficult for me to keep context and quickly do good work, while still maintaining a wall between work and non-work time.

We agreed to a month-long trial period, with the goal of me going full-time, with equity, working hard to grow Pashi in a few manufacturing verticals in the USA.

I ended up pulling the plug half-way through the trial. External sources of stress, plus the removal of normal health-promoting activities, plus the time-zone difference and loose communication meant I was working until late in the evening, and then hopping on calls at 7a the next day with the team, and I wasn’t able to rest or recover. Soham was totally pleased with my work, and excited for what we were going to do, and sad when I told him I couldn’t continue.

This was a tumultuous time for me, and a tumultuous experience. Kristi and I were experiencing profound relationship difficulties, I was extremely depressed, and I feel like I was operating at like 20% of my normal capacity.

December 2020

This was the first Christmas in the 13 years I’ve known Kristi that we didn’t spend the week leading up to Christmas doing difficult and exhausting work to prepare for the busiest season in the bakery.

It was something that had been long-promised in the family.

By next year, the business will be sold and we can enjoy Christmas like normal people!

The bakery had sold. We could enjoy Christmas like normal people. Except Wayne passed away, and we spent the Christmas without him. It sucked.

Kristi and I had scheduled a week-long “counseling intensive”, which brought us a lot of relief⁴

There’s much more that could be said. I usually do end-of-year “review” posts, and I didn’t do one for 2019, because I got curb-stomped by 2020, and struggled to write anything public. Ditto 2020, and I’d like to get to much more important topics to write about than this sort of naval-gazing, but this feels like it helps unblock me, and here I am.

The stories we tell ourselves are important.

I heard someone say something recently:

Narrative is the only difference between pain and suffering.

This was a true statement in the context in which it was said, and while it likely cannot be generalized to every situation, it’s a broadly helpful sentiment.

I’m spending some time making sure I get my narrative right. Lots of the errors I make in this domain are to have errors that tend in the direction of despair and hopelessness.

What has helped

This topic will eventually get more discussion. I’m doing things that are helping. I have friends that are enormously helpful, with and without awareness of what they’re helping with. In this section, asterisks and qualifications abound.

A thread through what seems to have helped has been things like:

Understand that when depressed, my reasoning exhibits different tendencies than when not depressed. Externalize my reasoning and emotions, let trusted friends weigh in on it. Trust them, and generally do what they suggest.

Being comfortable labelling myself as depressed, based on easy external metrics (DSM V, the many resources available to diagnose oneself)
Treating my depression as an illness instead of feeling shame (from myself or from others) for being depressed.
Talking about it with dear and trusted friends. (I’ll expand on this substantially soon.)
Making a concerted effort to trust my brain and emotions less when feeling sad, and let “feeling sad” trigger that intentional downgrading of trust in myself.
Imagine I had a friend who said:

Josh, I’m feeling rather depressed today. I’d like to spend an hour doing something that promotes wellness, because I know I should, but because I’m depressed, I’m struggling to identify or do that thing. What would you recommend?

How would that conversation unfold? What would I be trying to accomplish for that friend? What would I recommend? How would I follow up? OK, can I do that for myself?

If not, I should go ask a friend that question.

Footnotes

It’s not a perfect strategy, but a way I grew to observe my own depression was to find ways that my behaviors had changed compared to times that I know I wasn’t depressed. Writing has always been a big part of how I operate in the world, and I observed a strong aversion to any kind of biographical writing, which has historically not been the case. ↩
I did a few v8s in a single session, sometimes after just four or five attempts. Given that I’d never imagined myself a “strong climber”, I never thought V10 (or 5.13+) was attainable to me. Turns out it is. To most normal people, V10 is very, very hard. I also know some V13+ climbers that make V10 look easy and casual. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ↩
I got the job, and the opportunity, after Soham just clicked around this website a bit, and set up a coffee. We moved quick, he paid me for the first two weeks of work, and I quickly put together sales collateral and explainers to help some early critical sales opportunities land. ↩
We went to Restoring The Soul, and indeed, our souls were restored. ↩

Issues related to the city of Golden

2021-07-26T13:00:00+00:00

While I was biking around recently, I saw notes about an upcoming neighborhood meeting about some rezoning, a big lot in downtown Golden.

I went to the meeting (Thursday, July 22) and learned a lot.

Here’s the lot in question:

I have ridden my bike past this property hundreds of times. It’s directly between my house and downtown:

Blue lines are all the strava trips I’ve taken (by bike). See more here: https://cryptic-sea-38287.herokuapp.com/

There are two books that contain (broadly) everything an architect, land-user planner, or developer needs to maximize the value of the work they’re doing, and minimize the “externalities” of their project.

If you’re serious about cities being places that promote the wellbeing of their populations, the environment, etc, these are the two books you need to have on your bookshelf:

Fixing these problems in Golden takes three steps. Ideally, all three would be done, but any of them done in isolation at any level of implementation would be a step in the right direction:

Step 1: Get Parking Right

Golden city staff must read and implement The High Cost of Free Parking.

No other “solution” will do anything but make the current situation worse.

I’m writing more about parking here:

👉 parking in Golden, CO

Step 2: Get Buildings right (location, size, use, etc)

Read Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities

But Josh this is a big academic book I don’t want to read it…

It’s not that big, it’s quite approachable, but it’s fine if you don’t want to read it. Most modern planners have never read this book (I’ve asked about a dozen of them…) but they would be 100x better at their jobs (or they would at least stop making bad situations worse) if they’d read it.¹

This is THE book for anyone planning on spending a lot of money trying to solve a big problem in the city.

Step 3: Give full evaluation to the racist intent behind modern zoning and it’s impact of how cities have been built over the last century

As you might imagine, this system is not stable. Things are always changing, and either getting better, or getting worse.

They’re currently getting worse, and the new zoning plan that the city zoning staff is working on generally makes things worse, in addition to probably eating up about $1.5 million in budget and payroll.

Hindrance 1: Grossly Mismanaged parking

Parking is a scarce commodity, and like all commodities, if you mismanage access to said commodity, there are downstream negative effects.

The solution is technical, not political. There are some complexities to it, but implementing this fix is well within the capacities of the full-time planning and engineering staff.

This comes from The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup. Read more on this here:

👉 parking in Golden, CO

Set appropriate price for curb-side parking
Spend all revenue where it’s collected
Abolish parking minimums

Hindrance 2: Exclusionary zoning

Euclidean zoning, AKA exclusionary zoning, is killing our city. Serious people in the space don’t debate that exclusionary zoning is terrible.

Persons who support exclusionary zoning are as sophisticated in urban planning as doctors who believe in leeching are sophisticated about the human body.

It’s not up for debate. You don’t have to believe you, and I’m actually eager to convince you otherwise, and I am willing to do so, and I’ll do so gently, but exclusionary zoning is horrible for cities and causes most of the harms facing cities today.

Here’s more on this:

1/20 Thoughts on Denver's zoning and systemic racism.

Here's a screenshot from @CityofDenver's zoning map on https://t.co/Tzx271JS8u.

This is textbook Euclidean Zoning, AKA "Single-Use Zoning".

The problems of this form of zoning are well-known:https://t.co/WqiklxjB4h pic.twitter.com/7RDaFJlttS
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 15, 2020

Hindrance 3: Legally-imposed Minimums (lot size, setbacks)

Having “minimums” around lot sizes and setbacks wrecks cities. I’ll add more sources at some point, but again, this is not a contentious statement. If you think it’s politically charged, it’s because you’re thinking about the issue from the wrong angle.

Hindrance 4: Legally-imposed Maximums

Proscribing maximums (like floor area ratios, heights, densities) wrecks cities as much as the minimums do.

Most of the pleasant part of downtown that we all know and love is wildly illegal according to modern zoning codes, because it violates minimums (setbacks) and maximums (floor area ratios).

Together, these minimums/maximums leave little room for new development - all the new development we get is the ugly stuff. The charming, efficient buildings of the past are all illegal.

More later.

Resources

There’s a lot more I’ll say on “planners” soon - most of them mean well, and are highly constrained actors. Some of them are prevented from doing the right thing by broken political systems. Others are prevented from doing the right thing by ignorance. One of these is partically forgivable. ↩

RailsConf Presentation: 'Junior' Developers are a Solution to Many of your Problems

2021-05-21T13:00:00+00:00

Did this talk resonate and you want to implement some of the ideas at your company? I might be able to help. Shoot me an email at joshthompson@hey.com or book some time to talk at https://calendly.com/joshthompson/coffee.

This talk is available on railsconf.org, here: https://railsconf.org/watch/bettering-our-industry/junior-devs-are-the-solution-to-many-of-your-problems

I’ve only just started systematizing resources around this. I’d love to talk with you about your thoughts on these resources. Use the coffee link above, or if there’s no availability and this is an issue you’re willing to throw money at, book time on a much more flexible calendar here: https://calendly.com/joshthompson/flexible

I’m a month into creating public resources to create a “path” by which an ECSD can grow to a non-ECSD. Follow along here: https://github.com/sponsors/josh-works

Questions that came up from the talk

Misc Resources

There are lots of ways teams can better utilize the resources of their ECSDs.

Q&A on March 14th, at 4:40p.

Slides

Available on Dropbox

RailsConf CFP Draft Notes

Here’s the abstract for this talk: RailsConf CFP Draft Notes

Useful Resources

I’ll be relying upon scientific and non-scientific literature like:

Other Talks I’ve given

👉 Boulder Ruby: Move Slow and Improve Things: Performance Improvement in a Rails App 👉 Greater Than Code ep 220: Safety Science and Failure As An Opportunity For Growth

Footnotes

Josh Thompson presentation to Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB)

2021-03-29T13:00:00+00:00

Here’s a very important one-hour video that is highly relevant to GASB.

If my testimony accomplishes nothing but encouraging members of the GASB board (Joel Black, Jeffrey Previdi, James Brown, Brian Caputo, Kristopher Knight, Dianna Ray, and Carolyn Smith) to spend 15 minutes watching the following video, I will have considered my time to have been well-spent.

It’s worth watching the video to the 15 minute mark, when Chuck draws the parallel between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. When Enron became famous for fraudulent reporting, it was because they obfuscated their long-term liabilities, in the same way that state/local governments sometimes like to obfuscate their own financial position.

If you were to watch the first ten minutes, you’d have data to chew on for a few hours.

If you watched the first twenty minutes (at 2x speed, of course) you’ll be more knowledgeable about arcane government finance machinations than 99% of the lay population of the USA.

Josh Thompson’s Testimony

I submitted a letter (per the above presentation, which I watched live and took a lot of notes from). I ended up being given an opportunity to present to the board. Me, someone who’s a total outsider to the industry. I “manage” my household finances, and that’s the most financial management I’ve ever done.

Watch the live testimony here. You might even see my funny-looking face at 12:45p Mountain time, I’ll be presenting for a few minutes, with a time for the GASB board to ask me questions afterwards.

I’ll be sharing updates on twitter:

👉 twitter.com/josh_works

Here’s my slides

Get in touch! I’d love to talk about any of these things more: joshthompson@hey.com

Keep in mind that I’m a software developer, and only occasionally read financial statements. (That said, I do occasionally read financial statements, which I imagine is unusual for non-finance/accounting people).

I live in Golden, Colorado, and plan on living here for the next 60 years or so, until I (hopefully) die peacefully in my sleep.

The financial well-being of my family, my children, grand-children, and neighbors is necessarily associated with the financial well-being of the City of Golden.

If you’d like to read their annual financial reports, you may find them towards the bottom of the page here:

https://www.cityofgolden.net/government/departments-divisions/finance/

Data-Z’s gives Denver’s financial state a grade of “D”, summarizing the challenges as (paraphrased):

Denver so over-spends that each taxpayer would have to be taxed an extra $5,800 to simply cover its expenses.

Proposed Concept Statement

Here’s the proposed statement (pdf)

On page 10, you see the following:

Short-Term Financial Resources Measurement Focus and Accrual Basis of Accounting*

Definition (Josh Thompson’s light summarization/reformatting)

The short-term financial resources measurement focus incorporates outflows of short- term financial resources and inflows of short-term financial resources and all short-term financial assets, deferred outflows of resources, liabilities, and deferred inflows of resources.

Under an accrual basis of accounting, elements of financial statements arising from short-term transactions and other events are recognized as they occur, and elements of financial statements arising from long-term transactions and other events are recognized when payments are due.

Financial assets in this measurement focus include cash, assets that are available to be converted to cash, and assets that are consumable in lieu of cash. All liabilities in this measurement focus are financial liabilities.

Sheila Weinberg, Founder & CEO in Truth in Accounting:

One of the GASB members highlighted that because the governmental fund financial statements of the general fund exclude long-term obligations and related expenses, these statements “obfuscate the government’s true financial condition” and “conceal costs and obligations incurred in a current period.”

Some people have objected to the use of the word “obfuscate” suggesting it is a strong word indicating confusion and bewilderment. I think it is the CORRECT word.

It is confusing and bewildering to have a balance sheet of governmental funds that does not include the pension and OPEB liabilities even though those funds will be used to pay them. States report positive fund balances while collectively they have accumulated more than $855 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $617 billion of retiree health care liabilities. Most of the 75 most populated cities also report positive fund balances while they have collectively accumulated more than $179 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $160 billion of retiree health care liabilities.

You can download the entire detailed letter here (pdf)

These books are not technically about accounting and finance, but they’re about accounting and finance:

RailsConf CFP Outline

2021-03-27T13:00:00+00:00

I’m pitching some ideas for RailsConf. I only heard about it a few days ago (oops) so this is a bit rushed:

Idea 1: “Junior” Developers are the Solution to Many of Your Problems

Abstract:

Our industry telegraphs: “We don’t want (or know how to handle) ‘Jr. Devs’.”

Jr. Devs, or as I call them: Early-career Software Developers, or ECSDs, have incredible value if their team/company/manager doesn’t “lock themselves out” of accessing this value.

Whoever figures out how to embrace the value of ECSDs will outperform their cohort. 📈💰🤗

I will speak to:

Executives (CTOs/Eng VPs)
Senior Developers/Dev Managers
ECSDs themselves

About how to:

Identify which problems are solvable because of ECSDs
Get buy-in for these problem/solution sets
Start solving these problems with ECSDs

For Review Committee:

This content will be visible only to the review committee.

Details (Include any pertinent details such as outlines, outcomes or intended audience.)

I tried to get the important stuff in the abstract, like:

Audience:

Executives/senior leadership
Senior developers/developer managers
Early-career Software Developers (ECSD)

Desired Outcomes

I’d like to start with a skeptical audience, or an uncertain audience, and move all of the audience to feeling equipped to “drive change” at whatever degree of influence they have within the organization.

if representative members of each of the three groups from the same company attended the talk, they could make all these changes in short order.

I scare-quoted “driving change” because it implies a degree of coercion or force-of-will, but the tools I want them to have will sidestep that coercion entirely, and instead equip them to deliver more value to their organization by perceiving the role of the ECSD differently.

By way of analogy: forcing someone to eat a certain way is coercive. Cooking a delicious meal for them that they enjoy? That’s a gift. Same result, very different method.

desired outcome for an executive/cto/vp engineering:

“I can explain to my department and other business units how improving the experience of ECSDs at my company will guarantee hiring/promotion pipelines inside of my organization, allowing me to spend less time and opportunity cost on trying to get the right people, while also reducing my exposure to the risk of a bad hire”

desired outcome for a senior developer/developer manager:

“I can explain why my direct and effortful contributions to the learning, well-being, and safety of my team’s ECSD unlocks growth and value at several levels of the organization, including, but not limited to:

the experience of ECSDs (duh)
speed of feature development
change in overall technical debt in the application
error rate (be it bugs, outages, missed deadlines)
increases my own influence and reputation within my organization”

Desired outcome for an early-career software developer (ECSD)

“I understand specific ways that I can bring value to my organization, and I know how to leverage my own inexperience to produce valuable artifacts that will lead to my own growth as a developer, and can speak confidently to those values, while understanding that I am part of a system, for better or worse, and am not the only individual with influence over the value I bring to an organization.”

Talk Outline:

Evidence that the industry is not welcoming to ECSDs
Kinds of opportunity that is lost by not being welcomeing to ECSDs, in:
- speed/quality of onboarding
- growth in skills of ECSDs
- growth in skills of more experienced developers
- lost opportunities to connect ideas across domains and industries
Levers available to (executives|sr engineers|ECSDs) to do something about this I’ll be relying upon scientific and non-scientific literature like:
Leading/lagging indicators of success
- There’s lots that can be used for benchmarking “where you are” and “where are you going”, and speak to indicators of success for all three target audience cohorts.

Pitch

The industry is growing quite quickly, with “junior developers” being an “ever-present problem”. (Ugh, I’m channeling words others have said, not my own actual thoughts.)

So many ECSDs go through tremendous effort to get into the industry, hit it wide-eyed and excited, only to be told “you’re not good enough because you’re new”, or “only once you’ve spent time here will we treat you like a valuable contribution to our company”

I don’t think that recommending experienced developers “be more welcoming” is going to effect meaningful change. Those who are amenable to this suggestion are already implementing it, and those who are not amenable don’t really care. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

So, I want to explain in extremely clear language the benefits that accrue to persons at various levels of the engineering organization if they start acting like ECSDs have unique and meaningful contributions, partially because of their newness.

There’s very real money to be made, industries to be transformed, individuals to be impacted, by persons adapting this thinking. The more senior the person is who gets onboard, the more impact this kind of thinking will have within an organization.

Structural Holes and Good Ideas

2021-03-18T13:00:00+00:00

Note from author: This is part of an experimental series, more-or-less based on “white papers” and academic literature, as applied to somewhat practical-ish domains.

These pages serve as a brief overview of a paper, and I’ll be able to link to this paper down the road when I what to be able to do so, without having to repeat all of this information

status: draft

Structural Holes and Good Ideas

Paper on JSTOR, PDF available for free therein (or, as always, check a current mirror of scihub), or here

Here’s the paper abstract, lightly reformatted for readability:

This article outlines the mechanism by which brokerage provides social capital.

Opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, so people connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving.

Brokerage across the structural holes between groups provides a vision of options otherwise unseen, which is the mechanism by which brokerage becomes social capital.

I review evidence consistent with the hypothesis, then look at the networks around managers in a large American electronics company.

The organization is rife with structural holes, and brokerage has its expected correlates.

Compensation, positive performance evaluations, promotions, and good ideas are disproportionately in the hands of people whose networks span structural holes. The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable. I close with implications for creativity and structural change.

On page 387, the section under Creativity, is worth reading.

Basically, people who bring ideas from one domain/network along with them into another domain/network can create substantial value.

Conclusion

Footnotes

The Housing Market Is Absolutely Insane: How To Fix It

2021-02-23T13:00:00+00:00

I had a brief exchange with a good friend recently:

The housing market is indeed insane. This problem that we’re both discussing is:

Unbelievable ($650,000 for a fixer upper)
Oppressive (“unjustly inflicting hardship and constraint, especially on a minority or other subordinate group”)
Evil
Fixable

It’s not certainly fixable, it’s not unavoidably fixable, but it’s fixable if a few things can be made to happen.

I can defend each of these assertions. High housing costs are responsible for crippling the growth of generations of people, forcing large numbers of people to homelessness, etc.

I’m not writing this article to convince you that there’s an actual crisis around housing costs. Like, today, this week, this month. It’s a crisis. If you don’t think there’s a crisis, I’d posit you are part of the problem, but like I said, I’m not writing to convince you there’s a crisis. It’s so obviously a crisis that, to people who see it accurately, they’d be annoyed how much they’d have to explain it to you.

Read [The Color of Law], [The Power Broker], [The High Cost of Free Parking], [Order Without Design], [Seeing Like A State], [Strong Towns], etc. I don’t have time today to educate you on why the way “housing gets built” is a catastrophic problem.

When you look at your monthly income, and look at the cost of housing, and imagine trying to buy and pay off a house in any sort of desirable area in America, and you see how fundamentally impossible it is for you to ever own a house free-and-clear, within a few years, you know there’s a problem.

Introduction/Overview

We need to do a few things:

Understand how pleasant cities have historically developed. (AKA “Is there any place-or-time when this seemed like a solved problem”)
Understand how the current way of doing things makes things worse and not better
Understand the actual changes required to fix these problems
Work backwards from actual changes to the current world we live in

Get rid of things that harm us

Euclidean design

Fixes come from a range of directions. There are supply-side problems in housing, there are demand-side problems in housing. The entire financial infrastructure around homeownership is bananas.

Most of the modern legal regime governing housing, it’s acquisition, it’s payment, what you can do with it, is the regime created by racists with the explicit goal of keeping black people from being able to live in ‘nice neighborhoods’.

Zoning laws

Most zoning laws (I say “most” because I’m SURE someone can find a single counterfactual) cause extreme harm.

They slow down the speed of experimentation/change, the raise the costs of change, and they lock out large groups of people from ever participating in the evolution/creation of their own cities

I touch on this here:

1/20 Thoughts on Denver's zoning and systemic racism.

Here's a screenshot from @CityofDenver's zoning map on https://t.co/Tzx271JS8u.

This is textbook Euclidean Zoning, AKA "Single-Use Zoning".

The problems of this form of zoning are well-known:https://t.co/WqiklxjB4h pic.twitter.com/7RDaFJlttS
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 15, 2020

Euclidean zoning

Euclidean Zoning is cancerous. http://sites.bu.edu/dome/2018/07/19/the-problems-with-euclidean-zoning/

From that article:

Euclidean zoning has also:

exacerbated segregation issues
limited housing supply
encouraged urban sprawl

Eliminate minimum-everything

No more minimum lot sizes. No more minimum parking requirements.

Restrictions on minimum lot sizes, strict building codes, and other elements of Euclidean zoning have increased housing costs, limited new housing construction, worsened affordability issues, and increased the inequality divide in urban areas.

I’ll expand on this later. In general, minimum lot size laws were written to raise the cost of housing (and keep black people out of white neighborhoods). Do you need more evidence that the laws should be removed? If you’d like evidence of that assertion, I’m happy to provide it, assuming you’re acting in good faith.

Eliminate most building codes

I want to live in a safe house. I also want to live in a place with shelter. If I have two options, which should I choose?

Option 1: Live in a place that doesn’t meet residential building code requirements
Option 2: Be homeless

Which would you have me choose? If you well actually… your way into option 1, you’re part of the problem. But that’s OK, I don’t actually need you to agree with me to fix the problem.

People start with “inadequate” housing, when they’re resource-constrained, and then they upgrade their environment as they can.

Please see the book: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built

Eliminate zoning laws

They were written by racists to keep black people out of neighborhoods. I feel dirty even having to explain this. The racists wrote that this was their goal when rolling out the institution of zoning. If you’re even partially honest in saying “that cannot be!!! I am not a racist!” just go read the original zoning plan

Zoning laws, in America, are horrific and cannot be “modified” to be anything but horrific. Eliminate them.

We could replace it with Japanese zoning laws which, while they still have problems, are dramatically less harmful than American racially-biased zoning laws.

Do things that help us

So, after getting rid of bad stuff, we need to actually do lots of good things. reduce, reuse, recycle, better use of space, better use of money, provide more important things like jobs, shelter, food, transportation to the people who live in the city.

Hire people that actually understand how cities work, and let them provide expert guidance on how your city should work

Go read Order Without Design, and internalize its message.

Cities are labor markets

Cities are about labor markets and economic activity. Stop artificially separating housing from commerce. I wish so hard that I could walk next door and grab a coffee and a block over and buy some groceries and another block over and hit up the local tiny climbing wall, and on my way back grab a beer and do some work in a coworking space.

Oh, right, I can’t, because 100 years ago, some asshole decided that people shouldn’t be allowed to open businesses from their house because that was what poor black people did and that asshole used laws to criminalize the way of life of poor people.

Josh, we need licensing and permitting because without it, ANARCHY!!!

This is pearl-clutching, and you’re wrong. So wrong that I cannot even bear to write two sentances explaining why licensing is horrible. Just go read stories about it, and ask yourself ‘how the hell did we ever get to such a bad place’

So, since cities are about labor, and licensing artificially restricts the barrier to provided services, and cities have generally criminalized living and working in the same spot of dirt, you can maybe see why cities have to throw away all the shitty laws they’ve got around licensing and “home occupations”. (That’s a pejorative term, and I’d love to never hear it again.)

Oh, and stop funding your police department. They’re a terrible solution to mostly a not-problem, and most of what they do is oppress minorities and perpetuate our uniquely american “criminalization of poverty” thing. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-police/id1518323701

(I have problems with political authority. Mostly because it’s not real. There is no “political authority”. There’s three groups in the world:

people who use “political authority” as justification to make threats of violence against others
People who think political authority requires that they and others submit to the demands of group 1
Everyone else

Obviously, group 1 is small and powerful. Group 2 is huge. Group 3 is rapidly growing.

Eliminate restrictions on commercial and residential activity in the same lot

If I want to work and live in the same place, who the hell are you to tell me I cannot? This is how human societies have managed themselves for all of time.

Valid problems with these fixes

There’s some problems with these fixes. I’m suggesting throwing away about a century of legislation that seems beyond the pale to many people.

The issue is that Euclidean zoning, is so ingrained it will be difficult for towns to change their entire structure.

It’s so engrained. How do towns fix this?

Honestly, towns need to do away with local governments. Just straight up end it. Stop paying your taxes. Stop going to city meetings. Stop submitting building plan propossals. Stop requesting permits. Just take your property and build on it.

So, what happens when all this oppressive, legal bullshit is stripped away?

We let “the market” sort itself. When the price for something is high, that attracts persons who try to solve it because there’s money to be made.

An aging couple might convert their garage to college housing. They might rent out a basement to a small family. With a little up-work, they’ll bring in an extra $2k/month, forever.

Incidentally, this solves the ‘social security is running out of money’ problem for any elderly person who lives in a desirable locale.

Now, there’s more people living in neighborhoods. OH NO! THE TRAFFIC!

JK, that won’t be a problem, because most people won’t drive nearly as much as they do when they live here:

They will live within a short walk of: - grocery stores - doctors' offices - restaurants - markets - a billion home-run businesses - parks - bookstores - and much more > JOSH! My neighborhood doesn't have all those things! This isn't true! Your neighborhood doesn't have those things _because they're illegal. Make them not-illegal, and you'll start seeing them crop up._ ## End America's embarrassing fetishization of alcohol Fetish, definition: - an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to a particular thing - a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc - an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit. All three of these apply to how America thinks about Alcohol, _and it's ruining our damn cities_. Wanna serve alcohol anywhere? oops, open drinking laws mean you have to have a fence between where your patrons sit, and "the public" might walk. Good job, you just criminalized collective shared seating between a number of small restaurants Want to open a coffee shop, but you realize most people don't drink coffee at 5p, so you want to augment your offerings with time-and-context-aware offerings? Too bad, liquor licenses are expensive AF, and require letting the city be rather intimate with every one of your dealings, so you cannot just hit the local liquor store, buy a few boxes of wine, and start "selling wine". Want to open a restaurant, but you're from Spain, and you grew up drinking wine at lunch? Too bad. In America, you're a criminal and will be treated as such. ## The Positive OK, so, I've ranted and railed about "bad things that need to go away", but that doesn't help with how to promote more good things? Here's that list. We need to stop building in bad ways and start building in good ways. "We" is _not_ inclusive of "people who have historically built things". I'd love to see teenagers, college-age adults, and anyone under 30 getting into building buildings and mobility infrastructure. This is why licensing and credentialing is so damn harmful. If you want to _build_ anything in America you need to go through a decade of useless schooling and gatekeeping to get permission to do something, at which point your independence has been beaten out of you, and by the time you're done, you're likely depressed, overweight, and old. Not exactly a great spot to start "changing the world". - [Patterns of Home] - [A Pattern Language] - [How Buildings Learn] - [Best Practices Dutch Cycling - 5. Bicycle Streets](https://fietsberaad.nl/Kennisbank/Best-Practices-Dutch-Cycling-5-Bicycle-Streets) - [Order Without Design]() # How to actually accomplish all of this I'm not going to suggest any books about cities, when it comes to transforming out cities and ending the systemic racism that our modern legal regime perpetuates. Here's some dangerous books that will help paint a path out: - [The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15794037-the-problem-of-political-authority) - [Police Union Power, Politics, and Confrontation in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Issues](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4982654-police-union-power-politics-and-confrontation-in-the-21st-century) - [The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1111.The_Power_Broker) - [Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102748.Rules_for_Radicals) ### Further Reading - []() ### Footnotes

Driven by Compression Progress

2021-02-18T13:00:00+00:00

Note from author: This is part of an experimental series, more-or-less based on “white papers” and academic literature, as applied to somewhat practical-ish domains.

These pages serve as a brief overview of a paper, and I’ll be able to link to this paper down the road when I what to be able to do so, without having to repeat all of this information

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

Paper on arxiv.org, PDF available for free therein, or here

Here’s the paper abstract, lightly reformatted for readability:

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful.

Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known.

This curiosity drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve.

It motivates exploratory infants, mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial intelligence.

I read this mid-2019:

And three times since then. Whenever I re-read a paper, I add the date to it. Here’s it’s current state:

The abstract was hard for me to read the first time. I had to re-read it a few different times. Here it is, with my thoughts between sentences:

I argue that data becomes temporarily interesting by itself to some self-improving, but computationally limited, subjective observer once he learns to predict or compress the data in a better way, thus making it subjectively simpler and more beautiful.

A self-improving, computationally limited, subjective observer is a fancy way of saying “a normal person”. I’m a self-improving, computationally limited, subjective observer.

I feel a little dose of dopamine in my brain when I encounter novel information, and I have learned to predicted it or anticipate it better than I think I would have. A sign of “better prediction” or “compression” is when I can name a principle elucidated by an author or a known phenomena that is a likely precipitating cause for the unfolding of the story/event.

Curiosity is the desire to create or discover more non-random, non-arbitrary, regular data that is novel and surprising not in the traditional sense of Boltzmann and Shannon but in the sense that it allows for compression progress because its regularity was not yet known.

Do you know that reference? I have no idea who Boltzmann is¹, but I happen to know who Shannon is, and because I know what is being implied this entire paper takes on a new light.

Shannon is an incredible figure. I’d encourage you to read A Mind At Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. It’s fascinating. His life, and his approach to life and his research, is interesting, in the same recursive way that this entire paper I’m discussing is interesting.²

This drive maximizes interestingness, the first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility, that is, the steepness of the learning curve.

The “steepness of the learning curve” is in the same sense that the slope is more important than the y-intercept. (Click that link, read the talk. It’s important to understand the implications for having “the steepest learning curve possible”)

This “steepness” piece, combined with the idea of “compressibility”, posits that they’re inextricably linked. The person who finds the best means to compress information learns the fastest, and therefore outperforms all others in medium-to-long time horizons.

It motivates exploring infants, pure mathematicians, composers, artists, dancers, comedians, yourself, and (since 1990) artificial systems.

The conclusion of the abstract ties in this (admittedly dense) topic of “compression progress” to the domain of all of us.

Anyone engaged in pure research should read this. Anyone who creates anything (words, jokes, code) should attend to the idea of “compression progress”. To attend to this compression is to engage in learning and exploration in the most effective way possible.

Incidentally, for examples of persons driven by compression progress, we can all turn to infants, and observe how they explore the world.³

Conclusion

I’ll probably pull out quotes from the paper at some point. Download the paper and skim the table of contents.

Footnotes

After reading this article, my friend Stephen Pollard emailed me with:

I just read that you don’t know who Boltzmann is. He’s a baller. He’s associated with Entropy and information theory.

↩
An understanding of how Claude Shannon understood “information compression” sheds light on other forms of compression, as they compare/contrast, like: Jane Austen’s concept of information (Not Claude Shannon’s) (2013) ↩
One of the best books I’ve read recently expands on this “compression progress” from a novel ethnographic perspective. The book title is: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.

Don’t read the book, though, read this book review by Scott Alexander: Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success ↩

Two Critical Books and Two Critical Articles (For 'Software People')

2021-01-26T13:00:00+00:00

I speak with many persons who are considering becoming software developers (usually by way of a program like the Flatiron School or the Turing School).

I’m a graduate of the Turing School, and have written a lot about the program, like:

I recommend strongly the following books and articles all the time. They are broadly helpful no matter where you are in your career (or if you don’t have one! A “career” is a luxury, a “job” puts a roof over your head.)

This is a copy/paste from a recent conversation. I’m going to stop copy/pasting these four links to people all the dang time, and instead send them to this page you’re reading right now:

other person:

What where those books/resources that you said are so foundational to your understanding of the industry?

Me:

Read these two books, and these two articles. The books are available at your local library in any format you’d want. The articles are long, give them appropriate attention:

1/3rd of the reason I became a software developer is because of these two articles:

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (Patio11)

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice (Patio11)

This book is another 1/3rd of the reason I got into software:

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

The last 1/3rd (or maybe the first 1/3rd) was from this book:

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Dizzying but Invisible Depth

2021-01-16T13:00:00+00:00

The following is from https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe, but Google+ is shutdown, so it’s not easily sharable. I’m reposting here because this is such a useful post.

Dizzying but invisible depth

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn’t it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more.

Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let’s simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn’t it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more.

Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let’s simplify.

You just typed www.google.com in the location bar of your browser.

Simple, isn’t it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how operating systems work, it’s not quite that simple. You’ve just put into play a kernel, a USB host stack, an input dispatcher, an event handler, a font hinter, a sub-pixel rasterizer, a windowing system, a graphics driver, and more, all of those written in high-level languages that get processed by compilers, linkers, optimizers, interpreters, and more.

Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let’s simplify.

You just pressed a key on your keyboard.

Simple, isn’t it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know about bit about how input peripherals work, it’s not quite that simple.

You’ve just put into play a power regulator, a debouncer, an input multiplexer, a USB device stack, a USB hub stack, all of that implemented in a single chip. That chip is built around thinly sliced wafers of highly purified single-crystal silicon ingot, doped with minute quantities of other atoms that are blasted into the crystal structure, interconnected with multiple layers of aluminum or copper, that are deposited according to patterns of high-energy ultraviolet light that are focused to a precision of a fraction of a micron, connected to the outside world via thin gold wires, all inside a packaging made of a dimensionally and thermally stable resin.

The doping patterns and the interconnects implement transistors, which are grouped together to create logic gates.

In some parts of the chip, logic gates are combined to create arithmetic and bitwise functions, which are combined to create an ALU. In another part of the chip, logic gates are combined into bistable loops, which are lined up into rows, which are combined with selectors to create a register bank.

In another part of the chip, logic gates are combined into bus controllers and instruction decoders and microcode to create an execution scheduler. In another part of the chip, they’re combined into address and data multiplexers and timing circuitry to create a memory controller.

There’s even more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they’ll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Can we simplify further?

In fact, very scarily, no, we can’t. We can barely comprehend the complexity of a single chip in a computer keyboard, and yet there’s no simpler level.

The next step takes us to the software that is used to design the chip’s logic, and that software itself has a level of complexity that requires to go back to the top of the loop.

Today’s computers are so complex that they can only be designed and manufactured with slightly less complex computers. In turn the computers used for the design and manufacture are so complex that they themselves can only be designed and manufactured with slightly less complex computers.

You’d have to go through many such loops to get back to a level that could possibly be re-built from scratch.

Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they’re created, it’s impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that’s involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy’s law says that they simply shouldn’t possibly work.

For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all.

That is the reason why many people can find computers so frustrating to use: there are so many things that can possibly go wrong that some of them inevitably will, but the complexity goes so deep that it’s impossible for most users to be able to do anything about any error.

That is also why it’s so hard for technologists and non-technologists to communicate together: technologists know too much about too many layers and non-technologists know too little about too few layers to be able to establish effective direct communication.

The gap is so large that it’s not even possible any more to have a single person be an intermediate between those two groups, and that’s why e.g. we end up with those convoluted technical support call centers and their multiple tiers. Without such deep support structures, you end up with the frustrating situation that we see when end users have access to a bug database that is directly used by engineers: neither the end users nor the engineers get the information that they need to accomplish their goals.

That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs’ death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie’s: Steve’s influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis’ was much deeper.

On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can’t imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie’s influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.

Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they’re regulating and running.

That’s the ultimate bikeshedding: just like the proverbial discussions in the town hall about a nuclear power plant end up being about the paint color for the plant’s bike shed, the patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing, even though they are irrelevant to the actual function of the overall system being discussed.

Ethan Magnass' sermons from Grace Anglican Church in Grove City, PA

2020-12-14T13:00:00+00:00

update from a few years later: I tried a bunch of stuff to keep myself within evangelicalism. failed, so iterated through another option, sorta in the style of exit, voice, and loyalty: responses in decline of quality of firms. I’ve firmly left the club, and warmly invite anyone else finding themselves within it to do the same: On Leaving Evangelicalism and Opposing It

I’ve been recommending a collection of sermons to many people recently.

I’ve listened to each of these sermons quite a few times. They’re worth your time.

Ethan Magness is the rector at Grace Anglican Church in Grove City, PA.

Sermon Series on Joseph

Grace Anglican Church podcast feed (PocketCasts, Apple Podcasts)

Sermon on Matthew 5:43-48

From November 4, 2018: Gollum & the Outstretched Hand - Matthew 5

Relevant scripture:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

I have far more thoughts on the topic, but for now, this should help you, the reader, find these excellent sermons.

Todo

I’d like to get high-quality transcripts of these sermons. There are services that do this (Like Rev), I’ll pay for it sometime soon. I want good transcripts, not just AI-generated transcripts. It took me like two hours to clean up a few minutes of AI-generated text for My Thoughts on Eric Weinstein’s Thoughts on Pia Kalani’s Thoughts

At some point I’ll weave together other threads I’ve got sketched out, but are not ready for public consumption.

Additional Reading

Fred Roger's Method For Writing Scripts

2020-09-30T13:00:00+00:00

Someone said:

People think this is silly, but read about Fred rogers’ method for writing a script for his show. The rules aren’t fully applicable to presentations, but the attention to detail and to the Interpretation of the audience is. Don’t use any words carelessly.

I said:

I’m not normal. I’ve got three articles open right now. Is there a canonical resource you’d recommend, or I should just seat-of-the-pants research it?

I’m going to knock out what I can in 20 minutes, share back with said individual, and calibrate on if they think I learned what I need to learn. Timer starts at 3:17p.

It’s now 3:37.

Conclusion:

I didn’t find anything super specific to how he writes his scripts, but I think there’s a lot to glean from his approach to strongly empathizing with his audience. “strong empathy” feels like a criminal understatement.

I’ve never seen Mr. Rogers. I’m tempted now to find some and watch it. If you’d recommend it, where should I start? Any youtube video overviews I should check out?

10 things Tom Hangs learned by Playing Mr. Rogers

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood: 10 Things Tom Hanks Learned By Playing Mr. Rogers (screenrant)

The 10 lessons from the article.

Be kind, be kind, and be kind
Every single person you’re talking to should feel like they’re the only person in the world who matters
The slow, reflective nature of Mr. Rogers’ kindness
Be the message, don’t preach the message
Even now, keep looking for the helpers
The sweater is the key
Embrace the good and true, over the easy and cynical
To spread joy is the natural order of things
Kindness and compassion as ministry
It’s not just a children’s show

The titles don’t do it justice. Some of these spoke very loudly to me.

###

A few quotes in particular jumped out at me:

Per the pamphlet, there were nine steps for translating into Freddish:

“State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: It is dangerous to play in the street.

“Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in It is good to play where it is safe.

“Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, Ask your parents where it is safe to play.

“Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” In the example, that’d mean getting rid of “ask”: Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.`

“Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” That’d be “will”: Your parents can tell you where it is safe to play.`

“Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.” Not all children know their parents, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play.

“Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.” Perhaps: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is good to listen to them.`

“Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.” “Good” represents a value judgment, so: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them.`

“Rephrase your idea a ﬁnal time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand.” Maybe: Your favorite grown-ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.`

In working on the show, Rogers interacted extensively with academic researchers. Daniel R. Anderson, a psychologist formerly at the University of Massachusetts who worked as an advisor for the show, remembered a speaking trip to Germany at which some members of an academic audience raised questions about Rogers’s direct approach on television. They were concerned that it could lead to false expectations from children of personal support from a televised figure. Anderson was impressed with the depth of Rogers’s reaction, and with the fact that he went back to production carefully screening scripts for any hint of language that could confuse children in that way.

As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood looked and sounded, every detail in it was the product of a tremendously careful, academically informed process.

Now I’m wondering about the financial success of his show.

Wikipedia: Fred Rogers

link

The show was popular:

by 2016 it was the third-longest running program in PBS history

Ah, here’s how involved he was:

According to King, the process of putting each episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood together was “painstaking”[59] and Rogers’ contribution to the program was “astounding”. Rogers wrote and edited all the episodes, played the piano and sang for most of the songs, wrote 200 songs and 13 operas, created all the characters (both puppet and human), played most of the major puppet roles, hosted every episode, and produced and approved every detail of the program.

He had two stages to the show:

n 1975 Rogers stopped producing Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to focus on adult programming. […] In 1979, after an almost five-year hiatus, Rogers returned to producing the Neighborhood; King calls the new version “stronger and more sophisticated than ever”

Ahhh…. influence, and storytelling:

Even though Rogers was not yet nationally known, he was chosen to testify because of his ability to make persuasive arguments and to connect emotionally with his audience. The clip of Rogers’ testimony, which was televised and has since been viewed by millions of people on the internet, helped to secure funding for PBS for many years afterwards.

Lets watch the clip, or queue it up for later at least. He starts to speak at 0:20:

I will watch this video, just not quite right now.

Oh, and he’s from Pittsburgh. I went to school near there, just finished working remotely for a company in Pittsburgh. I loved visiting the city.

Optional Next Steps

I could read Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers
Actually watch some Mr. Rogers clips. I’m tempted to do that anyway, now.
Any recommended youtube videos?

Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or 'Deep Work' (Crosspost from `letterstoanewdeveloper.com`)

2020-08-20T13:00:00+00:00

Dan Moore is always welcoming to guest authors; he accepted something I wrote: Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention, or “Deep Work” (Letters to a New Developer). It ended up on Hacker News with 100 comments. I wrote this back in December 2019, forgot to post here until now.

Dan published a book by the title Letters to a New Developer. This letter is in it, but don’t let that disuade you. The book is full of great insights from developers of all experience levels.

Dear New Developer,

You know that there’s a chasm between your skill level and that of the mythical “senior software developer”.

If you build a list of topics you encounter on your job that, if learned to a deep enough level, would put you on the same level as a senior developer, you’ll end up even more demoralized than before compiling that list.

No need to assemble this list yourself! I’ve done it for you.

Here’s the list of topics that I’d need to dedicate significant time to, in order to close the gap between me and the senior developers on our team, that I’ve encountered in my last two days of work:

Breaking complex unknowns into simpler unknowns that can be further split into individual tickets
Adding tests to complex, legacy code, to guide further refactoring of said code.
Using grep to comb through server logs to diagnose a hard-to-identify-and-reproduce problem
Provisioning new servers
Building bash scripts to automate complex workflows
Digging into gem source code to can shed gem dependencies while maintaining certain features
Understanding indexing well enough to see that certain queries that we thought were using indexes were not, and fix this oversight index on the fly, without causing any blips in availability

Each of these line-items has many books written about the topic.

It seems like you could fill a bookshelf with books that address knowledge senior developers have available to them inside their own heads.

It takes me long enough to work through a single book, so imagining a bookshelf of extra-curricular reading is quite daunting.

It might feel daunting for you, too.

Leading vs. lagging indicators

The above list of skills is a lagging indicator of the underlying knowledge. We should not target improving lagging indicators, we should improve leading indicators.

Josh, what is this ‘lagging and leading indicator’ stuff?

Great question!

A lagging indicator is “evidence that something has already happened.”

If you got an A on a test, that is evidence that you learned the material.

A leading indicator is “evidence that something will likely happen”.

If you want to get an A on a test, you should study in a similar way as others who have gotten an A on that test. Maybe you need ten high-quality hours of study to get an A, so “number of high-quality study hours” would be a leading indicator of your grade.

We no longer take tests (phew. I hated taking tests.) but we get mini-tests of our knowledge, daily. We’re paid to solve problems, which often require learning new things.

Rather than focusing on a list of things other developers have learned, and targeting that list, I humbly propose that a leading indicator of acquiring this kind of knowledge is “hours per week spent in a state of intentional deep work”.

The above list of topics are lagging indicators of a high degree of technical knowledge. Someone acquires the knowledge, then, and only then, can demonstrate that they have it.

Leading indicators are “predictive”, in that if you can identify correctly those indicators, you can predict the outcome of the issue at hand.

In this case, the issue at hand is “become significantly more experienced in the domain of software development”.

I propose that a leading indicator of someone gaining these skills is the amount of time they spend in a state of deep work.

I’d encourage you to read Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. The author makes a case for deep work being a key role in the success of “knowledge workers” (which includes many types of work, including, of course, software development.)

If you’d rather not read the book, here’s the gist, from this summary of the book:

In order to produce the absolute best stuff you’re capable of, you need to commit to deep work.
The ability to quickly master hard things and the ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed, are two core abilities for thriving in today’s economy.
“To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.”
“Your work is craft, and if you hone your ability and apply it with respect and care, then like the skilled wheelwright you can generate meaning in the daily efforts of your professional life.”
“The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.”
Imagine two equally knowledgeable early-career software developers. They have the exact same skills on January 1, 2020. If the first software developer spends four hours a week doing deep work, while the second software developer spends fifteen hours a week doing deep work, their trajectories will be quite different, and that second developer will quickly gain technical knowledge and proficiencies.

So, if you’re an early-career software developer, track the time you spend doing deep work. That has you focusing on a leading indicator of growing in your skills.

At that point, you’ll benefit from Peter Drucker’s assessment:

What is measured, improves.

You’ll track how many hours you spend doing deep work, and by tracking it, you’ll do more and more of it.

In conclusion

Do more deep work, and over a year or two years, your skills will grow much faster than those doing less deep work. Eventually, you might find that you’re doing the work of a senior developer!

Good luck!

-Josh

Full Copy of 'The Atlanta Zone Plan' from 1922

2020-08-17T12:00:00+00:00

update: I originally wrote this in 2020. It’s as present in my mind today as it was then. Some explanations can be found in the updates I wrote below. I might change the published date sometimes to float this up to the top of the list of blog posts.

To see the document that enshrined this thing into law across the USA, read A Standard State Zoning Enabling Act: Under Which Municipalities May Adopt Zoning Regulations (pdf). It is full of jaw-dropping sentances. From page ONE:

Definitions. — No definitions are included. The terms used in the act are so commonly understood that definitions are unnecessary. Definitions are generally a source of danger. They give to words a restricted meaning. No difficulty will be found with the operation of the act because of the absence of such definitions.

Hilariously, the document is, in fact, full of definitions. Each page has a few lines of text and 3/4s of it is footnotes.

Under a section called remedies, my jaw dropped, again. Wow. To see it, and appreciate that this document is being faithfully re-implemented, every day, today, a thousand times, in different cities around the world, especially though in the united states, is to be brought to tears.

A Warning and a Request

In a moment, you will read the full text of a 1922 marketing pamphlet. This document is an important thread to understanding some very large political problems facing the world today, specifically ~~housing, affordability, the growing wealth gap, and more~~.

update from a few years after I first wrote this post:

When i first wrote this, I downplayed what this document connects to. It was written by a supremacist, who wanted to maintain the supremacy he was clinging to, the violent oppression and exploitation of people deemed slaves.

this 1922 marketing pamphlet became “law” in the greater united states in 1926, in a supreme court case between the municipality of Euclid, ohio, and a real estate company. American-style zoning is known as ‘euclidean’ zoning, for this reason. That supreme court case obviously references this 1922 document. That style of zoning is presumed god in the USA today. The people who know enough about the space to know what ‘euclidean zoning’ is generally do not know that the person who invented it, in first penning the section about residence districts, wrote r1-white and r2-colored in it. Definitionally, american-style zoning expects all housing to be segregated by that european-american style of supremacy, hallucinations of the concept of ‘race’. ‘single-family housing’ was the supremacist fantasy of whiteness, and multi-family housing was where they poured their rejected shadow-side. It was all, of course, heavily wrapped with layers of coercive control. Womp womp. the concept of political authority is, definitionally, credible threats of violence from one group against another. yaaaaaaay!

This document tells a story. This story is about power. Most people that have true power, power that can shape entire cities and how billions of dollars get spent, don’t run around telling everyone “I’m ludicrously powerful and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

These ludicrously powerful people hide their power under layers of misdirection and distraction, and they make it look like they’re less powerful than they actually are. Like Robert Moses.¹

This 100 year old marketing brochure influences your daily experiences today. Powerful people wrote that document.

Context for the Atlanta Zone Plan of 1922

I recently read Racial Zoning: Segregation and the U.S. Federal Government.

I’ll share a quote from the article:

Whitten then went ahead and designed a zoning ordinance for Atlanta, advising city officials that “home neighborhoods had to be protected from any further damage to values resulting from inappropriate uses, including the encroachment of the colored.”

The zone plan drafted by Whitten and unpublished by the Atlanta City Planning Commission in 1922 explained that “race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.”

The zoning law divided the city into an “R-I white district” and “R-2 colored district” with additional neighborhoods undetermined (Rothstein 2017)

This quote referenced a zone plan: The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta

I read every word of that document. It’s pictures of the original pamphelt, converted to PDF. Here’s the full document:

There’s only 15 pages with much text on them, and it is all so riveting.

I share some high points and screenshots of the zoning plan in the following thread. I’d encourage you to peruse the threads before continuing:

Thoughts on Denver’s zoning and systemic racism (Twitter thread #1)

1/20 Thoughts on Denver's zoning and systemic racism.

Here's a screenshot from @CityofDenver's zoning map on https://t.co/Tzx271JS8u.

This is textbook Euclidean Zoning, AKA "Single-Use Zoning".

The problems of this form of zoning are well-known:https://t.co/WqiklxjB4h pic.twitter.com/7RDaFJlttS
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 15, 2020

Deeper dive into connections between 1922 zoning plan and modern Denver (Twitter thread #2)

I missed a piece in this "R-1 White District" and "R-2 Colored District" narrative outlined in Atlanta's 1922 zoning plan.

The central piece of Witten's racist zoning plan was "the encroachment of the colored" in white neighborhoods. https://t.co/2gWMdsaEb8 pic.twitter.com/mej9ILqNOK
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 16, 2020

I wanted to make the text more readable/discoverable, instead of it living “inside” of this PDF, so I used a tool to extract text from the images. I’ve sprinkled some of my notes below.

Oh, and if you find this kind of thing interesting, I’m working on an interesting related project, and I’d love your help:

Want to stay up to date on these projects? Enter your email below, and you'll get an approximately-monthly newsletter from me.

The Atlanta Zone Plan: Report Outlining a Tentative Zone Plan for Atlanta

copied from this online resource

Introduction: Purpose of Zoning

Zoning will prevent the destruction of the comfort and value of your home through the erection nearby of a:

Public garage
Oil filling station
Grocery store
Steam Laundry
Sanatorium
Ice plant
Foundry

Plan Authors

Atlanta City Planning Commission

James Key, Mayor, Chairman ²
Robert R. Otis, Vice-Chairman
Frank Pittman
Fred J. Terry
Hoke Smith
Joel Hurt
Chas. A. Wickersham
Robert H. Whitten, Consultant
H. D. Cutter, Jr, Engineer and Secretary

Five Illustrations of the Need for Zoning

Note from Josh: Each of these illustrations are complex. They interleave facts and misdirection, I have a lot I could say about each sentance, but I’ll restrain myself until later in the document, as much as possile.

Illustration 1

A mechanic buys a home for his family in a newly developed residence subdivision. He and his neighbors plant trees and shrubs and make the section a quiet and attractive home neighborhood.

Then the adjoining house changes hands and the new owner (thinking only of his own immediate advantage) builds a small grocery store projecting to the sidewalk line and surrounds it with a litter of boxes and barrels.

Our mechanic who has invested his entire savings, $3500 [$54,000 in 2020 dollars], in his home and given a first mortgage lien for the remainder of the purchase price would like to move away and offers his home for sale but finds that it will now bring but half the amount he paid for it and his entire savings, $3500, have been lost.

He is forced to remain where he is. Not only his home but all the homes in the block are depreciated in value; as a result the owners are discouraged; the yards are neglected and the property allowed to run down.

This nice, quiet home section has been ruined and the savings of the home owners wiped out. This is an example of what is happening in one block after another all over the city. Is this the way to encourage thrift or promote home ownership?

Illustration 2

Mr. Smith has purchased a home in an attractive neighborhood. All of the homes have large well kept yards.

Mr. Smith believes that children, like plants, must have plenty of sun light and room in which to grow. The location selected seems an ideal one in which to live and raise his family. But there is a vacant lot next door. A speculative builder estimates that he can buy that lot, erect a four story, sixteen suite apartment house thereon, rent the apartments, sell to some investor and clean up a handsome profit for himself.

The apartment house is erected and is quickly rented and sold.

It rents well because it is in a section of private homes and has the benefit of the lawns and open spaces about the adjoining houses. But the value of Mr. Smith’s home is practically destroyed. His light and air is cut off by the huge bulk of the apartment house.

The quiet and comfort of the entire block for private residence purposes has been largely destroyed.

Each home owner fears that a similar apartment building may be constructed next door to him. Those who can, sell out or move away and rent their homes for any purpose or use that offers.

Apartment houses are needed but is it necessary to permit them to scatter indiscriminately throughout the private home sections? If Atlanta is to be preserved as a city of homes we must protect the home owner by establishing definite limits beyond which the apartment house may not spread³.

Illustration 3

A number of large apartment houses have been erected in a block in a section near the center of the city that is being generally developed for apartment house purposes. There is a large vacant lot in the block and a speculative builder determines that in consequence of the demand for garage storage space in this apartment-house neighborhood he can make a good profit by building a public garage on the vacant lot.

The garage is built and the noise and traffic incident to its operation makes the entire block undesirable for residence purposes. The tenants of the nearby apartment houses move out and the vacant suites are only again rented at a rate that means an enormous loss to the owners⁴.

Zoning is just as essential for the protection of the apartment-house owner as it is for the protection of the home owner.

Illustration 4

Here is a large area that has been built up quite uniformly with small homes. There is a block near the center of the area that has remained undeveloped owing chiefly to the cost of bringing the lots to street grade.

An ice manufacturer picks this block as a good location for his new ice plant. The plant is built and becomes the ice distributing center for a large area. The delivery teams are stabled at the plant, and early each morning the rumbling of the wagons and the shouts of the teamsters make sleep for the nearby residents impossible.

Added to this, there is the continuous noise arising from the operation of the plant. The entire district is now undesirable for residence purposes⁵. Property values fall and other small shops and industries take advantage of the low prices to secure locations for their operations.

The area becomes blighted.

It is spoiled for residence use and being without railroad track facilities is of little value for industrial purposes.

Illustration 5

A ten story office and store building is erected at the corner of the best business block in the central business section of the city. The building is a financial success: the ground floor is rented for retail store purposes and the upper floors, being light and airy, bring good rentals.

Its success, however, leads to the erection of a sixteen story building across the street from one of its frontages, a twenty story building across the street from the other frontage and of sixteen to twenty-four story buildings on both sides and in the rear.

The offices, being darkened by the higher buildings are forced to use artificial light throughout the entire day and are rentable only at a fraction of the former amounts.

The building no longer earns a fair return on the investment. As the competition in building height proceeds a large proportion of the office floors of each building in this entire section are so darkened as to make the returns from the rentals insufficient to cover the investment⁶.

Unless office building heights are strictly limited the result is bound to be disastrous to the investors as well as injurious to the health and comfort of the clerks working in the darkened offices.

What Zoning is and does

Josh: We’re getting closer to the author’s revealing their true colors. Just keep in mind the authors have a strong preference to keep black people out of white neighborhoods.

Zoning is a conscious, intelligent effort to direct the building of the city in accord with a well-considered plan⁷. Like good housekeeping it provides a place for everything and tries to keep everything in its place. Like good industrial management it plans for an orderly growth and expansion of the plant.

Zoning divides the land area of the city into residence, business and industrial districts and prevents the erection of business and industrial buildings in the residence districts or of industrial buildings in the business districts⁸.

Zoning prevents the development of great blighted areas near the heart of the city. Unless some definite limit is fixed to the distance to which business may spread out from the central business area one block after another is abandoned by the resident owners until great areas are affected that will never be needed for business and the typical blighted district results⁹.

St. Louis has one of the best examples of this wasteful development¹⁰.

Zoning will centralize local business in well-defined local business centers. This will facilitate the transaction of business. It will improve land and rental values in the business sections, while at the same time conserving values in the residence sections¹¹.

Zoning will keep the apartments out of the private house sections. The coming of the apartment drives out the private home. Only by setting definite limits to the spread of the apartment can the city be preserved as a city of homes¹².

Zoning will prevent congestion of population. In addition to confining tenement house construction to certain areas, zoning will prevent excessive crowding even in the tenement areas. This will be accomplished by requiring a minimum number of square feet of lot area for each family for which the tenement is arranged¹³.

Zoning is essential to preserve the morale of the various neighborhoods or communities into which the city is divided. Zoning creates confidence that the existing character of the neighborhood will be preserved¹⁴. Such confidence is essential to the improvement of the area and to the maintenance of a vigorous civic pride and spirit.

Zoning requires each owner so to use his property as not to injure his neighbor. Without zoning the individual owner is powerless to prevent the destruction of the value of his property¹⁵. Only by submitting to some restriction on his power to do with his own just as he pleases is he himself able to obtain protection. Zoning is a practical application of the Golden Rule to the use of property.

Zoning enforces a certain degree of co-operation among property owners for their mutual advantage and protection. A certain degree of uniformity in the development of a block or area is beneficial to all owners. This is the meaning of restrictive covenants in all better-class residential developments. Zoning applies the principle of the restrictive covenant in so far as it can be used to promote public as distinct from purely private ends.

The growth of cities has made it necessary to modify former ideas both of personal library and property rights. What a man can be allowed to do and what uses he can be allowed to make of his property depend on whether he lives on a 100 acre farm or in the middle of a city block.

With the growth of the city it becomes more and more necessary to distinguish between liberty and license both as applied to persons and to property. Property in a city is “affected with a public interest.” Its value is a joint product of individual initiative and community growth. Its misuse can bring irreparable injury to the community and to property owners generally. It must submit to control both in the public interest and for its own preset vation.

No useful trade or industry is in itself a nusiance; but any trade, industry or other use of property may become a nuisance if located in violation of an appropriate and orderly plan of city development.

Zoning will limit the height of buildings differently in different parts of the city. The height limits will be those appropriate for the various classes of use. No owner will be permitted to appropriate for the use of his building an undue share of the common stock of light and air. Without a height limit the tendency is for each new office or hotel building to push up higher than its neighbors in order to get more light and air. This competition to build the highest building with its attendant street traffic congestion will be stopped by zoning.

Zoning will conserve property values. Haphazard development is bound to be costly and uneconomic development. Zoning will save enormous waste in building construction. With uncontrolled building development the construction of a new building in a neighborhood often means a net loss in the aggregate value of the building of that neighborhood. With zoning, each new building increases the aggregate value in an amount equal to and usually in excess of its own cost.

Zoning will attract money to a city for investment in real estate. Large lending institutions will be inclined to favor those cities in which their investments will be afforded the safeguard of a comprehensive zoning plan. Failure to provide the zoning safeguard is as inexcusable as failure to protect property against destruction by fire.

Zoning protects the home. Quiet and freedom from the distraction incident to trade, industy and attendant street traffic are essential to a wholesome home environment.

Zoning will establish uniform building lines in the residence sections, thus giving opportunity for a front yard with a lawn and trees and preventing one building from pushing out in front of its neighbors.

Zoning will promote industrial development. It will set aside adequate areas for industries within which the new plant may locate without incurring the criticism and continual complaints of neighboring residents and owners. It will attract to the city and to the home areas near the industrial areas a good and abundant labor supply. The segregation of industries will make it possible to serve the industrial areas more ef efficiently and more economically with sewers, trucking routes and freight facilities.

Zoning promotes the health and comfort of the people. Orderly city growth cannot fail to have a marked effect on the physical fitness and vitality of the city’s inhabitants. The rapid increase in nervous and organic disorders has some very definite relation to the congestion, noise and confusion incident to the existing haphazard and uncontrolled building development.

The New York Zoning Commission said:

The necessity for reducing the stress and strain of city life is becoming more and more apparent. This is essential if the city is to be a place in which our heritage of health and vitality is to be used, conserved and handed down to succeeding generations instead of being abused and exhausted.

Outline of Tentative Zone Plan

The zoning amendment of the city charter provides that zoning plans may be prepared by the City Planning Commission and that such plans if adopted by the General Council after public hearing have been held shall have the force of law. It is fully realized that plans of this kind, before being adopted, should have the benefit resulting from their study and criticism by property owners and civic and business organizations throughout the city. The plan herewith presented is not a final plan, but merely a tentative draft to secure public suggestions and criticism.

It is proposed that this tentative plan shall be taken up in detail with the members of the General Council, with citizens interested, and with civic and commercial organizations and as a result of the recommendations thus received a final plan will be prepared for submission to the Commission and the General Council. It is expected that the final plan will be the result of the joint efforts and best thought of all concerned in the direction of building development along orderly and well considered lines of city growth.

The city of Atlanta is divided into six classes of use districts. Two of these are residence districts and four are business and industrial districts. In addition to the use districts there are four classes of height districts and five classes of area districts. The height and area districts are superimposed over the use districts.

Consequently, each portion of the city is in some one of the six classes of use districts, in some one of the four classes of height districts and also in some one of the five classes of area districts. The boundaries of the various use, height and area districts are shown on the zone map.

Residence Districts

THE two classes of residence districts are:

Class UI or dwelling house district.
Class U2 or apartment house district.

A building arranged for more than two families may not be constructed in a dwelling house district. One of the chief purposes of the zone plan is to preserve Atlanta as a city of homes.

While a certain number of apartment houses are beneficial, they should not be allowed to drive out the private homes in all sections of the city. Carefully limited but adequate areas are allowed for apartment house developement. The dwelling house districts, from which apartment houses are excluded, will include the larger portion of the entire area of Atlanta¹⁶.

Trade and industry are excluded from the residence districts¹⁷. Churches, schools, libraries, etc., are permitted in the residence districts. Hospitals, sanitariums and institutional buildings are permitted in those blocks of the residence districts already occupied by similar buildings. They will also be permitted in other locations with the approval of the board of zoning appeals.

Race Zoning

The residence districts are further subdivided into three race districts:

R1 or white residence district.
R2 or colored residence district.
R3 or undetermined race district.

In the white residence districts no house not occupied by a colored family at the time of the passage of the zoning ordinance can be thereafter occupied by a colored family.¹⁸ In the colored residence districts no house not occupied by a white family at the time of the passage of the zoning ordinance can be thereafter occupied by a white family.¹⁹

Servants quarters located on the same lot as the residence they serve will nevertheless be allowed in either districts without distinction to race²⁰.

Certain limited limited residence areas are placed in neither the white district nor the colored district but are left undetermined as to the race zoning. The above race zoning is essential in the in interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race. Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.

Business and Industrial Districts

There are four classes of business and industrial districts:

Class U3 or local retail store district.
Class U4 or commercial district.
Class U5 or industrial district.
Class U6 or industrial (semi-nuisance) district.

In the local retail store (class U3) district retail stores, offices and small shops for custom work or for the making of articles to be sold at retail on the premises are permitted. The uses permitted in the residence districts are also permitted in the local retail business district.

Public garages, light manufacturing and bulk storage are excluded from the local retail business district. This district is suitable chiefly for the smaller retail centers adjacent to the resident tial sections. The attempt has been to provide small areas for neighborhood stores at half-mile intervals throughout the resident sections.

The commercial (class U4) district regulations permit in addition to all uses permitted in the local retail business district, light manufacturing of a non-nuisance character and also public garages, bulk storage and wholesale business. The commercial districts will include most of the central business sections and some of the local business sections along the main traffic arteries and street car lines.

In the industrial (class U5) district all heavy industrial uses of a comparatively non-nuisance type are permitted in addition to all the uses permitted in the residence and business districts.

Most of the area appropriate for industrial development extending out through the industrial housing areas along the railroads should be placed in the class U5 district and thus aid in the spreading out of the industries and of the industrial population.

In the semi-nuisance industrial (class U6) district such uses as boiler making, structual iron works and junk yards are permitted. This district provides for industries that need to be distributed in various industrial sectors about the city but are detrimental if immediately adjacent to residences. The nuisance features, usually noise, smoke or odor, extend up to about 1,200 feet from the industry, thus making the vicinity undesirable for certain other types of industry and very undesirable for housing.

Fertilizer plants, glue factories, slaughter houses and similar industries are classed as nuisances and under the zone plan will not be permitted to locate within the city limits.

The excluded nuisances are those that affect a very wide area with these exceptions the purpose of the four business and industrial districts is to provide locations for all types of business and industrial use with a minimum of inconvenience and waste and a maximum of efficiency.

A manufacturer of food preparations may be seriously injured by the location nearby of a chemical plant. Moreover certain types of business and industrial use may be lo city close to good residential sections without material injury while other types if located within a quarter of mile of such sections are distinct nuisances.

It is only by carefully grading the various trade and industrial uses according to their comparative freedom from nuisance characteristics that an orderly and efficient development of the city can be secured.

The zoning regulations also provide that such special uses as a cemetery, crematory, aviation field, sewage disposal plant or refuse dump may be located only on application to and with the approval of the board of zoning appeals.

Height Districts

The entire city is divided into four classes of height districts. The maximum limits are 35 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet and 150 feet, and the height districts are termed respectively class H1, H2, H3 and H4.

In the class Hı height district the height limit is 2 1/2 stories but not in excess of 35 feet²¹. The one and two family dwelling and the two story apartment sections will generally be placed in the class H1 district. This class will therefore include most of the residence sections.

In the class H2 height district the maximum height is 50 feet. The 50 foot limit permits the erection of the ordinary four story apartment or the four story commercial building.

In the class H3 height district the maximum height is 100 feet. The 100 foot limit provides for the ordinary eight story office or factory building. Most of the industrial areas will be included in this district.

In the class H4 height district the maximum height is 150 feet. This 150 foot limit provides for the ordinary twelve story office or hotel building. The class H4 district will include that portion of the central business area where the most intensive office and hotel dedevelopment is anticipated.

There are at present only seven buildings in the city over 150 feet in height. Our streets in the business section are so congested that it is imperative that the height of buildings be strictly limited so as to spread out the areas of intensive use. The widths of the streets will not take care of the traffic of a three story city and it will be absolutely disastrous to burden them with the traffic of a twenty or thirty story city.

Values in the high grade shopping sections can best be maintained by encouraging the spreading out of the business area and the reservation of such sections for retail business and the traffic incident to retail business. The proposed height limit of 150 feet will tend to spread out the business district and will tend also to reduce traffic congestion and maintain values in the best retail business sections. The experience of New York and other large cities is that excessively high buildings are un-economic and very undesirable from a public standpoint²².

A single high building may pay as it takes its light and air from above its neighbors; but when this first skyscraper becomes surrounded by buildings of similar height, light and air are cut off and only the upper floors can be leased at remunerative rentals. The occupants of the darkened offices on all the other floors must use artificial light throughout the

day. By restricting all buildings to a reason ble height, so that when the business area is solidly built up, most of the floors of every building will have a fair supply of daylight, enormous economic loss will be avoided and the health of the people occupying offices and shops in the buildings will be conserved.

Area Districts

The entire city is divided into five classes of area districts:

Class A1 requiring 5000 sq. ft. of lot area per family
Class A3 requiring 1250 sq. ft. of lot area per family.
Class A4 requiring 625 sq. ft. of lot area per family.
Class A5 with no required lot area per family when applied to commercial districts.

The area districts are superimposed over the height and use districts. The area district regulations are intended to promote an approprate distribution of population and to resist the tendency toward the congestion of population. The requirement of a specified number of square feet of lot area per family is based on the number of housekeeping units or families for which the building is arranged or designed.

On a lot of 40 feet by 125 feet a single family house can be constructed in a class A1 district; a two family house in a class A2 district; a four family house in a class A3 district; and an eight family house in a class A4 district. A more intensive development is in cach case allowed on corner lots.

The class A1 district requiring 5000 sq. ft. of lot area per family is applied in those sections of the city where a single family house is the most appropriate development. The two family house is prohibited in A1 districts.

The residence actions that seem appropriate for improvement with either a single family house on a small lot or a two family house on a lot having 5000 sq. ft. of lot area are placed in the class A2 district where the requirement is 2500 sq. ft. of lot area per family. Most of the apartment house districts will be in the class A4 districts requiring 625 sq ft. of lot area per family. This will permit an eight family apartment house on a lot 40 feet by 125 feet. Other apartment house areas will be placed in the A3 district which will permit the housing of but for families on the same size lot.

The requirement of a certain number of square feet of lot area per family applies to residence buildings whether they are within the residence districts or are constructed within business or industrial districts. In computing the number of families that may be housed on a given lot area, deduction is made where a portion of the lot is used for business or industrial purposes. Thus in a class A3 area district where, for example, four families might be housed on a 40 ft. by 125 ft. lot, if there are stores occupying 2000 sq. ft. of area on the ground floor, the number of families that can be housed on the lot is reduced by one, or in other words there is a reduction of one family for each 2000 sq. ft. of lot area occupied for business purposes.

The ordinary two or three story store and dwelling building is not a desirable type of construction from a public stand point. The regulations as applied will tend to reduce the number of flats that would otherwise be located over stores. The erection of dwellings or apartment houses is not prohibited in the industrial districts, though for the most part these districts are so located that there would be little tendency to build residences within them.

It is, of course undesirable for many reasons to have residences and factories intermingled. The factories do not create a proper environment for the home, and the nearness of the home to the factories subject the factory owners to the complaints of the residents because of the nuisance features incident to the normal operations of the factories.

While the zone plan does not prohibit the erection of residences even in the semi-nuisance industrial districts, it will tend to discourage the erection of dwellings therein for two reasons:

first, with definite areas set aside for residences and factories, the financial hazard incident to the placing of residences in a factory zone will, in most cases, serve as a suf ficient deterrent;
second, the semi-nuisance in industrial districts will be placed in the A1 area districts which will require 5000 sq. ft. of lot area per family. This will further tend to make the erection of a residence in one of these districts uneconomic.

Side and Rear Yards

Side and rear yards are required in all residence districts. In business and industrial districts, side yards are not required, but rear yards are required where such districts adjoin residence districts.

The zone plan does not attempt to provide a complete code for the lighting and ventilation of the building. It simply establishes minimum standards for those open spaces about the building that have a relation to the lighting and ventilation of the adjoining buildings as well as to that of the building itself. The zone regulations are thus confined to those things in which adjoining owners have a mutual interest. Side yards, rear yard and front yard spaces are required for the mutual advantage of all owners and occupants of the block. The provision or omission of an interior court, on the other hand, does not affect the neighbor.

Front Yards: Building Lines

Atlanta has been generally developed with residences setting well back from the street line, affording adequate room for lawn and trees. This makes a healthful and convenient city as well as beautiful city. Grass and trees make an attractive home environment and are almost essential to a normal, healthful development of the child.

Occasionally, in a detached residence section, an apartment house disregards the existing building line and is erected at or near the street line. This cuts off light and air from the neighboring buildings and if it becomes a type will entirely change the character of our residence sections. Atlanta will tend to reproduce conditions obtaining in certain other cities where there are great areas with apartment houses erected right on the street line and with out a bit of vegetation-nothing but the pavement and the bare brick walls. We can pre vent the reproduction of such conditions in our residence sections by maintaining the existing building lines.

Classification of Uses

The classification of uses which is a part of the zoning ordinance divides the various uses of property into groups, classes and subdivisions. The use classes correspond to the use districts. Each use class lists the uses for which the corresponding use district class is specially designed to provide. Starting with the private dwelling, the classification enumerates the various kinds of residential use and then the business and industrial uses graded and arranged according to their comparative freedom from nuisance characteristics. In the hierarchy of uses the dwelling comes first and garbage reduction and fertilizer plants last.

Non-conforming Uses

The zoning ordinance does not affect existing uses of property. A use or building existing at the time of the passage of the zoning ordinance which does not comply with the regulations of the use district in which it is located is called a non-conforming use. Such use or building may be continued though not conforming to the use district regulations. The zoning ordinance is not retroactive. If, for example, there is a store in an area that under the zoning ordinance is included in a residence district the store may nevertheless be continued. A non-conforming use may also be changed subject to the general rule that, if changed, it must be to a higher use as listed in the classification of uses. If, however, the non-conforming use is a class U6 (semi-nuisance) use or class U7 (nuisance) use it may not be changed unless to a conforming use. A change to another use listed in the same subdivision of the classification is not deemed a change of use under the ordinance. Thus a change from a grocery store to any other kind of a retail store or shop would technically be deemed a continuance of the existing use.

A building housing a non-conforming use may not be structurally altered to an extent exceeding during any ten year period 60 per cent of the assessed value of the building²³.

While, therefore, an existing non-conforming use may be continued the limitations imposed on a change of use and on the reconstruction of the building housing the non-conforming use will eventually bring about the elimination of the non-conforming use²⁴.

Enforcement: Board of Zoning Appeals

The zoning ordinance will be enforced by the inspector of buildings²⁵. No building permit will be issued unless the building and its proposed use conform to the zoning regulations.

In the application of the zoning many cases will arise, especially near the dividing line be tween two use districts, where the strict letter of the zoning regulations may properly be modified. This can be done in specific cases with out injury to general public purposes of the ordinance, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary injury to the individual owner.

Strictly limited discretion is therefore lodged in a board of zoning appeals created by the ordinance to make minor modifications and exceptions to the general rules and regulations established by the ordinance.

Amendment of Zone Plan

The Council will have full power to amend or supplement the zoning plan. Minor changes will be necessary to correct imperfections in the plan. Other amendments will be required to meet changing conditions of city growth. It is to be expected that the plan will be supplemented and changed when certain fundamental factors affecting the physical structure of the city have been fully worked out.

While provision should be made for necessary changes, the method of such change should be safeguarded so as to prevent hasty and ill-considered action. A zone plan in order to afford the protection for which it is designed should be fairly permanent. Those who build in accordance with its provisions should feel reasonably sure that their investment will not be jeopardized by changes in the district lines. On the other hand, the method of change should not be so difficult as to make it impractical to conform the zone plan to changing conditions of city growth.

Under the zoning ordinance any amendment proposed must secure a three-fourths vote of the Council for adoption²⁶, and before voting on such amendment the Council is required to submit the amendment to the city planning commission for its recommendation²⁷. If an amendment is proposed by the petition of the owners of 50% of the land in the area to be changed, Council must vote on such amendment within 90 days²⁸.

Building the Future City

Zoning is a first essential to the securing of a measure of orderliness in the building of the city. The common sense of the average citizen leads to a degree of order in the home, the store and the factory that is all but lacking in the life and work of the community as a whole. For want of a well-considered plan of building development each man builds without reference to his neighbor. The result is chaotic. Haphazard growth is inefficient, wasteful and ugly. Why not use the same forethought and care in the building of our community home that each sane man uses in the building of his individual home or factory? Zoning is the direction of building development along orderly and well-considered lines of city growth. On the economic side, zoning means increased industrial efficiency and the prevention of enormous waste. On the human side, zoning means better homes and an increase of health, comfort and happiness for all the people.

And that is the end of the 1922 Zoning Plan!

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on projects in this space. I’d love to have your help:

Want to stay up to date on these projects? Enter your email below, and you'll get an approximately-monthly newsletter from me.

Updates across the years

I could have, maybe wish I had, done more incremental updates to this post. Since writing it, I’ve written many other stand-alone pieces that are thematically related, but never updated this piece itself. I’ll do some back-filling. I’m writing these updates long after I’ve written some of these pieces:

zoning regimes very different than ours it’s a substack, of course. In it I was/am simply discussing zoning regimes, in the style of a book titled ‘legal systems very different than ours’. the first post of the substack explains the name more
parking minimums as ethnic cleansing is an attempt at a partial answer to ‘gosh, josh, why do you dislike some things about american style parking lots so much?’

2025

I’ve referenced this document quite a few times since 2020, the year I first discovered the document and did this write-up.

For instance, I once showed up at a neighborhood zoning meeting (right after doing this write-up), and while everyone was mixing and mingling about a proposed modification to the zoning code (a neighborhood zoned r2, where I lived at the time, yet almost every attendee lived in an adjoining r1 neighborhood).

I asked the then director of planning and zoning for the city of Golden (Rick Muriby, Director of Community and Economic Development), if he know about this wild thing I’d just encountered, ‘the racialized origins of american-style zoning’?

As I recall, he gave a bit of a smirk - not shock or fear or discomfort or whatever, and silently turned around and walked away.²⁹

Few people capable of reading today will explicitly defend supremacy, and the ones who do defend it explicitly are so odious that everything about them is off-putting, thus to join them is to sorta willingly cede influence, and the possibility of being taken seriously by anyone of dignity or interest.

Please remember that r1 zoning is virtually synonymous with ‘single family housing’ is virtually synonymous with ‘the suburbs’.

Here’s a quote from Golden’s zoning code, today:

Residentially zoned area. “Residentially zoned area” means an area zoned for the development of residential dwelling units, including the CO, AG, RE, R1, R1A, R2, R3 zone districts, and portions of PUD developments designed for such use.

I think a ‘proper appreciation’ for the origin of such designations lead to conversations vastly more interesting about American-style zoning than are otherwise available.

I, personally, notice fatigue or boredom settling in on me when I am overhearing people speak seriously about modern american-style zoning, residence districts, the suburbs, all of it.

to have one’s life affected by something like race districts/residence districts is to have ones life grievously affected by the ongoing effect of a supremacists willingness/desire to coerce their supremacy and beliefs and fears and griefs upon the world around them.

Footnotes

After this document from 1922 was sorta ‘ratified’ by the american supreme court in Euclid vs. Ambler (1926), it got labelled ‘euclidean zoning’ or ‘form-based zoning’. Robert Moses got his hands on it, and as reported early in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, he spread this municipal form of government all around new york city and state. he’s more responsible for the built environment of the globe today than anyone else conceivable. (literally the geometry of roads, highway onramps, features multiplied across the world in asphalt, steel, and concrete like leaves on a tree.) He invented ‘urban highways’, ‘eminent domain’ in the modern sense, slum clearence/urban renewal, the federal highway administration, and much more. ↩
Only now did I realize the mayor signed his name on this document. This document is explicitely racist, and the mayor was certainly not trying to move the Overton window. That means nothing in this proposal would jepordize the mayor’s political future. This is a plan by racists and for racists. ↩
The plan buries the lede. They are going to soon propose creating R-1 White Districts (which ban apartment buildings) and R-2 Colored Districts which permit small apartment buildings. The author also argues that a principle purpose of this zoning plan is to prevent the encroachment of Black people on White neighborhoods. ↩
I actually agree with this assessment. Living next door to a parking garage is unpleasent and damages property values. Ironically, our modern zonign paradigm forces the creation of parking garages where they would otherwise never exist, and forces the harms it claims to defend against. ↩
Long commutes are expensive, harmful to the environment, pocketbook, and soul. How nice would it be to live next to where you work? If I read Illustration 4 with the perspective of someone who works at the ice plant, I would be a big fan of being able to live near where I worked. ↩
I laughed a little as I read this. I’m sure in 1922 a 20-story building was rather large and uncommon. I think we’ve all grown up with enough tall buildings that we can reject this assessment as categorically false, based on our lived experience. Every urban area has tall buildings (50 stories, 100 stories tall!) and the adjacent buildings go up in value, not down. ↩
We could re-word this sentence to:

Zoning is a conscious, intelligent effort to ~~direct~~ enforce the building of the city in accord with a ~~well-considered~~ supremacist plan.

↩
screenshot zoning codes from Denver that show restrictions of commercial activity in residential zones ↩
The author is describing a phenomena known as “white flight”, but without labeling it as such. ↩
St. Lewis has horrific history around racism. I’ll add links here soon. Just know that alarm bells should be going off in your head, as you read this reference to St. Lewis. ↩
The authors are arguing for “Euclidean zoning”. There’s no question that Euclidean zoning encourages sprawl and car-dependence, accomplishing the exact opposite of what the authors say zoning will accomplish. My first twitter thread goes into this phenomina in some detail. ↩
Remember that the authors associate apartment buildings and black people. They should have written Zoning will keep the Blacks out of the White neighborhoods. The coming of the Black drives out the White. Only by setting definite limits to the spread of the Blacks can the city be preserved as a city of Whites. ↩
This sentiment is what gives us “minimum lot size requirements”, which are, again, everywhere in modern zoning codes. (screenshots? I can add screenshots) Oh, and this is where our density limits come from. ↩
This sentance is why so many “pro-density” advocates claim that anyone who mentions ‘preserving neighborhood character’ is racist. They’re wrong - neighborhood character is an AMAZING thing to preserve, but our modern form of zoning just happens to be a pretty bad way of going about it. Neighborhoods can be preserved even as they adapt to the needs of the people that live there, as everyone becomes better off and more satisfied with where they live. ↩
Of course we should not injure others. This sentance is tricky because what it’s really saying is Without zoning the White owner is powerless to prevent a black person from modifying their property as they see fit. ↩
Translation: This zoning plan bans apartment buildings from most of the city. ↩
Translation: This zoning plan bans all commercial activity from most of the city. ↩
Translation: In an R1 district, it will become illegal for a black person to buy or rent property from a white property owner. ↩
Translation: In an R2 district, it will become illegal for a black property owner to sell or rent their property to a white person. ↩
Translation: White people who own slaves or have servents get a blanket exclusion from all this zoning limits we’re about to place on R1 (white single-family home) districts. ↩
Would it be strange if we found many, many references to a 35 foot height limit in zoning codes across the nation? I predict it would be uncomfortable. (most of the land in american cities has a 35 foot height limit) ↩
Now that we have 100 more years of experience with cities like New York City, I don’t think one can accept at face value the proposition that “excessively high buildings are uneconomic and very undesirable from a public standpoint”. Based off of the price of land in NYC, many, many people desire to live there. ↩
Translation: If a given building is “non-conforming” and assessed at a value of $50,000 (for example), if you spend more than $30,000 on renovations over a ten-year period, you are required by law to bring the entire building into ‘conforming uses’, which means you may spend more on bringing the building “to code” than you wanted to spend on the renovation. Sprinkler systems and elevators are very expensive. Most old neighborhoods are non-conforming This single clause causes near-endless fiscal trouble for property owners, cities running out of money, and renters ↩
Remember the goal of this “non-conforming use” section. It’s to force compliance with zoning laws over time, and it’s dammned effective. 40 percent of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today ↩
Local law enforcement is often an arm for zoning enforcement. This article is an amazing investigation into long-term abuse of policing powers in Florida. One of the themes is “police harass residents”. You don’t have to read the whole article, just notice how they use zoning code to harass residents, including issuing mandatory court appearances, and if the person failed to show up or pay the fine, the police would arrest them:

If the targets, their family members or associates wouldn’t speak to deputies or answer questions, STAR team deputies were told to look for code enforcement violations like faded mailbox numbers, a forgotten bag of trash or overgrown grass, Rodgers said. The father of one Sheriff’s Office target was fined over the numbers posted on his house. The numbers were there, the document notes in the top-right, but a nearby light made them hard to see. The form indicates the father had to attend a mandatory court hearing.

Pasco Sheriff’s Office:

“We would literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us,” he said.

Rodgers said people sometimes would fail to pay the fine, which would result in a warrant being issued for their arrest.

“We’d get them one way or another,” he said.

Rodgers said the tactics made him and many of his colleagues uneasy. He thought the strategy was both ineffective and unethical, he said. But when he raised concerns, he said, a supervisor threatened to strip him of his rank and send him back to patrol.

The father of one Sheriff’s Office target was fined over the numbers posted on his house. The numbers were there, the document notes in the top-right, but a nearby light made them hard to see. The form indicates the father had to attend a mandatory court hearing. ↩
Remember, the mayor signed his name on this supremacist document. No way will 3/4ths of the city council sign off on anything that diminishes institutionalized supremacy/european american nobility norms. ↩
🤔 I wonder how supremacist the city council in Atlanta in 1920 was. How about 1950? 1980? 2010? 2020? 2025? ↩
I laughed out loud as I read this last line of the paragraph. This zoning regime is carefully sculpted to look like it’s responsive to the inputs of “the people”, but it’s really responsive to the inputs of only politically powerful people, like the mayor who put his name on this supremacist plan. ↩
I don’t remember if I used the word ‘racialized origin’, which is technical and very specific, or if I used the phrase ‘race-based origin’. racialized means make racial in tone or character, and categorize or divide according to race.. It’s the same as enslaved, segregated, ghetto-ized, interred (internment camps), reserved (native people slaughtered and entrapped inside of reservations), it’s known to be what Very Bad People did in Eastern Europe in the 19th century. ↩

My Thoughts on Eric Weinstein's Thoughts on Pia Kalani's Thoughts

2020-08-06T13:00:00+00:00

Context for two sentances

It’s August 8, 2020.

The news is full of coronavirus, schools, employment, police brutality, a vaccine, elections, so much politics, China, Tik-Tok, the Twitter-dm-hack-bitcoin-scam-or-was-it-dm-content hack happened.

Tiger King, Cheer, Filthy Rich are some of the most-watched shows in America, run on Netflix. Hamilton came out on Disney+ six weeks ago, and I’ve not heard about civil unrest, protests, riots or anything in a week or so.

My wife and I are trying to buy a house in Denver. We just looked at a small property that was adorable for many reasons, closely related to the themes expounded upon in Strong Towns, Granola Shotgun, and Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities.

The property will likely sell to someone for $500,000, but we feel strongly that it does not justify this price, and we will therefore not purchase it.

This quote I want you to read comes from a podcast episode recorded April 21. I listened to the podcast episode a few days ago.

I’ve never really listened to any Eric Weinstein before, but the guest was an author I find interesting. I’ve read two of the author’s books twice, and I rarely re-read books.

Here’s the whole episode: The Portal ep 31: Ryan Holliday

Before the episode starts, though, Eric Weinstein shares a thought he had. I found it striking, and wanted to see if others might find it striking as well.

Here’s what he said:

It occurred to me […] that the two older generations of Americans who are to duke it out in the race for the Presidency share a single purpose:

Their common goal [is]: stop the future from arriving at essentially any cost to future generations

The purpose for this goal is: that they could live out their remaining days in as close to the style to which they’d become as accustomed to [in the 50’s through 70s] as is actually possible.

This quote maybe wouldn’t have stuck out to me in isolation, but I’d heard it after some context building he did.

So, I’ll share that context with you, so you can consider the above quote in context.

I tried to find a transcrip of this episode, and found this machine-generated transcript. It was a giant blob of text, no line breaks, no formatting, so I’ve edited that version here.

As I edited it, I’ve made a few modifications for clarity and I inject my own thoughts. I mark my own thoughts clearly, but it seems the easiest way to share the context.

3 minutes from the opening of The Portal, Episode 31

Josh: I’m quoting Eric from the podcast episode now. These are all his words, or his recounting of his conversation with his wife/others:

Eric (00:02:27) For the last month I’ve spent nearly all of my time at home with my family and many of the better thoughts I’ve been exploring during this time are due to my collaborator and wife, Pia Malaney.

Pia is the economist who currently runs CIGS, the Center for Innovation, Growth and Society, which she co-founded with INET, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Very early on, I was fumbling to try to understand the most likely effects of the virus and she said something clarifying which I wish I had repeated to you all when it was fresh, she said:

I think in a way the virus can be thought of as representing the future.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m dense, but I didn’t catch it the first time so I asked her to clarify. She was surprised that this wasn’t obvious to me so she spelled her position out:

Think about it this way, take all of the seemingly varied issues we discussed constantly over the dinner table and at conferences.

“All of them?” I replied with the slightly teasing voices. I assumed she was speaking with hyperbole.

Without an ounce of self doubt in a voice that I have learned to fear over many years of collaboration, she said brightly:

Why yes, pretty much all of them.

She continued:

Let’s start with

surveillance

monopolies

automation,

telecommuting

next generation warfare

UBI

future of work

the retail apocalypse

online dating

antivaxxers

the student debt crisis

supply chain vulnerability

green tech and climate change

urban homelessness

college equivalency certificates

biohacking,

the retreat from globalization,

collapse of mainstream journalism

Chinese ascendance

social engineering

Saudi modernization and the move away from fossil fuels in the Kingdom

inclusive stakeholding

political realignment and the problem of gerontocracy and the end of naive capitalism underpinned by U. Chicago-style economics

in fact, pretty much all the things we’ve used [the Center for Innovation, Growth, and Society] to explore.

“Okay”, I said nervously

“Well”, she continued,

you know that tired tech expression the future is already here it just isn’t evenly distributed?

Across the board, this virus is accelerating that unifying future that was already headed our way.

And recapitulating that moment, where agent Kujan drops the Kobayashi coffee mug in The Usual Suspects, a forest spontaneously emerged for me, from the confusion of the trees I had seen previously.

Josh: I didn’t know this reference, as I was editing this transcript, I looked it up. I’ve not seen the movie, so looked up the scene.

The description is: The Ending of Usual Suspects when agent Kujan finds out who Keyser Soze is. One of the best scenes from the previous decade.

back to Eric:

Eric (00:04:20)

All of these seemingly disparate phenomena were suddenly revealed as closely related:

Americans were actually calling for their own surveillance only they were calling it “contact tracing”.
The retail apocalypse which had been building slowly suddenly became a matter of a government decree creating an ever more imposing monopoly for the world’s now richest human.
He in turn, owns and controls the only paper to take down a US president, consolidating control over our sense-making apparatus.
Most supposedly “essential” face-to-face office work was revealed to be illusory, as easily monitored-and-recorded telecommuting replaced the high-carbon commute
the demand for fossil fuels in turn evaporated pushing oil futures into radical states of contango.
Social distancing solved the problem of unwanted #MeTo toxic male touch a sexless Zoom dating put the hurt on “Netflix and chilling”.
Indeed, nearly UBI-like payments were going out to newly-unemployed former workers who were expected to sit at home on couches, as universities effectively all-but-confessed that they could deliver the same value through distance learning by not rebaiting extortionary tuition.
China, through an emasculated World Health Organization, seemingly began inducing our own US institutions like the CDC and Surgeon General’s office to impart deadly “magical thinking” to Americans about the ineffectiveness of masks for healthy people.

This all came as if some kind of twisted revenge for the Boxer Rebellion where Chinese believe swords and martial arts made them invulnerable to Western high-tech warfare.

Spontaneous protests broke out in cities across the country, as masked protesters fought mysterious rules that communicated that one may not peaceably assemble, in contradition to the First Amendment.

We were also not allowed to contradict public health authorities, who are clearly covering for a level of Baby Boomer and Silent Generation incompetence to keep the manufacturer and storage of essential goods and services within national boundaries and out of the hands of strategic rivals who think nothing of blatantly lying to us in matters of life, death and statistics.

I reasoned, however, that there were clearly too many different things happening in such a situation, for the sudden arrival of the future to lack a single ideology.

Eric (00:6:28)

And so it occurred to me (and to Peter Thiel as well, who I called immediately) that the two older generations of Americans who were to duke it out in the race for the presidency shared a single purpose.

Their common goal was “to stop the future from arriving at essentially any cost to future generations” so that they could live out the remaining days in as close to the style to which they’d become accustomed in childhood and young adulthood as was actually possible.

And what did they use to accomplish this? Well, it was a combination of three ingredients:

political control
a seemingly inexplicably indifference to the world of trouble that they would finally leave to their descendants after their demise.
a reliance on 75 years of astonishingly good luck, which can partially be explained as a rational universal fear of the future after:
- two world wars
- totalitarian atrocities
- the 1918 pandemic
- the Great Depression

This is related to Francis Fukuyama’s theory of The End of History.

To [Boomers and Silent Generation members who held] this way of thinking what was happening was simple.

The magic trick of holding back nearly all aspects of our true future required all three elements to be in place simultaneously.

And nothing had changed with respect to the first two. In fact, all that it occurred was that their luck had finally run out with the COVID virus.

To my generation, and the ones that followed that past version of the post-war American Dream was like a mesmerizing rumor and tale that the older generations had repeatedly and vividly wielded to cast a spell.

This spell intimidated many of us from demanding answers and a say our own future.

The spell they cast said:

If you can’t get a second home in your 30s from a paper route, a low cost education or a life in public service, then perhaps you should wait your turn and let the elders who made it work lead for a little while longer, until the younger generations can prove that they’re ready to assume adult responsibilities.

This was a magical spell indeed, which blinded those of us who are forced to repeat “Okay Boomer” to explain our seeming relative inability to earn and lead in the presence of elders who could out-earn us in their prime.

And this was even under the weight of multiple divorce settlements, or three-Martini lunches, and without the extensive training and apprenticeships that we seem to require.

Well, that spell is now broken for me, watching our supposed leaders contend with a true pandemic.

The Silent and Boomer generations, lacking any kind of precedent now look like incompetent adults.

I suppose it is theoretically possible that the rest of us former gritty latchkey kids and Digital Natives would not fare better, but we could scarcely do worse.

In fact, our elders are revealed not as go-getters or “can-do” leaders but as creatures of The System, who simply held back confronting the inevitable future for decades because its shape and form are indeed terrifying.

And it wasn’t really the virus that was accelerating the terrifying future across the board.

Any worldwide crisis of sufficient depth would have done it.

The world has always been caught up in escalating plagues, wars, depressions and conflicts. The Coronavirus was ushering in the future simply because it was the first piece of early 20th-century-scale bad luck to fall into our new millennium characterized as it is by fragility.

I’ve got some thoughts that I’ll jot down at some point.

But as I collect my thoughts, how about you? What’s your gut reaction to this?

How To Write A Letter of Recommendation for Yourself

2020-08-06T13:00:00+00:00

I meet regularly with early-career software developers. A few recurring meetings, 1x/week, plus ad-hoc calls as needed with others.

A question came up recently:

My three-month internship is close to wrapping up. The Co-founder/CEO/lead developer of the consulting company I’m at likes me, said he wishes he could hire me but cannot, because they don’t have enough work in the pipeline.

He said he’d write me a letter of recommendation, and asked me to draft it for him.

How do I write my own letter of recommendation, for my first real software development job?

Feels like a trap, huh?

source

Or, maybe they know you. They know you too well

source

I explained a few concepts that we wanted to “speak to” in the letter. I’ll explain.

The software developer that I meet with mentioned that the CEO’s advice on the next job included “be able to speak to low liability”.

I wanted to dig into this “liability” piece.

How much does a bad hire cost?

What’s the biggest risk in hiring?

It’s the risk of a bad hire.

How much does it cost to make a bad hire?

I would conservatively estimate that it costs $100,000 and nine months of your life. Here’s how the math works from a hiring manager’s point of view:

Spend a month and 25 hours of labor dev team manager labor to find/interview the candidate(s) and winnow the applicants down to someone to make an offer. (the hiring manager would prefer to be doing literally anything else but hiring.)
Extend an offer, wait 2-6 more weeks before the new candidate starts. It can be painful to wait another six weeks, because the team is currently short-staffed, and has been for a long time. That’s why they’re hiring!
Start date! Start paying $150,000/yr or $3000/week for your shiny new employee.
Pay $12,000 for the first month of them working, figuring out your dev environment, ticket management, who knows what parts of the codebase, and a few easy bug fixes.
Start getting nervous. Employee not batting it out of the park like you’d hoped. Maybe still onboarding, give it another month (and $12,000 in payroll expense).
OK. Three months in and another $36,000 in payroll later, you’re pretty sure there’s a problem.
Start the pre-Performance Improvement Plan work. Talk to their team, their manager, them. Why is it not working? Why is the team working slower with this new team member, instead of working faster? Not only are you wasting five figures of payroll, the rest of your expensive dev team is producing less as well!
Pre-PIP work is over. Another $5k in payroll gone forever. Now it’s time to give the formal PIP, which everyone knows is “beginning the firing process”
Two more months and $24,000 in payroll later, you fire the employee.
You feel relief with having gotten rid of the bad employee. You’re thrilled that you can get back to normal work.
Check the clock and balance sheet. It took you nine months and $100k to get to where you were at step 1.

Add up the time/expense:

1-2 months to to find/hire a candidate.
7-8 months (and $84K-$96k) to hire, trial them, try to help them be successful, give up on that plan, and fire them.
Many hours spent thinking about this specific problem, talking with others about it.

There’s nine months of your life. That’s 9 months of time, sure, but it’s also 9 months of opportunity cost. What if you’d hired a great candidate? They’d be rapidly approaching their first year on the job, and everyone would be happy about it, instead of this disaster you’ve had to deal with.

Here’s the really scary part: To large organizations (1000+ employees), wasting $100k is meaningless compared to the wasted time and mis-directed effort. The entire organization is more annoyed at having lost the time of a productive software developer. They don’t care that they lit a giant pile of money on fire, they’re annoyed that their competitor is getting new features out the door and gaining marketshare and the future of their $x,000,000 company hangs in the balance.

Oh, and the good managers, not only do they want to be wise with money and build features/gain market-share…

They want to see their team flourish.

Being fired is a life-defining moment. (I speak from experience)

If you’re a kind and empathetic person, it’s particularly unpleasent to fire someone and it feels like a personal failure.

You want to work for a kind and empathetic manager. (They’re not common, but they’re not impossible to find.)

So, tailor your letter to speak to the concerns of a kind and empathetic manager. This manager would:

Want to see you do well
Want to see you develop your skills and competencies
Want you to make meaningful contributions to the product
Want a healthy team dynamic
Want you to voice concerns and observations as relevant

And much more

A Primary-goal for an early-career software developer: Telegraph Low Liability

First, when I say telegraph low liability I mean it in the sports definition:

In sporting terminology, to telegraph is to unintentionally alert an opponent to one’s immediate situation or intentions. The sporting use of the term telegraph draws a direct comparison with the communication device of the same name. “Telegraphing” always refers to a reflexive physical action rather than a protracted or intellectual give-away. For example, a boxer rotating his shoulders to throw a hook would be telegraphing.

You should aim to “telegraph” that you’re a low-liability hire without ever saying it so explicitely. It’s a subtle thing, best communicated incidentally, not directly.

Five years ago, I wrote So you want to work remotely…

Quoting myself:

First, there’s the matter of framing how you go about working remotely. Obviously you want to work remotely, but put yourself in the shoes of a prospective employer. They don’t care if you work remotely or not - they want you to do great work for them and make them an effective, profitable organization.

Companies that hire remotely tend to be younger, agile-er, and smaller. So every employee matters. Making a bad hire can be catastrophic in terms of money and opportunity cost. Your job is to make it very, very obvious that hiring YOU is a great decision. In fact, you want to be so good at what you do that passing up on you is a terrible decision.

[…]

When you can walk someone down the path from “Hire me” to “I’ll help you make $x00,000/year more than you would otherwise”, you’re talking their language. You’re telegraphing that you understand their concerns without ever stating their concern explicitly.

To bring it full circle, here’s how I would go about drafting a CEO’s Letter of Recommendation for me. If you find this idea uncomfortable, don’t worry about it. That’s a sign of psychological health, that you don’t love putting flattering words about yourself into other people’s mouths.

Six Steps To Draft A Self-Promotional Letter Of Recommendation That A Friendly Boss Requested

Normally, that’s a good aversion to have. For this particular situation, you’ll have to bite the bullet and move on. I’m not going to give you the actual words (how could I?) but I’ll explain my process. I’ll include comments throughout:

1. Draft the opening/closing

Hi there,         
# I find it easier to strike a natural tone when thinking relatively
# informally. So, I draft documents, even if they'll end up being 
# formal, informally. 
             
             
Sincerely, 
- Boss's name, Title, Company
# Yes, I write the closing right after the opening.

2. Provide 1 general introduction/context sentence

Hi there,

# Establish the relationship. This helps readers contextualize 
# what comes next
I met {person I am recommending} {n months ago} because 
 {internship|coffee meeting|event|etc}.

Sincerely,
- Boss's name, Title, Company

3. Say a complementary thing about yourself

This is the first uncomfortable sentence you’ll have to write:

Hi there,

I met {Zaniyah} {a few months ago} because {she and I crossed paths
at a local Ruby meetup}.

# No gushing required. A claim of "I would hire this 
# person if I could" is plenty strong social signaling. 
I wish I could hire them myself, but don't have the budget and work
lined up to utilize them to their full potential. 

Sincerely,
- Boss's name, Title, Company

This can be hard to think of an anecdote. It might take a few attempts to feel good about the one you’ve chosen and how you speak of it. Just write something down, see how you feel, delete it, write something else down, etc.

Hi there,

I met {Zaniyah} {a few months ago} because {she and I crossed paths 
at a local Ruby meetup}.

I wish I could hire her myself, but don't have the budget and work 
lined up to utilize her to their full potential. 

# add a punchy positive story
When she started at {company}, one of the first things she did was 
make many updates to our onboarding documentation. 

It was rather out-of-date, and the team hadn't had new hires in a 
while. 

Any time she ran into friction or trouble, she would hunt down the 
answer, and immediately update the documentation so the next 
person would have a smoother process.

Sure enough, the next hire spent half the time she did getting 
up and running.

# If possible, generalize from that story to a stable attribute 
# that informs your work:
She brings a similar attention to detail and thoughtfullness about 
"the next person" to all of the work that she does. 

Sincerely,
- Boss's name, Title, Company

5. Add a sentence offering to speak further about you

Hi there,

I met {Zaniyah} {a few months ago} because {she and I crossed paths 
at a local Ruby meetup}.

I wish I could hire her myself, but don't have the budget and work 
lined up to utilize her to his full potential. 

# add a punchy positive story
When she started at {company}, one of the first things she did was 
make many updates to our onboarding documentation. 

It was rather out-of-date, and the team hadn't had new hires in a 
while. 

Any time she ran into friction or trouble, she would hunt down the 
answer, and immediately update the documentation so the next 
person would have a smoother process.

Sure enough, the next hire spent half the time she did getting 
up and running.

She brings a similar attention to detail and thoughtfullness about 
"the next person" to all of the work that she does. 

# `An offer to provide evidence` is functionally the same as 
# `evidence`, so:
I'd be happy to answer any follow-up questions you might have 
about Zaniyah. Feel free to email me at `email`

Sincerely,
- Boss's name, Title, Company

Give this letter to your boss for them to edit it to their liking

It may be intimidating to hand something like this to your boss.

Would they really have said such kind things about me? Won’t it be awkward if they read it, and say “eh, you’re not this great, lets tone it down a bit.”

It would be awkward, but they won’t do that.

Instead, they’ll be thankful that you did all this work for them. You know what feels terrible?

really wanting to say a nice thing about someone, but good stories/examples of why they’re great don’t come to mind. You KNOW there are good stories and examples, but you don’t remember them all.

You’re solving a big problem for your boss, in writing this letter. That is why they asked you to draft your own letter of recommendation for them.

Done!

If you’ve been tasked with writing your own letter of recommendation and it’s super intimidating, get in touch and I’ll help you out. Writing the first one is the hardest, it gets easier as you go.

I’m not an expert on this kind of thing, but I always like finding templates others have given for how they do things. Don’t think that this is the Right Way or (heaven forbid) The Only Way. This is just how I do it. If you’d got a resource that has helped you, tell me about it and I’ll update this post with a link to it!

Lastly, if you got value from this blog post, I can probably deliver value to you again. Punch your email in below and I’ll let you know when I write other posts, or do a big update to an existing post.

Build a Personal Website in Jekyll - A Detailed Guide For First-Timers

2020-08-06T13:00:00+00:00

You’re a turing student, in the backend program.

You know Ruby, you wanna start blogging, but everyone who says

go start a blog

Seems to also think you have 10 hours (or 20 hours? or 2 hours? how long does this take) to sit around dealing with setting up a personal website.

Lets set one up.

Intended audience:

Turing Mod 1 backend student, or ambitious mod-0 student

Output and expected results

Have a basic site online, at your-github-username.github.io that looks professional enough you could share it with a future employer, but puts the main emphasis on your words, not the flashyness of the page or complexity of the technology.

My website (the one you’re reading on right now) looks pretty simple, and I know how to set it up, so we’ll start with setting up something similar to my website, and I’ll show you how to use different templates as well.

1. Get started with basic jekyll/theme combination

Head to https://github.com/poole/poole, and hit the clone or download url.

In your terminal, make a new dirctory, perhaps in your pre-existing turing directory

$ cd ~/turing

# Here's we're cloning the repo, but placing it inside of a folder _we_ define name
$ git clone <url from that `poole` repository> jekyll-site

$ cd jekyll-site

$ bundle install
# if `bundle install` throws error, do `gem install bundler`, then re-try `bundle install`

$ bundle exec jekyll serve

Now the server should be running.

Now, in a web browser, visit the given url:

great question! Holy cow.

Jekyll’s documentation assumes a strong knowledge of how the internet works.

Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs

What does this mean? What’s a “static site generator”? Why do some people even care so much?

more to come soon

2. Learn the basics of how Jekyll works, so you can customize it to your liking

Lets figure out the important parts of this new directory.

`_config.yml`

the .yml extension stands for “Yaml Ain’t Markup Language”, which is the punchline to a joke.

.yml is format common in Ruby for writing machine-readable setttings that are equally easy for humans to understand. So, your Jekyll site will use this file to set basic settings, but it’s easy for you to modify the values yourself.

Here’s the first two changes you should make on your site:

Look at lines 2 and 3 in my editor - try making those changes, then make them show up in your browser. Don’t forget to restart your server! (hit ctrl-r to kill it.)

3. Set up github repo to host your site

From github’s instructions:

Head over to GitHub and create a new repository named username.github.io, where username is your username (or organization name) on GitHub.

If the first part of the repository doesn’t exactly match your username, it won’t work, so make sure to get it right.

Once you’ve done that, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/username/username.github.io

In that new directory, you’ll need to place your Jekyll site. If you want to keep working with the poole theme we’ve worked with, you will need “connect” your Jekyll site locally to this new repository.

Lets first create a new directory at the root of your laptop for your website.

mkdir ~/your-github-username.github.io
cd your-github-username.github.io
mv ~/turing/jekyll-site .

Now, lets connect your github repo to this repository:

$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Initial commit"

$ git remote -v
# should come back empty

$ git remote add origin <your clone-this-repo url from above>

$ git push origin master

And, when you visit that URL, you should see all your files up there!

Customizing your new jekyll site

I’d recommend setting up a very basic landing page. It’s what my home page looks like, and it’ll probably work for you.

Here’s how:

Then delete all that stuff, and make it your own:

Then fill it out and make it your own!

Here’s what I might write, if I were doing this for myself:

And here’s how it would look running locally:

I didn’t like how large the headings were, so instead of H1s (#), I went with H2: ## before each section.

Additional resources

A Runbook for Upgrading Your Parent's Junky Old Laptop to a Chromebook

2020-07-20T13:00:00+00:00

tl;dr: I’m creating a `runbook` for a very specific, delicate, and potentially time-consuming and emotionally-charged operation to `replace my 70-year-old newly-widowed mother-in-law's ancient desktop computer with a easy-for-me-to-manage Chromebook`

Update: I posted to r/ChromeOS this question:

How much should I spend to get a solid Chromebook for aging mother-in-law?

My mother-in-law is almost 75. Her husband managed the computer stuff for her, and he died in January.

I’m the tech-savvy son in law who gets the phone calls to help her connect to the WiFi again, or help her print stuff.

I’d love to buy her a chromebook - I think it’ll serve her well, be easy for her to use, and will make it way easier for me to help her with computer things.

Money isn’t an object, per se. I’m willing to spend $700 on a good machine if that’s what does the job.

But even if I am to spend that amount, I still don’t know where to start.

So, do any of you have aging parents who you’ve gotten setup with a Chromebook?

What laptop did you get? Are you happy with it? Any regrets or things you wish you did differently?

Here’s results from the thread:

My MIL has simple needs:

She has simple needs:

Facebook
~facetime/hangouts/zoom~ facetime won’t be possible on a Chromebook. No problem
AOL email (AOL is horrible)
banking and stuff
read her kids’ instagrams, Tumblrs, etc
print stuff

Printing could be tricky:

I’d be cautious about getting a Chromebook if printing is a requirement. I’ve not had much luck getting Chrome OS to recognise printers and I have to transfer PDFs to another machine. I’ve tried with two HP printers which work fine on Windows and Ubuntu, but your mileage may vary if she has a different model of printer.

But then:

If your printer is Google Cloud Print compatible then its super easy.

Oh, yeah, but of course Google is sunsetting Google Cloud Print in 3 months. 🙄

So… we’ll see. I’ll buy something, might end up replacing her printer too.

Wikipedia says a runbook is:

In a computer system or network, a runbook is a compilation of routine procedures and operations that the system administrator or operator carries out. System administrators in IT departments and NOCs use runbooks as a reference.

Runbooks can be in either electronic or in physical book form. Typically, a runbook contains procedures to begin, stop, supervise, and debug the system. It may also describe procedures for handling special requests and contingencies. An effective runbook allows other operators, with prerequisite expertise, to effectively manage and troubleshoot a system.

source

Here’s the definition for the runbook I will create:

In ~~a computer system or network~~ life, a runbook is a compilation of routine procedures and operations that the ~~system administrator or operator~~ individual carries out. ~~System administrators in IT departments and NOCs~~ People use runbooks as a reference.

Runbooks can be in either electronic or in physical book form. Typically, a runbook contains procedures to begin, stop, supervise, and debug the ~~system~~ situation. It may also describe procedures for handling special requests and contingencies. An effective runbook allows other ~~operators~~ people, with prerequisite expertise, to effectively manage and troubleshoot a ~~system~~ situation.

How I decided on a “runbook” instead of a “guide”

A day after I announced the first version of this, a friend replied:

I've got 90%ish of my laptop set-up in a single bash script. Would probably pay for the chromebook equivalent of that + documentation explaining what has been setup. Something that creates all of the necessary accounts and software and explains it....
— Jack Pincus (@jwpincus) August 4, 2020

He said:

I’ve got 90%ish of my laptop set-up in a single bash script. Would probably pay for the chromebook equivalent of that + documentation explaining what has been setup. Something that creates all of the necessary accounts and software and explains it….

I replied with (essentially)

That’s what I’m trying to do

And then I used a word in my response that was a big aha moment:

i don't think i'll be able to make it that clean of a process, but I'm thinking more of a Runbook for a given situation.

- "if this, that"
- "this portion is Very Important, the rest of this is not".
- pre-written scripts for common objections

etc.
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 4, 2020

Runbook Origin Story, aka 24 hours ago (Aug 3, 2020)

I spent a few hours recently helping my 75-year-old mother-in-law reconnect her junky old Windows laptop to the internet. Across five phone calls, and many pictures of her computer screen, we got her internet working again.

As I did this, I live-tweeted the experience. It was about 20 tweets. A few pictures my mother-in-law sent me, and a poll.

My mother in law is frustrated that her internet wasn't working today. It's been broken all day. I've called her a few times between other events to try to help debug it.

This is a screenshot I just received (via email) that she took *with her phone* pic.twitter.com/5KnfCGZ2F4
— Josh Thompson (@josh_works) August 3, 2020

Part of the debugging process involved her taking pictures of her computer screen, because I couldn’t tell what she was looking at. (I don’t ever use a Windows operating system, so I was operating blind.)

She was frustrated with it all, so I’d first suggested plugging-in/unplugging the router. It would be easier to walk her through that then the unfamiliar OS.

After it didnt work (and hours passed) we did this back and forth. She took a picture and emailed it to me.

It took a few minutes to arrive, then I’d look at it, tell her what to click, and wait for another screenshot:

about 15 minutes and another phone call later, I got this:

All she ended up needing was to click her home wifi network and connect to it, per these screenshots.

Months ago, I’d read things like:

On this last one, read through this answer. Emphasis mine.

I convinced my wife and her two brothers to purchase the Asus Chromebox for their mother this past December for Christmas.

She had been complaining about how slow her desktop had been for years. Every year we all put money together to update something electronic for her. One year it was a camera, then she lost that camera (lol) so we got her another the next year. Then it was a Bluray player. The computer had been on the list for years.

In my family and circle’s I am the “go to person” to fix computer or technology related problems. I never gave my self that title but unfortunately for me I’m stuck with it.

I don’t know about you but I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked to “fix”, “speed up”, or “I think I might have a virus, my computer is so slow can you take a look at it”. What I have found over the years is that almost always there isn’t a virus. The fix for all of those problems more times than not is you need a new machine. Your Sh** is old. And honestly I just grew tired of getting this from so many “tech illiterate” people.

Windows (I can’t speak for Mac) is a pain to maintain. There are a lot of people who would say otherwise but unless you find that sort of thing easy, it just is.

So with all that (hopefully funny backstory) said I wanted to get my mother in law a Chrome device. And like I said we got the Asus Chromebox.

Let me tell you, it is by far my mother in laws favorite device we ever got her. We got it off of Amazon on black Friday. We paid $119.99 US and I bought an extra stick of ram from corsair I believe. That would upgrade the ram from 2gb to 4gb.

She no longer has a slow computer. It boots up in less than 10 seconds. Everything is saved and synced. No windows updates. No fragmented hard drives. No virus/malware. She can still play solitare via a chrome store app. It plays video’s great when she sees them while looking at her facebook. The browser doesn’t lag and isn’t slow. ChomeOS updates automatically and is seamless. I know a lot of people that had their windows machines freeze while on a windows update. Essentially making their computer a brick, until someone like me comes and fixes it for them. If ChromeOS ever gets into trouble, it is as simple as doing a “powerwash” which is basically a factory reset and everything goes back to new. But since everything in ChromeOS is synced, as soon as you log back in everything is restored just how it was.

Chromebooks/boxes come with at least 100gb of online storage and Drive is “mounted” in chromeOS it’s self so it acts just like if it were a hard drive in the computer. ChromeOS is incredibly simple. There aren’t a lot of options menus. You can’t get lost in the OS.

ChromeOS I would argue is amazing for tech illiterate people. I’m far from tech illiterate but ChromeOS has been an absolute breath of fresh air for me as well! There really isn’t much of a learning curve, outside of understanding how to install/remove a chrome app or extension.

There are, however, some take-aways. For one you can not install any software like you would on windows or mac. There is one program my mother in law uses and I have found no way of a work around for her and the chromebox. Skype is not available right out of the box for ChromeOS. There is a a work around but requires using a program to convert the Android Version to work in ChromeOS.

I have lots more I could say, but I’m getting the evil eye from the wife, time to get off of Reddit!

I can’t recommend a Chromebook/Box more, especially for non tech folks. And is wonderful for us who have to run tech support. Makes our job so much easier! I tell people to first examine their primary needs and research if they can be met with ChromeOS, before buying. Understand it’s limitations. If you go into it knowing exactly what you are getting, then it is a wonderful experience.

I was hooked. I want a Chromebook for my mother-in-law! $120? I would have bought that yesterday if I knew exactly what to do and how long it would take to setup.

I’d have spent another $120 on a guide that gave me exactly what I needed, super-custom to my exact use-case and background. :chefs-kiss:

I want (and will therefore create) a Runbook to figure out what Chromebook to get her, set it up for her, and help her be successful with it. This can easily take many hours. I want my effort to be helpful to you.

It won’t be quite as straight forward as a bash script - think of it as a Runbook for Humans

Later that day, here’s what happened:

source: @sarahdoingthing

So, I’ve got a lot of the questions I’ll need answered jotted down, and I wanna see if there’s any interest in buying a guide like this. Would it be worth $10 to you? $100? $1000?

In the pole, someone expressed it might be worth as much as $2000, so I am including that option below.

Maybe it’s worth $1000 but you don’t even have $5 to spend to acquire the guide. Whatever I end up creating, I’ll make available to you.

Here’s the current planned detail of the guide, as it exists in my head right now:

Questions I’ll answer

When I recognized it was the right time to actually take action
How I phrased the pain-points so she would agree that it was a problem
How I used the time I spent debugging her problems convincing her that she should use a different type of laptop
what actual machine to buy
how to set up an account for your parent
how to handle them using a non-gmail account (I assume this is a requirement)
how to take remote access of the machine and accomplish tasks yourself. (This beats your mother-in-law emailing you cell phone pictures.)
her reactions and first-run experience with my documented process
how I tweak my plans based on her responses
how to use all of this information to aid your own parents through a similar process

The benefits you will receive from this guide

Help your parent(s) feel a sense of dignity and control through this process, even though it might feel like it’s displacing an important, familiar thing needlessly
Remove a point of frustration that might be emotionally charged, thanks to issues related to maintaining competence and control over one’s affairs. (I suspect I’ll be looking for a step-by-step guide to helping your aging parents stop driving soon)
how to help your parent(s) use as much Gmail as they have to, while most likely using their primary email address with an AOL or yahoo or comcast email account. (and they get tons of spam in it :eyeroll: )
How to handle a password manager with them. Use or don’t use Chrome/Firefox password tools?
Oh, 1Password? If you use 1Password, and have your parent’s credentials in a 1Password vault that is shared with your siblings and/or in-laws, but you’re the one who manages that account, what should you do?
the above presumes that you came to have your parent’s credentials at their request, of course.
once it’s set up, can it be easy enough to set up that they can unbox it themselves?
how much does it cost to ship a laptop through the mail, anyway? Is it safe? Legal?
Is it actually possible to “easily” “remote in” and “fix things” for your parents? The reader might be skeptical of how “easy and simple” software often is, and is curious to know exactly what to expect.
An example to point to, when convincing your parent to take the plunge.

Look, this guide is from this guy on the internet that did this exact same thing with his mother-in-law who was similar to you because {reasons}, and look at this quote here where she says how thankful is she did this thing:

Hi, I’m Barb, and since I switched to this chromebook thing I spend 20 extra minuts a day facetiming with my grandkids! I love that!

The un-faq

These are diqualifying conditions. Do not purchase this guide if:

Your parents are familiar with the Apple ecosystem, because I have always used Android and MacOS, don’t have an iPad or an iPhone. I feel strongly inclined to do MacOS.
You don’t want to use a Chromebook or learn a Windows operating system
You expect a perfectly-polished, high-production-value product

The poll got some answers, so I’m tossing up real-live purchase buttons to guage interest at your level of buy-in

Purchase Options

In the twitter poll, I gave options from $0 to $2000, so giving all those options below. For the record, this is prepurchasing options. I’ve not built anything yet, other than some notes floating around my laptop. I use “someone put money down” as an expression of strong interest.

1. Money Is No Object ($1900)

You want an excellent runbook and value your time.

2. Meaningful money, but if it saves you 5-25 hours and hard feelings and frustration, You’re All In ($495)

You’d be spending one or two days of income to have a bullet-proof solution to upgrading your aging parent’s laptops. The story from Reddit had you nodding along hard. This is exactly what you experience and want. But five years ago? What hardware do I need now? Can I dual-boot the operating system? How do I actually convince him/her/them to start using it?

3. You expect non-trivial value from this guide ($99)

You probably have spent at least $99 on something that will deliver much less value to you than this guide will.

If that’s true, but this is not at $495 or $1900 problem to you, this would be your best bet.

Low cost, you’ll get whatever I create. It’s a cheap gamble that $99 could save you from “donating” many thousands of dollars over the next six months.

20 (scarce, non-work, nights-and-weekend) hours @$100/hr = $2000

4. What You Might Spend on Dinner with a Friend ($49)

If you think you’d spend $20 but not $50, this guide might not be for you. It will be so good that $50 will be a screaming deal.

5. Send You The Guide When I’m Done ($0)

If you just want to follow along, or are on the fence about the value of what I’ll make, punch your email in below.

I’ll end up writing my process up carefully, and I’ll certainly share it out when I’m done. I am good at writing detailed guides that save people dozens of hours and large amounts of frustration. I’ll share the guide when I’m done, and I’ll send updates as I go. I love to work in public; if you subscribe and follow along, you’ll get to see what I’m building as I go, and I’d love to get your input along the way.

And if down the road you decide it’s worth paying for, you’ll have the option.

Enter your email, and you’ll get all that when it’s available:

if you don’t see the subscribe form above, click here.

FAQ

If your question isn’t asked, shoot me a note at @josh_works or joshthompson@hey.com. I’ll answer it and update this list.

What all is included

A runbook for technical people who help their non-technical aging parents/family/friends with their technology problems.

Specifically, writing up how to help the following persona:

A 70 mother-in-law with good relationships with her kids/grandkids
extremely resistant to change
feels bad needing constant help from her family
the tech trouble reminds her that her husband died recently and she misses him
on good terms with the person using this runbook (you!)

This runbook will rely on building/deepening trust between you and the recipient, and that requires having something to build on. I’m sure it’ll be helpful even if the relationship is poor, but I wanted to mention it.

A detailed guide with links to the exact product, tools, services that I use

Lots of perspecive of how this is landing with my mother-in-law

etc.

Might do video walk-throughs. Here’s an example of how I do these.

What if you want your money back

Then I 100% wanna give it to you. Just let me know and I’ll send it right back, all fees included, between now and forever.

You might want the $100, or $500, or $2000 verison, but don’t know which/if-any yet

Yeah, totally get it. I’d say pop your email address into the $0 form, and reply to one of the emails when you feel so inclined.

You have other questions I’d like to ask you

Great! Pop your email in below; the very first email you’ll get asks:

I’d really love to know what prompted your interest. Are you going through something similar right now? Do you think you might be doing something like this soon? Any advice or words of caution that you’d share?

if you cannot see the email collection form above, you will have to turn off your JavaScript blocker or visit this page to submit an email address

feel free to reach out at joshthompson@hey.com if you’ve got questions

`Medusa` mythical creature: part 1

2020-07-20T13:00:00+00:00

Preparing for Turing Series Index

What follows is an eight-part series that will help you pick up useful information about a number of topics related to Ruby, specifically geared for students learning the Ruby programming language, as part of the Turing School’s Backend Software Development Program

It’s generally intended that you progress sequentially, but there’s no “right way” or “right order” to encounter these topics. You could convince me I have the order exactly backwards. I’d disagree, but only slightly.

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

Wow. I made parts 1 and 2 of this video months ago, forgot to make them findable.

Turing’s Mythical Creatures: Medusa

When you’re done, check out part 2.

`Medusa` mythical creature: part 2

2020-07-20T13:00:00+00:00

Preparing for Turing Series Index

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

Wow. I made this video months ago, forgot to make it findable.

Turing’s Mythical Creatures: Medusa refactor

Watch/read part 1 if you’ve not already:

Here’s a walk-through for strategies and tactics to refactor the mythical creature we built last time. The refactored code is much improved, and your own understanding of your own code will be much improved as well.

Part 2 is a 14 minute video, contains a lot of information. Block out 30-40 minutes to work through it.

2019 Annual Review

2020-01-31T13:00:00+00:00

It’s that time of the year. I always really enjoy reading other people’s annual reviews, and I find value in writing my own.

Previous reviews: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015

My review breaks down into a few broad categories:

Travel
Relationships & Community
Leadville Trail Marathon
Climbing
Software Development
Reading
Projects

Travel

Last year, Kristi and I said we wanted to travel “less” in 2019 than we did in 2018. I spent 113 nights away from Golden in 2019, or, in total, three months and three weeks. About 25% of that time was on climbing trips, the rest of it was travel for time with family and friends, or “regular” non-climbing travel, or work travel.

As far as the climbing trips, I got to climb in Cuba, Kalymnos, Greece, and did a fair bit of climbing within the USA.

It’s the height of privilege and opportunity to travel this much, and it was about 25% less than we travelled last year. I will still travel less in 2020, and I’d like a much higher percentage of that travel to be climbing trips.

I’m starting this post in an airport. Maybe next year I’ll be doing it at home?

Relationships & Community

I care deeply for Kristi, wife, and she cares deeply for me.

She and I know that anything that contributes to our individual flourishing contributes to the health of our relationship, and a healthy relationship likewise contributes to individual flourishing.

We still love marriage counseling, and individual counseling. I mention this counseling regularly in conversation with others, with a goal of normalizing seeking professional help for important things.

If you agree that a professional of any domain would be well-off seeking improvement in their craft, even to the point of getting 1:1 coaching, you should agree that pursuing marriage counseling, regularly, is healthy.

Despite how much Kristi and I were traveling away from Golden, we felt more connected and “plugged in” to a local community. This is a rich and wonderful thing, and its one I want to explore in great depth going forward.

Leadville Trail Marathon

From late 2018 through mid-2019, I trained for the Leadville Trail Marathon. It’s supposedly one of the harder marathons out there, because it’s at such high elevation. It starts at 10,000+ feet and gets as high as 13,000+ ft.

How one does on a race like a marathon is largely reflective of how well one prepared for it. I didn’t have audacious goals in running it. My goal was no higher than:

Don’t embarrass myself

Sam Landfried was my eternally encouraging and kind running partner. We ran many of our weekly long runs together, and quite a few of the short mid-week runs.

I would not have completed the training and the race without him.

More than a few Saturdays began with a drive into the mountains to run 15-20 miles at elevation.

Sometimes we were on the road, sometimes we were post-holing through thigh-deep snow.

On the race day itself, there were a few times that he could easily have left me in the dust and run ahead (and consequently achieved a faster time) but he kindly stuck with me.

We finished right at the 50th percentile for all finishers of the 2019 Leadville Trail Marathon. My goal was to finish above the bottom 25%, so this was a success.

I’m thankful I had the opportunity to train and run with him.

Sam and I, somewhere in the latter half of the marathon.

Climbing

The downside of training for and running a marathon is that time spent training has to come from something. For me, the time came from climbing.

My climbing training in the spring and early summer took at hit, since I was training for Leadville. Between that and a very busy year with lots of travel, I didn’t accomplish any of my climbing and training goals, or even spend that much time outside.

This all said, I did have some wins:

I did more than a few 5.12d’s in a day
I felt confident on 5.12 in general; onsighted/flashed most 12 minuses
I hopped on more 5.13s, including a 5.13c in Rifle. I could pretty casually do all the moves on my first attempt (though, of course, weighted the rope dozens of times). Feels projectable, and I’d be very excited to send it in 2020.

Software Development

I met my goal of last year to give two talks at meetups. I captured some lessons here and both talks went quite well.

I’m now into my second year as a software developer, and I’ve learned a lot, and I look forward to the third year.

Most of my writing on this website over the last year haCs been about software development, but at the tactical level; recapping lessons learned and ideas I may want to make easy to find later.

Reading

I read 77 books. Here’s my year in books from GoodReads.

Noteworthy reads:

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

Paints the current trends in the political sphere as one of the public rejecting the authority of the political elites.

Worth the Candle

A modest 2500 ebook of the “rationalist fiction” genre. I didn’t realize that rationalist fiction was a thing, but I enjoyed it.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

More rationalist fiction (also very long, available online for free). It was delightful.

Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

The authors helped me rationalize my faith and my utter disgust with most of the dominant “christian” organizations and groups in the USA. Here’s a pragraph of a review of this book on Goodreads:

One of the most powerful and pertinent messages this book offers is its depiction of a church narrative enslaved to the doctrines of democracy and consumerism.

It paints both liberals and conservatives as two sides of the same coin, both looking to the government and her articulation of freedom, human rights, power, peace, and prosperity as method and mode of salvation.

They cite Yoder’s paradigm: The “activist” church desires to transform the world in a way that makes God and Christ unimportant and unnecessary, and the “conversionist” church is selfishly consumed with an individualistic saving of souls. Both are subjugated to the almighty nation-state and consumed by its heretical perspectives.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities

One of the more potent books I’ve ever read. I’ve got a much longer review coming soon, and I am re-reading it right now.

This book is likely to have a lasting impression on the trajectory of my life.

Here’s a long-but-good review

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind

The state (and markets) are crushing community. All the “stuff” of our life happens in this “community” that we live in.

It’s risky that states are unable to perceive it’s existence, and we’re all impoverished by this state of affairs.

Wait But Why: The Story of Us

This isn’t a book - it’s a series of very long articles illustrated with stick figures and graphs. It is incredible.

From the introduction:

As a writer and a generally thinky person, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about the society I live in, and societies in general. I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger.

When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.

It’s very worth the click. Go on. Click right here

I might do a longer book review (or thoughts on the books I read) another time.

Things I’m thinking about for 2020

I taught a six-week Bible study on the book of Titus for my church. Learned a lot from it, and enjoyed the experience. Rumor has it others considered it to be “not a total waste of time”. I’d like to do this again.

I’ve been pretty involved with helping mentor Turing students (and non-Turing students) who are breaking into the software development industry. Time spent in this domain is some of the most rewarding things I’ve undertaken this year, and I’d like to double down on that

I don’t do goals so much as trying to build the right habits. If I can lay a good set of habits, then the ‘accomplishments’ take care of themselves.

So, I’m working to build habits around writing, software development, teaching, rock climbing, and the intersection of all of the above.

I’ve got far more on my mind, and we’ll see how 2020 plays out.

Other people’s annual reviews

Refactoring practice: Get rid of `attr_accessors` in `ogre.rb` in 2 minutes

2020-01-27T13:00:00+00:00

Preparing for Turing Series Index

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

More refactoring practice!

I was reading Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby, and then was looking at a Turing student’s work on the ogre mythical creature when I realized this was a perfect chance to explain a little about some principles of Object-Oriented Design.

Here’s a quick TWO MINUTE walk-through:

Here’s the code we’re starting with:

class Ogre
  attr_reader :name, :home, :swings, :encounter_counter
  def initialize(name, home = "Swamp")
    @name = name
    @home = home
    @swings = 0
    @encounter_counter = 0
  end
  
  def encounter(human)
    @encounter_counter += 1
    human.encounter_counter += 1
    if human.notices_ogre?
      swing_at(human)
    end
  end
  
  def swing_at(human)
    @swings += 1
  end
  
  def apologize(human)
    human.encounter_counter = 0
    @swings = 0
  end
end

class Human
  attr_accessor :encounter_counter
  attr_reader :name
  def initialize(name = "Jane")
    @name = name
    @encounter_counter = 0
  end
  
  def notices_ogre?
    return @encounter_counter % 3 == 0
  end
  
  def knocked_out?
    return true if encounter_counter >= 3
    false
  end
end

All tests pass.

I made changes to any time the Ogre class changed the “internal state” of another object (aka the Human class)

Copy-paste the code into your editor, and make the changes yourself!

The finished refactored version:

update: 👏 to Gaby Mendez for catching an error I made in the refactored code!

class Ogre
  attr_reader :name, :home, :swings, :encounter_counter
  def initialize(name, home = "Swamp")
    @name = name
    @home = home
    @swings = 0
    @encounter_counter = 0
  end
  
  def encounter(human)
    @encounter_counter += 1
    human.increment_encounters
    if human.notices_ogre?
      swing_at(human)
    end
  end
  
  def swing_at(human)
    @swings += 1
    # Gaby pointed out that the human needed to actually get knocked unconscious
    # at a certain point. Duh! I added this line in response:
    human.knock_unconscious if swings % 2 == 0
  end
  
  def apologize(human)
    # Gaby pointed out an error, so in fixing it I am deviating from the 
    # finished code in the video walkthrough. 
    human.revive
    @swings = 0
  end
end

class Human
  attr_reader :name, :encounter_counter, :knocked_out
  def initialize(name = "Jane")
    @name = name
    @encounter_counter = 0
    @knocked_out = false
  end
  
  def increment_encounters
    @encounter_counter += 1
  end
  
  def revive
    @encounter_counter = 0
    @knocked_out = false
  end
  
  def knock_unconscious
    @knocked_out = true
  end
  
  def notices_ogre?
    encounter_counter % 3 == 0
  end
  
  def knocked_out?
    # updated this a bit too. Sorry for the confusion!!!!!
    knocked_out
  end
end

Preparing for Turing Series Index

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

Mythical Creatures: Refactoring wizard.rb

2020-01-25T13:00:00+00:00

Preparing for Turing Series Index

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

Today we’re refactoring some code.

I find it extremely fruitful when others look over my code and help me clean it up. Quite a few Turing students have told me that the process of refactoring their own code with the help of someone who knows a bit more than them has been super helpful.

This is an exercise from Turing School’s ruby-exercises repository.

Specifically, we’re refactoring a solution that makes this test pass.

How to get the maximum value from this exercise

So far, I’ve found it most helpful to have my own code refactored. I wish I could help every single person who might read this post refactor their own code.

But I cannot.

But here’s the thing - when you’re working, you’ll often not be refactoring your own code either. It’s most likely you’ll be reading (and updating) code that someone else wrote.

Or you’ll be nestling in new code and new features alongside existing code and existing features.

So it’s useful to get practice reading other people’s code, and being able to work with it.

Video Walk-through

Sometimes video walk-throughs are helpful, so I put one together. It is 7 minutes long, and covers useful material.

Copy-paste this code into your editor and run the tests:

# ruby-exercises/mythical-creatures/wizard.rb
class Wizard
  attr_reader :name
  def initialize(name, bearded: false)
    @name = name
    @rested = 0
  end
  def bearded?
    if name == "Ben"
      true
    else
      false
    end
  end
  def incantation(saying)
    "sudo " + saying
  end
  def rested?
    if @rested >= 3
      false
    else
      true
    end
  end
  def cast
    @rested += 1
    "MAGIC MISSILE!"
  end
end

The tests should pass.

We’re going to cover a few things:

Guard Clauses
Default variables
Running just a single test from a test file instead of the whole thing
Sometimes simple things go wrong and are deeply frustrating

Guard Clauses

Here’s the guard clauses I mention: guard clauses (thechrisoshow.com)

Default variables

the test wizard are bearded by default implies that in the initialization method, we should set bearded equal to true, rather than false.

Run just a specific test in a test file (Minitest)

Sometimes it’s helpful to run just a single test in a test file, rather than the whole thing.

Here’s the format:

ruby something_test.rb --name=/a-string-that-matches-something-in-the-test-you-want-to-run/

instead of --name=/abc/, you can use -n=/abc. I’ll often append the string zzz to the test I want to run, then append -n/zzz/ to the test running command. (With rspec you can identify test by line number.)

Things go so, so wrong

The video walk-through was my second time recording the video, because I’d wandered so much in my explanations in the first video.

Then, mid-way through the video, I closed the terminal window, CD’d into the wrong directory, and got a bunch of errors. I got it fixed, then fat-fingered my way back into closing the terminal. I was super frustrated.

I’m ostensibly a “professional”, in that I get paid to “develop software”, but I thought it a useful reminder that we all do things that are frustrating and cause us to waste time. When you do this yourself, don’t worry about it to much. Our entire craft is hard. Reality has a surprising amount of detail and it’s annoying when we get bit by that detail.

Here’s the final version:

class Wizard
  attr_reader :name, :bearded, :rested, :spell_counter
  def initialize(name, bearded: true)
    @name = name
    @rested = true
    @bearded = bearded
    @spell_counter = 0
  end
  
  def bearded?
    bearded
  end
  
  def incantation(saying)
    "sudo " + saying
  end
  
  def rested?
    return false if spell_counter >= 3 # this is a "guard clause", sorta
    rested
  end
  
  def cast
    @spell_counter += 1
    "MAGIC MISSILE!"
  end
end

Preparing for Turing Series Index

I encourage you to skim around these chapters, get the “shape” of what’s to come, in your mind, and then dive in wherever you want. Good luck, and bug reports are welcome.

How to take payments via Stripe on a Static Site

2019-12-22T13:00:00+00:00

I’ve had rolling around my head an idea of selling small how-to guides and resources. Things that I wish existed, but have never been able to find.

For example, I’ve read a bunch of books that talk about good Object-Oriented design, or refactoring code, or writing better tests. Despite all these books, the most useful part of learning, doing the thing you’re trying to learn, is still hard to come by.

I’m afraid that when I read a book about software, I retain only a fraction of the material, because I get so little exposure to actually writing code that exemplifies a given topic.

I went to the Turing School of Software and Designe, and they’ve got a great set of exercises for learning basic Ruby. It’s a repository of tests, and you run the tests and make them pass.

It’s one of the most effective methods I’ve encountered for learning Ruby.

I’d love for something similar to exist for learning more complex topics; targeted at early-career software developers. Shorter and more focused than a book, but more interactive and of higher quality than the smattering of blog posts one might find on the topic.

Since this is a problem I’m willing to throw money at (and have spent non-trivial sums of money on, across books, courses, and hours spent working through this material), I imagine others are willing to do the same.

Therefore, I want to simultaneously:

Scratch my own itch
Make these resources available for others to benefit from
(Aspirationally) inspire someone else to build a course or guide to some topic I want to learn, so I can buy it.

Josh, why would you sell something like this, instead of giving it away for free?

Great question. I’ve got a few reasons:

1. I want to learn how to collect payment for something

For better or worse, much of the world revolves around exchanging money for services.

If the thing I can help you do is valuable to you, you will pay me a fraction of the perceived value to obtain said service.

I always teach what I know. There’s a running joke among some of my friends and co-workers: “Josh has written a gist about everything”.

I keep copious notes and document nearly everything I do. I love to teach others and help them, so “selling a product about how to sell a product” fits right in line with teach everything I know, despite how much it smells like a multi-level marketing scheme.

2. Putting a price on something means I’ll put a lot of effort into making it good

The difference between

Write a blog post and publish to the world

and

Build a first-class, best-in-breed guide to an important skill that helps people put a roof over their head

is enormous.

Putting a price on something I’ve made moves it from the former category to the latter, and I treat it with the care it deserves.

3. When someone does something for free, they are telegraphing to the recipient that it’s not worth any money

We, as humans, ascribe value to that which has evidence of value. If have two things, and one was free and the other cost money, I’m going to value the thing that cost the money more.

The thing that I’m building will deliver value. Value that is far greater than what it will cost. If I made it free, you would not value it as much.

I’ve put together a lot of resources for students getting ready to start Turing. Someone going to Turing is spending $20,000 and taking nearly a year off from earning any money to learn the skills of writing software.

They’ve got a lot invested in the program.

I put this guide in front of every new student going through the back-end program. I drop it in their cohort Slack channel before Turing starts.

You know how much interest it generates? Invariably, very little. The actual value of the material is enormous, but almost no one ascribes significant value to it.

I’ve considered putting a price on it, just so it doesn’t get lumped in with all the other free stuff out there… but I have not, and likely never will.

I’ll be honest. It’s scary to put something out there and ask people to give you money for it.

In general, when something scares you, it’s probable that pursuing that scary thing will be really good for you.

It is on this principle that I’m offering anything for sale.

Courses for sale

How to Integrate Stripe and a static site

Change your MAC address with a shell script

2019-12-18T13:00:00+00:00

For a while, I’ve had notes from Change or Spoof a MAC Address in Windows or OS X saved, so if I am using a wifi connection that limits me to thirty minutes or an hour or whatever, I can “spoof” a new MAC address, and when I re-connect to the wifi, the access point thinks I’m on a new, unique device.

For the record - when I’m posted up at a coffee shop for an extended period of time, I make sure to buy products regularly in payment for my time. So, if you’re spoofing your MAC address to use wifi for a longer period of time, maybe make sure to spend $5 or $10 when you run the script.

Now, in case you think that I’m actually saving myself time here, I’m totally not. Here’s why:

XKCD: Automation

And:

XKCD: Is it worth the time?

Here’s the steps, for someone who’s on a MAC, to spoof your MAC address:

Get your current MAC address

Hold down option key, click your wifi icon:

Figure out which adapter your machine is using to connect to the wifi

ifconfig en0 | grep ether # one of these will return a MAC address that matches
ifconfig en1 | grep ether # the value you saw when looking for your current
ifconfig en2 | grep ether # mac address.
ifconfig en3 | grep ether # Keep incrementing the `en0` value until you run out of 
                          # devices

Here’s me working through the list:

For me, the very first result matched the MAC address I got from option+clicking the wifi network.

That means I’ll be using en0 as the [E]ther[N]et adapter I’ll update shortly.

Generate a random new MAC address

A MAC address has a standard-looking format.

It looks like six blocks of two digits, which happen to be hexadecimal representations of 00000000 through 11111111.

Here’s some randomly-generated MAC addresses:

e2:81:f6:f6:f9:e8
1f:24:37:47:d6:25
03:20:3f:48:46:ad

To generate a random string of characters that produces a valid MAC address, run:

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'

And boom. You’ve got a MAC address.

Now we need to update our current MAC address to this new MAC address.

Set current mac address to temporary/new MAC address

You can use ifconfig to set the ethernet address (is that interchangable with the MAC address?) to the randomly-generated string you got from the openssl command:

# you need to sudo it, unfortunately. No quotes around the mac address
sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

# here's the full command
sudo ifconfig en0 ether 8c:85:90:5a:79:56

And with that, you can re-connect to the wifi network, and it should recognize you as a new device, and let you onto the network.

Here’s what I first ended up with:

#!/bin/bash

echo "Hi! lets change our mac address."
echo "Step 1: hold down option key, click wifi logo. Note the mac address"
echo "Step 2: click 'disconnect from network' "
echo "Step 3: note which ethernet adapter lines up with the mac address you just saw"

en0=$( ifconfig en0 | grep ether )
en1=$( ifconfig en1 | grep ether )
en2=$( ifconfig en2 | grep ether )
en3=$( ifconfig en3 | grep ether )
en4=$( ifconfig en4 | grep ether )
en5=$( ifconfig en5 | grep ether )

echo en0 is: $en0
echo en1 is: $en1
echo en2 is: $en2
echo en3 is: $en3
echo en4 is: $en4
echo en5 is: $en5

read -p 'Step 4: Enter which ethernet device lined up with the given mac address: ' ether_adapter
export ether_adapter=$ether_adapter

mac=$( openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//" )
export mac=$mac

echo "btw, here's the new mac address we're going to use: $mac"
echo "OK, we will change the mac address associated with: $ether_adapter"

old_mac=$( ifconfig $ether_adapter | grep ether )

echo "The old value was: $old_mac"

sudo ifconfig $ether_adapter ether $mac

new_mac=$( ifconfig $ether_adapter | grep ether )

echo "The new value is: $new_mac"
echo "go ahead and re-connect to the wifi. You should be able to join the network."

Believe it or not, this script was far from perfect.

First off, not all randomly-generated mac addresses are valid, even though they were passing an online mac address validator I was testing against. AskUbuntu nicely shared what was going on.

I didn’t want to deal with manually building a valid MAC address; I just noticed that about 2 out of 3 attempts to change my mac address, using the above script, the MAC address didn’t change.

So, my next version of this script pulls the generate mac address and set current mac address to generated mac address steps into a function, and keeps calling the function until the mac address has changed.

Why be elegant and precise when you can brute force a crappy solution?

Here’s my finished “solution”:

#!/bin/bash
# skipping some lines
read -p 'Step 4: Which device lined up would you like to change? (hit return for en0) ' ether_adapter

if [ -z $ether_adapter ]
then
  ether_adapter="en0"
fi

export ether_adapter=$ether_adapter

generate_and_set_new_mac_address() {
  mac=$( openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/./0/2; s/.$//")
  export mac=$mac
  echo "OK, we will change the mac address associated with: $ether_adapter"

  old_mac=$( ifconfig $ether_adapter | grep ether )

  echo "The old value was: $old_mac"
  sudo ifconfig $ether_adapter ether $mac

  new_mac=$( ifconfig $ether_adapter | grep ether )
  echo "The new value is: $new_mac"
}
echo $new_mac
echo $old_mac

while [ "$new_mac" == "$old_mac" ]
do
  echo "not the same"
  generate_and_set_new_mac_address
done

echo "go ahead and re-connect to the wifi. You should be able to join the network."

and this seems to work pretty well:

I hope that in the near future, I’ll look at this bash script and have many ways to improve it. For now, it’ll do the trick.

Feb 9, 2021 update

Following this tweet by @serent, I updated the script a little. To generate a valid MAC address:

@@ -160,7 +162,7 @@ fi
 export ether_adapter=$ether_adapter

 generate_and_set_new_mac_address() {
-  mac=$( openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//" )
+  mac=$( openssl rand -hex 6 | sed "s/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/./0/2; s/.$//")
   export mac=$mac
   echo "OK, we will change the mac address associated with: $ether_adapter"

There’s other pain points in the script. I’ll fix them at some point.

POODR Notes: Acquiring Behavior Through Inheritance (Chapter 6)

2019-11-28T13:00:00+00:00

I’m reading through Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby .

These are some notes from chapter 6, Acquiring Behavior Through Inheritance; mostly these are for me, and they don’t intend to stand on their own. Read the book, work through chapter six, and then come back and read through this.

The current state of the code is we have this RoadBike object and MountainBike object that share significant code.

We’re going to extract common functionality into the Bycycle superclass.

Step one, according to Sandi Metz, is always move code from the base class to super class, never start with code in the super class.

class Bicycle
  # Please note how empty this class is.
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  attr_reader :size, :front_shock, :rear_shock
  def initialize(args)
    @size         = args[:size]
    @front_shock  = args[:front_shock]
    @rear_shock   = args[:rear_shock]
  end
  
  def spares
    { chain:      '10-speed',
      tire_size:  '2.1',
      rear_shock: rear_shock
    }
  end
end

class RoadBike < Bicycle
  attr_reader :size, :tape_color
  def initialize(args)
    @size       = args[:size]
    @tape_color = args[:tape_color]
  end
  
  def spares
    { chain:      '10-speed',
      tire_size:  '23',
      tape_color: tape_color }
  end
end

mtb = MountainBike.new(
  size:        'small',
  front_shock: 'manitou',
  rear_shock: 'fox'
)
road = RoadBike.new(
  size:       'large',
  tape_color: "Red",
)

We have three broad goals:

Clean up the initialization methods, so the sub-classes have sensible defaults
Clean up the spares method, so sub-classes have sensible defaults
Accomplish 1 and 2 in such a way that the next developer who adds a sub-class doesn’t have to inspect the existing classes in great detail to figure out subtle nuance.

First, a sub-optimal refactor for `#initialize`

First with adding @tire_size to the Bicycle superclass:

class Bicycle
  attr_reader :size
  def initialize(args)
    @size = args[:size]
  end
end

and we have to call super from the sub-class initialize method, in order to get all of our instance variables initialized:

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  attr_reader :front_shock, :rear_shock
  def initialize(args)
    @front_shock  = args[:front_shock]
    @rear_shock   = args[:rear_shock]
    super(args) # we need this to get size from the superclass, otherwise we lose the `@size` instance variable
  end
end
  
class RoadBike < Bicycle
  attr_reader :tape_color
  def initialize(args)
    @tape_color  = args[:tape_color]
    super(args)
  end
end

We’ve created a problem, now.

Every new subclass of Bicycle that we might ever make needs to call super in the initialization method. That’s a subtle requirement, and not one that will be immediately apparent to future developers.

Use `post_initialize` instead of `initialize`

To navigate this requirement that subclasses never call super, we’ll strip our entire initialize method out of our subclass.

Here’s what we end up with next:

class Bicycle
  attr_reader :tire_size
  def initialize(args)
    @tire_size = args[:tire_size] || default_tire_size
    post_initialize(args)
  end
  
  def post_initialize(args)
    nil
  end
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  attr_reader :front_shock, :rear_shock
  def post_initialize(args)
    @front_shock  = args[:front_shock]
    @rear_shock   = args[:rear_shock]
  end
  .
end

No calls to super, and future developers, when looking at either the Bicycle class or one of its existing sub-classes immediately see what’s going on, and follow the existing pattern.

Future subclasses can now follow the pattern of existing subclasses. They won’t create an initialize method, but instead will implement a hook that responds to post_initialize.

Setting sensible defaults

Lets step back to the state of the class, pre-refactor, when we had a spares method in both sub-classes, which contained values we’d rather set as defaults, like chain, which is currently the same value across all Bicycle subclasses, and tire_size which differs by sub-class

class Bicycle
  # empty again
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  .
  def spares
    { chain:      '10-speed',
      tire_size:  '2.1',
      rear_shock: rear_shock }
  end
end

class RoadBike < Bicycle
  .
  def spares
    { chain:      '10-speed',
      tire_size:  '23',
      tape_color: tape_color }
  end
end

Here’s the first round of refactors.

We pull chain into the superclass, fetching the value of default_chain if Bicycle isn’t explicitly given a chain value.

default_tire_size is trickier; we require every Bicycle subclass to implement default_tire_size, since it’s not implemented in the superclass:

class Bicycle
  attr_reader :chain, :tire_size
  def initialize(args={})
    @chain     = args[:chain]     || default_chain
    @tire_size = args[:tire_size] || default_tire_size
  end
  def default_chain
    '10-speed'
  end    
  
  def spares
    { chain: chain,
      tire_size: tire_size}
  end
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  .
  def default_tire_size
    '2.1'
  end
end

class RoadBike < Bicycle
  .
  def default_tire_size
    '23'
  end
end

When we give RoadBike and MountainBike a default_tire_size method, the superclass may now call default_tire_size and set it appropriately.

We’ve created a trap, however. From the book:

The root of the problem is that Bicycle imposes a requirement upon its subclasses that is not obvious from a glance at the code. As Bicycle is written, subclasses must implement default_tire_size. Innocent and well-meaning subclasses like RecumbentBike may fail because they do not fulfill requirements of which they are unaware.

We can remove this trap, though, in the superclass, by telling all future developers that they need to implement certain methods.

class Bicycle
  .
  def default_tire_size
    raise NotImplementedError, "this #{self.class} cannot respond to 'default_tire_size'"
  end
end

Now when the new class is initialized, rather than simply failing to set a tire_size value, we’ll explicitly halt execution and tell them exactly what method they need to add.

Phew. All this work, and we’ve still not fully fixed our spares method.

We’ve got this spares method in the superclass, now using our handy sensible defaults:

class Bicycle
  attr_reader :chain, :tire_size
  def initialize(args={})
    @chain     = args[:chain]     || default_chain
    @tire_size = args[:tire_size] || default_tire_size
  end
  
  def default_chain
    '10-speed'
  end    
  
  def spares
    { chain: chain,
      tire_size: tire_size}
  end
  
  def default_tire_size
    raise NotImplementedError, "this #{self.class} cannot respond to 'default_tire_size'"
  end
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  .
  def spares
    super.merge(
      front_shock: front_shock,
      rear_shock: rear_shock
      )
    end
end

class RoadBike < Bicycle
  .
  def spares
    super.merge(tape_color: tape_color)
  end
end

By now, you should feel skeptical of calls to super. We want to avoid causing confusion with future developers about what classes should implement the spares method, and what it should do.

The fix is easy, once you see it written out. We’re going to expect our classes to implement local_spares, and we’ll simply ask our superclass to merge those local_spares into its own hash, like so:

class Bicycle
  .  
  def spares
    { chain: chain,
      tire_size: tire_size}.merge(local_spares)
  end
  
  def local_spares
    {}
  end
end

class MountainBike < Bicycle
  def local_spares
    { front_shock: front_shock,
      rear_shock: rear_shock }
  end
end

The `Template Method` Pattern

I had to read this chapter four or five times before it all sunk in, then I had to manually convert the classes from “tightly coupled and bad” to “appropriately abstract” three or four times for this to all sink in, at the very basic level of this example.

Anyway, this Template Method Pattern seems to mean:

Where abstract superclasses and their sub-classes share methods, the superclass must be explicit about what the subclasses must do.

If the superclass provides a globally-available method (like some default value) that can be overridden (or ‘specialized’) by the sub-class, no further action need be taken by the superclass

If the superclass requires a method value (like the subclass providing some specific default value or specialization) it ought to raise an error if that default value is not specialized.

Is it a rule of thumb that the subclasses never have an initialize method? it seems the superclass will call the subclasses with some sort of post_initialization method, rather than the subclasses calling super after initializing themselves.

Subclasses ought to provide specializations on the superclass, rather than ever overriding specific superclass attributes.

I’d love to come up with a repository of drills or exercises to practice refactoring code according to this Template Method design pattern.

Some day, later.

Aggregate and deduplicate your deprecation warnings in Rails

2019-10-03T13:00:00+00:00

We know we all stay on the cutting edge of Rails; no one, and I mean no one out there is making a 4.2 -> 5.2 upgrade because Rails 4.2 is no longer supported.

You, dear reader, have just suddenly found an interest in resolving deprecation warnings, and as one jumps a few Rails versions in short order, finding and resolving them systematically will save you a lot of time.

Sure, you could run tail -f log/test.log | grep "DEPRECATION WARNING", but that’s not systematic. If the same line of code gets called 50 times, and prints a deprecation warning each time, that generates a lot of noise, not much signal.

This does no one any good:

Here’s what I settled on:

In one terminal window, run tail -f log/test.log | grep "DEPRECATION WARNING" >> deprecation_warnings.txt
In another terminal window, run all your tests. rails test or whatever.

If you take a look at deprecation_warnings.txt after all your tests run, you’ll see plenty of deprecation warnings. Maybe even a few hundred lines of them.

Daunting, eh?

Lets make that less daunting:

We’re going to remove all duplicates from that list, so the final output will show just the unique deprecation warnings.

Run:

sort deprecation_warnings.txt | uniq -c > unique_deprecation_warnings.txt

You have to sort the file and pipe it into uniq. The -c flag prints the number of occurrences of each line. This might help you figure out where to get started in resolving the dependencies.

Now, the contents of unique_deprecation_warnings.txt is one line per deprecation warning that popped up when running your tests (or, you could do this with log/development.log and exercising/running the app locally) and you can be a bit more systematic in resolving these deprecation warnings.

I originally got 300 lines of deprecation warnings; once I sorted and deduplicated that list, I was down to 18. Much more manageable!

This is much more usable!

Since the deprecation warnings include the specific line of code that generates the warning, this list now functions as a checklist of what I need to resolve in the app.

Notes from 'Why We Sleep'

2019-09-13T13:00:00+00:00

I first read Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams about two years ago. It immediately led me to prioritize sleep over almost everything else.

Most of us don’t get enough sleep, and are worse for it. Usually when the topic of sleep comes up, I say

Hey, there’s this great book I read on sleep. You should read it, and then sleep more…

The people most in need of more sleep are also usually the people most unable to make time to read a book about sleep. So, here’s an effort to help these people save time, prioritize sleep, and then maybe give the book a read anyway.

I hope to use this post to accomplish two things:

Convince you that sleep is massively important and you should sleep more
Convince you to read the book. If you find anything below compelling, you’ll find it even more compelling if you read the whole book yourself.

Everything that follows is a quote from Why We Sleep.

If I add my own comments, they’ll be inline and italicized, like so:

Josh: here’s a comment I’m adding

Please note: Alexey Guzey did a fantastic review of the science in the first chapter of this book: Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors. As you might guess from the title of the piece, there are some big problems with the science Matthew Walker users to justify his arguments.

Index

I’ve quoted from this book, extensively. I don’t recommend reading this post top-to-bottom, but rather jumping around the post, from this following index, to a section that looks interesting, then going back to the top, jumping to a different section, etc.

Not everyone is genetically wired to wake up early. Don’t let people shame you for sleeping in
Many of use drink a lot of coffee. What’s actually happening when we drink it?
Most people who don’t get enough sleep think they get enough sleep. Here’s a quick way to tell if you get enough
Turing students: Sleep the night before learning helps you learn new things
Turing students: Sleep the night after learning something boosts retention 20-40%
Sleep helps us forget things that we should forget
Turing students, athletes: Sleep helps you learn complex new patterns (physical or mental)
Turing students, college students: further studies and examples of sleep helping master difficult material
Turing students: What does forcing yourself to wake up earlier than you should do to you?
Rock climbers, athletes: Sleep deprivation on physical performance. (Hint: It more than undoes everything you worked for in the last year)
Sleep deprivation and something that kills 40,000 people in the USA each year. (Driving)
You cannot estimate how poor your performance is when sleep deprived
Driving while sleep deprived is as bad as driving drunk
Sleep lets you read other’s emotions well
Sleep deprivation contributes to substance abuse
Sleep deprivation contributes to Alzheimers
Yes, one hour really matters, AKA “cool insights from daylight savings time”
Sleep deprivation will make you fatter
Sleep deprivation will make you less able to fend off illness
Sleep and relating to other people (emotional intelligence)
You (and everyone you’re in charge of, if you’re a manager) are less creative when sleep deprived. This is relevant to businesses
Sleep and Insomnia
Sleep and Insomnia: please stop looking at your phone as you go to sleep
Alcohol messes up your sleep, big time. (This chapter changed my life)
If you use sleeping pills or know someone who does, please read this section
Sleeping pills work - but so do placebos
Sleeping pills make you unconscious, but not sleep. This damages your immune system
OK, you’ve got insomnia. Can’t use sleeping pills. What then should you do?
Sleep and effectiveness as work: performance, job satisfaction, and ethics
Children should be allowed to be well rested. Less car accidents in 16-18 year old drivers, more of an improvement than ABS brakes
Sleep and ADHD. It’s likely that half of children diagnosed with ADHD are just sleep deprived
Doctors make mistakes when sleep deprived. And the founder of med school was a cocain addict. Preventable Medical Errors are the third-leading cause of death among Americans. 😱

Quotes from Why We Sleep:

Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.

This is the grab-bag of negative impacts on sleeping too little. From the first chapter. The author expands on all of these points later in the book.

Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.
Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Inadequate sleep — even moderate reductions for just one week — disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.
Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure.
Fitting Charlotte Brontë’s prophetic wisdom that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow,” sleep disruption further contributes to all major psychiatric conditions, including depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
Perhaps you have also noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired? This is no coincidence. Too little sleep swells concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while suppressing a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction. Despite being full, you still want to eat more. It’s a proven recipe for weight gain in sleep-deficient adults and children alike.
Worse, should you attempt to diet but don’t get enough sleep while doing so, it is futile, since most of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass, not fat.

Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.

The old maxim “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.

But can we go so far as to say that a lack of sleep can kill you outright? Actually, yes…[one way sleep deprivation can kill you] is the deadly circumstance of getting behind the wheel of a motor vehicle without having had sufficient sleep.

Drowsy driving is the cause of hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents and fatalities each year.

And here, it is not only the life of the sleep-deprived individuals that is at risk, but the lives of those around them.

Tragically, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour in the United States due to a fatigue-related error.

It is disquieting to learn that vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

back to index

Don’t let people shame you with the ‘early to bed early to rise’ concept.

Some people can go to bed early and wake up early. Others cannot. It’s not a moral issue, it’s genetics.

An adult’s owlness or larkness, also known as their chronotype, is strongly determined by genetics.

If you are a night owl, it’s likely that one (or both) of your parents is a night owl.

Sadly, society treats night owls rather unfairly on two counts.

First is the label of being lazy, based on a night owl’s wont to wake up later in the day, due to the fact that they did not fall asleep until the early-morning hours.

Others (usually morning larks) will chastise night owls on the erroneous assumption that such preferences are a choice, and if they were not so slovenly, they could easily wake up early.

However, night owls are not owls by choice. They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hardwiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.

back to index

How does caffeine work?

It fills adenosine receptors in the brain, preventing actual adenosine from getting in. This masks the sleep-stimulating effect of adenosine

Caffeine works by successfully battling with adenosine for the privilege of latching on to adenosine welcome sites—or receptors—in the brain. Once caffeine occupies these receptors, however, it does not stimulate them like adenosine, making you sleepy. Rather, caffeine blocks and effectively inactivates the receptors, acting as a masking agent.

Best practice might be to refrain from caffeine anytime after the mid-morning.

What is problematic [about caffeine] is the persistence of caffeine in your system. In pharmacology, we use the term “half-life” when discussing a drug’s efficacy. This simply refers to the length of time it takes for the body to remove 50 percent of a drug’s concentration.

Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7:30 p.m. This means that by 1:30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1:30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.

There’s nothing benign about that 50 percent mark, either. Half a shot of caffeine is still plenty powerful, and much more decomposition work lies ahead throughout the night before caffeine disappears.

Sleep will not come easily or be smooth throughout the night as your brain continues its battle against the opposing force of caffeine. Most people do not realize how long it takes to overcome a single dose of caffeine, and therefore fail to make the link between the bad night of sleep we wake from in the morning and the cup of coffee we had ten hours earlier with dinner.

back to index

Lots of folks think they’re getting enough sleep

Here’s a starting point to evaluate that statement

Am I getting enough sleep?

Setting aside the extreme case of sleep deprivation, how do you know whether you’re routinely getting enough sleep? While a clinical sleep assessment is needed to thoroughly address this issue, an easy rule of thumb is to answer two simple questions.

First, after waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at ten or eleven a.m.?

If the answer is “yes,” you are likely not getting sufficient sleep quantity and/or quality.

Second, can you function optimally without caffeine before noon?

If the answer is “no,” then you are most likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.

back to index

Sleep as an aid to learn new things

This is particularly relevant to Turing students

Sleep has proven itself time and again as a memory aid: both before learning, to prepare your brain for initially making new memories, and after learning, to cement those memories and prevent forgetting.

The author explains the methodology of many sleep-and-memory-related studies. I’ll include the high points for you.

Later that day, at six p.m., all participants performed another round of intensive learning where they tried to cram yet another set of new facts into their short-term storage reservoirs (another one hundred face-name pairs).

Our question was simple:

Does the learning capacity of the human brain decline with continued time awake across the day and, if so, can sleep reverse this saturation effect and thus restore learning ability?

Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests).

In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at six p.m. was not small: a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.

back to index

On Sleep the night after learning

The second benefit of sleep for memory comes after learning, one that effectively clicks the “save” button on those newly created files.

In doing so, sleep protects newly acquired information, affording immunity against forgetting: an operation called consolidation…

The experimental results of Jenkins and Dallenbach have now been replicated time and again, with a memory retention benefit of between 20 and 40 percent being offered by sleep, compared to the same amount of time awake.

This is not a trivial concept when you consider the potential advantages in the context of studying for an exam, for instance, or evolutionarily, in remembering survival-relevant information such as the sources of food and water and locations of mates and predators.

Using MRI scans, we have since looked deep into the brains of participants to see where those memories are being retrieved from before sleep relative to after sleep.

It turns out that those information packets were being recalled from very different geographical locations within the brain at the two different times.

Before having slept, participants were fetching memories from the short-term storage site of the hippocampus - that temporary warehouse, which is a vulnerable place to live for any long duration of time if you are a new memory.

But things looked very different by the next morning. The memories had moved.

After the full night of sleep, participants were now retrieving that same information from the neocortex, which sits at the top of the brain - a region that serves as the long-term storage site for fact-based memories, where they can now live safely, perhaps in perpetuity.

back to index

The benefits of sleep to forget things

Up to this point, we have discussed the power of sleep after learning to enhance remembering and avoid forgetting.

However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders).

Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need.

It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection.

Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering.

sleep helps us remember what we want, and clears out memories of unimportant or painful events

The results were clear. Sleep powerfully, yet very selectively, boosted the retention of those words previously tagged for “remembering,” yet actively avoided the strengthening of those memories tagged for “forgetting.” Participants who did not sleep showed no such impressive parsing and differential saving of the memories.

We had learned a subtle, but important, lesson: sleep was far more intelligent than we had once imagined.

Counter to earlier assumptions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sleep does not offer a general, nonspecific (and hence verbose) preservation of all the information you learn during the day.

Instead, sleep is able to offer a far more discerning hand in memory improvement: one that preferentially picks and chooses what information is, and is not, ultimately strengthened.

Sleep accomplishes this by using meaningful tags that have been hung onto those memories during initial learning, or potentially identified during sleep itself.

Numerous studies have shown a similarly intelligent form of sleep-dependent memory selection across both daytime naps and a full night of sleep.

back to index

Sleep for learning complex and novel skills, like typing, piano, etc

The term “muscle memory” is a misnomer.

Muscles themselves have no such memory: a muscle that is not connected to a brain cannot perform any skilled actions, nor does a muscle store skilled routines.

Muscle memory is, in fact, brain memory.

Training and strengthening muscles can help you better execute a skilled memory routine, but the routine itself — the memory program — resides firmly and exclusively within the brain.

Years before I explored the effects of sleep on fact-based, textbook-like learning, I examined motor skill memory.

[A] transformative experience happened some years later while I was obtaining my PhD. It was 2000, and the scientific community had proclaimed that the next ten years would be “The Decade of the Brain,” forecasting (accurately, as it turned out) what would be remarkable progress within the neurosciences.

I had been asked to give a public lecture on the topic of sleep at a celebratory event… After my lecture, a distinguished-looking gentleman with a kindly affect, dressed in a tweed suit jacket with a subtle yellow-green hue that I still vividly recall to this day, approached me.

It was a brief conversation, but one of the most scientifically important of my life.

He thanked me for the presentation, and told me that he was a pianist. He said he was intrigued by my description of sleep as an active brain state, one in which we may review and even strengthen those things we have previously learned.

Then came a comment that would leave me reeling, and trigger a major focus of my research for years to come.

“As a pianist,” he said, “I have an experience that seems far too frequent to be chance. I will be practicing a particular piece, even late into the evening, and I cannot seem to master it. Often, I make the same mistake at the same place in a particular movement. I go to bed frustrated. But when I wake up the next morning and sit back down at the piano, I can just play, perfectly.”

“I can just play.”

The words reverberated in my mind as I tried to compose a response. I told the gentleman that it was a fascinating idea, and it was certainly possible that sleep assisted musicianship and led to error-free performance, but that I knew of no scientific evidence to support the claim.

He smiled, seeming unfazed by the absence of empirical affirmation, thanked me again for my lecture, and walked toward the reception hall.

I, on the other hand, remained in the auditorium, realizing that this gentleman had just told me something that violated the most repeated and entrusted teaching edict: practice makes perfect.

Not so, it seemed.

Perhaps it was practice, with sleep, that makes perfect?

back to index

Studies and evidence for sleep leading to mastery of difficult material

The author goes into the studies he did to determine the effects of sleep on “finishing” the work that’s begun with deliberate practice

I took a large group of right-handed individuals and had them learn to type a number sequence on a keyboard with their left hand, such as 4-1-3-2-4, as quickly and as accurately as possible.

Like learning a piano scale, subjects practiced the motor skill sequence over and over again, for a total of twelve minutes, taking short breaks throughout.

Unsurprisingly, the participants improved in their performance across the training session; practice, after all, is supposed to make perfect.

We then tested the participants twelve hours later. Half of the participants had learned the sequence in the morning and were tested later that evening after remaining awake across the day. The other half of the subjects learned the sequence in the evening and we retested them the next morning after a similar twelve-hour delay, but one that contained a full eight-hour night of sleep.

Those who remained awake across the day showed no evidence of a significant improvement in performance.

However, fitting with the pianist’s original description, those who were tested after the very same time delay of twelve hours, but that spanned a night of sleep, showed a striking 20 percent jump in performance speed and a near 35 percent improvement in accuracy.

Importantly, those participants who learned the motor skill in the morning—and who showed no improvement that evening—did go on to show an identical bump up in performance when retested after a further twelve hours, now after they, too, had had a full night’s sleep.

In other words, your brain will continue to improve skill memories in the absence of any further practice. It is really quite magical. Yet, that delayed, “offline” learning occurs exclusively across a period of sleep, and not across equivalent time periods spent awake, regardless of whether the time awake or time asleep comes first.

Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.

We went on to show that these memory-boosting benefits occur no matter whether you learn a short or a very long motor sequence (e.g., 4-3-1-2 versus 4-2-3-4-2-3-1-4-3-4-1-4), or when using one hand (unimanual) or both (bimanual, similar to a pianist).

Analyzing the individual elements of the motor sequence, such as 4-1-3-2-4, allowed me to discover how, precisely, sleep was perfecting skill.

Even after a long period of initial training, participants would consistently struggle with particular transitions within the sequence. These problem points stuck out like a sore thumb when I looked at the speed of the keystrokes.

There would be a far longer pause, or consistent error, at specific transitions.

For example, rather than seamlessly typing 4-1-3-2-4, 4-1-3-2-4, a participant would instead type: 4-1-3 [pause] 2-4, 4-1-3 [pause] 2-4.

They were chunking the motor routine into pieces, as if attempting the sequences all in one go was just too much.

Different people had different pause problems at different points in the routine, but almost all people had one or two of these difficulties. I assessed so many participants that I could actually tell where their unique difficulties in the motor routine were just by listening to their typing during training.

When I tested participants after a night of sleep, however, my ears heard something very different.

I knew what was happening even before I analyzed the data: mastery. Their typing, post-sleep, was now fluid and unbroken. Gone was the staccato performance, replaced by seamless automaticity, which is the ultimate goal of motor learning: 4-1-3-2-4, 4-1-3-2-4, 4-1-3-2-4, rapid and nearly perfect.

Sleep had systematically identified where the difficult transitions were in the motor memory and smoothed them out.

This finding rekindled the words of the pianist I’d met: “but when I wake up the next morning and sit back down at the piano, I can just play, perfectly.”

back to index

What do you lose, if you “chop off” the last hour or two of your planned sleep time?

My final discovery, in what spanned almost a decade of research, identified the type of sleep responsible for the overnight motor-skill enhancement, carrying with it societal and medical lessons.

The increases in speed and accuracy, underpinned by efficient automaticity, were directly related to the amount of stage 2 NREM, especially in the last two hours of an eight-hour night of sleep (e.g., from five to seven a.m., should you have fallen asleep at eleven p.m.).

Indeed, it was the number of those wonderful sleep spindles in the last two hours of the late morning — the time of night with the richest spindle bursts of brainwave activity — that were linked with the offline memory boost.

More striking was the fact that the increase of these spindles after learning was detected only in regions of the scalp that sit above the motor cortex (just in front of the crown of your head), and not in other areas. The greater the local increase in sleep spindles over the part of the brain we had forced to learn the motor skill exhaustively, the better the performance upon awakening.

Many other groups have found a similar “local-sleep”-and-learning effect. When it comes to motor-skill memories, the brainwaves of sleep were acting like a good masseuse—you still get a full body massage, but they will place special focus on areas of the body that need the most help. In the same way, sleep spindles bathe all parts of the brain, but a disproportionate emphasis will be placed on those parts of the brain that have been worked hardest with learning during the day.

Perhaps more relevant to the modern world is the time-of-night effect we discovered.

Those last two hours of sleep are precisely the window that many of us feel it is okay to cut short to get a jump start on the day. As a result, we miss out on this feast of late-morning sleep spindles.

It also brings to mind the prototypical Olympic coach who stoically has her athletes practicing late into the day, only to have them wake in the early hours of the morning and return to practice.

In doing so, coaches may be innocently but effectively denying an important phase of motor memory development within the brain — one that fine-tunes skilled athletic performance.

When you consider that very small performance differences often separate winning a gold medal from a last-place finish in professional athletics, then any competitive advantage you can gain, such as that naturally offered by sleep, can help determine whether or not you will hear your national anthem echo around the stadium.

back to index

Sleep and physical performance

I back up these claims with examples from the more than 750 scientific studies that have investigated the relationship between sleep and human performance, many of which have studied professional and elite athletes specifically.

Obtain anything less than eight hours of sleep a night, and especially less than six hours a night, and the following happens:

time to physical exhaustion drops by 10 to 30 percent, and aerobic output is significantly reduced.
Similar impairments are observed in limb extension force and vertical jump height, together with decreases in peak and sustained muscle strength.

Add to this marked impairments in cardiovascular, metabolic, and respiratory capabilities that hamper an underslept body, including faster rates of lactic acid buildup, reductions in blood oxygen saturation, and converse increases in blood carbon dioxide, due in part to a reduction in the amount of air that the lungs can expire.

Even the ability of the body to cool itself during physical exertion through sweating — a critical part of peak performance — is impaired by sleep loss.

Even teams that are aware of sleep’s importance before a game are surprised by my declaration of the equally, if not more, essential need for sleep in the days after a game.

Post-performance sleep accelerates physical recovery from common inflammation, stimulates muscle repair, and helps restock cellular energy in the form of glucose and glycogen.

back to index

Sleep deprivation and driving

One brain function that buckles under even the smallest dose of sleep deprivation is concentration.

The deadly societal consequences of these concentration failures play out most obviously and fatally in the form of drowsy driving.

Every hour, someone dies in a traffic accident in the US due to a fatigue-related error.

There are two main culprits of drowsy-driving accidents:

The first is people completely falling asleep at the wheel. This happens infrequently, however, and usually requires an individual to be acutely sleep-deprived (having gone without shut-eye for twenty-plus hours).

The second, more common cause is a momentary lapse in concentration, called a microsleep. These last for just a few seconds, during which time the eyelid will either partially or fully close.

They are usually suffered by individuals who are chronically sleep restricted, defined as getting less than seven hours of sleep a night on a routine basis.

During a microsleep, your brain becomes blind to the outside world for a brief moment—and not just the visual domain, but in all channels of perception.

Most of the time you have no awareness of the event. More problematic is that your decisive control of motor actions, such as those necessary for operating a steering wheel or a brake pedal, will momentarily cease.

As a result, you don’t need to fall asleep for ten to fifteen seconds to die while driving.

Two seconds will do it. A two-second microsleep at 30 mph with a modest angle of drift can result in your vehicle transitioning entirely from one lane to the next. This includes into oncoming traffic. Should this happen at 60 mph, it may be the last microsleep you ever have.

back to index

We underestimate your sleep-deprivation-induced performance disability

“I’m not sleep deprived”, you say. “Besides, even if I am sleep deprived, I’m still OK at doing what I need to “do.

The third key finding, common to both of these studies, is the one I personally think is the most harmful of all.

When participants were asked about their subjective sense of how impaired they were, they consistently underestimated their degree of performance disability.

It was a miserable predictor of how bad their performance actually, objectively was.

It is the equivalent of someone at a bar who has had far too many drinks picking up his car keys and confidently telling you, “I’m fine to drive home.”

Similarly problematic is baseline resetting.

With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels.

That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.

A link between the former and latter is rarely made in their mind. Based on epidemiological studies of average sleep time, millions of individuals unwittingly spend years of their life in a sub-optimal state of psychological and physiological functioning, never maximizing their potential of mind or body due to their blind persistence in sleeping too little.

Sixty years of scientific research prevent me from accepting anyone who tells me that he or she can “get by on just four or five hours of sleep a night just fine.”

back to index

Driving while sleep deprived is about as bad as driving drunk

Sleep deprivation is about the same as being legally drunk. If you’d consider it unethical to get drunk and drive, or drunk while working, or drunk while trying to work through a hard conversation with your significant other, consider getting more sleep

In a disturbing later study, researchers in Australia took two groups of healthy adults, one of whom they got drunk to the legal driving limit (.08 percent blood alcohol), the other of whom they sleep-deprived for a single night.

Both groups performed the concentration test to assess attention performance, specifically the number of lapses.

After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk.

Said another way, if you wake up at seven a.m. and remain awake throughout the day, then go out socializing with friends until late that evening, yet drink no alcohol whatsoever, by the time you are driving home at two a.m. you are as cognitively impaired in your ability to attend to the road and what is around you as a legally drunk driver.

In fact, participants in the above study started their nosedive in performance after just fifteen hours of being awake (ten p.m. in the above scenario).

Drunk driving and drowsy driving are deadly propositions in their own right, but what happens when someone combines them?

It is a relevant question, since most individuals are driving drunk in the early-morning hours rather than in the middle of the day, meaning that most drunk drivers are also sleep-deprived.

We can now monitor driver error in a realistic but safe way using driving simulators.

With such a virtual machine, a group of researchers examined the number of complete off-road deviations in participants placed under four different experimental conditions:

(1) eight hours of sleep (2) four hours of sleep (3) eight hours of sleep plus alcohol to the point of being legally drunk (4) four hours of sleep plus alcohol to the point of being legally drunk

Those in the eight-hour sleep group had few, if any, off-road errors.

Those in the four-hour sleep condition (the second group) had six times more off-road deviations than the sober, well-rested individuals.

The same degree of driving impairment was true of the third group, who had eight hours of sleep but were legally drunk.

Driving drunk or driving drowsy were both dangerous, and equally dangerous.

A reasonable expectation was that performance in the fourth group of participants would reflect the additive impact of these two groups: four hours of sleep plus the effect of alcohol (i.e., twelve times more off-road deviations). It was far worse.

This group of participants drove off the road almost thirty times more than the well-rested, sober group.

The heady cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol was not additive, but instead multiplicative.

They magnified each other, like two drugs whose effects are harmful by themselves but, when taken together, interact to produce truly dire consequences.

This coming week, more than 2 million people in the US will fall asleep while driving their motor vehicle.

That’s more than 250,000 every day, with more such events during the week than weekends for obvious reasons. More than 56 million Americans admit to struggling to stay awake at the wheel of a car each month.

As a result, 1.2 million accidents are caused by sleepiness each year in the United States.

Said another way: for every thirty seconds you’ve been reading this book, there has been a car accident somewhere in the US caused by sleeplessness.

It is more than probable that someone has lost their life in a fatigue-related car accident during the time you have been reading this chapter.

You may find it surprising to learn that vehicle accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

Drowsy driving alone is worse than driving drunk.

That may seem like a controversial or irresponsible thing to say, and I do not wish to trivialize the lamentable act of drunk driving by any means.

Yet my statement is true for the following simple reason: drunk drivers are often late in braking, and late in making evasive maneuvers.

But when you fall asleep, or have a microsleep, you stop reacting altogether.

A person who experiences a microsleep or who has fallen asleep at the wheel does not brake at all, nor do they make any attempt to avoid the accident. As a result, car crashes caused by drowsiness tend to be far more deadly than those caused by alcohol or drugs. Said crassly, when you fall asleep at the wheel of your car on a freeway, there is now a one-ton missile traveling at 65 miles per hour, and no one is in control.

back to index

Sleep and emotions

Many of us know that inadequate sleep plays havoc with our emotions. We even recognize it in others.

Consider another common scenario of a parent holding a young child who is screaming or crying and, in the midst of the turmoil, turns to you and says, “Well, Steven just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

Universal parental wisdom knows that bad sleep the night before leads to a bad mood and emotional reactivity the next day…

Analysis of the brain scans revealed the largest effects I have measured in my research to date. A structure located in the left and right sides of the brain, called the amygdala — a key hot spot for triggering strong emotions such as anger and rage, and linked to the fight-or-flight response — showed well over a 60 percent amplification in emotional reactivity in the participants who were sleep-deprived.

In contrast, the brain scans of those individuals who were given a full night’s sleep evinced a controlled, modest degree of reactivity in the amygdala, despite viewing the very same images.

It was as though, without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity.

We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.

back to index

Sleep and Substance Abuse

Sleep disturbance is a recognized hallmark associated with addictive substance use.

Insufficient sleep also determines relapse rates in numerous addiction disorders, associated with reward cravings that are unmetered, lacking control from the rational head office of the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

Relevant from a prevention standpoint, insufficient sleep during childhood significantly predicts early onset of drug and alcohol use in that same child during their later adolescent years, even when controlling for other high-risk traits, such as anxiety, attention deficits, and parental history of drug use.

back to index

Sleep and Alzheimers

Around the same time that we were conducting our studies, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester made one of the most spectacular discoveries in the field of sleep research in recent decades.

Working with mice, Nedergaard found that a kind of sewage network called the glymphatic system exists within the brain. Its name is derived from the body’s equivalent lymphatic system, but it’s composed of cells called glia (from the Greek root word for “glue”).

Glial cells are distributed throughout your entire brain, situated side by side with the neurons that generate the electrical impulses of your brain.

Just as the lymphatic system drains contaminants from your body, the glymphatic system collects and removes dangerous metabolic contaminants generated by the hard work performed by neurons in your brain, rather like a support team surrounding an elite athlete.

Although the glymphatic system — the support team — is somewhat active during the day, Nedergaard and her team discovered that it is during sleep that this neural sanitization work kicks into high gear.

Associated with the pulsing rhythm of deep NREM sleep comes a ten- to twentyfold increase in effluent expulsion from the brain.

In what can be described as a nighttime power cleanse, the purifying work of the glymphatic system is accomplished by cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain.

Nedergaard made a second astonishing discovery, which explained why the cerebrospinal fluid is so effective in flushing out metabolic debris at night.

The glial cells of the brain were shrinking in size by up to 60 percent during NREM sleep, enlarging the space around the neurons and allowing the cerebrospinal fluid to proficiently clean out the metabolic refuse left by the day’s neural activity.

Think of the buildings of a large metropolitan city physically shrinking at night, allowing municipal cleaning crews easy access to pick up garbage strewn in the streets, followed by a good pressure-jet treatment of every nook and cranny.

When we wake each morning, our brains can once again function efficiently thanks to this deep cleansing.

So what does this have to do with Alzheimer’s disease? One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein—the poisonous element associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Other dangerous metabolic waste elements that have links to Alzheimer’s disease are also removed by the cleaning process during sleep, including a protein called tau, as well as stress molecules produced by neurons when they combust energy and oxygen during the day.

Should you experimentally prevent a mouse from getting NREM sleep, keeping it awake instead, there is an immediate increase in amyloid deposits within the brain. Without sleep, an escalation of poisonous Alzheimer’s-related protein accumulated in the brains of the mice, together with several other toxic metabolites.

Phrased differently, and perhaps more simply, wakefulness is low-level brain damage, while sleep is neurological sanitation.

back to index

From this cascade comes a prediction: getting too little sleep across the adult life span will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Precisely this relationship has now been reported in numerous epidemiological studies, including those individuals suffering from sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea.

Parenthetically, and unscientifically, I have always found it curious that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan — two heads of state that were very vocal, if not proud, about sleeping only four to five hours a night — both went on to develop the ruthless disease.

The current US president, Donald Trump — also a vociferous proclaimer of sleeping just a few hours each night — may want to take note.

Daylight Savings Time helps us see what a single-hour reduction in sleep brings about

In the Northern Hemisphere, the switch to daylight savings time in March results in most people losing an hour of sleep opportunity.

Should you tabulate millions of daily hospital records, as researchers have done, you discover that this seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day.

Impressively, it works both ways. In the autumn within the Northern Hemisphere, when the clocks move forward and we gain an hour of sleep opportunity time, rates of heart attacks plummet the day after.

A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents, proving that the brain, by way of attention lapses and microsleeps, is just as sensitive as the heart to very small perturbations of sleep.

Most people think nothing of losing an hour of sleep for a single night, believing it to be trivial and inconsequential. It is anything but.

back to index

Sleep Deprivation and Insulin Resistence

insulin resistance as the root of metabolic syndrome (obesity, heart disease, etc is covered in great depth in The Case Against Sugar and Why We Get Fat)

By taking small tissue samples, or biopsies, from participants at the end of the above experiments, we can examine how the cells of the body are operating.

After participants had been restricted to four to five hours of sleep for a week, the cells of these tired individuals had become far less receptive to insulin.

In this sleep-deprived state, the cells were stubbornly resisting the message from insulin and refusing to open up their surface channels.

The cells were repelling rather than absorbing the dangerously high levels of glucose.

The roadside drains were effectively closed shut, leading to a rising tide of blood sugar and a pre-diabetic state of hyperglycemia.

back to index

Sleep Deprivation and the Immune System

Prather retrospectively separated the participants into four sub-groups on the basis of how much sleep they had obtained in the week before being exposed to the common cold virus:

less than five hours of sleep
five to six hours of sleep
six to seven hours of sleep
seven or more hours of sleep

There was a clear, linear relationship with infection rate.

The less sleep an individual was getting in the week before facing the active common cold virus, the more likely it was that they would be infected and catch a cold. In those sleeping five hours on average, the infection rate was almost 50 percent. In those sleeping seven hours or more a night in the week prior, the infection rate was just 18 percent.

back to index

Sleep and Emotional Intelligence

Having had a full night of sleep, which contained REM sleep, participants demonstrated a beautifully precise tuning curve of emotional face recognition, rather like a stretched out V shape.

When navigating the cornucopia of facial expressions we showed them inside the MRI scanner, their brains had no problem deftly separating one emotion from another across the delicately changing gradient, and the accuracy of their own ratings proved this to be similarly true.

It was effortless to disambiguate friendly and approachable signals from those intimating even minor threat as the emotional tide changed toward the foreboding. Confirming the importance of the dream state, the better the quality of REM sleep from one individual to the next across that rested night, the more precise the tuning within the emotional decoding networks of the brain the next day.

Through this platinum-grade nocturnal service, better REM-sleep quality at night provided superior comprehension of the social world the next day.

But when those same participants were deprived of sleep, including the essential influence of REM sleep, they could no longer distinguish one emotion from another with accuracy.

The tuning V of the brain had been changed, rudely pulled all the way up from the base and flattened into a horizontal line, as if the brain was in a state of generalized hypersensitivity without the ability to map gradations of emotional signals from the outside world…

By removing REM sleep, we had, quite literally, removed participants’ levelheaded ability to read the social world around them.

back to index

Sleep and Creativity

Perhaps the most striking proof of sleep-inspired insight, and one I most frequently describe when giving talks to start-up, tech, or innovative business companies to help them prioritize employee sleep, comes from a study conducted by Dr. Ullrich Wagner at the University of Lübeck, Germany.

Trust me when I say you’d really rather not be a participant in these experiments.

Not because you have to suffer extreme sleep deprivation for days, but because you have to work through hundreds of miserably laborious number-string problems, almost like having to do long division for an hour or more.

Actually “laborious” is far too generous a description. It’s possible some people have lost the will to live while trying to sit and solve hundreds of these number problems!

I know, I’ve taken the test myself.

You will be told that you can work through these problems using specific rules that are provided at the start of the experiment.

Sneakily, what the researchers do not tell you about is the existence of a hidden rule, or shortcut, common across all the problems.

If you figure out this embedded cheat, you can solve many more problems in a far shorter time.

I’ll return to this shortcut in just a minute. After having had participants perform hundreds of these problems, they were to return twelve hours later and once again work through hundreds more of these mind-numbing problems.

However, at the end of this second test session, the researchers asked whether the subjects had cottoned on to the hidden rule.

Some of the participants spent that twelve-hour time delay awake across the day, while for others, that time window included a full eight-hour night of sleep.

After time spent awake across the day, despite the chance to consciously deliberate on the problem as much as they desired, a rather paltry 20 percent of participants were able to extract the embedded shortcut.

Things were very different for those participants who had obtained a full night of sleep—one dressed with late-morning, REM-rich slumber.

Almost 60 percent returned and had the “ah-ha!” moment of spotting the hidden cheat—which is a threefold difference in creative solution insight afforded by sleep!

back to index

Insomnia

Other factors, however, come from within a person, and are innate biological causes of insomnia.

Noted in the clinical criteria described above, these factors cannot be a symptom of a disease (e.g., Parkinson’s disease) or a side effect of a medication (e.g., asthma medication).

Rather, the cause(s) of the sleep problem must stand alone in order for you to be primarily suffering from true insomnia. The two most common triggers of chronic insomnia are psychological:

(1) emotional concerns, or worry (2) emotional distress, or anxiety.

In this fast-paced, information-overloaded modern world, one of the few times that we stop our persistent informational consumption and inwardly reflect is when our heads hit the pillow.

There is no worse time to consciously do this. Little wonder that sleep becomes nearly impossible to initiate or maintain when the spinning cogs of our emotional minds start churning, anxiously worrying about things we did today, things that we forgot to do, things that we must face in the coming days, and even those far in the future.

That is no kind of invitation for beckoning the calm brainwaves of sleep into your brain, peacefully allowing you to drift off into a full night of restful slumber.

Since psychological distress is a principal instigator of insomnia, researchers have focused on examining the biological causes that underlie emotional turmoil.

One common culprit has become clear: an overactive sympathetic nervous system, which, as we have discussed in previous chapters, is the body’s aggravating fight-or-flight mechanism.

The sympathetic nervous system switches on in response to threat and acute stress that, in our evolutionary past, was required to mobilize a legitimate fight-or-flight response.

The physiological consequences are increased heart rate, blood flow, metabolic rate, the release of stress-negotiating chemicals such as cortisol, and increased brain activation, all of which are beneficial in the acute moment of true threat or danger.

However, the fight-or-flight response is not meant to be left in the “on” position for any prolonged period of time.

As we have already touched upon in earlier chapters, chronic activation of the flight-or-flight nervous system causes myriad health problems, one of which is now recognized to be insomnia.

back to index

Light (specifically blue light, or light from screens) and sleep

stop looking at your phone right before going to bed. Please.

Compared to reading a printed book, reading on an iPad suppressed melatonin release by over 50 percent at night.

Indeed, iPad reading delayed the rise of melatonin by up to three hours, relative to the natural rise in these same individuals when reading a printed book.

When reading on the iPad, their melatonin peak, and thus instruction to sleep, did not occur until the early-morning hours, rather than before midnight.

Unsurprisingly, individuals took longer to fall asleep after iPad reading relative to print-copy reading.

But did reading on the iPad actually change sleep quantity/quality above and beyond the timing of melatonin?

It did, in three concerning ways.

First, individuals lost significant amounts of REM sleep following iPad reading.
Second, the research subjects felt less rested and sleepier throughout the day following iPad use at night.
Third was a lingering aftereffect, with participants suffering a ninety-minute lag in their evening rising melatonin levels for several days after iPad use ceased—almost like a digital hangover effect.

Using LED devices at night impacts our natural sleep rhythms, the quality of our sleep, and how alert we feel during the day.

back to index

Sleep and Alcohol

I used to regularly have a glass of wine in the evenings, shortly before bed. I stopped doing that.

Give alcohol a little more time, and it begins to sedate other parts of the brain, dragging them down into a stupefied state, just like the prefrontal cortex.

You begin to feel sluggish as the inebriated torpor sets in. This is your brain slipping into sedation. Your desire and ability to remain conscious are decreasing, and you can let go of consciousness more easily.

I am very deliberately avoiding the term “sleep,” however, because sedation is not sleep.

Alcohol sedates you out of wakefulness, but it does not induce natural sleep.

The electrical brainwave state you enter via alcohol is not that of natural sleep; rather, it is akin to a light form of anesthesia.

Yet this is not the worst of it when considering the effects of the evening nightcap on your slumber.

More than its artificial sedating influence, alcohol dismantles an individual’s sleep in an additional two ways:

First, alcohol fragments sleep, littering the night with brief awakenings.

Alcohol-infused sleep is therefore not continuous and, as a result, not restorative. Unfortunately, most of these nighttime awakenings go unnoticed by the sleeper since they don’t remember them. Individuals therefore fail to link alcohol consumption the night before with feelings of next-day exhaustion caused by the undetected sleep disruption sandwiched in between. Keep an eye out for that coincidental relationship in yourself and/or others.

Second, alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of.

When the body metabolizes alcohol it produces by-product chemicals called aldehydes and ketones. The aldehydes in particular will block the brain’s ability to generate REM sleep. It’s rather like the cerebral version of cardiac arrest, preventing the pulsating beat of brainwaves that otherwise power dream sleep.

People consuming even moderate amounts of alcohol in the afternoon and/or evening are thus depriving themselves of dream sleep…

You don’t have to be using alcohol to levels of abuse, however, to suffer its deleterious REM-sleep-disrupting consequences, as one study can attest.

Recall that one function of REM sleep is to aid in memory integration and association: the type of information processing required for developing grammatical rules in new language learning, or in synthesizing large sets of related facts into an interconnected whole.

To wit, researchers recruited a large group of college students for a seven-day study. The participants were assigned to one of three experimental conditions. On day 1, all the participants learned a novel, artificial grammar, rather like learning a new computer coding language or a new form of algebra. It was just the type of memory task that REM sleep is known to promote.

Everyone learned the new material to a high degree of proficiency on that first day—around 90 percent accuracy.

Then, a week later, the participants were tested to see how much of that information had been solidified by the six nights of intervening sleep.

What distinguished the three groups was the type of sleep they had.

In the first group — the control condition — participants were allowed to sleep naturally and fully for all intervening nights.

In the second group, the experimenters got the students a little drunk just before bed on the first night after daytime learning. They loaded up the participants with two to three shots of vodka mixed with orange juice, standardizing the specific blood alcohol amount on the basis of gender and body weight.

In the third group, they allowed the participants to sleep naturally on the first and even the second night after learning, and then got them similarly drunk before bed on night 3.

Note that all three groups learned the material on day 1 while sober, and were tested while sober on day 7.

This way, any difference in memory among the three groups could not be explained by the direct effects of alcohol on memory formation or later recall, but must be due to the disruption of the memory facilitation that occurred in between.

On day 7, participants in the control condition remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge relative to initial levels of learning, just as we’d expect from good sleep.

In contrast, those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge.

This fits well with evidence we discussed earlier: that of the brain’s non-negotiable requirement for sleep the first night after learning for the purposes of memory processing.

The real surprise came in the results of the third group of participants. Despite getting two full nights of natural sleep after initial learning, having their sleep doused with alcohol on the third night still resulted in almost the same degree of amnesia—40 percent of the knowledge they had worked so hard to establish on day 1 was forgotten.

The overnight work of REM sleep, which normally assimilates complex memory knowledge, had been interfered with by the alcohol.

More surprising, perhaps, was the realization that the brain is not done processing that knowledge after the first night of sleep.

Memories remain perilously vulnerable to any disruption of sleep (including that from alcohol) even up to three nights after learning, despite two full nights of natural sleep prior. Framed practically, let’s say that you are a student cramming for an exam on Monday.

Diligently, you study all of the previous Wednesday. Your friends beckon you to come out that night for drinks, but you know how important sleep is, so you decline.

On Thursday, friends again ask you to grab a few drinks in the evening, but to be safe, you turn them down and sleep soundly a second night.

Finally, Friday rolls around — now three nights after your learning session — and everyone is heading out for a party and drinks. Surely, after being so dedicated to slumber across the first two nights after learning, you can now cut loose, knowing those memories have been safely secured and fully processed within your memory banks.

Sadly, not so. Even now, alcohol consumption will wash away much of that which you learned and can abstract by blocking your REM sleep.

How long is it before those new memories are finally safe? We actually do not yet know, though we have studies under way that span many weeks. What we do know is that sleep has not finished tending to those newly planted memories by night 3.

I elicit audible groans when I present these findings to my undergraduates in lectures. The politically incorrect advice I would (of course never) give is this: go to the pub for a drink in the morning. That way, the alcohol will be out of your system before sleep.

back to index

Sleep and Sleeping Pills

Most relevant, and a key focus of this chapter, is the (ab)use of prescription sleeping pills. Sleeping pills do not provide natural sleep, can damage health, and increase the risk of life-threatening diseases. We will explore the alternatives that exist for improving sleep and combating insipid insomnia.

No past or current sleeping medications on the legal (or illegal) market induce natural sleep.

Don’t get me wrong — no one would claim that you are awake after taking prescription sleeping pills. But to suggest that you are experiencing natural sleep would be an equally false assertion.

The older sleep medications — termed “sedative hypnotics,” such as diazepam — were blunt instruments. They sedated you rather than assisting you into sleep.

Understandably, many people mistake the former for the latter.

Most of the newer sleeping pills on the market present a similar situation, though they are slightly less heavy in their sedating effects.

Sleeping pills, old and new, target the same system in the brain that alcohol does — the receptors that stop your brain cells from firing — and are thus part of the same general class of drugs: sedatives.

If you compare natural, deep-sleep brainwave activity to that induced by modern-day sleeping pills, such as zolpidem (brand name Ambien) or eszopiclone (brand name Lunesta), the electrical signature, or quality, is deficient.

The electrical type of “sleep” these drugs produce is lacking in the largest, deepest brainwaves.

Adding to this state of affairs are a number of unwanted side effects, including next-day grogginess, daytime forgetfulness, performing actions at night of which you are not conscious (or at least have partial amnesia of in the morning), and slowed reaction times during the day that can impact motor skills, such as driving.

True even of the newer, shorter-acting sleeping pills on the market, these symptoms instigate a vicious cycle.

The waking grogginess can lead people to reach for more cups of coffee or tea to rev themselves up with caffeine throughout the day and evening.

That caffeine, in turn, makes it harder for the individual to fall asleep at night, worsening the insomnia. In response, people often take an extra half or whole sleeping pill at night to combat the caffeine, but this only amplifies the next-day grogginess from the drug hangover.

Even greater caffeine consumption then occurs, perpetuating the downward spiral.

Another deeply unpleasant feature of sleeping pills is rebound insomnia.

When individuals stop taking these medications, they frequently suffer far worse sleep, sometimes even worse than the poor sleep that led them to seek out sleeping pills to begin with.

The cause of rebound insomnia is a type of dependency in which the brain alters its balance of receptors as a reaction to the increased drug dose, trying to become somewhat less sensitive as a way of countering the foreign chemical within the brain. This is also known as drug tolerance.

But when the drug is stopped, there is a withdrawal process, part of which involves an unpleasant spike in insomnia severity.

back to index

Sleeping Pills vs Placebos

A recent team of leading medical doctors and researchers examined all published studies to date on newer forms of sedative sleeping pills that most people take.

They considered sixty-five separate drug-placebo studies, encompassing almost 4,500 individuals.

Overall, participants subjectively felt they fell asleep faster and slept more soundly with fewer awakenings, relative to the placebo.

But that’s not what the actual sleep recordings showed.

There was no difference in how soundly the individuals slept. Both the placebo and the sleeping pills reduced the time it took people to fall asleep (between ten and thirty minutes), but the change was not statistically different between the two.

In other words, there was no objective benefit of these sleeping pills beyond that which a placebo offered.

Summarizing the findings, the committee stated that sleeping pills only produced “slight improvements in subjective and polysomnographic sleep latency”—that is, the time it takes to fall asleep.

The committee concluded the report by stating that the effect of current sleeping medications was “rather small and of questionable clinical importance.”

back to index

Sleeping Pills and Damage to the Immune System

One frequent cause of mortality appears to be higher-than-normal rates of infection. Also discussed in earlier chapters, natural sleep is one of the most powerful boosters of the immune system, helping ward off infection.

Why, then, do individuals who are taking sleeping pills that purportedly “improve” sleep suffer higher rates of various infections, when the opposite is predicted?

It is possible that medication-induced sleep does not provide the same restorative immune benefits as natural sleep.

This would be most troubling for the elderly. Older adults are far more likely to suffer from infections. Alongside newborns, they are the most immunologically vulnerable individuals in our society.

Older adults are also the heaviest users of sleeping pills, representing more than 50 percent of the individuals prescribed such drugs.

Based on these coincidental facts, it may be time for medicine to reappraise the prescription frequency of sleeping pills in the elderly.

Another cause of death linked to sleeping pill use is an increased risk for fatal car accidents. This is most likely caused by the non-restorative sleep such drugs induce and/or the groggy hangover that some suffer, both of which may leave individuals drowsy while driving the next day.

Shouldn’t drug companies be more transparent about the current evidence and risks surrounding sleeping pill use?

Unfortunately, Big Pharma can be notoriously unbending within the arena of revised medical indications. This is especially true once a drug has been approved following basic safety assessments, and even more so when profit margins become exorbitant.

Consider that the original Star Wars movies—some of the highest-grossing films of all time — required more than forty years to amass $3 billion in revenue. It took Ambien just twenty-four months to amass $4 billion in sales profit, discounting the black market.

That’s a large number, and one I can only imagine influences Big Pharma decision-making at all levels.

back to index

How, then, should one treat insomnia?

Currently, the most effective of these is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-I, and it is rapidly being embraced by the medical community as the first-line treatment.

Working with a therapist for several weeks, patients are provided with a bespoke set of techniques intended to break bad sleep habits and address anxieties that have been inhibiting sleep.

CBT-I builds on basic sleep hygiene principles that I describe in the appendix, supplemented with methods individualized for the patient, their problems, and their lifestyle. Some are obvious, others not so obvious, and still others are counterintuitive.

The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom.

In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night.

One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with.

By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure—a greater abundance of adenosine. Under this heavier weight of sleep pressure, patients fall asleep faster, and achieve a more stable, solid form of sleep across the night.

In this way, a patient can regain their psychological confidence in being able to self-generate and sustain healthy, rapid, and sound sleep, night after night: something that has eluded them for months if not years.

Upon reestablishing a patient’s confidence in this regard, time in bed is gradually increased. While this may all sound a little contrived or even dubious, skeptical readers, or those normally inclined toward drugs for help, should first evaluate the proven benefits of CBT-I before dismissing it outright.

Results, which have now been replicated in numerous clinical studies around the globe, demonstrate that CBT-I is more effective than sleeping pills in addressing numerous problematic aspects of sleep for insomnia sufferers.

CBT-I consistently helps people fall asleep faster at night, sleep longer, and obtain superior sleep quality by significantly decreasing the amount of time spent awake at night.

More importantly, the benefits of CBT-I persist long term, even after patients stop working with their sleep therapist. This sustainability stands in stark contrast to the punch of rebound insomnia than individuals experience following the cessation of sleeping pills.

Here’s the link to these 12 tips, as a single page: nih.gov

back to index

Sleep and Effectiveness at Work

Interestingly, participants in the above studies do not perceive themselves as applying less effort to the work challenge, or being less effective, when they were sleep-deprived, despite both being true.

They seemed unaware of their poorer work effort and performance — a theme of subjective misperception of ability when sleep-deprived that we have touched upon previously in this book.

Even the simplest daily routines that require slight effort, such as time spent dressing neatly or fashionably for the workplace, have been found to decrease following a night of sleep loss.

Individuals also like their jobs less when sleep-deprived — perhaps unsurprising considering the mood-depressing influence of sleep deficiency.

Under-slept employees are not only less productive, less motivated, less creative, less happy, and lazier, but they are also more unethical.

Reputation in business can be a make-or-break factor. Having under-slept employees in your business makes you more vulnerable to that risk of disrepute.

Previously, I described evidence from brain-scanning experiments showing that the frontal lobe, which is critical for self-control and reining in emotional impulses, is taken offline by a lack of sleep. As a result, participants were more emotionally volatile and rash in their choices and decision-making.

This same result is predictably borne out in the higher-stakes setting of the workplace. Studies in the workplace have found that employees who sleep six hours or less are significantly more deviant and more likely to lie the following day than those who sleep six hours or more.

Seminal work by Dr. Christopher Barns, a researcher in the Foster School of Business at Washington University, has found that the less an individual sleeps, the more likely they are to create fake receipts and reimbursement claims, and the more willing to lie to get free raffle tickets.

Barns also discovered that under-slept employees are more likely to blame other people in the workplace for their own mistakes, and even try to take credit for other people’s successful work: hardly a recipe for team building and a harmonious business environment.

back to index

Sleep and the k-12 educational system

[A school district experimented with starting school later in the day…]

Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times — something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased.

The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed.

When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age.

Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m.

The result was astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers. To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent. It was deemed a revolution.

back to index

Sleep and ADHD

An added reason for making sleep a top priority in the education and lives of our children concerns the link between sleep deficiency and the epidemic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation.

If you make a composite of these symptoms (unable to maintain focus and attention, deficient learning, behaviorally difficult, with mental health instability), and then strip away the label of ADHD, these symptoms are nearly identical to those caused by a lack of sleep.

Take an under-slept child to a doctor and describe these symptoms without mentioning the lack of sleep, which is not uncommon, and what would you imagine the doctor is diagnosing the child with, and medicating them for?

Not deficient sleep, but ADHD. There is more irony here than meets the eye. Most people know the name of the common ADHD medications: Adderall and Ritalin.

But few know what these drugs actually are.

Adderall is amphetamine with certain salts mixed in, and Ritalin is a similar stimulant, called methylphenidate. Amphetamine and methylphenidate are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep the brain of an adult (or a child, in this case) wide awake.

That is the very last thing that such a child needs.

As my colleague in the field, Dr. Charles Czeisler, has noted, there are people sitting in prison cells, and have been for decades, because they were caught selling amphetamines to minors on the street.

However, we seem to have no problem at all in allowing pharmaceutical companies to broadcast prime-time commercials highlighting ADHD and promoting the sale of amphetamine-based drugs (e.g., Adderall, Ritalin).

To a cynic, this seems like little more than an uptown version of a downtown drug pusher. I am in no way contesting the disorder of ADHD, and not every child with ADHD has poor sleep. But we know that there are children, many children, perhaps, who are sleep-deprived or suffering from an undiagnosed sleep disorder that masquerades as ADHD.

They are being dosed for years of their critical development with amphetamine-based drugs.

One example of an undiagnosed sleep disorder is pediatric sleep-disordered breathing, or child obstructive sleep apnea, which is associated with heavy snoring. Overly large adenoids and tonsils can block the airway passage of a child as their breathing muscles relax during sleep. The labored snoring is the sound of turbulent air trying to be sucked down into the lungs through a semi-collapsed, fluttering airway.

The resulting oxygen debt will reflexively force the brain to awaken the child briefly throughout the night so that several full breaths can be obtained, restoring full blood oxygen saturation.

However, this prevents the child from reaching and/or sustaining long periods of valuable deep NREM sleep.

Their sleep-disordered breathing will impose a state of chronic sleep deprivation, night after night, for months or years on end.

As the state of chronic sleep deprivation builds over time, the child will look ever more ADHD-like in temperament, cognitively, emotionally, and academically. Those children who are fortunate to have the sleep disorder recognized, and who have their tonsils removed, more often than not prove that they do not have ADHD.

In the weeks after the operation, a child’s sleep recovers, and with it, normative psychological and mental functioning in the months ahead. Their “ADHD” is cured.

Based on recent surveys and clinical evaluations, we estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications.

A major public health awareness campaign by governments — perhaps without influence from pharmaceutical lobbying groups — is needed on this issue.

back to index

Sleep and Medical Errors

If you are about to receive medical treatment at a hospital, you’d be well advised to ask the doctor: “How much sleep have you had in the past twenty-four hours?”

The doctor’s response will determine, to a statistically provable degree, whether the treatment you receive will result in a serious medical error, or even death.

All of us know that nurses and doctors work long, consecutive hours, and none more so than doctors during their resident training years.

Few people, however, know why. Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in this exhausting, sleepless way?

The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD, who was also a helpless drug addict.

Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1889. As chief of the Department of Surgery, his influence was considerable, and his beliefs about how young doctors must apply themselves to medicine, formidable.

There was to be a six-year residency, quite literally. The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge.

Fledgling residents had to suffer long, consecutive work shifts, day and night.

To Halsted, sleep was a dispensable luxury that detracted from the ability to work and learn. Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue. But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict.

It was a sad and apparently accidental habit, one that started years before his arrival at Johns Hopkins. Early in his career, Halsted was conducting research on the nerve-blocking abilities of drugs that could be used as anesthetics to dull pain in surgical procedures.

One of those drugs was cocaine, which prevents electrical impulse waves from shooting down the length of the nerves in the body, including those that transmit pain.

Addicts of the drug know this all too well, as their nose, and often their entire face, will become numb after snorting several lines of the substance, almost like having been injected with too much anesthetic by an overly enthusiastic dentist.

Working with cocaine in the laboratory, it didn’t take long before Halsted was experimenting on himself, after which the drug gripped him in an ceaseless addiction. If you read Halsted’s academic report of his research findings in the New York Medical Journal from September 12, 1885, you’d be hard pressed to comprehend it. Several medical historians have suggested that the writing is so discombobulated and frenetic that he undoubtedly wrote the piece when high on cocaine.

[…]

Halsted inserted his cocaine-infused wakefulness into the heart of Johns Hopkins’s surgical program, imposing a similarly unrealistic mentality of sleeplessness upon his residents for the duration of their training. The exhausting residency program, which persists in one form or another throughout all US medical schools to this day, has left countless patients hurt or dead in its wake — and likely residents, too.

That may sound like an unfair charge to level considering the wonderful, lifesaving work our committed and caring young doctors and medical staff perform, but it is a provable one.

Many medical schools used to require residents to work thirty hours. You may think that’s short, since I’m sure you work at least forty hours a week. But for residents, that was thirty hours all in one go.

Worse, they often had to do two of these thirty-hour continuous shifts within a week, combined with several twelve-hour shifts scattered in between. The injurious consequences are well documented.

Residents working a thirty-hour-straight shift will commit 36 percent more serious medical errors, such as prescribing the wrong dose of a drug or leaving a surgical implement inside of a patient, compared with those working sixteen hours or less.

Additionally, after a thirty-hour shift without sleep, residents make a whopping 460 percent more diagnostic mistakes in the intensive care unit than when well rested after enough sleep.

Throughout the course of their residency, one in five medical residents will make a sleepless-related medical error that causes significant, liable harm to a patient.

One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep. Since there are over 100,000 residents currently in training in US medical programs, this means that many hundreds of people — sons, daughters, husbands, wives, grandparents, brothers, sisters — are needlessly losing their lives every year because residents are not allowed to get the sleep they need.

As I write this chapter, a new report has discovered that medical errors are the third-leading cause of death among Americans after heart attacks and cancer. Sleeplessness undoubtedly plays a role in those lives lost.

Of course, medical institutions put forward other arguments to justify the old-school way of sleep abuse.

The most common harkens back to a William Halsted–like mind-set: without working exhaustive shifts, it will take far too long to train residents, and they will not learn as effectively. Why, then, can several western European countries train their young doctors within the same time frame when they are limited to working no more than forty-eight hours in one week, without continuous long periods of sleeplessness? Perhaps they are just not as well trained?

This, too, is erroneous, since many of those western European medical programs, such as in the UK and Sweden, rank among the top ten countries for most medical practice health outcomes, while the majority of US institutes rank somewhere between eighteenth and thirty-second.

As a matter of fact, several pilot studies in the US have shown that when you limit residents to no more than a sixteen-hour shift, with at least an eight-hour rest opportunity before the next shift, the number of serious medical errors made—defined as causing or having the potential to cause harm to a patient—drops by over 20 percent.

Furthermore, residents made 400 to 600 percent fewer diagnostic errors to begin with.

back to index

Josh Thompson

Continuos Glucose Monitors (part 2)

The long story and comparison between the new system and the old

improvements in the sensor/app

How much glucose is in a human body anyway?

Giant qualifications about health and eating

mixing it all together - slightly timing meals, and eating plant fat + mushrooms + cruciferous stuff

A reluctant book recommendation: Brain Energy

Crucial point of distinction: it can be done without meat

Autophagy

Meat is wildly over-consumed

On meat & protein & ‘gaining muscle’

Calories in/Calories out

Sidebar on Oral Health

Mitochondria are cool as heck

Other Reading

note on fast-adjacent things

Visualizing Mitochondria

A note on calories in/calories out

calorie deficit is propaganda, counterproductive

Mitochondria generate energy inside of neurons & mitochondria prefer to consume ‘ketone bodies’

✨ The Meal ✨

Pulse oximiter, blood oxygen level & breath holding

‘ketone bodies’ whatever the heck those are

More lists of books that have been quite interesting to me

Footnotes

Demonstration Junction Repair on Downing in Denver

Timelapse of me placing the cones & observations

Changes From Placing These Cones

Reduced junction size

shared space vibes

Notice the changed shape of left and right turns

Rear ending/tailgating/racing past behavior is eliminated

The sounds. so much better.

manifesting Repair as a Service

Additional Reading

Footnotes

On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park

Introduction

Agaricus Bisporus

🍄 from the park vs the grocery store

Where in the park to find them

Mushrooms and fungal networks are cool

Fat is cool, too

Sidebar on fermented food

Foraged mushrooms vs capitalism

Foraging Mushrooms respectfully

Long-term storage

Mushrooms and amino acids

How to prep & eat mushrooms, deliciously

Foraging and pesticides

Additional Reading

Footnotes

Movies I went out of my way to watch

Introduction

Two documentaries

The Act of Killing

The Look of Silence

Scooter-themed

Super Cub

The Interpreter

Amalie

Robert-Moses-themed movies

Motherless Brooklyn, 2019, Edward Norton

“I Won’t Go”

Homebodies, 1974 satirical comedy horror

No particular theme

Delicious in Dungeon

Suzume

The Way of the House Husband

Charlie Wilson’s War

Additional Reading

Footnotes

Words and Phrases I Find Myself Using and Avoiding, with Kid

Introduction

Page 1, things I do and do not say [to kids]

how I compliment

things I say

I do not say

I say instead

manifesting `Repair as a Service`