lee.ourand.me

Good read of the week was Mike Monteiro’s How to eat with others. Some choice snippets:

While I appreciate having friends with different points-of-view, or even different politics […] I will not be friends with people who want my daughter dead. I will not be friends with people who want, or even tolerate, my neighbors being kidnapped. I will not be friends with people who believe some of us are somehow entitled to more rights than others. And I will not be friends with people who believe if we keep our heads down, as others around us suffer, we’ll save ourselves.

Personally, if I’m having a gathering in my home I want my friends to feel welcome. Not just by me, but by everyone else there. And I need my friends to know that me, my guests, and my house are a safe place. Not just for this particular event, but always.

Think of it this way: if you invite someone from a marginalized community into your home and they ask if there’s going to be someone there that wants them dead, or doesn’t feel like they’re entitled to full personhood, and you tell them that you’re having a separate party for those folks the next night, how do you think that person would feel? You can’t claim to care about someone while also caring for the people who would bring them harm. You really don’t care about your friend in that situation. You’ve made a decision that speaks more to your standing in the social order than their safety. And that’s fucked up.

A timely reminder for Thanksgiving. I’m thankful I don’t have to deal with much of this mess with what remains of my own family.

Read this Who Goes Nazi? article, written by Dorothy Thompson in 1941. It’s as sharp today as the day it was written.

Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.

Who among us doesn’t know a Mr. B or two in our own lives?

Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. […] But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

Dorothy Thompson saw J.D. Vance coming 84 years in advance.

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room.

And Stephen Miller too.

Finished reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. I’ve not read any other translations, so can’t exactly compare. But I liked her style on this: she kept commentary to a minimum. But when she did leave comments, they were incredibly insightful.

It was also neat to connect some dots as to why certain words were chosen, from my limited Chinese. E.g., the number 10,000 is used repeatedly in the book as kind of an arbitrary “a lot” value. That would’ve seemed odd to 6-months-ago me. But now I’m super-enlightened™, and know about 萬 (wàn), the Chinese word for ten-thousand.

Anyway, here’s one of my favorite chapters:

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.
So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

Hello Lee,

Thank you for reaching out to eBay [blah blah blah]. We understand you have concerns [blah blah blah]

We take great care to remain neutral and unbiased [blah blah blah]

In short: “We hear you. We read your message. We’re going to do nothing but send you a significantly longer email that says nothing.”

Kind regards,

Randall M.

Thanks Randall M! After reading this, I noticed eBay charged me another $32, which now brings my total to $179 in losses. All because I dared use eBay to sell something, the winning bidder (who lived on the other side of the country) decided he didn’t want it anymore and returned it, and I was left on the hook for all shipping costs, eBay’s listing fee, and the sales tax, which eBay is just keeping. Cool business you’re running there! I’d literally have been financially better off throwing the machine into the trash.

If you think it is okay to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and I is probably not possible.

Welp. My returned espresso machine arrived in the mail, and I followed through on my brilliant plan for disputing eBay’s dumb decision to refund the espresso buyer. They rejected my appeal with some bland canned reply. And I can tell they didn’t even watch the video I so painstakingly recorded, because the only web log entry is mine. So now I’ve got my fully functional espresso machine back, and I’m $150 poorer than I started.

I tried escalating through eBay’s “secret” phone support. The first rep left me on hold for about 35 minutes while she was “trying to pull up my account”. She then updated me that her supervisor had fixed the problem, but we’d need to first disconnect the call, and she’d call me right back. Shockingly, that return call never came. So I called back, got a different rep, got a supervisor on the line, and also had no luck. After explaining eBay had already made their decision, there was nothing she could do, but she then brilliantly suggested I “simply re-list the item for $150 more than I sold it for last time” to recoup my losses. So, y’know. eBay’s really running a tight ship over there.

1. Who was president prior to January 20, 2021. And
2. The difference between the federal government quelling speech vs someone facing consequences from friends, employers, or the general public for what they say.