P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

It highlights the choice we face as American people: do we accept that some things are true regardless of how they make us feel, or do we accept that there can be multiple truths--"alternative facts" with no bearing on reality whatsoever?

His [Trump's] delivery of intentional disinformation preys on his opponents' steadfast commitment to the moral high ground even if it leads to their destruction; the public's belief in a basic level of integrity; the collective lack of knowledge about governmental minutiae; and the latent racism that still undergirds so much of society.

The actions that have historically been markers of racism have changed. [...] The absence of enslavement and lynching does not signal the presence of equality and justice.

The false distance of history aims to deceive us into believing that the trauma of racism and injustice is in our past. It plays on our desire for a memory of the past that makes sense and feels good. The false distance of history provides the vehicle for monuments celebrating traitors who rebelled in order to preserve the institution of slavery to be left standing.

For so long the police controlled the narrative. They were the only ones who were regarded as telling the story from a position of credibility. But in this moment, their control over information is slipping, revealing an unchecked institution that is inherently incapable of policing itself and providing the set of service to the community that the community needs and desires.

...in Baton Rouge it's impossible to call in a complaint of a police officer; they must be completed either online or by mail, they cannot be anonymous, and they can be dismissed for a host of factors within ten days, at the discretion of Internal Affairs. This isn't accountability.

And it turns out these policies matter, a lot. [police] Departments that had the most restrictive use of force policies were 72 percent less likely to kill people than those with the least restrictive policies.

We found that police kill twelve hundred people each year in America, meaning one in every three people killed by a stranger in this country is killed by a police officer.

Importantly, the problem is not limited to a few bad apples, but rather, a bad barrel--today's culture of policing simply doesn't match the needs of communities.

The reality is that human flourishing is a more complicated function of effort, circumstance, and luck, among other things. But regardless, what we find with race is that people of color are deemed as high need-to-earn and low deserve, while white people are high deserve and low need-to-earn. The closer one's proximity to power, the greater one's sense of entitlement to that power.

It is a commonly held belief that people of color or poor people have not actually earned health care, housing, access to equitably funded public education, and so forth. To the contrary, the attainment of these things, the argument goes, is a function of effort, or intelligence, or decision-making--all things that these groups supposedly lack.

Fuck this.

There's sumthin' magical about this...but not in a good way.

I swear I've been reading for ten minutes and glance down at the page count and find that it's only advanced one page.

Was hoping to get through this despite the all-exposition-dumpyness, but...really looking longingly at other books.

Sigh. Oh, Roque. I know I should hate you, but...I don't.

Nothing much has happened to so, but surprisingly, I'm not bored.

Big ass battle. Usually, I love blood and guts, but I'm so invested in these characters that this one is making me chew-my-nails-to-the-quick neurotic.

I feel so much love for this band of misfits and oathbreakers. So much fear. I wish that I could protect them from this. Find some way to spare them the coming hell.

Ugh. Me too. I'm dreading the upcoming battle.

It's still incomprehensible, but the weird factor is ramping up (baby-eating Venusians), which makes it more interesting.

Good thing it's got pretty art, but otherwise, it would be a DNF.

...and Sir Henry Wattleman...
Wattleman. *Snort.* I bet he got his ass kicked a lot in school with that name.

The into the frying pan, out of the fire plotting is sending my anxiety into overdrive.

Mustang's back! *Does dance of happy.*

Ah, men (boys). Beat the living shit out of each other, then kiss and make up. The bromance is back on.

Experiments I had read about, conducted at the Seattle Aquarium, proved that octopuses can and do recognize individual humans, even when the people are identically dressed and even when the octopuses are simply looking up through the water at them.

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

After Chris, and too soon afterward, Tess had died, the one thing that kept me going was the comforting thought that I could kill myself.

This. So understand this.

My love for my dog and my pig burned ever brighter as they aged. There was no darkness we couldn't navigate together. But what about when Chris and Tess were gone?

To me, one of the most heartbreaking conditions of life on Earth is that most of the animals we love, [...] die so long before we do. I used to joke with friends as I left for trips to land with poisonous snakes, man-eating carnivores, and active landmines that I was trying to make sure I predeceased Chris and Tess. But I deeply dreaded being left behind when Chris and Tess passed on.