Month: November 2017

by William Skink

As we stumble toward the dystopia science fiction writers anticipated decades ago, I wonder what Philip K. Dick would think of Facebook’s roll out of AI technology to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported.

Why does it feel like every episode of Black Mirror is whispering to us from a world lurking just around the next corner?

The latest season of American Horror Story, my friend tells me, synched weirdly with current events. One episode was quickly edited after the Las Vegas shooting because the content was deemed too similar and too soon after the massacre. Another coincidence was the death of Charles Manson near the end of a season that featured a cult leader with undertones of Charlie.

Is fiction taking over? Are stories stronger than facts?

I say yes, and yes. Fiction is taking over because we increasingly can’t trust the sources trying to define what the facts are. Faith in institutions, faith in authority, is bottoming out. The compass is broken.

And Skynet is getting the red carpet roll-out from Facebook.

by William Skink

What do we do with the art of monstrous men? That is the question Claire Dederer tries to get at with this piece in the Paris Review. Whether you are selfish enough to call yourself an artist, or you are not, it’s worth a read.

Dederer is getting a lot of flak for comparing her admittedly minuscule acts of monstrousness to the acts of Woody Allen and alleged pedophiles like Kevin Spacey. If you read her piece she makes it perfectly clear there is no comparison, and I think engages honestly and thoughtfully about how selfish we sometimes have to be to get work done.

With the idea of getting work done I may try something a little different. I haven’t decided yet.

by Travis Mateer

For this post I’m using my real name because someone out there really wants to convey to me that writing under a pseudonym is an act of cowardice. This message couldn’t be posted as a comment or sent to me via email. Nope, this anonymous critic (irony alert!) has now sent two letters to the non-profit where I work to let me know how cowardly I am for hiding behind William Skink.

When I told one of my co-workers about this letter she admitted to Googling me and finding this piece I submitted to Last Best News after leaving my job at the shelter. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect example that illustrates why I choose to maintain a thin firewall between the name on my pay stub and the name on my blog post.

The stigma of being a “conspiracy theorist” keeps getting more ominous. I heard an interview recently on NPR about an Atlantic piece titled The Making Of An American Nazi. This is the part that stuck with me:

INSKEEP: Did he go straight to white supremacy?

O’BRIEN: No, he went first into what I like to call trutherville (ph) – this kind of horror-scape (ph) of conspiracy theorists and raving lunatics online, the most notable figure among them being Alex Jones and…

INSKEEP: This is the conspiracy theorist who has been praised by President Trump, and the president has appeared on his program.

O’BRIEN: Right. And I think what a lot of people don’t realize about Alex Jones is that he actually is a gateway into white nationalism because a lot of these white nationalists arrive at their hateful views through conspiracy theories. And his ideology is starting to take shape over time as he dwells in these echo chambers online. And he was trying to create his own echo chamber and attract disciples to it so that he could then have his own following.

Do I believe in conspiracy theories? Some of them, yes, so check. Am I white? Definitely, so check. Do I try to understand the election of Trump as something more nuanced than every vote being from a hateful racist Nazi thug ready to goose-step with Putin to destroy America? Yes, I do try to understand things beyond the 2 minutes of hate our Orwellian propagandists attempt to instigate through corporate media, so check, check and check.

The mistake the sender of this hate mail is making is the assumption William Skink is just a mask I use to hide behind. William Skink is much more than that.

So stay tuned…

by William Skink

It didn’t take long for Montana’s Special Session to devolve into a partisan shit show. This should come as no surprise. Last month George Ochenski offered this prescient warning to Montana lawmakers:

While it’s understandable that Democrats would want to preserve the spending priorities they feel are important to their constituents, it’s extremely naïve to believe the Republicans wouldn’t want to do the same thing. In this case, their goal would be the core Republican belief in shrinking, not growing, government — exactly as Sen. Jones has already said.

For those who have been through special sessions and know their pitfalls, the Democrat legislators asking the governor to call a special session are asking for more trouble than they know — especially given they don’t have to votes to control the agenda, let alone the outcome and it could backfire horrendously on the very priorities they hold most dear.

While Ochenski assumes naiveté on the part of Montana Democrats I’m not so sure. Maybe Democrats are just allowing Montanans to get what they deserve.

Think about it. Montana Democrats have been getting their asses handed to them in recent election cycles, so why continue to fight when the electorate is clearly choosing to elect politicians who explicitly state their intentions to take a machete to the safety net of government social services?

I don’t think Democrats in this state are that naive. It was apparently obvious during the legislative session that revenue estimates were grossly inflated, meaning the triggers for cuts if revenue marks weren’t met should have been anticipated as a near-certainty. Yet Bullock signed the bill and legislators went home as their budgetary time-bomb ticked.

Now that it’s about to blow, Bullock and Montana Democrats have initiated a process they knew they couldn’t control. What we are seeing now is the shit show Ochenski predicted could happen.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Democrats, realizing how powerless they are to stop the Republican agenda, decided to feed enough rope to Republicans so they can make their noose to strangle government.

Montana voters have chosen this path, have they not? So why keep trying so hard to stop the inevitable pain from the brutal cuts Bullock will be forced to make? Why not just give Montanans what they apparently want?

When the cuts happen, and the pain begins to be felt, Democrats can say I told you so. This is what you get, they can say, when you vote for the Republican agenda.

The other interpretation is that Democrats in Montana really are just naive and clueless. Did they really think Republicans would listen to families and service providers about the resulting pain of cuts to services for the most vulnerable in our communities? Did they really think Republicans would stick to the Governor’s script for the Special Session?

I don’t know what’s worse, Democrat naiveté or Democrat complicity. In the end it doesn’t really matter because the result will be the same: already difficult living situations for Montana’s most vulnerable citizens will become unlivable. Hospitals, jails and other institutional environments will become more burdened by increasingly desperate need. And vile Republican extremists will continue turning this critical legislative process into a circus.

by William Skink

Will a few wins embolden establishment Democrats to stay the failed course? I don’t know, but identity politics seems to be a difficult strategy to let go of.

Not as difficult as letting go of my whiteness. I mean, it’s like I can’t. I wake up in the morning white all over. My kids are white, as is my wife. At work it’s mostly white people, but lots of them are women so that makes it better.

I think it’s because I have upper-middle class suburbs in my blood. But I rebel, man. I grow my hair long and got some tattoos. And I sing songs with my white voice.