I am really pretty happy with the job Keith Ellison has done in the last four years, and I will talk more about this when I write about this race in the general election. In the primary, though, your options here are Keith, and … uh, this other guy. Bill Dahn’s website that he linked from his affidavit doesn’t work. I found another website here but it actually seems to be maintained by Sharon Anderson (also running for AG but on the Republican ticket, see below) and that may explain why so many of the documents on there seem to have literally nothing to do with him? Or possibly not. He has a Twitter on which he airs his two primary grievances, police officers with ‘roid rage and Jesse Ventura having paid the filing fee for him so he could re-register in the GOP primary race for governor instead of the Reform primary race for governor in 1998. (You can find area weirdo Leslie Davis explaining that controversy at great and extensive length here.) To sum up: Bill Dahn is a guy with a list of extremely niche grievances and he doesn’t belong anywhere near the AG’s office. Vote for Keith Ellison.
Jim Schultz is a fellow far-right extremist who’s doing his best to keep his views under wraps by responding to questions about abortion by saying that no one cares about abortion and responding to questions about whether he thinks our elections are fair (n.b.: they are) by just not answering the questions at all (although he has a shout-out to the people who think there was fraud over on his website). Wardlow, of course, calls him a RINO. Schultz is running on crime, crime, and crime, with a website that as close to content-free as he could get it. I just want to note, though, that I really vehemently disagree with his theory that no one actually cares about abortion because we’re all more focused on crime. I care deeply about abortion, and while I think it’s unlikely to be made illegal in Minnesota in the next four years, I absolutely think that the rights of women to engage in interstate travel are going to be up for debate, and the prospect of an Attorney General who’d be tempted to side with the forced-birth legislators in Arkansas is completely unacceptable to me.
Sharon Anderson, okay. I’ve written about her before, a couple of times, but here’s a quick C&P from what’s currently at the top of her blog-slash-election-site. I’ve pasted as plain text to remove all the weird formatting and also the links, go on over to see the original if you want the full effect.
Sharon must because of Medical Malpractice must citre Keith Ellison as the Minnesota AntiChrist. magner v. gallagher – Google Search Affiant Widow,White Whistleblower state and alleges re penalty of perjury free speech that in her humnble, opinion Keith Ellison is the Anti Christ, further complicit with former Dnc Chair Tom Perez to Q Minnesota Attorney General election, 2022 (August 9 Republican primary) – Ballotpediauid Pro Quo dismiss ussc 10-1032 titled Magner vs Gallagher files Consumer Complaint vs. Facebook, Zuckerberg with her opponent for MN Jim Schultz (Minnesota)AG Muslin Keith Ellison, who answers to Quran and not the State and Federal Constitution. Today FB exploiting Blindness You Zuckberg are conflictig, arbitrarily, discriminating vs Affiant Sharon Anderson with manulipating e address etc. THEREFORE: Legal notice to opponent mUSLIN kEITH eLLISON MN AG RE http://sharon4mnag.blogspot.com
Ha ha ha yeah anyway. This lady? WON the Republican Primary back in 1994. She was the Republican candidate in the general election in 1994. (Minnesota politics in the 90s were wild.)
Absolutely any of these candidates would be a disaster as AG but in Sharon’s case the Republican party would be unlikely to rally behind her (they didn’t in 1994, they just pretended that race wasn’t happening) because there’s “saying the quiet part loud” and then there’s … whatever this is. So if I were going with the Chaos Option and voting for Bobagain at the top of the ticket, I’d be tempted to vote for Sharon next. But not because I think she should be AG, just to be clear. I am absolutely voting for Keith Ellison in the general election regardless of who his opponent is.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven. You will also be able to get them from Uncle Hugo’s when it reopens at 2716 E 31st St! (and maybe by mail order now? I’m not sure how much mail order Don is doing while getting ready to re-open.)
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded (or, in the case of the Movement Voter fundraiser, continuing to raise money past their goal). I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and that fundraiser is still active. (Also, I owe some embarrassing readings of my juvenalia to the Internet.)
So I know I said I was just going to leave this for later but I did the thing where I e-mailed a bunch of candidates (in other races, not this one) and now feel duty-bound to actually wait until they’ve had a reasonable amount of time to get back to me (especially the one whose campaign manager e-mailed me back and said he’s out of town) and anyway, this one is straightforward and I can feel like I’m accomplishing something because I’ll have another post up.
In the Governor’s race, there are contests on the ballot for Republicans, Democrats, and both weed parties. Here’s how primaries work in Minnesota: you get a ballot and it’s divided up into sections by party, and you have to pick a party to vote in. You can vote in all the Republican primaries, or all the DFL primaries, or all the Grassroots primaries (there’s only one), or all the Legal Marijuana Now primaries (again, there’s only one). You can also vote in all the nonpartisan primaries regardless — those are typically on the other side of the ballot. If you vote in multiple party primaries (even if you pick different races) you have spoiled your ballot and it will not be counted. (If you’re voting in person, the machine will spit your ballot out and you can trade it in for a fresh ballot and try again.)
You know who Tim Walz is and you probably know if you’re happy with him or not. But even if you’re not happy with him, your alternative on the primary ballot is Ole Savior, this guy whose long-time hobby is running in elections. He ran for governor, also in the DFL primary, in 2018, when I described him as the “quintessential flake candidate.”
Here’s the thing that’s kind of weird: I swear I remember that he died. Like I saw a news story about Ole Savior, long-time perennial candidate, dying, and thinking, “gosh, one fewer person on the ballot next time!” and … apparently I hallucinated this? Or dreamed it? It only counts as the Mandela Effect if other people remember it (like the Berensteain Bears) but seriously Ole turning up on the ballot felt like a glitch in the Matrix. I am going to vote for Tim, because there’s an actual primary in the DFL congressional race in 4 and so I’m voting in the Democratic races, and I’m not unhappy enough with Tim to risk even the narrow possibility of an Ole win. (It’s a very, very, very narrow possibility but you never know.)
Joyce Lacey has an impressively pointless website. She has a section labeled “blog” and if you go there, you’ll see a photo of her with a sign saying “viruses come and go, loss of freedom is forever” and the post title “Defending our Freedom” and a photo of her with a sign saying “Life Is For Everyone” with the post title “Defending the Right to Life for All Ages.” If you click on either post, you will find that neither post has any text — they’re just the photo. She does have a Twitter on which she mentions some activism around abuse of guardianship, but her website doesn’t mention it.
BobAgain is another perennial candidate, as is Jack Sparrow, and I’m amused by the team-up. Bob is also running in the First District congressional district special election primary (because of course, this means he can run for two things back to back! presumably if he wins that one he’ll withdraw from the gubernatorial primary but the risk here is not high.)
My favorite bit of Bob’s website is that he has a secret plan for a Viking Super Bowl victory. (This is from his application form for a running mate, which is still up):
Dr. Scott Jensen, one of the GOP candidates, has selected former Viking Matt Birk as his running mate. If they’re endorsed, I’d like to be able to roll out a plan for the Vikings to win the Super Bowl by 2025 – if you know a lot about football, I’ll give your candidacy preferential consideration. To be blunt – winning the Super Bowl is something a lot of Minnesota voters may be more interested in than anything some politico says! This is all part of a general effort to encourage people to think differently – and to begin talking when that otherwise might not happen. (I actually do have a “secret plan” for how to do this – if Jensen/Birk is nominated at the convention it could be rolled out in book form during the campaign – you could possibly help write it and be a co-author. There is an admittedly lighthearted aspect to this. There would be some “serious side effects” from following the plan – that would be worth discussing too – but… bottom line… it could be done.)
If I were voting in the Republican races, I would absolutely vote for Bobagain to be the Republican gubernatorial candidate.
It took a lot of digging to find Darrel Paulsen’s website. Googling got me to his LinkedIn, which pointed me to the Facebook of his company, Paulsen and Company, which had a link to his Twitter, which when I scrolled down a bit had a link to his website. He’s a disability advocate and wheelchair user (his website had a link to this really interesting article from a few years ago about his and his wife’s parenting experiences). Anyway, he came to cannabis legalization via disability advocacy, I think.
Steve Patterson’s issues page starts out with a whine about the COVID lockdown (“My business partner Brian Miller and I were on pace to open Prime Stein Brewery in Rochester in June of 2020. That plan was derailed by Governor Walz and he created his first of several overly aggressive executive orders stating that no one could leave their home unless they were going to work.”) Moves on to the statement “I also do not believe in free healthcare as I think if it was free it should be abused” and wraps up with him wanting to enact the “Castle Doctrine” in Minnesota. Whee. I look at people like this and wonder why they’re not running as Libertarians? I assume it’s because the Libertarians aren’t a major party and Grassroots is at the moment.
If I were voting in this primary, which to be honest I have no idea why anyone would, I would vote for Darrel Paulsen.
Much like how Patterson is a Libertarian running on a weed party ticket because it’s a major party, James McCaskel is a Green running on a weed party ticket because it’s a major party. The text on his Platform page is bold, underlined, and centered, and thus really difficult to read, but they’re basically the Green Party’s Ten Key Values.
If forced to choose between these two people, I guess I would go with Chris Wright on the grounds that at least with him, weed is genuinely central to his political philosophy, he’s not a Green who’s hitchhiking on the LMP because they’re a major party right now and the Greens aren’t.
Honestly, for anyone who’s embracing chaos in their approach to the partisan primaries, you’re not going to beat Bob Again as an option.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven. You will also be able to get them from Uncle Hugo’s when it reopens at 2716 E 31st St! (and maybe by mail order now? I’m not sure how much mail order Don is doing while getting ready to re-open.)
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded (or, in the case of the Movement Voter fundraiser, continuing to raise money past their goal). I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and that fundraiser is still active. (Also, I owe some embarrassing readings of my juvenalia to the Internet.)
I’m starting with an easy one — though, hmm, how should I say this, this is one of those races that feels jinxed for me personally because I strongly supported Dave Hutchinson four years ago and while I do in fact think he was the lesser available evil compared to having Stanek in office from 2018 through 2022, the guy also drove while absolutely hammered, crashed his car while going 126 mph, and lied to try to cover it up. (Modern cars are a wonder of technology.) (And then yesterday another story about Hutch hit, which was about him appearing to engage in a pattern of deliberately overspending because the county was garnishing his paychecks to cover the cost of the car he crashed while shitfaced, and when I went just now to look for that link I found a NEW story about him sending racist and homophobic texts to subordinates.)
Anyway. In 2022, there are three people running, two of whom will advance to the general.
Jai Hanson is a Bloomington police officer who was adopted from India as a child. Two minutes of reading his website made it pretty goddamn clear why I don’t think anyone should support him.
Hanson was disgusted by the video of officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and he was disgusted at the destruction.
THESE TWO THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME AND EQUATING THEM IS HORRIFYING. (And yes, this framing absolutely suggests that these are two things of equal weight.)
Later, he drove to his parents’ house, and in their front window he saw a big sign. “SAY THEIR NAMES,” it read, listing people killed by police. Anti-police sentiment was everywhere. Now it felt like it was in his childhood home.
And Jai Hanson was furious. […] The sign felt flippant and anti-law enforcement. He drove off in a huff. Later, he wrote his dad an e-mail that the sign deeply offended him. In 14 years in law enforcement, he’d never heard his parents express sadness about a police officer getting killed.
His snit over this sign was less than a week after George Floyd was murdered. And regarding memorializing police officers: there are multiple big stone memorials on the capitol grounds and another one at the airport and that’s off the top of my head, I’m pretty sure there are others around the area. When Ron Ryan Jr. and Timothy Jones (and Jones’ dog) were murdered in 1994, the city mourned and their murderer was swiftly sentenced to life in prison.
And honestly: this is all I really need to know about Jai. He’s a police officer who immediately made a crime committed by a police officer all about his hurt feelings as a police officer. I would absolutely not vote for him, regardless of his other positions.
Today I saw a news story about a Somali woman who was named teacher of the year in 2020 who is now leaving teaching. One of the incidents mentioned in her reasons why: after she read the picture book Something Happened In My Town, which was written specifically to help young kids process the trauma of high-profile police violence happening in their community, Jai condemned this on his blog, inciting a huge amount of harassment. (And also, you know, complaining about reading a book that was written to help kids process trauma that the kids in our community experienced and his rationale for his bitching about this was, “it’ll teach them to be afraid of police.” Jai, kids in the Twin Cities are afraid of police because a police officer murdered a man in front of cameras while three other cops stood by, and then another police officer murdered a man because apparently she couldn’t tell her taser from her sidearm, and then a SWAT team murdered a man after breaking into his house in the middle of the night. Kids in the Twin Cities are afraid of police because the police have demonstrated that they’re really fucking dangerous to the community.
Dawanna Witt works in the Sheriff’s office; she’s a Black woman who’s spent 22 years working in law enforcement. Her website emphasizes public safety and restoring trust. She’s endorsed by the DFL and I think all the DFL electeds who have endorsed in this race have endorsed Dawanna.
Worth noting for those who want someone law-and-order-y — Dawanna is endorsed by the DFL Senior Caucus, LaTrisha Vetaw, and Dean Phillips. She starts out by talking about prioritizing violent crime. So like: you’ll get that. There’s no option that isn’t that. With Dawanna you can have that but without the whining and “actually, it’s police officers who are the real victims” bullshit of Jai.
Two weeks ago, a friend noticed that Joseph Banks had an events calendar on his website that had zero Joseph Banks events but was displaying all upcoming Yankees games. He’s now fixed that, but the “Become a Volunteer!” button on his Get Involved page says, “I’m a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It’s easy. Just click “Edit Text” or double click me to add your own content and make changes to the font. I’m a great place for you to tell a story and let your users know a little more about you.”
Joseph ran four years ago and my main comment on him at the time was that he hadn’t seemed to get much traction. That seems to be true this time, as well. I watched the LWV forum for Sheriff candidates and Joseph seems smart and committed, but so does Dawanna.
I would vote for Dawanna in the primary and I would vote for whoever isn’t Jai Hanson in the general election. Fingers crossed that the next Hennepin County Sheriff is smart enough to stay at the hotel instead of driving home shitfaced and also won’t be a racist Trump supporter! Seriously the lowest of low bars. The absolute lowest.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April 2021, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis. It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven. You will also be able to get them from Uncle Hugo’s when it reopens at 2716 E 31st St! (and maybe by mail order now? I’m not sure how much mail order Don is doing while getting ready to re-open.)
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded (or, in the case of the Movement Voter fundraiser, continuing to raise money past their goal). I explained back in May why I’m fundraising for the Movement Voter PAC and that fundraiser is still active. (Also, I owe some embarrassing readings of my juvenalia to the Internet.)
I’ve started getting e-mails asking if I’m going to write about the primaries, so it’s probably time to write about the primaries. Minnesota’s primary election this year will be on August 9th.
On everyone’s ballot in the state of Minnesota:
Governor Attorney General Secretary of State
In addition to multiple DFL and Republican candidates for Governor, AG, and SoS, there’s a contested primary in the governor’s race for both weed parties. In Minnesota, you can vote in whichever party primary you want — but you have to pick one and stick with it in all the partisan races on that year’s ballot. If you vote for Ole Savior for governor in the DFL primary, you can’t then vote for Sharon Anderson for AG in the Republican primary.
Both US House MN-04 (the seat currently held by Betty McCollum) and US House MN-05 (the seat currently held by Ilhan Omar) are having primaries — again, both DFL and Republican candidates are on the ballot. (There are primaries in lots of other districts but I only write about the races people vote on in Minneapolis and St. Paul, so like, local to us + statewide.)
In Hennepin County, there is a primary for County Attorney and one for County Sherriff. (This is a non-partisan primary: the top two vote-getters in each race advance.)
In Minneapolis, there is a primary for School Board At-Large and also for Minneapolis School Board District 5. The other Minneapolis school board seats up for election this year aren’t having primaries because not enough people are running to require them. These are also non-partisan and the top vote-getters advance (but it’s the top 4 for School Board At-Large because there are two open seats).
The following metro-area State House seats are contested, I think:
62A: Aisha Gomez (incumbent) Osman Ahmed
65B: Anna Botz Maria Isa Pérez-Hedges
66A: Leigh Finke Dave Thomas
67A: John Thompson (incumbent) Liz Lee
And the following metro-area State Senate seats are contested, I think:
And there’s a Ramsey County Board race. At least one.
I’m starting out this year already tired (I mean, have you seen a newspaper this week?) so I’m going to prioritize the downticket races and save the top for the end or if I’m feeling burned out and need a break. I mean, you know I’m going to say to vote for Tim Walz, Steve Simon, and Keith Ellison — Tim’s DFL opponent is Ole Savior! Steve’s being challenged in the DFL primary by a Republican! Keith’s opponent hasn’t got an actual website! — you don’t actually NEED my help there.
One of my personal takeaways from 2020 was that donating to organizing was more effective than donating to campaigns. In Maine, people flooded Sara Gideon with cash and we got another six years of Susan Collins being very, very concerned; in Georgia, people donated a bunch of money to both Ossoff and Warnock once the runoff started, but I think it was clear that the battle was won by Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams’ organization.
The Movement Voter Project is an umbrella organization that raises money to support small, local, progressive groups primarily in key states. (Including, but not limited to, Fair Fight.) I set up a recurring donation to MVP late last year. There are a couple of things about these groups I think are important:
They’re not just focused on big races like the US Senate but also on downticket races where we absolutely have to build power.
In addition to registering and motivating voters, they’re groups that will pressure the Democratic party to live up to the progressive values it claims to hold.
They are run by local people who know a lot better than I do which primaries matter and which candidates have a real chance. They’ll also work to elect the lesser evil, if that’s what’s on the table.
I generally try to avoid donating to primary races outside my own area (do I know who has the best chance at beating Marjorie Taylor Greene? I do not! You know who might? the Democrats in her district!) but post-primary is often really late to start fundraising for the general election. Funding organizing helps to provide a head start for whoever wins.
Let’s be honest about this: the Democratic party in some states is run by people who truly do not appear to know their ass from their elbow. I appreciate the opportunity to donate to groups that have some chance of filling the gap in states where the party is incredibly badly run.
Anyway: I created a fundraiser for the Movement Voter Project. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could do as an incentive for a fundraiser, because the problem with offering stuff like Tuckerizations is that I have to keep track of whether I’ve actually fulfilled my end of the bargain — it’s fine if it’s just a few, but it doesn’t scale well.
But! I have an entire box of spiral-bound Mead notebooks from my childhood, containing my creative writing from when I was as young as nine.
I was a very enthusiastic writer from a very young age. I was not a particularly good writer. For every $500 raised I will read some of my deeply embarrassing childhood prose for you on video and upload it. The story in this notebook was my fourth grade attempt at a novel about a magical talking horse, if that gives you some idea of what to expect.
If people have other ideas of things I could offer, feel free to leave them in the comments.
WorldCon is normally held in August, but this year is being held in December, because there were various catastrophes (aside from the Big Obvious Ongoing Catastrophe, the hotel they were planning to hold the con in closed down) and the convention organizers rescheduled it for December. It’s being held both virtually and in-person. I’m vaxxed, boosted, and going in person.
I am a finalist for two Hugo Awards this year: “Monster” is a finalist for Best Novelette, and “Little Free Library” is a finalist for Best Short Story. Both stories are up against an amazing set of fellow finalists; it’s an honor to be listed among them.
I’m getting in Wednesday evening, flying home Monday. Here’s my schedule:
Thursday
10 am: Post-Pandemic Aesthetics.Virtual Panel. “The 1918 flu pandemic had huge impacts on culture over the subsequent decades, including significant changes to architecture and personal fashion. What kinds of long-term changes to our public aesthetic will we see in reaction to COVID-19? Will restaurants and other public spaces need to change their room layouts and building designs? Will branded, designer facemasks become de rigueur symbols of conspicuous consumption?” I am moderating. Other panelists: Ana Rüsche, Charlie Stross, Leonardo Espinoza Benavides, sandy manning.
11:30 am: Kaffeeklatsch – Suite 325 Main Room.
1 pm to 1:50pm: Signing at the SFWA table in the Dealer’s Room.
2:30 pm: The Fallout of Being the Chosen One. Forum Room. “Being a Chosen One isn’t always happily-ever-after. The season-by-season model of television, and the multi volume novel, allows viewers to explore the arc of the chosen one-type hero after the initial hero’s journey is complete. What are some of the emotional impacts and plot implications of the Chosen One’s story? What kind of generational trauma can being, or being near, the Chosen One inflict?” Ellen Kushner, Naomi Kritzer, Patricia A. Jackson, Sarah Guan, Hildy Silverman (Moderator)
5 p.m.: Hugo Nominee reception, Ambassador Ballroom. This is a big public reception for people to meet the nominees from 2021 and the winners (and maybe also nominees?) from 2020 (which also includes me: I won the Lodestar Award for Catfishing on Catnet). How long I stay is going to depend heavily on whether I was able to find food between 12:30 and 1, and/or between 1:50 and 2:30, or if I’m running on pop and granola bars.
10 pm: Social Media: Making Enemies & Alienating People. Virtual. “Social media can be an excellent place to find online community, especially during a pandemic, but it can also be a fraught world of vicious gossip, lip service activism, and whatever the Algorithm is. The panel will explore ways of using different forms of social media to connect with like-minded people, while providing tips to avoid falling prey to such platform’s worst aspects.” Elizabeth Hirst, John Wiswell, K.G. Anderson, Naomi Kritzer, Travis Tippens (Moderator)
(Yes, my Thursday is ridiculous. It was already ridiculous and then I added the signing at the SFWA table because the other available slots were problematic in other ways and I decided that I’d just come prepared to live on snacks that day if I have to. The 10 p.m. panel on social media dumpster fires should leave me thoroughly alert to go find people in the bar!)
Friday
10 am: Legal and Actuarial Supernatural Hypotheticals. Forum Room. “What does a lifetime annuity mean to the undead? Are werewolves responsible for their actions during the full moon if they contracted lycanthropy by accident? Do mermaids have standing to bring citizen suits under the Clean Water Act? Do vampire thralls run afoul of anti-slavery laws? Not actual legal advice. Results may vary. Please contact your local coven before attempting to bargain with the fae.” I am moderating. Also on the panel: Alex Shvartsman, Andrija “Andy” Popovic, Pat Bahn, Tenaya Anue.
Saturday
2:30 p.m.: 2020 ruined my novel! Forum Room. “2020 was a giant curveball for the entire world. Everyone was affected in one way or another. What about authors? Our panelists will discuss what changes they had to make to their 2020 work-in-progress to accommodate all the weird things that were happening in the real world.” Alyc Helms, Lindsay Ellis, Lisa Nohealani Morton, Naomi Kritzer, Sue, Victor Manibo, Wesley Chu (Moderator)
8 p.m.: Hugo Award Ceremony. Definitely planning to go to this.
Sunday
I have nothing currently scheduled for Sunday other than being able to sleep in.
Anyway — for anyone coming, please say hi! Also please don’t be worried if I have to squint at your nametag to know who you are — I have always been bad at facial recognition, add masks and it’s just hopeless (but I’m strongly in favor of masks. Just, also nametags.) I am looking forward to the mix of in-person and virtual programming. If you want something signed and can’t make it to my signing or Kaffeeklatsch, feel free to just waylay me after a panel.
I went to Convergence this summer and in some ways, it was a very different con. It was smaller; a lot of stuff had been scaled back or cancelled either because they lacked volunteers to run it or because they couldn’t come up with a good way to make it safe. But it was still so great to see people again. I have missed conventions so much and I’m really grateful that WorldCon is being held.
Welcome, my friends, to my annual guide to passive-aggressive gifting.
In a better world, no one would feel like gift-giving was an unavoidable obligation, and certainly no one would find themselves resentfully shopping for someone they actively dislike, but we’re not in that world yet, and across the globe in December (or November, especially when Hanukkah comes early), people resentfully head to the mall to try to select something acceptable yet inexpensive for their mother-in-law, their neighbor, their obnoxious cousin, or their least-favorite coworker who they unfortunately drew for the office Secret Santa.
And I’m here for you! Once again, I have assembled a selection of inexpensive items that will look like you cared enough to send the very best, while in fact giving people the gift of wasted time, wasted space, frustration, annoyance, etc.
As always, I want to take a moment to emphasize that I don’t buy gifts for anyone I don’t like — if I’ve given you a terrible present, I like you and it was clueless goodwill and not passive-aggression (the very sort of clueless goodwill the rest of you can use as camouflage). I also do not scrutinize gifts I receive for hints that someone secretly dislikes me. (I cheerfully assume that everyone likes me, and occasionally discover that I’m wrong, and then usually forget that the person dislikes me and embarrass us both the next time I see them in public and give them a hearty hello while they’re trying to avoid eye contact.)
Anyway. I’m doing this guide very early this year for two reasons: (1) Hanukkah starts in November (we almost got another Thanksgivukkah) and (2) SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES. As everyone knows, supply chain issues are wreaking havoc everywhere, on all the things, and this is a particular subtle bonus to passive-aggressive gifters as you could buy something completely bizarre, like you could give the person from your office gift exchange a Bob Ross Chia Pet or an Archie McPhee Yodeling Pickle and then shrug and say “you know, supply chain issues!” and they’ll be forced to assume that the shelves at Walgreens were otherwise picked bare and you did the best you could.
(The shelves are not actually going to be bare. There will be tons of stuff, you just won’t be able to find the item you want in your size, which is always true, but it’ll be more true this year. Also, print copies of your friends’ books may be hard to find, so if you haven’t bought all your friends’ books already, get on that or resign yourself to ebooks.)
Let’s talk about some bad gift options, shall we?
What you look like you need is a new hobby!
You know what your sister-in-law needs? Something more productive to do with her time than reading OANN links on Facebook. Maybe she could take up bonsai. Bonsai is a great hobby, but usually when you gift someone a bonsai, you give them a tiny tree that they can mold and trim. This kit gives you seeds. Do you know how long it takes to grow a tiny tree from seeds? It takes years.
Alternately, here is a kit where you make tiny bowls out of embroidery thread. Per reviews, the glue soaks right through the thread so it’s almost impossible to get it off the plastic shell included to form the bowls on. In the event that your recipient gets it to work, the result is a tiny bowl made from embroidery thread, which can’t be used for much of anything useful. So you can give someone both a time waster and a tchotchke.
For a mere $10, you can buy someone a reasonably nice pocket set of watercolors that comes with brushes and a brush holder. Of course, your recipient will need some watercolor paper. You can then buy them 14 sheets of high quality, large sheets of paper, so that they’ll worry endlessly about wasting it. Alternately, you can buy a similarly thin pad of large, cheap paper. (That one telegraphs “for kids!” though — for maximum psychological pain, a tiny high grade quantity of a key consumable is a good way to make a new hobby feel painfully high stakes.)
If you know someone who likes to think of themselves as a rugged, self-sufficient type, you could give them a survival kit. There are lots of pre-made survival kits with various types of gear; this one is very small, and very cheap. (A cautionary note for anyone thinking about giving it to a person they dislike but would rather not see actually die in an actual emergency: the flashlight comes without batteries.)
Speaking of batteries, apparently some people find it helpful to take them all out of their packaging and carefully load them into this elaborate case. Definitely give this to someone you don’t like who already has a perfectly reasonable battery storage solution.
There are many people who find compasses to be useful. They probably would not actually want to take this large, showy, decorative compass into any situation where a compass might be useful. (It weighs almost 12 ounces! Imagine using it to orienteer your way through the woods!)
Have you ever tried to fix something while holding a flashlight and encountered the “not enough hands” problem? Maybe you think this problem would be solved by building LED flashlights into a pair of fingerless gloves. According to several reviewers, this problem is solved a whole lot better by a head lamp, since that points where you’re looking and your glove flashlight might or might not.
Most people these days get the bulk of their weather forecasting information via a phone app. It can be nice to have an indoor-outdoor thermometer but the dial kind is a lot easier to read than the classic “mercury is rising/falling” style (which are made without mercury, FYI). You can also buy some very attractive barometers, at various price points, one of which seems to basically be a snow globe for grownups. In other words, a gadget that purports to be useful, isn’t particularly, but IS fragile and attractive so they can’t just shove it in a closet: the perfect bad gift, at least for someone who, if they need a weather forecast, is going to look not at their fancy glass barometer but at their phone.
Would your recipient enjoy owning a fitness tracker? I know a lot of people who enjoy fitness trackers but none of them have fitness trackers with an alarm that once you’ve turned it on, you will never be able to shut off or reset, which according to the reviews is a feature of this budget-priced model. It also only works in metric, and despite being mainly a step counter, is incredibly unreliable about counting steps.
(Almost forgot to include this one!) Via the Black Friday Sales, how about a toaster-style hot dog and bun cooker? All the counter space of a large toaster but so much more pointless.
There are also a ton of desk accessories that could be either horrifying or awesome, it depends a lot on the recipient. For example, this tape dispenser with a monkey that claps cymbals as you pull out tape. (I love how product descriptions for this sort of thing always call a “conversation starter.” Entirely accurate for conversations that begin with, “what the hell is that?”)
“What the hell is that?” “Oh, that’s my tape dispenser with a monkey that claps its cymbals when you pull out tape.”
Alternately, you could get this kind of amazing skull desk organizer. It has two holes in the back of the head for you to put your pens and pencils in, but also the mouth is open and you can use it to store paperclips and stuff like that. If that’s just a little too far over the line, this motorcycle design is less gory but takes up way too much space for a pen holder. This dragon pen holder is also very large. The Knight Pen Holder is less overall bulky but it also holds a single pen.
There are a whole range of unique decorative staplers, including dragon, T-Rex, and carved wooden animals. None of them are particularly well-reviewed as a stapler, but the carved wooden deer looks particularly difficult to use because of how the head gets in the way of your hand, and it looks to me like the staples you’d have to use in that one are the mini kind, which are both harder to find and really useless.
A magazine you’re interested in is something you can enjoy all year. A magazine you are not interested in is junk mail that endlessly piles up and makes you feel guilty for not reading it!
Smithsonian magazine costs $12/year, comes with a tote, and supports the Smithsonian Institution. This would be a good gift to people interested in American history and historical research. This would be a terrific gift to people who have loud, angry opinions about “heritage” but mostly seem to have gotten their history education from right-wing Facebook memes. (ETA a quick warning: that subscription comes with auto-renewal! So be careful about that.)
The Nib sells print subscriptions that send out 3 issues per year. It’s a magazine that does comics and cartoons — who doesn’t like that? (You don’t have to tell your recipient that you do know it’sleft wing comics and cartoons.)
Finally, if you’ve got someone in your gift-giving circle who’s fond of the phrase “I’ve done my own research,” for $26/year you could support their research interests with a subscription to Scientific American!
From the Department of Either Nightmarish or Awesome, Could Go Either Way
All of this is the sort of thing that is perfect for some people, absolutely atrocious for other people — you could potentially gift the exact same t-shirt (or hoodie or apron) to your best friend and your worst enemy, and get the reaction you’re hoping for from both.
Finally, this one isn’t clothing, but is an object that would be delightful to the right person, horrifying to the wrong person: a glowing, color-changing dragon lamp. (They’re marketing it as a night light, but they also claim it’s a dinosaur. Anyway: someone in your life might need this, either because they’ll love it or because they’ll have to pretend to love it.) Llama and Unicorn are also available.
Charitable Gifts
One of my favorite passive-aggressive charitable gift options is to symbolically give someone an animal that offers a subtle negative comment on their looks, hygiene, or personality. This would be easier if more zoos included all their animals as opposed to just the notably cute ones. I did find a useful article that lists the 19 dumbest animals on earth, though, and there’s a decent chance that a zoo near you will have giraffes, flamingos, sloths, ostriches, komodo dragons, or slow lorises available for adoption. Great Horned Owls are also on offer — owls have this great reputation for wisdom but are incredibly dumb, kind of like certain conservative NYT columnists.
The Minnesota Zoo notes you can sponsor any animal at the zoo for $100 and get a certificate and a fun book if they don’t have the appropriate stuffed animal. Mystifyingly, despite having a “name a hissing cockroach after your ex for $10” promotion for Valentine’s Day at least once, they don’t list their hissing cockroaches. (I bet they’d do it for you if you called.) They do list giraffes, flamingos, and sloths, as well as porcupines, pigs, and sheep.
The St. Louis Zoo offers $25 adoptions and will also let you adopt any animal at the zoo (for $35, you get a picture of the animal), and in addition to the usual stuff (everyone has giraffes), they have tarantulas, a wild ass, and cobras.
Branching out from zoos, the Friends of Saguaro National Park will let you symbolically gift someone the adoption of a Saguaro Cactus! ($35, and you get a certificate.) And the Wetlands Institute of New Jersey lets you adopt a horseshoe crab. ($25 and you get a digital certificate and a digital photo of a horseshoe crab. You could always print it out for them.)
I HAD A BOOK COME OUT THIS YEAR! Chaos on CatNet, the sequel to Catfishing on CatNet. I also have a short story collection called Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories. You can often find signed copies from Dreamhaven Books or Uncle Hugo’s, both of which do mail order (Uncle Hugo’s is currently exclusively doing mail order). When Amal El-Mohtar tweeted about Catfishing on CatNet she said, “Do you know a queer teen? Are you a queer teen? Are you an adult who misses an internet that felt kinder & purer? Did you love the Hugo-winning short story ‘Cat Pictures Please’? PLEASE do your heart the gift of acquiring & reading this beautiful book.”
So if you want a good gift you could totally give someone a copy of my book. And just from Amal’s description you can probably figure out exactly which of your relatives this would be a bad gift for. I’ll note that there’s nothing on the book jacket that will give away, for example, the scene where the main character and her friends hack an instructional robot to provide accurate sex ed, so if you want to pretend ignorance later, your plausible deniability is covered. You could also buy any or all of these for yourself — if you’ll be spending time this holiday season around highly stressful family members, there’s no escape like a good book. And if supply chain issues have made print copies difficult to find, I am just as happy when people read my books on their e-reader as when they read print copies.
Happy holidays!
Passive-Aggressive Gift Giving Guides from Previous Years:
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis (and includes scenes of my imagined future of public safety). It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and from the current mail-order-only incarnation of Uncle Hugo’s.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded. Some that are worth your consideration:
In Minneapolis:
A first-year teacher at Bryn Mawr would like a variety of classroom supplies, including individual dry-erase boards, a big easel, a classroom rug, a selection of books, and some educational games.
A middle school teacher at Andersen would like to provide her students with some manga they’ve requested; they currently don’t have a media center, and students rely on classroom libraries for books.
A second-grade teacher at Folwell would like to provide her students with graphic novels in both Spanish and English. (A large percentage of her students speak Spanish at home.)
In Saint Paul:
A science teacher at Washington Technology high school in St. Paul would like to provide electronic balances and voltmeters so that his Chemistry students can see “how adding nanoparticles to a conductive solution affects voltage.”
Crossroads Elementary needs a large stock of disposable face masks. (This doesn’t seem like something you should have to fundraise for, does it? but apparently it is.)
And a Head Start teacher would like snowpants, mittens, and hats for her students to wear to play outside in the winter!
And a different kind of school fundraiser (again, in Minneapolis):
next was the play Anon(ymous). Chris and i are not paid to run DC, but we did use our own money to fund a fight choreograph for this incredibly important performance. due to Covid-19 & school closures, opening night on March 19, 2020 never happened.https://t.co/AKaOFgHHZM
Kaytie Kamphoff is a special education resource teacher at Patrick Henry High School and the co-director/producer of Henry Drama Club. (Christopher Michael is her co-director and their full-time theater and dance teacher.) She initially asked for funds on Twitter just so the Henry Drama Club could stage a couple of plays this year. Ms. Kamphoff has now set her sights higher: she’s hoping to raise enough to run a summer theater program for Northside kids, free for participants, paid for the recent grads/Drama Club alums who work. You can donate to her by Venmo or Paypal: Venmo is Henry_DC and PayPal is Kaytie.Kamphoff@gmail.com. Note “Henry Drama Club” in the memo and if Paypal insists you need the last four digits of her phone number, it’s 5548.
Her Twitter thread is solidly worth reading if you’d like some heartwarming stories of the transformational power of theater in the lives of high school students.
I got an e-mail after my earlier post on public safety from someone who suggested that it would be helpful to make a positive case for what I think it should look like, since one of the objections is the lack of a mapped-out plan. Just to be clear, before I start: I am not an expert on this, I’m not someone who would be called in to help write a plan, and there are a lot of people who are experts who would be involved in writing a plan.
Given that caveat, a couple of thoughts.
Until the 1960s, some cities didn’t have ambulances.
This was one of those fascinating things I learned from Twitter (that someone else learned from a podcast); here’s an article about it. From that article:
Emergency services were not there to provide treatment at the scene or even necessarily on the way to the hospital… they were just about getting you to the hospital as quickly as possible. It also wasn’t clear whose responsibility it was to rush to the scene of an accident. Oftentimes firefighters were the ones to respond, and they were expected to deal with health treatment themselves. In other areas, the responsibility for transporting patients often fell to local funeral homes. In many major cities, this crucial task fell to another municipal service that probably had even less business responding to medical emergencies: The police.
The police in many cities would literally take people to the hospital in the back of a paddy wagon! In Pittsburgh, the city ambulance service was created by a Black-run jobs training program called Freedom House, in a Black neighborhood, in cooperation with Dr. Peter Safar, an anesthesiologist who went on to basically create the idea of critical-care emergency medicine.
The idea of a city without an ambulance service is literally unthinkable now. But when the Freedom House ambulance service started, the police viewed them as competition:
The police felt like Freedom House had taken their jobs away, but Freedom House believed that the police — with their poor training — were a threat to the patient. Moon says that Freedom House would have a police scanner on to monitor the calls and would try to get to emergency situations before the police did to make sure care was given properly. Sometimes the police would relent, but other times they would threaten the paramedics with arrest unless they backed off.
What don’t we have today, that in twenty years could feel as absurd as not having ambulances? I can tell you that the concept of having mental health specialists respond to people in mental health crisis has been suggested since at least the late 1990s (probably longer, but I specifically remember an incident in the late 90s or early 2000s that set off a “why don’t we deal better with mental health crises” conversation that did not, in fact, result in mental health specialists being available to deal with people having mental health crises.)
Police get called for noise complaints. For conflicts between neighbors. They show up for entirely medical ambulance calls — sometimes even usefully. They get called on kids selling hot dogs. That story had a happy “police help kid get business permit” ending but why are armed officers of the law the people sent in response to a business operating without a permit?
What if, in response to conflicts between neighbors, we could send out a mediator? What if, if you wanted a wellness check for someone you were worried about, the city could send out someone who would check on them, then help connect them with services? What if, when you needed to report a crime for insurance purposes — to file an official statement of “someone broke into my garage and stole my bike” — the person who showed up had a clipboard instead of a gun?
I mean, in the late 1960s, the idea that you might have special people, with their own uniforms and training, just for the part where you drove people to the hospital — that was new. And the police resisted the idea! But putting resources into ambulances and trained paramedics was a transformative shift in public safety.
When all you have is a hammer, and the hammer isn’t fixing the problem, adding more hammers is probably not going to improve anything.
I read this fascinating Mother Jones article this morning. It discusses two incidents where police were called on a person who was sleeping or unconscious in his car, with a gun visible. In both cases, the initial call made was not “this person is a danger,” it was absolutely “I am worried that this person is in danger.” In the 2021 case (which didn’t end in the police shooting the guy! progress!) he’d crashed his car — it looked to the caller like he’d lost consciousness at the wheel.
And yet instead of treating this as a medical emergency, this was treated as a potential threat. Someone in the neighborhood recognized the unconscious man, and managed to reach his mother, who came and was (eventually) granted permission to try to wake him. His mother, in the article, commented, “I just couldn’t believe there were so many police with just one person” — “Three police vehicles blocked in Jones’ car. Five officers were positioned behind one cruiser. Another kept a gun trained on the hatchback from the turret of the BearCat.”
The police response to any situation they’re not sure how to handle is “add more police,” whether that makes any sort of sense or not. This was for one unconscious guy. Who had a gun in his lap that was illegal for him to own, but I don’t think the legality of the gun was a major factor here.
I do actually sympathize with the essential problem here, which was, “we don’t know if he’ll wake up, freak out, and start shooting.” This almost never happens — but there is, in fact, a local case where a police officer responded to a call of someone sleeping in a car and got shot. (In 1994, Ron Ryan Jr. checked on a sleeping man after a neighbor called. Guy Harvey Baker shot him as he walked back to his squad car to run Baker’s ID. Baker fled, then during the manhunt later murdered a second police officer along with his dog. This is a good illustration of why police paranoia about unknown people with guns is not entirely unreasonable.)
But the essential question in this case seems to me not “how do we get police to respond better,” it’s “in a medical emergency where we’re worried about the safety of the EMTs, how can we keep the EMTs safe?” Because this was a medical call. (One of the things I kept thinking about, reading the story, was that the ultimately peaceful — peaceful-ish — resolution was contingent on him waking up and following the instructions of the police. If he’d actually been un-rouseable due to lifethreatening hypoglycemia, or a heart attack, or a drug overdose, he’d have just died in the car while the police yelled at him to wake up.)
This actually seems like a legit use for those robot dogs with the grabber hands — if you can send a robot dog to open up someone’s car and grab the gun, and the guy wakes up and shoots the robot, you’re out a robot. (And let’s face it, if you woke up and saw one of these things climbing into your car, I wouldn’t blame you’d for shooting it.) But I’d much rather equip ambulance crews and mental health responders with robots to secure the scene, as an alternative to police, rather than equipping police with robots.
Policing in the US is a pretty classic example of the “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” problem, and the stories that result range from a comedy of errors to absolutely horrifying. Maybe instead of saying “we need to take these people, the ones we equip with guns, clubs, tasers, pepper spray, and tactical vests, and train them to do things other than use force” we should send different people. People with different equipment and different training.
There’s an awful lot of low-hanging fruit here.
There are so many civic roles that we have handed to the police that could be done a different way or by someone else. This article has a good graphic that shows you the percent of time police officers in Philadelphia spend on various tasks. It also quotes a former police officer:
“When I was an officer, I got calls about dead animals, ungovernable children who refused to go to school, people who hadn’t gotten their welfare checks, adults who hadn’t heard from their elderly relatives, families who needed to be informed of a death, broken-down cars, you name it,” says Seth Stoughton, a legal scholar at the University of South Carolina and former Tallahassee police officer. “Everything that isn’t dealt with by some other institution automatically defaults to the police to take care of.”
Right now, Minneapolis’s charter (which is a lot harder to change than the ordinances) not only specifies a structure for a police department, it requires a minimum of 17 police department employees per 1000 residents. Eliminating that minimum is one of the biggest changes in the public safety charter amendment, and it will allow the city to try shifting funds to have other people handle traffic accidents, property crime, derelict vehicles, truant schoolkids, embezzlement, and so on. If we cut down what we expect police to handle to the violent crimes with a sideline in “showing up for a call only to find out that nothing’s happening” (the biggest box on that chart above! and sadly I see no way around that one) could we have a city with a lot fewer cops? I really think that would be an option.
There are absolutely people with a more radical vision than me.
There are people who say “abolish police” and mean it, and mean that it should happen right now. There are other people who say “abolish police” and mean that as a long-term goal — they view crime as being overwhelmingly caused by societal ills (and certainly there are a lot of fixable contributing factors).
But you don’t have to be on board with abolition to support Question 2 in Minneapolis (the Public Safety charter amendment). All the charter amendment will actually change is the following:
It will replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. Initially, the Department of Public Safety will look and work like the Police Department, but it will be possible to make changes via the ordinances.
It will get rid of the minimum number of police per Minneapolis resident, a rule that does not exist in any other city or town in Minnesota.
The Department of Public Safety will be overseen the same way as all other city departments, rather than answering solely to the mayor.
The amendment will open the door to further change — but all that future change is contingent on the City Council agreeing that these changes are a good idea. Radical changes will require a majority of City Council reps to buy in, which is part of why the scaremongering from groups like “Heroes PAC” is so patently absurd. The most radical people on the ballot, if you actually look at their plans, are talking about things like a gradual decrease in armed law enforcement while building capacity in other ways.
I feel like the argument we’ve been having for the last year and a half is about whether we need to keep spending all our money on hammers, or if maybe it would be okay to explore the possibility of investing in a screwdriver, a crescent wrench, a pair of pliers, and a tape measure.
I really hope Minneapolis votes Yes on Question 2.
In addition to writing political commentary, I write science fiction and fantasy. My book that came out in April, Chaos on CatNet, takes place in a future Minneapolis (and includes scenes of my imagined future of public safety). It’s a sequel to Catfishing on CatNetand signed copies of both books are usually available from Dreamhaven and from the current mail-order-only incarnation of Uncle Hugo’s.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi, but you can make a donation to encourage my work! I get a lot of satisfaction watching fundraisers I highlight getting funded. Some that are worth your consideration:
In Minneapolis:
A first-year teacher at Bryn Mawr would like a variety of classroom supplies, including individual dry-erase boards, a big easel, a classroom rug, a selection of books, and some educational games.
A middle school teacher at Andersen would like to provide her students with some manga they’ve requested; they currently don’t have a media center, and students rely on classroom libraries for books.
A second-grade teacher at Folwell would like to provide her students with graphic novels in both Spanish and English. (A large percentage of her students speak Spanish at home.)
And a different kind of school fundraiser (again, in Minneapolis):
Chris and i have been choosing v progress plays during our time together running Drama Club. our first play together was Gunplay in Dec. 2019. i saw Gunplay at @mixed_blood during Fringefest in 2018 and knew Henry needed to perform it. it was amazing.https://t.co/E12WzLBbQu
Kaytie Kamphoff is a special education resource teacher at Patrick Henry High School and the co-director/producer of Henry Drama Club. (Christopher Michael is her co-director and their full-time theater and dance teacher.) She initially asked for funds on Twitter just so the Henry Drama Club could stage a couple of plays this year. Ms. Kamphoff has now set her sights higher: she’s hoping to raise enough to run a summer theater program for Northside kids, free for participants, paid for the recent grads/Drama Club alums who work. You can donate to her by Venmo or Paypal: Venmo is Henry_DC and PayPal is Kaytie.Kamphoff@gmail.com. Note “Henry Drama Club” in the memo and if Paypal insists you need the last four digits of her phone number, it’s 5548.
Her Twitter thread is solidly worth reading if you’d like some heartwarming stories of the transformational power of theater in the lives of high school students.
I left this one for last because of all the races, it’s the one that you’re going to have the least trouble finding information about.
There are seventeen people running for mayor of Minneapolis, most of whom will be dropped after the first ballot. I wrote about fourteen of them in another post. The three people with a strong chance of winning:
tl;dr don’t rank Jacob. Vote either Kate/Sheila or Sheila/Kate. I’m going to talk about what I see as their distinctive strengths but I’m not going to tell you how to rank them; I am endorsing both.
Will Tell Stories For Food 