Anghraine

Hey all. :\

I have a post on Tumblr about it that I imagine most of you have already seen. The short version would be that this doesn't feel as bad as Trump's first victory did—I had told myself over and over that this could happen, that it would come down to political trends thousands of miles away from where I live, etc. But my brain is telling me it's actually much worse. Trump scraped a victory in 2016 with a deck stacked very heavily in his favor, and without certainty about what his administration would really look like given that he's a lying blowhard, via the electoral college but against the will of the greater number of voters. That didn't mean he wasn't president, but getting fucked over by outdated mechanics of government set up by long-dead men is not the same as getting fucked over by fellow citizens who are very much alive and who know, or have the ability to easily find out, about the policies of the first Trump administration. Kamala Harris, whatever her faults, did not have anything like the baggage of HRC and yet the people of this country were far more willing to vote for Trump against her.

I've been quietly enraged for hours in a way I don't often get—I get annoyed, and sometimes I get normal angry, but like ... in 2016 I broke down crying over and over, and I haven't done anything of that. I feel cold but not numb. The last time I felt this kind of frozen hatred was when a relative told me he'd struck a plea bargain about statutory rape with a sixteen-year-old student and was telling me so I didn't find out about it in the news. I didn't get upset as such, or feel immediately angry, or fight with him about it. I simply didn't care whether he lived or died for years afterwards.

There's this awful review of The Borgias that condemns Jeremy Irons's performance as Alexander VI/Rodrigo Borgia, because the reviewer claimed Irons lacks the appropriate "fire" to play Rodrigo—he admits that Irons does play him with a kind of fire, but says that Irons "burns with the steely flame of the North, not Latin fire." I thought this was a hilarious and very stupid characterization of both Alexander VI and Jeremy Irons, and told my best friend J about it, and it's entered our friendship lexicon. But he (my bff) has remarked a couple times that when I get truly, genuinely angry, it is absolutely a Steely Flame of the North situation. And I'm definitely feeling that now—not numb, not sad, not shocked, not screaming, just kind of hard.

I will say that, despite dutifully voting for him in the primaries, Bernie's "this is happening because of the Democrats turning their backs on working-class people, they lost the white ones to Trump and now they're deservingly losing Latino and Black ones" shtick is even more contemptible than usual IMO. Yeah, he's hammering it into his The Class War Is The Only War constant replay loop, but I don't know why the fuck he's associating this with Black voters. From what data we have at this point, the talk about Black men switching from Biden to Trump came out to a shift of four points from 2020 in exit polls (which, while done carefully, are known to be rough estimates—that's in the realm of statistical noise) and even if you did treat them as 100% accurate, the exit polls have Black female support for Trump actually dropping three points from 2020. (Union households favored Harris, btw.) Maybe he referenced Black voters to avoid sounding like he's scapegoating Latine voters specifically (who did shift towards Trump, especially men), maybe he's talking about lower turnout, but I think it's honestly super shitty to associate Black voters with this loss when a) there are many other more proximate causes, b) many Black voters are deliberately disenfranchised by their state governments and deal with more obstacles to voting than virtually any other group, and c) Black voters have been and remain unambiguously the most stalwart Democratic demographic apart from LGBT people (iirc the only group even slightly close is Jewish people—the same exit polls have them at 78% Democratic to Black voters' 85%, with Black women specifically at 91% for Harris). Lumping Black voters in with almost anyone else flattens a truly vast divide.

No doubt this merely reflects my own bourgeois morality or whatever the fuck, but I have absolutely zero tolerance for every single post that's like "the only problem with AI is capitalism and you're all just Luddites about it, the measurable environmental harm is NBD, and also data scraping from people without permission, acknowledgment, or recompense is fine actually."

They keep trying to obscure their basic argument that scraping art without credit of any kind to the artists is totally cool by plastering it over with Marx quotes and a lot of buzzwords about communism, neoliberalism, corporations, etc. But let's be real: this is bullshit sophistry. Data scraping without informing the people whose data is used, much less gaining their consent, much less recompensing them in any way at all, much less enough to compensate for this process's profound disrespect for their skills and professions, is unethical. It would be unethical in a communist utopia and it is worse in reality. AI is not bad in any and all cases, but the ways it is being trained and used are wrong, and extremely so, and the environmental harm is both significant and intrusive, which is also bad.

Yes, people are prone to jumping to extreme hyperbole about it, or believing said hyperbole, because of the Internet's usual habits and because various forms of "AI" are being imposed on people in a particularly obnoxious way and because the data scraping is genuinely super shitty and because being forced into extremely reluctant complicity with something that harms the noticeably worsening world around us is deeply frustrating. But the AI techbros' practices really are unethical and the idea that you can rationalize and deconstruct and obfuscate this to the point where every moral failing in the world is either a) a problem entirely reducible to capitalism or b) not a problem is beyond absurd, and in some ways, beyond contemptible.

Until I posted about the resuscitation of Voyager 1, my activity bar over on Tumblr was split pretty evenly between responses to a P&P post that had been reblogged by a BNF and various people who are extremely into The Borgias discovering my back catalogue. Before the P&P post reblog, the activity bar was ... like, 90% Borgias reblogs and likes. And good for them, it's still my favorite TV show ever!

In any case, this is probably why I included my brief quasi-epistolary modern US American politics Borgias AU from 2016 in my random list of fics in this post. I did re-read it before finishing that post and had fun immersing myself in all the little details that went into the AU. I'd originally hoped to write more of it, but writing a US politics AU was ... a more difficult prospect after Trump's election and I never did. Still, there's quite a bit that I'd already nailed down and forgotten later.

I did remember that one element of the basic premise is that this version of the Borgia family is not (recently) from Valencia or Italy. Rodrigo is the son of immigrants to the US from Ecuador and rose against adversity to wealth and political power. After serving as a capable Speaker of the House, Rodrigo beats the Republican presidential nominee "Julius Rove" (Giuliano della Rovere) and in the same election cycle, Rodrigo's seat in the House is won by his young nephew César (Cesare, of course). And I remembered that the story was primarily told via excerpts from news headlines and clippings (in fact it's entirely told that way because I never wrote the rest).

Other details I didn't remember:

• These Borgias are Californians! West Coast, best coast. :D
• Rodrigo's first VP is Katharine Powers (Caterina Sforza). In the fic, this relationship had yet to go horribly awry, but I had plans for a later disaster.
• I had a brief aside about Rove delaying a formal concession to Rodrigo. Although the fic was posted in July of 2016, you didn't need foresight to imagine that being a RL concern later, though I certainly didn't anticipate the form it would take in 2021.
• Vanozza is Rodrigo's ex-wife, Vanessa Gautier, a Canadian actress from Montréal who raised not only their children but the orphaned César as well. I seem to vaguely recall that she was a fairly minor public figure at the time of their divorce, years before the election, known mainly for a well-regarded performance as Empress Theodora in Byzantium, a made-up film that is very different from the actual Byzantium film directed by Neil Jordan (creator of The Borgias; I am pretty sure this was a convoluted shout-out that amused me at the time). Vanessa's very PR-savvy daughter Lucrecia jokes that her first public appearance was in Byzantium (Vanessa was pregnant with her at the time; I'm sure this was a reference to Carrie Fisher's jokes about her "performance" in Tammy, when Debbie Reynolds was pregnant with her).
• Since then, Vanessa has worked her way into more consistently prominent roles and is now a very well-known movie star in her own right, especially following her role in a massively successful HBO epic fantasy TV series that is this universe's version of Game of Thrones, but based instead on David and Leigh Eddings' Elenium and Tamuli novels (Vanessa plays Sephrenia but brings a bit of Lena Headey-as-Cersei energy to the role).
• I still kind of love this element (with a very major reservation discussed below) of a bizarro world hit fantasy series based on a completely different book series being embedded into an AU about the Borgias navigating US politics as a Democratic political dynasty along the lines of the Kennedys, but obviously dealing with a very different world and other pressures like, uh, racism.
• There's also a reference to Lucrezia's rivalry with Sancia d'Aragona in the show; Lucrecia's first actual public appearance was not political but rather, at a big entertainment event with Vanessa. Lucrecia managed to upstage the new superstar Sasha Darby.
• There's a reference to a photograph of Lucrecia with César at a political event, in which she is of course wearing Valentino (this still amuses me).

So just after that, I was visiting my parents and saw that my dad is re-reading The Belgariad, the most popular of David and Leigh Eddings's fantasy series (but The Elenium is better, fight me). We talked a little about it and of course, I also thought of my random The Elenium adaptation subplot in the Borgias politics AU I'd just been re-reading, and remembered that I'd actually once had an idea inspired by the fic subplot for an Elenium fancast that draws entirely from the actual cast of Game of Thrones. I don't remember the specifics since I never did it, except (of course) Lena Headey as Sephrenia and I think Peter Dinklage as Stragen. Charles Dance as Dolmant??? I kind of like the idea of Nathalie Emmanuel as Ehlana, but there are multiple options.

I should add that David and Leigh Eddings are high-octane problematic figures in SF/F. The Belgariad especially includes a lot of misogyny and racism, and is, let's say, politically ambiguous in general. Moreover, it became well-known after David and Leigh Eddings's deaths that decades earlier, he and Leigh had adopted two children, abused the son, and the children were taken away by the state. The Eddingses separately served a year in prison for the abuse at a time when this was rarely punished at all. The knowledge of this makes all subsequent re-reads feel very surreal, given the prominence in the novels of weird yet idealized kids who turn out to be literal gods. (The linked post also discusses reading the Eddings books, especially the Belgariad-centered ones, in light of this.)

I had personally been very invested in the Eddingses' novels as a teenager/young adult; they were formative experiences for me as a fantasy fan and I have strong feelings about basically every aspect of all of them up to and including The Redemption of Althalus. I kept my collection of Eddings books after finding out what they'd done, since they were dead anyway at that point, but it feels weird to talk about them without mentioning the level of baggage around them. Apparently David was an alcoholic (extremely unsurprising), Leigh was generally violent, and he considered divorce, but never went through with it. Eventually several strokes left her unable to write or speak, though David continued to credit her as co-author, and he himself had increasingly severe dementia and required constant care in his last years while still writing. They had become extremely wealthy and left their millions to medical research and need-based scholarships at Reed College, his alma mater. So the legacy is a LOT and, as I said, it feels odd to talk about their work without acknowledging it.

More political schadenfreude:


[A screenshot from a news headline reading "Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes remarks"]

hahahaha

I reblogged a gif of dancing crabs overlaid with "TRUMP IS GONE," as one does.

Tagged: #THANK GOD #i just watched the whole inauguration and spent it being like 'nothing go wrong nothing go wrong' #and 45 is out :D

I didn’t think (i.e., dare hope) the Senate was realistically in reach, but seems like it is! Congrats to Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock (D-GA). :D

Tagged: #and seriously ... shout-out to georgia democrats and democratic voters for making this possible #both policy-wise and schadenfreude-wise

It’s not that the last four years haven’t been weird and awful, but this election has been really, really strange.

Tagged: #the now deeply conservative scotus just went 'bzuh?' at texas's case and it's like #yeah. 'bzuh?' is pretty much my feeling too

[ETA 3/13/2024: This is somewhat "huh" to read in retrospect—I didn't see the insurrection coming at all, but I feel like "something weird is in the air" was basically the right instinct!]

I know that Republicans trying to make voter fraud a thing to de-legitimize results they don’t like is very serious, but also some of the people trying to jump on the bandwagon are truly ridiculous. They’re like … I lost in a D+71 district, how could this be???!?

Tagged: #he lost by 72 points instead of 71 so obviously shenanigans

I meant to tone down the election posting once it was called, but



[A screencap of a headline reading: "Trump voters in Pennsylvania face distress and disbelief: 'I don't ever remember feeling so devastated.' The article begins: "For many Trump supporters, Biden's narrow victory in the state felt especially disorienting because Trump significantly increased his turnout this..."]

hahahahahaha

Tagged: #sorry joe i have no intention of being gracious about this #mmm i'll just have some delicious schadenfreude in my tea today

I can’t stop grinning and laughing tbh