Skip to main content

Big News

So I joined the Peace Corps, and on the 23rd I'll be heading to South Africa to start training. So long as I don't wuss out, I'll be moving into some kind of township in September. Right now, I'm in a hotel in Washington DC (man, Matt was right, the buildings are short here), and the douchebag baggage attendant in Cortez refused to put my luggage on the plane because I was 10 minutes late for check-in (apparently you have to be there 45 minutes before boarding). That might make marginal sense for a medium sized or large plane, but this was a 15-seat cropduster, half empty. The baggage check was literally 30 yards from the plane. I walked out on the runway and got to stare at the wide-open baggage compartment, then sit on the plane for 15 minutes. So of course they sent one bag to LAX and the other to Tajikistan or something.

Anyway, I hope they show up eventually--though I think I could probably survive without them. I anticipated this would happen and brought the bare minimum of toiletries and so forth in my carry-on. I'd just have to replace my entire wardrobe.

They say that we will have very limited access to cell phones and the internet for the three months of training, which ends September 17th. Reports are mixed as to whether or not that's actually true, but in any case I probably won't post too often here until I get out in the field. I'll try to do a weekly I'm-still-alive post at least.

My cell phone from the states won't reach me anymore. I'll update when I get a South African number.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that