Pin Postscript: Keep Your Powder Dry

I'm going to start with this

So, I listen to a few podcasts, now. When I learned that one of my favorite authors and geekerati, Pat Rothfuss, was doing a podcast (with Max Temkin, a creator of the game Cards Against Humanity), I immediately began tuning it.

When I went to NerdCon:Stories I got to see a live recording of their podcast. It was marvelous.

Their most recent one, was a reaction to Trump's election. They are both very firmly progressive in their politics, and Max even started and ran a super PAC called the Nuisance Committee during the campaign cycle.

Listen to the whole thing, if you can.

I listened to it just today, and wish I'd heard it before I wrote about safety pins, because they bring up a couple really nice points that I didn't think about or cover well.

First, and I sort of got close to this point without making it clear: Max highlights a weakness of the safety pin: it is really easy to put on and take off a safety pin. Too easy, is his implication - too easy to put on even if you're not super feeling it, and too easy to take off if what it stands for is inconvenient. Max does heavy-lifting type of activism, and has worked on political campaigns, and so I think its easy to see the safety pin as lazy or weak activism from his perspective. He also has positive things to say about the idea, so don't think this point is the sum total of his feelings.

Pat brought up another nice point, though, and it dovetails with the 'easy activism' argument. He also used D&D terminology in his explanation, so I was bound to get attached to it. Look at me acknowledging my bias. His point was that an easy thing to do is maybe just what some people need - people who have never done any activism, who don't typically take any political stands. Maybe now they want to, and maybe for them that safety pin is the first step - sure, they might just take it off next week, but maybe it is the cantrip that leads them to study the magic of social justice and activism. Seriously, listening to Pat explore the D&D analogy is worth listening to the podcast.

None of that starts to explain the title - 'Keep Your Powder Dry'. That is another aspect of their reaction. Maybe it'll get its own blog.