“Sex Trafficking” is good, actually

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  1 Response »
Aug 202021
 

OnlyFans will no longer host pornography, because major credit cards will no longer do business with adult content providers. This is the handy-work of the anti-sex-work lobby, which is spearheaded by disgusting evangelical theocrats and the liberals who love them. Our elected representative support them, because this will supposedly protect people from being “sex-trafficked.” It’s for the children, doncha know.

Specifically, the children of the rich and powerful, to allow their parents to immiserate an underclass for political advantage.

I.

Previously in my life, I had a very close friend that came from working class roots. She was sexually abused by her father. As soon as she was old enough, she “sex trafficked” herself safely on camgirl sites. This let her pull together a fair chunk of money fast, and she got the fuck out of there and moved to Colorado, where we met.

She picked up “legitimate” work here, but it was shitty and didn’t pay much, and her bosses were absolute assholes. So she took initiative and became an entrepreneur. She became her own boss, and “sex-trafficked” herself. Working her own hours, answering only to herself, and making better money. Her primary source of advertisement was Backpage.

A few years later Backpage was effectively destroyed by the government for “sex trafficking.” Its founders were thrown into jail as sex traffickers. Fortunately, through hard work, side hustles, and some very shrewd investment, by this time my friend had amassed a bit over $100,000. The “sex traffic” industry allowed her to escape from her abusive father, live independently, and save up what was some real money back in those years. Now that industry was being destroyed, forcing her into more dangerous conditions, with far less ability to screen her clients, and far greater costs in finding them. Alternately, she could go to work for someone else, once again having her future taken out of her control and receiving significantly less pay for the same work, and no choice in her clients.

While the people that created the tools she had used to take control of her life rotted in jail, those who threw them in jail and destroyed those tools continued to persecute my friend and those like her. People at the very bottom of the social respectability scale, who could be spit on and ground down to score political popularity. Led by Kamala Harris, they passed FOSTA/SESTA despite being fully aware of the damage it would do. My friend pulled up stakes and moved out of the country (last I heard).

II.

Back when I was a young’un, my parents sat me down and we watched John Stossel’s special arguing that Greed Is Good. I was pretty shocked, because my parents were very liberal, quasi-socialist really, but strongly agreed with much of this.

As I watched, I came to realize that Stossel didn’t mean Greed in the way we’re trained to think of Greed – destructive, money-grubbing, jealous, inhumanly cruel and unconcerned with anyone’s welfare. He was arguing economics 101. People are motivated to make their lives better. They will work for their betterment. In a society, the best way to better yourself is usually to provide things of value to other humans, and thus a community of humans working in their own self-interest will create a better society for everyone. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

In the social milieu I was then immersed in, most economic activity had been labelled as “motivated by greed.” This is true in the econ 101 sense of working in one’s self-interest. Since the word “greed” was used, it was easy to conflate it with the traditional notions of Greed. It was very easy to flip that into a narrative that capitalism is destructive, money-grubbing, and inhumanly cruel. A simple trick, easy to execute.

One can fight against this by pointing out the differences between Greed and economic self-interest, and how one is destructive and awful, and the other is why our standard of living is no longer in the “shits in a pot in one corner of the house” phase. This requires quite a bit of time and effort. It is a complex defensive maneuver that is comprehensive, but cannot be easily deployed to deal with something as simple as “Capitalism runs on greed.”

So Stossel created a simple counter – reclaiming the word. Proclaiming that Greed Is Good. With, yes, an hour long special that basically does everything discussed above to back it up. But its a simple slogan. Whenever one is told “Capitalism is greedy” one can just counter “Greed is good.” Greed is the reason you have everything that you do have.

“Sex Trafficking” brings up images of Taken. In its traditional usage, it was supposed to be a polite way to say “Long-Term Kidnapping and Rape.” But no action taken by those in power for the past 20+ years in the name of fighting “Sex Trafficking” addresses Long-Term Kidnapping and Rape at all. Often times it makes the problem worse. What the powerful actually do is take opportunities away from those that most need them. They further grind the most vulnerable under their heels, for their political advantage. They strip young women of the ability to escape from their sexually abusive fathers.

III.

I don’t really blame MasterCard and others that are adopting anti-women policies for what they’re doing. They saw what happened to Backpage. No one wants to be called a child-rapist and thrown into federal prison. If I was threatened with federal prison, I’d probably stop doing business with OnlyFans too.

I have no doubt my friend would have ended up fine eventually. She is intelligent and driven. But being able to “Sex Traffic” herself gave her a rocket boost into a better life. Anti-Sex-Trafficking would have kept her in a bad place longer. And not everyone in bad situations is as intelligent and driven as her, not everyone can crawl out of arbitrarily deep holes; so the government shouldn’t keep making them deeper.

The way that Kamala Harris and others of her ilk use the term “Sex Trafficking” nowadays has nothing to do with the traditional meaning. “Sex Trafficking” now is female-driven entrepreneurship. It’s the disadvantaged and down-trodden making better lives for themselves. It’s creating value and self-sufficiency in the face of opposition. It’s doing well despite the ruling elite spitting in your face.

Long Term Kidnapping and Rape is horrendous. Repulsive. It should be stopped, and those responsible for making it worse (like Kamala Harris and the moral crusaders that give her more power) should face the fucking Wrath of God.

But “Sex Trafficking?” In the actual on-the-ground, female-driven-entrepreneurship and life-reclaiming sense? Sex Trafficking is Good.

How To Hold Politicians Accountable – Stupidest Timeline Edition

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Aug 162021
 

So Andrew Cuomo has been forced out of office. One might think this was because his Department of Health issued a directive to nursing homes instructing them to accept coronavirus-positive residents returning from hospitals in late March of 2020, and despite many alarms being raised and people begging for this to be reversed, Cuomo held the line on this requirement for a full month and a half. Resulting in well over 10,000 additional dead. Which he then tried to hide by altering records.

In fact, it’s because he sexually harassed at least 11 women* [EDIT – not true. He was accused of sexually harrasing at least 4 women, without much credibility. Fucking siiiiigh]. He [is accused of] subjecting women to unwanted kisses; groped their breasts or buttocks or otherwise touched them inappropriately; made insinuating remarks about their looks and their sex lives; and created a work environment “rife with fear and intimidation.”

First, I want it to be very clear that sexual harassment is unacceptable, and any politician guilty of such conduct SHOULD be thrown out of office. It’s good that he’s been removed and is disgraced. Fuck these pigs.

But I’m more than a bit distraught that if he hadn’t sexually harassed those women, it looks like he would still be in power, without any serious danger of being removed or held accountable for his gross negligence, incompetence, and evidence tampering. The deaths of over 10,000 people isn’t enough reason for the democratic coallition to risk losing a piece in the political game.

Which is fucking disgusting.

It bothers me immensely that it feels like I should be grateful that he sexually harassed women, so he can be removed from office. It worries me that this is one of a vanishingly small number of offenses that can be used to hold politicians accountable, and Multiple KiloDeaths isn’t on that list. It makes me think that maybe we should make sure all potential politicians have harassed women in the past, or worn black-face, or tweeted something TERF-y, just so there’s SOME WAY to get them out of office if they do end up killing tens of thousands of their own people.

Of course, I then immediately realized that I’d just recreated the villian’s gambit of The Traitor Baru Cormorant (a great novel by Seth Dickinson which you should read if you haven’t yet). And it’s probably a sign that my thinking is being warped if I’m reinventing one of the defining tactics of the freakin’ Cabal of Evil Villians in a novel.

It also creates some truely pervese incentives — anyone wanting to run for office would need to go sexually harass some people. We don’t want to incentivize that. Also, we couldn’t hold women accountable, which would mean either excluding women from politics, or having this same problem again with a new demographic. It all falls apart upon further inspection.

But shit. Maybe we should find a few more things to add to the “this gets you kicked the heck out of office” list that don’t require the electorate getting incredibly “lucky” about their rulers having one particular failure of humanity.

Life On Hold

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  No Responses »
May 292021
 

I have a very soft spot in my heart for stories of people being forced to live lives that don’t matter. The classic case of this being Groundhog Day, and similar stories such as The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. Much of my life has been spent trying to matter. I think the majority of people in the Modern, Western world have similar hang-ups. I used to think this was due to the fact that we (as a species) had solved the primary challenge the world throws at us, and are now floundering to find a new one. I have recently been convinced that this was a terrible misunderstanding, and instead it’s because most of us have been dramatically traumatized early in adulthood.

Imagine if right now you were told nothing you do for the next five years will matter. You cannot do anything that has any value to the people you care about. You cannot better your own life. You won’t own any property, can’t work, and won’t be allowed to keep your wages if you do work. You can’t significantly harm your life either. You’ll be fed and clothed and housed, and there won’t be legal consequences for almost anything you do. You can’t harm your reputation, because no one will take anything you say seriously. Of course, this also means your opinion has no value to anyone as well. It’s a bit like being in Groundhog Day for 5 years. All you can do is wait.

Personally, I’d get pretty damn depressed. I probably wouldn’t care to do anything. I imagine a lot of people would turn to drugs or alcohol to help burn through the five years as quickly as possible. I’d expect all sorts of psychological damage from this.

This is what we do to every teenager (with a tiny fraction of exceptions) in the USA. It would be bad enough if I was forced to endure this at my current age. When humans are in their early teens, they have a burning biological drive to start their lives, start doing things and distinguishing themselves. At that age, every year is a near-eternity. And you don’t yet have the experience to realize things can/will get better. All you know is you are trapped in an imposed hell of meaninglessness.

I nearly killed myself when I was a teen. Dropping out of college to start doing something that actually mattered was the best decision I’d made in my life up to that point (and still ranks in the Top 5 of all my life decisions). Everyone I know feels lucky to have survived their teen years, even though statistically just about everyone makes it. Our society traumatizes everyone raised within it to a massive degree, and most of us are completely blind to this. We don’t just steal five years of life from every citizen of our nation. We create permanent damage that takes decades to overcome.

The next episode of The Bayesian Conspiracy, #138, will talk about Robert Epstein’s work on this topic. I’ll link it here when it’s done. I’ve dumped my highlights from his book Teen 2.0 here, but honestly, it’s a bit of a mess. Right now I’m just asserting that we’re fucking ourselves up, all of us, and we’re perpetuation this trauma over and over on the next generation in the typical cycle we’ve all come to know and hate. And it needs to stop.

Burn The Heroes

 Musings On Present Day  3 Responses »
May 162021
 

COVID helped me to lose what trust I had remaining in government institutions. However, my faith in humanity actually grew on net, because of the outstanding success of private individuals and institutions. US Pharma created the COVID vaccine in just two days back in January of 2020! Production takes several months, but by the time it got rolling we were producing tens of millions of vaccines per month, and eventually tens of millions per week. Distribution has gone so well that basically every adult in the US that wants to be vaccinated will be by the end of May.

The US govt got in the way at every step. It wouldn’t allow challenge trials, and demanded unnecessarily long, large, and expensive trials. Pharma pays hundreds of millions per drug to gain FDA approval, when initial creation sometimes takes as little as TWO DAYS. The producers were barred from selling the vaccines at market price, instead forced to sell only directly to the govt.

And now Joe Biden wants to remove the vaccine patent protections.

Now, this won’t really change anything. The patents already aren’t being defended, and the primary production bottleneck is rare inputs, not IP restrictions. The Pharma companies are still making a nice profit. So in that respect, it’s a way for Biden to grab approval points without actually hurting the companies that saved us all.

On the other hand, it’s pure fucking treachary. These are the people and institutions that literally saved us from a world-wide pandemic the likes of which hasn’t been seen in living memory. In response, Biden is advancing the idea that Greedy Big Pharma is behind whatever delays and setbacks have prevented us from already being clear of this, and he’ll save us by revoking their IP protections. The protections that the government granted them in the first place to make up for the hundreds of millions of dollars in costs they impose, and many months of delays that killed thousands of people. To take the heroes that brought us out of this and cast them as the villains because your base has a “Kill Capitalists” proganda message is so fucking disgusting to me I have a hard time putting it into words.

Also, it throws into doubt that certainty that future patents will be protected, which will change the calculus of every corporation that has to decide whether its worth spending the millions needed to create these drugs in the first place. It imperils our future salvation, to score a few political points. It’s almost criminally short-sighted. I don’t even know where to go from here, I just had to rant. This is why I don’t vote lizards anymore.

“We’re Nuanced, You’re a Monolithic Block”

 Musings On Present Day  4 Responses »
Feb 132021
 

Yesterday I objected to the lies being spread about Gina Carano. I hate lies in general, but I especially hate them when they’re used to tear down people in a guilt-by-association purge.

The problem with Gina Carano isn’t that she’s racist or antitrans, as those are proven lies. They problem is that she’s Red Tribe. Since everyone knows that Red Tribe is super racist and super antitrans, if you can find even a the smallest thing that is kinda cringy you don’t need anything more than that. The vast majority of people I talked to never read any of Carano’s original tweets, they simply read the summary of “anti-trans” or “anti-semitic”, believed it, and spread the narrative with outrage in their voices. Because look at that Red Triber being so typically Red Tribe! We can’t have this sort of bigotry in public society, there must be consequences for this behavior!

The Red Tribe, as it turns out, is not a monolithic group. In fact, it’s more fractured in the wake of Trump’s disasterous presidency than it’s ever been in modern history.

There is absolutley a tight knot of racists and bigots within the Red Tribe.

There are also a lot of people who are Red but are not bigots, and they dislike being lumped in with them.

Their politicians feel they have to court the bigots as well to get enough votes to win elections, and as it turns out, yeah, some of them DO have to court those people to win. It’s a fucking mess over on the Red side right now. Honestly I expect the Republican party will collapse and restructure within this decade, due to this growing divide, which Trump brought into the light. And it’s gonna suck for a lot of them. It’ll probably be better in the end, once the rotten contingent can be excised.

But crucially, this means the rest of us need to acknowledge the part of the Reds that are not Bads, and work with them. Right now what much of the Left seems to want to do is drive those decent Reds back towards the Hate Core. They reject anything short of complete repetanance and baptism within the Blue Way. Since a lot of Good Reds won’t do that, the Blues instead vilify them and drive them back towards the Bigots… and This Is Bad.

(Why is this Bad IMO? It isn’t just a “gosh this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable” problem. The last year has seen riots burning down city centers, and insurection groups declare parts of a city an independant autonomous zone. Just last month we had a failed coup in an attempt to overturn our election, that lead to five deaths.  I think we’re in danger of social collapse and possible civil strife/violence if things continue to escalate.)

This sort of “Driving Good People Into The Dark Recesses” happens even to people who aren’t Red, but simply Aren’t Blue Enough. Fucking Laci Green of all people was outcast. Laci Green! It’s maddness, and I hate what it’s doing to all sides.

It just happened to Gina Carano. Now that Disney fired her, she’s teaming up with freakin’ Ben Shapiro. While I’ll admit Ben Shapiro isn’t the worst person on the right, he’s definitely in the Shitty Person camp, and having Carano pushed towards him has made everything worse. A good Red Person is being driven deeper towards the cruddy recesses, and everyone on the left celebrates? Is this really what you wanted? Has this made the world a better place?

The problem is that any who’s already drowning in the Blue Tide doesn’t see the difference between a Gina and a Ben. I’ve had people ask me how I could defend someone who’s part of a political party that sometimes courts the votes of racists with swastika tattooes. I don’t understand how such a person can consider themselves an enlightened member of the modern world. We were supposed to be the side that looked beyond what group you fell into. We looked beyond skin color, or religion, or lack of education, or accent. We judged people individually for what they themselves did. We do not believe in collective punishment or collective prejudice. We understand that all groups have many people a great nuance within them.

Or we did, at one time. Now all we need to know about someone is that they are proudly Red, and we know that they’re part of a group that includes racists, so they deserve to be outcast. If someone were to point out that some people in the Blue Tribe are violent, unapologetically racist, unapologetically sexist, promote the mass murder of demographic groups, and believe in group punishment, well… those are a small minority. They don’t speak for the Democratic Party. They’re outlier fringe groups. We are a Big Tent that has to represent many people, and we keep the most-radical in check. We are nuanced. But you… you’re a monolithic block. Get fucked.

Sadly, the Democratic Party is far from falling apart, and so unlike the Republican party, I don’t think the knot of horrible Blues will be excised any time soon. If anything, they seem to be gaining power. There’s some people trying to push against that (even little old me, with my miniscule little blog), but we appear to be losing. :/

(And yes, much like what happened to Rowling, I expect that what happened to Carano will push her further and further right, and will end up with her associating with actual bad people, and thus this post won’t age well. That’s a feature of this sort of attack though, not a bug. Good job guys. /s)

Kamala Harris is a coward who attacks the vulnerable for popularity

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  2 Responses »
Aug 132020
 

I.

You can tell a person’s character by how they treat vulnerable people.

Throughout history there have always been victim populations. People who are targetted for abuse specifically because they are vulnerable and unpopular. A small subpopulation that doesn’t have the ability to defend itself, that is denigrated by the rest of society as unclean or immoral, and that anyone can throw a punch against to make themselves more popular without any fear of retaliation or consequence.

In a noble society, such a group would be protected. In most societies their plight is ignored. In some of the worst societies, what few protections such groups may have had are systematically stripped away to make them more and more vulnerable.

There are people who say “If I was a 1930s German I would have stood up against the Nazis” or “If I was an early American I would have stood up against slavery,” not realizing that the problem isn’t standing up for a group of noble innocents, it’s associating yourself with a group of hated criminals in front of all of your peers and coworkers.

In 2018 Kamala Harris had an opportunity to gain public favor. To do this, she would have to target a group of people already hated by much of America. A group of people who already don’t have any protection of the law in their workplace. A group made up predominantly of women, minorities, and the poor. She would have to make their already precarious lives more dangerous, taking away some of the few tools they have to defend themselves, and turn the police even further against them. And if that wasn’t enough, Harris would be doing this by furthering the slander that this group is mostly child rapists.

She did this knowingly. Many advocacy organizations contacted her to plead on behalf of the hated group, as most of them can’t do so themselves. People I know in my personal life did some of this work, as they were Harris’s constituents at the time. But Kamala Harris saw the popularity to be gained by attacking this group, and judged that to be more important than standing up for a vulnerable, hated subpopulation in her state.

On March 21, 2018, Kamala Harris voted for H.R. 1865, known as Fosta/Sesta, to advance the persecution of sex workers, and to advance her own career at the cost of their misery and their lives.

II.

It sickens me that the two realistic options on the presidential ticket this year have an opportunistic abuser of the vulnerable on one side, and a wanna-be tyrant with contempt for democracy on the other. It makes me want to burn down the entire system. It makes me want to vote for someone who would do his darndest to destroy these corrupt institutions rather than bothering to actually lead the nation or act as an administrator.

This leads me to realize that’s exactly what Trump is. Trump is the brick thrown by the rioter. He is the molotov cocktail of the enraged, the wrench slipped into the works. In 2016, a vote for Trump was specifically a vote to destroy the system. He is the riot vote. The “a city/country on fire and in ruins is better than this” vote. We’ve had four years of a country on fire. It’s bad. I can’t believe these are my options.

But notice that Kamala Harris’s opportunistic abuse of the weak is what launches this brick-throwing. Kamala Harris is the reason Trump was elected in 2016. Too many people would rather see the system burn than see opportunistic evil like her’s take power.

III

Why yes, the funny part IS that a large part of the reason she got Biden’s VP nod was because there have been many violent riots recently, and people are afraid and want a cop to stop the violence. The cycle continues.

So Long To The Second Floor

 Musings On Present Day, Personal, WorldCon  3 Responses »
Aug 022020
 

Chicago 2012

In my recent review of A Memory Called Empire I posted

“there is nothing exceptional about this. It’s…. fine. It’s fine. But it’s not good. It’s certainly not genre-defining or among the best things published that year. It’s just a space opera story being stretched out to meet publisher demands for a series. That is not inspired, and it’s not inspiring.

I know there’s at least one Hugo nominated novel that I just don’t get every year, but I don’t think anyone is doing Martine a favor by pretending they think her novel is a Hugo contender. I feel bad that this happened.”

A few days later, A Memory Called Empire won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

This has made me really reflect on myself, SF in general, and what The Hugo Awards are/mean. Here’s what I’ve come to–

The Hugo Awards are given out by the participants of The World Science Fiction Convention. It’s a fancon run by huge SF fans, and it’s great. :) They read a lot of SF, and at some point in the past decided “Hell, we have this big ol’ party/con every year, why not vote on what our favorite books/stories of the last year were, and give them an award?”

As these cons are attended by people who read A LOT of SF, they were pretty decent at picking out really good examples of SF lit. Since the con is often attended by people in the SF publishing industry, and frequently by VERY big name authors in the SF field, the awards they gave out started to get some attention. In time they became a marker of overall quality in the field.

And yes, ultimately it’s a popularity contest. That means works by popular authors are more likely to be noticed, and outstanding novels by unknowns will sometimes be missed. That’s just how things are. Nonetheless, usually things that are really good become popular, so it works out enough that one accepts that The Perfect should not be the enemy of The Good.

But of key importance in a popularity contest is who the audience is. If you are a vegetarian, the Best BBQ In The South of 2020 isn’t gonna matter to you, because as good as it may be considered among BBQ aficionados, it just isn’t for you.

This is why I never bothered with Lit Fic awards. I don’t care how great some piece of LitFic is, I’m not gonna like it cuz it’s LitFic. The Hugo Awards were what I really cared about, because the people who voted on them were like me. They were nerds and dreamers who got excited about fantastic magical devices and weird alien societies, and heroes going through scarring trauma but saving the day in the end. They created a big ol’ nerd con they could all go to once a year where they’d all geek out together over the latest Fantasy epic or SF mind-fuck.

For the last several years, this has been less and less the case. And before we go nuts, I want to stress this is not a bad thing in itself. I’ll explain myself.

When guys hear I’m in a book club, they always assume I’m the only dude in a sea of women. This is because that’s what most non-SF book clubs are like. Ours is different, we have a nearly 50/50 split, sometimes favoring men a little. I assume this is because SF/F is typically viewed as a Guy Thing. There’s a stereotype of the SF nerd, and he’s not female.

We are fortunate to have a wide variety of people in my book club, and it makes for interesting discussions. We even have what I nowadays think of as “the white woke woman.” She’s not a social justice warrior. But she is white, well-educated, politically liberal, works in academia, etc. I want to stress here that none of these are bad things. We all love her, she is a joy to be around, and I consider her a friend. If you were to picture the type of lady that attends monthly book club meetings reading Lit Fic, you’d see her.

She loved most of the things nominated for this year’s Hugos. She was far more into the shorts than anyone else, they really spoke to her. And that is wonderful. It is always a pleasure to see a friend taking true delight in something! It is good for there to be joy in the world, and watching people experience that joy is great, and I don’t want to take that away from anyone.

But it strengthened my impression that the typical WoldCon attendee has been trending further and further away from the SF nerd that used to include me, and now consists mostly of the woke lady reader. I didn’t think anything of the fact that A Memory Called Empire was nominated — every year there is always some nominee that has no place in the Hugo pantheon IMO, but got in through a fluke of popular convergence. They are always sifted out during the voting process. This year, the sifting out decided that A Memory Called Empire is indeed the highest peak that one can aspire to within WorldCon circles.

This isn’t that surprising, when one thinks about it. Men Don’t Read. Not literally true, but when you look at the numbers, women consume FAR more written fiction than men do. If you want to be a successful author, your best bet is to write Romance, that’s where the majority of the money is. Failing that, LitFic aimed at women audiences is also huge. Whether this is because men are inherently less interested in reading, or if it’s because our sexist society systematically discourages male reading, or something else entirely, is unimportant. Women read a lot more, and they predictably have differing tastes in the aggregate.

In the past, SF had a certain aura about it that kept it mostly restricted to SF nerds. Most non-nerds stayed away, in part due to the aura of weird nerd crap that SF exuded. There were definitely nerd women in those circles (like I said, half our book club is women), but they were way outnumbered by the men. Also, they had tastes pretty similar to the other nerds, which is why they pushed through that aura of nerddom in the first place.

In the past decades, SF/F has become very mainstreamed. Normies read and love it now. Which is great! I love when people love things. :) But it means that the ghettos that used to be populated by SF nerds have been gentrified by regular readers. And most of those readers are woke women. They are educated and fairly well off. (It’s not a coincidence that going to WorldCon is far more expensive now. It’s also often an international destination event.) That’s simply how the demographics work out when a written genre becomes popular. Most heavy readers of most fiction words are educated, well-off, and women. Demographics aren’t good or bad, they’re just the way the world is.

So the Hugos are now, in effect, an award given out by a type of person with tastes very different from my own. I am glad they have a community they are happy in, and an award they can give out to celebrate works they love. I admit I am sad to be evicted from a place I used to consider a home. But I ain’t fancy, I’m a basic boi that reads a bunch, and I don’t fit in anymore. When all your friends move out, ultimately you gotta realize it’s time for you to move on as well.

What does this mean for me? It means I can no longer say anything is “Hugo material” or not, because my judgements of quality do not mesh with the audience of the Hugos. It means I don’t really need to bother reading Hugo works, any more than I read LitFic award winners, because they don’t say anything useful about what I will appreciate. And it means I gotta go looking for a community that is more like me, and likes the things I like, so I can go geek out with them and feel at home again. Maybe we can even throw a con for ourselves so we can meet up IRL and fanboy about the latest thing with cool swords and explosions and tormented heroes and freshman philosophical quandaries. :)

On the plus side, WorldCon was my nerd home for a while, and I’ll always have those memories, and the friends I made there

Emergency Skin is Satire, plus Poe’s Law

 Book Club Review, Musings On Present Day, WorldCon  No Responses »
Jul 212020
 

Sorry for the long delay, I guess sometimes “tomorrow” means “in over a week”!

I.

Anyhow, yes, Emergency Skin is meant to be funny. I don’t think this should be controversial. I mean, there’s a dick joke in the first paragraph. Not only does the poor protag obviously not know what is desirable in a human body (long thighs?), but he’s being sold a long penis when we all know a long, thin penis is no one’s friend.

Most of the humor in the story is of this style – we see a naive protagonist being lied to by a narrator that is taking advantage of him. It’s a sort of comedy of errors, as we see a couple of complete idiots bumbling about in a Three Stooges-style fiasco, getting more and more wrapped up their buffoonery. Like, how can you not laugh at a society that thinks they’re The Best Evar but apparently hated women so much they replaced them all with “pleasurer robots?” Their entire society is so mentally and culturally deficient that it’s pretty clear that they were politely given the tech to leave by a humanity that really wanted them to move away, and they’ve lied to all their descendants claiming that they were so very smart that they found a way to leave the planet when no one else could. As if they’d had the capability to do cutting edge research, or accumulate vast wealth, with the three brain cells they had left. :D

Anyway, this would just be a straight-up farce if it was simply a depiction of this society of charicatures, but it turns into a satire when we see one of these flunkies coming back to Earth to interact with normal people. At that point, Emergency Skin reads very much like a take down of bad message fiction. It’s holding up a mirror to writers of bad message fic and saying “See, this is what you look like when you don’t do this well.” Writing good message fiction is a skill, and takes a lot of work. When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Satire can point this out via demonstration, and make us laugh along the way.

The really cool part of Emergency Skin is that you actually feel sympathy for the protag here, because he’s so niave and doesn’t know any better. He’s being used by the narator, and so we cheer when he sees through their lies and decides to go back and help his fellow citizens. There’s an actual good character arc, which is pretty unusual for a short satire piece.

II.

Poe’s Law is an artifact from the atheism wars on the early internet, which states that it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied. No matter how ridiculous of a religious claim you made, someone would think it was serious, because why not? Religions are already looney toons. Religious people would often get upset about this, saying that it was plain freakin’ insulting that someone would say they couldn’t tell the difference between an absurd parody and a real religious claim. This sometimes resulted in hilarious own-goals, when it was discovered the original claimant was in fact a religious person expressing a sincere belief that the objecting theist had claimed was so ridiculous that only a liar trying to Own The Opposition would pretend to be confused whether it was a joke or not.

(Related fun study – some conservatives thought The Colbert Report was a pro-conservative show. From a study: “conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.”)

Which is to say that the meta punchline is Emergency Skin is being Poe’d. At least a couple people in our book club assumed Jemisin was writing this as a serious piece of anti-something propaganda. I’m not entirely sure what the “something” in this case is, but I think some combination of Billionaires, Capitalists, Whites, and Men. And, sure, those are all popular targets of the illiberal woke-ists out there. But I don’t think an objective reading of the story can support this.

III.

The story, as a satire, is pretty obviously about idiots the rest of humanity didn’t want to have around. They are shown to be a dysfunctional society brought to the brink of extinction due to their own mental, moral, and cultural failures. They’re just barely keeping old tech functioning, having to scavenge repair parts from Old Earth regularly. They are a fascist slave-owning society with dogma and philosophy completely inimicable to scientific advancement or functional capitalist systems. There is no way they got off Earth on their own. They were basically kicked off, and teach their descendants blatent lies. They do their best to hide these lies from the scavenger scout, but the truth is so blindingly apparent, and the society is so inept at even something as basic as lying, that the figleaf of falsehoods is blasted away immediately upon arrival.

The story, as serious criticism, is…. let’s say “problematic.” It’s the story of a minority group of humans. This minority group has distinct physical features (skin color, facial structure, hair) that make it obviously different from the rest of humanity. This minority group is also mentally, morally, and culturally retarded. Yet despite being vastly inferior to the rest of humanity, they have somehow insideously taken control of major power structures on Earth. In addition, they’ve tricked, defrauded, or outright stolen vast amounts of wealth from those who created it and should rightfully own it, and horde it for themselves. When the rest of humanity was in its most desperate situation, they stabbed humanity in the back and abandoned us, taking all their stolen wealth with them.

Basically, they’re 1930s Jews in Nazi propaganda.

What’s more, it turns out that once they were left to themselves, their true nature of theiving untermensch is revealed, and their new world collapses. Meanwhile, now that Earth is freed of their insidious leeching, Earth flourishes, and ushers in a New Golden Age where everyone has plenty and there is no more strife. By extension, the reader is left to wonder that if only… IF ONLY this vile minority of sub-humans could somehow be removed from the planet everything would be sunshine and roses.

So, yeah. I know this is combining Poe’s Law with Godwin’s Law, but reading this as a serious work of modern cultural criticism, one would be forced to say that Jemisin basically recreated the worst kind of exterminationist Nazi propaganda. And, to be quite honest, I don’t think that’s remotely plausible. It’s as silly as saying Colbert is a secret Republican, or Obama is a secret Muslim, or Scott Alexander is a secret Nazi.

And come on! This is a story that includes lines like “Beautiful? That’s… You’re only saying that beacuse they have skin.” Or “They want everything for everyone and look at where it’s gotten them! Half of them aren’t even men.” These are jokes, and pretty good ones!

Also, would an author that seriously embraced that sort of ideology be one of only two (of the twelve short work authors) who didn’t make the story available freely to all? And be the only author who made the story available ONLY at Amazon, so people are forced to give their money to the boogeyman of the leftists? I had to install a Kindle app to read this, I don’t think anti-capitalism is a driving value here. :)

Profiles in Cowardice: HBO

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  No Responses »
Jul 072020
 

I was recently brought to my attention by my cohost at The Mind Killer podcast that HBO is run by simpering cowards. They will not make available the five South Park episodes that have Muhammad in them.

Two of these episodes, Cartoon Wars part 1 and part 2, are still available to the South Park Comedy Central website (linked).

The other three: Super Best Friends (alt); 200, and 201 (combined), are available at various torrent sites around the internet. I can’t vouch for any of these links, I didn’t download them myself.

The episodes also are likely available on the DVD versions. Super Best Friends is in season 5 and 200 & 201 are in Season 14. Again, I have not bought these, so I can’t verify they are on the DVDs.

And here’s my drawing of Muhammad from way back in the day. Remember the cartoonists massacred in Paris. HBO has spit on their memory.

 

The Real Transphobes Are The Ones We Made Along The Way

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  7 Responses »
Jun 162020
 

I. TERFs are shitbags

I didn’t really know what a TERF was or why anyone cared for a while. If some minority of women didn’t think that some women were “real” women, how was that different from any other form of dumb gatekeeping? As usual, enlightenment came in the form of a blog post —

If you ever visit a racist internet forum or user group or whatever, you’ll notice that they do the same thing. They talk about every single gruesome crime committed by a black person or an immigrant or a Muslim, anywhere in the world. They seek these out […] [in] TERF blogs, a large share of the content is – yep – circulating gruesome, horrifying, and detailed accounts of random crimes or acts of bullying committed by specific trans people. […] Doing this warps your intuitions. It is possible to target any group of more than a few thousand people with this tactic, it tells you nothing, and it’s bad.

TERFs don’t just do the usual shitty gatekeeping thing — they actively practice blood-libel. That’s basically all I need to know about them. They’ve outed themselves as horrible people who deserve contempt. Maybe in a time before social media, that would have been the end of it.

II. Universal Guilt

Societies tend to be in favor of guilty people being punished and innocent people being left alone. This is all well and good normally, but some groups want to really dominate everyone. Millenia ago religion came up with one of the simpler mechanisms of control — universal guilt. It starts with Original Sin, sure, but that’s too abstract for the common folk. The real money is in making normal behavior “deviant.” The more powerful the drive to do the “evil” thing is for everyone, the more power the church has. Once you make sexual attraction itself a sin, you’ve really got ’em by the balls.

Governments picked up on this. It’s very inconvenient having citizens you can’t threaten with imprisonment at any time, which is why it’s impossible not to break some law simply by living a normal life. The more impossible it is to not break a law while trying to live, the more power the government has. Then the government selectively enforces the law based on how much you’ve annoyed them.

This is also the reason there are words you can’t say. Much of the purpose of having such shiboleths is for the creation of victims. It gives the punishing organization control over people’s lives. And the more such words are things people feel driven to say, the more power the organization has.

 

III. Outrage Junkies

I’m not going to re-examine the guts of the social media mob, it’s been so extensively documented that there’s nothing for me to add. Self-righteous rage is addictive, and many people need someone new to hate and destroy every week to keep their endorphins going. The bigger the target, the stronger the rush. And a juicy fall-from-grace narrative that allows people to get in on a plunge from truly outlanding heights… well, that is a prize you don’t get every day.

Enter JK Rowling. Rowling has a long history of championing progressive causes, from women to minorities to the queer community. She’s among the most famous people in the English-speaking world, and a billionaire, and has used that fame and wealth to advance the causes of progressives. It would be quite a scandal if she was a Secret Nazi.

Rowling has never displayed hatred of trans persons. (Yes, she fears cismen as a class, but I think such fears are largely legitimate) She hasn’t participated in bloodlibel showcasings of trans criminals, nor of dehumanizing speech. The worst one can say she’s done is prioritized outreach to ciswomen, and expressed fears that safe spaces for women could be phased out for gender-neutral spaces instead.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with someone prioritizing helping other people like themselves who have had the same struggles in life. No one can help everyone, and many people are motivated to help minority groups which they themselves belong to. This is fine, and common. Very few people complain that scholarships for black people don’t accept applicants who aren’t black. Or that support groups for immigrants don’t support people who aren’t immigrants.

I think it’s unfortunate that bathrooms are the defacto safe-spaces we have for women in public areas, but if there is a social goal of providing such safe spaces for women (both cis and trans), then they must prohibit men from entering (both cis and trans). I am aware that it’s debatable if such safe spaces are needed at all.

What Rowling is “guilty” of is using words that are tabooed. Of (most recently) pointing out (correctly) that our society used to have a word for “people who menstruate” and now such a word no longer exists. And being flippant and salty about it.

 

IV. Creating Frankenstein’s Monster

Because certain people are so eager for their outrage porn, when Rowling has uttered tabooed words before, they were quick to denounce her as a transphobe and a TERF, and spread the word as quickly as possible.

It’s obvious that Rowling’s first missteps were, as is normally the case, the missteps of someone who thinks that merely being a good person and being allied with progressives will offer some protection. “These people know I’m not evil” is a common mistake of someone questioning official dogma they think might be wrong.

It’s been a while since then, with a few outrage cycles. The noteworthy part of this latest situation is that in her response post, Rowling cites TERFs and repeats some TERF talking points, despite not being a transphobe herself.

As has been pointed out before, when good people censor the truth, then the only place people who want to know/say the truth can go is forums held by bad people. If one was never allowed to say “Black criminality rates are higher than the US national average” one couldn’t follow that up with “due to government-aided impoverization and the legacy of racist policies.” If the only place one could go to even utter the question “Why are black criminality rates higher?” was the forums of racists, the only answers one would find is “because black people are inherently bad.”

If the only place one can say anything in the vein of “I’m uncomfortable with governments treating a cisman who says the words “I’m a woman” as a woman for policy purposes” without being turned into a pariah is in TERF forums, then one will go there to say it. As surely as horny teens will fool around regardless of how evil sex may be in the eyes of God. And once in the forums of the TERFs, one is going to be assaulted by their vile sewage.

This is the stupid, stupid cycle of wokeism. The thought-lines must be kept pure, so deviation is met with exile, and exiles are subsequently exposed to drowning oceans of hate-mongering and bloodlibel. The justice mob ruins lives AND makes society worse by their own metric. But hey, at least they feel really good while doing it.

Frankly, I’m relieved that Rowling appears to have remained mostly trans-friendly, with a possible blindspot regarding safe-spaces. I think she has a strong heart, and she’ll ultimately resist the hatred spewed by the TERFs. But man, what a horrible thing to do to someone. Way to go, Wokes.

 

V. Why Bother?

I pondered for some time about whether to write this at all. I lost one of the most important relationships of my life by publicly & repeatedly opposing woke dogma a few years back. Usually the price of speaking up isn’t nearly that high, but there is a social cost every time, and a lot of stress.

In large part it goes back to pedophile priests.

When I was an atheist activist, I was outraged by pedophile priests and the cover they got from their parishioners. Not just The Church. I couldn’t believe how much ordinary people would just not say anything about it. It wasn’t their business. Their priest was fine. Why involve themselves in this mess that wasn’t their fault?

I think maybe it was unfair of me to expect church-going people to denounce pedophile priests. They aren’t to be held accountable for someone else’s actions. But I never could get over the silence. It still angers me.

I don’t want to be the person who is always silent. Who sees denunciations I think are unfair, but leaves it alone because it’s not my business. That’s how everyone ends up thinking everyone is a woke-ist, when most people are not.

To call Rowling a transphobe is to devalue the word to the point where it’s not useful in fighting actual hate. Those calling her such are outrage-porn addicts that don’t care what damage they do as long as they can get their next hit. Don’t be like them. And if you see something like this happen, if you can afford to take the hit, dropping even just a “I disagree” helps. :)

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