Using the NRA for good

 Musings On Present Day  13 Responses »
Dec 082015
 

prepare for securityYou gotta admire the NRA for their dedication. They are the embodiment of heroic responsibility, IF one restricts that responsibility sole to defending a right to own firearms.

I enjoy fiction about bad-ass motherfuckers, in the sense that they absolutely do whatever is necessary to Get Shit Done. Takeshi Kovacs and Rorschach are these sorts of bad-ass motherfuckers. Harry J. Potter-Evans-Verres is another. Because being a bad-ass motherfucker does NOT mean physically beating the crap out of someone. It is a state of mind. It means when something has to be done you trust no one else to do it, and you don’t take even the slightest chance it could go wrong, because it’s too goddamned important. Almost no one behaves this way about anything, because it’s destructive and dangerous. But that sort of bad-assness makes my blood sing. :)

The NRA is that way about gun rights. I seriously doubt most NRA supporters actually want to make anti-tank weaponry legal. They want handguns and rifles. But the NRA knows that if we even get to the point where we’re considering discussing limits on handguns and rifles, they’ve already lost. They need to keep the discussion as far from that as possible. In an ideal world they’d be able to keep the discussion on “should we limit people to just TWO rocket launchers?”, so that nothing ever gets even close to infringing on small arms. That’s how important that right is! You don’t take chances on something like that, you leave as wide a margin as physically possible.

Which is why I support making it illegal for people on the No-Fly List to buy guns. As we all know, the No-Fly List is fascist bullshit. People are placed on it without notice and without charge. The process that leads one to be put on the No-Fly List is unknown, and there is no way to challenge or dispute the placement. No appeal, no recourse. It is arbitrary government impingement on one’s ability to travel, and I suppose I should expect that by now, but by god is it vile! The ACLU, because they are principled as hell, opposes any sorts of liberty restrictions based on this bullshit black list.

Normally I’d also be against it. Restricting liberties arbitrarily should never be allowed. Demonstrate why a particular person should not denied their constitutional rights first! But in this particular case, I say – do it. Because the NRA will have a goddamn stroke. Perhaps they will throw their considerable weight behind the effort to make the No-Fly List accountable to some sort of fucking oversight, or have it trashed utterly and relegated to the history textbooks as another embarrassment in our claims of being the land of freedom and bravery. If anyone could do it… well, it’ll probably be the ACLU, actually. But it’d be nice to see the NRA using their wealth and power to do something that’s actually good, for a change.

Zuckerberg’s Moral Karma

 Musings On Present Day  6 Responses »
Dec 052015
 

zuckerbergI generally don’t go seeking out drama. It’s made my life much better. So when I first started seeing posts about how terrible Mark Zuckerberg is, I thought “Well, thank goodness that’s another controversy I won’t ever have to get embroiled in. Everyone I know is already sane.” Turns out I was wrong. I personally, IRL, know someone who started saying what a terrible person Zuckerberg is, so now I have to say something. /sigh

I don’t want to repeat everything that’s already been said better by smarter people, so instead here’s a link to 5 criticisms of billionaire mega-philanthropy, debunked, and one to Unit of Caring.

At first I was shocked to hear anyone was shitting on Zuckerberg at all. Who hears “A billionaire is giving away almost all his money” and thinks “THAT ASSHOLE! Let’s take him down a peg!”? Looking over the arguments, I was struck by something someone else (can’t recall who) said – It is remarkably difficult to steel-man* the anti-Zuckerberg arguements. The “best” I ran into was that this amount of money was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and Zuckerberg should be using his resources to effect systemic change instead. Interestingly, this argument came from a person who is normally very vocal about how the mega-wealthy have far too much say in politics, and their riches should be ejected from the political process. Do we seriously want MORE money in politics?

And what exactly are Zuckerberg’s options anyway? The people who are attacking him for giving away almost all his money to humanitarian efforts are implicitly saying that he should either A) use the money to go into politics instead, or B) spend it on gold-plated yatches and other rich-people toys instead.

A) What if Zuckerberg isn’t sure his political opinions are the best opinions possible, and he doesn’t want to impose them on others? Or that he doesn’t want to ignite the hatred of half the voting public (look at how Soros and the Koch Brothers are viewed) and doesn’t want to get into that whole EXTREMELY wasteful tug-of-war? Zuckerberg-haters are very explicitly giving a “You’re with us or you’re against us” ultimatum, which is always a big red flag that you are the evil side. What’s a guy who wants to stay neutral to do? One would think that good, politically-neutral charities would be the way to go, but apparently that just gets you hate from both sides. So you go with B)

B) Toys. You know, what rich people typically spend their money on. Anyone who promotes this is, IMHO, trying to make the world a worse place. I am reminded of this fantastic passage from Three Worlds Collide, which takes place in a utopia:

>”There was so much wrong with the world that the small resources of altruism were splintered among ten thousand urgent charities, and none of it ever seemed to go anywhere.  And yet… and yet…”

“There was a threshold crossed somewhere,” said the Confessor, “without a single apocalypse to mark it.  Fewer wars.  Less starvation.  Better technology.  The economy kept growing.  People had more resource to spare for charity, and the altruists had fewer and fewer causes to choose from.  They came even to me, in my time, and rescued me.  Earth cleaned itself up, and whenever something threatened to go drastically wrong again, the whole attention of the planet turned in that direction and took care of it.  Humanity finally got its act together.”

This gives me shivers when I read it. You need the context of the rest of the story, but it’s so damned beautiful. Someday, we can get there. And everyone who is shitting on Zuckerberg is making this less likely. They’re pushing it further away. Philanthropy should be encouraged.

Of course none of this is about philanthropy at all. What it’s actually about is Mark Zuckerberg, and Moral Karma. I want to thank Scott Alexander for clarifying the concept of Moral Karma for me, in his post Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments. So much of the world makes much more sense after reading that. To summarize – in almost any political conflict, no one gives a shit about the actual policies. They pick the side they support. Then they load that side with as much “Good Karma” as they can. (“Concepts get good karma by doing good moral things, by being associated with good people, by being linked to the beloved in-group, and by being oppressed underdogs in bravery debates.”) They load the opposing side with as much “Bad Karma” as they can. (“Concepts get bad karma by committing atrocities, being associated with bad people, being linked to the hated out-group, and by being oppressive big-shots in bravery debates. Also, she obviously needs to neutralize Player 1’s actions by disproving all of her arguments.”). The winner of the Karma Contest gets to set the actual policies as they see fit.

Suddenly all the hate makes sense. Zuckerberg is the head of Facebook. He’s already associated with privacy violations, rampant consumerism, those awful Millennials, those terrible people gentrifying San Francisco, and whatever other excesses of capitalism the Blue Tribe hates. Zuckerberg/Facebook is very much The Hated Opposition of Blue Tribe. Therefore it is a Blue Tribe imperative to ensure his Karma balance is always in the Negative.

Now Zuckerberg is donating all his wealth to charity, which is traditionally a Good Karma move. And it’s a LOT of wealth. There is a danger that this action could push A Hated Opponent into the realm of Positive Karma. This is absolutely not allowable. It is a threat to the side of Goodness and Justice, and what kind of evil mutant supports a Hated Opponent against the side of Goodness and Justice?? This is the time where “she obviously needs to neutralize Player 1’s actions by disproving all of her arguments” rears its ugly head. Since it’s very hard to forcibly stop Zuckerberg from giving away his money, it now must be proven that he’s not really doing it for good reasons, and it doesn’t count, and he’s still a terrible person.

Finally the hatred makes sense. As Jai points out in Foes Without Faces, people love villains, and causes without a human face get neglected (“It’s obviously not worth allying ourselves with an ancient unspeakable evil whose voice is the essence of death just to kill one lousy human, no matter how awful they are. Right?” “Would the plan to compromise polio eradication to hunt down Bin Laden have gone forward if our leaders treated faceless enemies with the same weight they afford human enemies?”). Zuckerberg has a face. The millions of people who could potentially be helped by his charitable efforts? Not so much. No more than the hundreds of thousands of potential victims of polio. They’re a statistic. So it’s easy to get people to keep attacking a hated Villain, and not even realize that they are literally pushing away the Three World’s utopia by doing so.

Because we can’t even say “This person is evil, and the things he did in the past are awful, but this one thing he did is good. Even if he did it for the wrong reasons, it is a good thing, and we should encourage that thing.” No. Fuck that person. Never let anything good be associated with them, no matter the cost. The Karma War cannot be lost.

To not be too much of a downer, I must consider how I update my beliefs. Do I update in the direction of “people are inherently amoral, and political contests matter more to them than actually being good”? Or do I update in the direction of “Outrage is a fantastic way to spread memes, and the most outrage-producing ones are the most shared ones, even when they reflect only a tiny minority viewpoint, and so I should further downgrade my opinion of The Media rather than humanity in general”?

I think the question answers itself. Or at least I tried to word it so it would. :) In either case – Zuckerberg is awesome. The world would be better if more people emulated his example, at least in this regard. A “Like” to him!

 

* Steel-manning being the act of strengthening your opponents position in order to engage it more fairly and thoughtfully – the opposite of straw-manning)

Link Archive 10/1/15 – 12/1/15

 Uncategorized  4 Responses »
Dec 012015
 

Cats are AssholesIf you want to say Thank You, don’t say Sorry

The Beggar CEO and Sucker Culture “We wear our unpaid, uncompensated overtime as a badge of honor. We sleep less, brag about our caffeine intake, and are available for calls and emails 18 hours per day. We measure our importance by how many half hour slots during the day are double or triple booked, and we perversely consider it honorable to do this for free.”

Beyond Gun Control
In 2012, 90 people were killed in mass shootings. Nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns.
Ceasefire dropped youth homicides by 63 percent in the two years after it was launched
assessment from a White House staffer: There was no political will in the country to address inner-city violence.
“These are men who do not trust the police to keep them safe, so “they take matters into their own hands,” It’s long-running feuds, Crandall said, that drive most murders in Oakland.
Men involved in these conflicts may want a safer life, but it’s hard for them to put their guns down. “The challenge is that there is no graceful way to bow out of the game,”

The media has no idea how to deal with Donald Trump’s constant lying – “this dynamic is generally why liars and conspiracy theorists aren’t allowed on respectable news programs.”

Fast-Talking High-Trousers! I love the way that accent sounds (or sounded, I guess) Why Do People In Old Movies Talk Weird?

Hardball Questions For The Next Debate includes a very convincing narrative relating how Bush’s grandfather stole a holy relic from the defeated Nazi government at the end of WWII and used it gain political power(!) (In the question to Rubio)

The Modern Workplace Is Designed To Make You Sick. My fellow office workers know what he’s talking about.

How Facebook is Stealing Billions of Views >< I know, I know – we’re not the customer, we’re the product. But outright theft is really a step beyond the pale.

Jim’s rule of buts – Reverse your but. For serious guys. “what follows ‘but’ always dominates what precedes it. Compare, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, but what you said made me really angry.” and “What you said made me really angry, but I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

If you have Facebook M, you have a free, human personal assistant. I can’t imagine Facebook will be subsidizing free assistants for all of us for very long… what’s the end-game here?

Hang The Jedi
“when Anakin Skywalker turns to mass murder – he isn’t even so much as censured, let alone removed from the Council and brought to justice.”
“The Jedi only seem to protest chattel slavery of humans when it inconveniences them personally, and themselves casually keep mechanical sentients … that can be sold, destroyed, or even mind-wiped at the whim of their owners.”

(and if the payload delivered in the last paragraph of the article interests you, I highly recommend the related links:
The Hobbit: How the ‘clomping foot of nerdism’ destroyed Tolkien’s dream – and the fantasy genre
&
very afraid (Worldbuilding is dull) )

Over Half the Student Body of One Colorado High School Facing Felony Charges. For sexting. Thank god they broke up that crime ring. What other crimes can you be both the victim and the perpetrator?

MLP vs Your Civics Textbook
“My Little Pony Friendship is Magic presents a bitterly cynical portrayal of democratic elections. Pip is a silent pawn of the organized minority special interest group, the Cutie Mark Crusaders. They control every aspect of his election, handle his marketing and stir up support among the rationally ignorant and ideologically motivated electorate.”
“Pip did what politicians do best: smile and wave. He kept his mouth shut and presumed not to know anything about actual electioneering.”

According to Alex Irvine on Twitter, Ted Chaing has a new anthology coming out from Knopf! According to google “Ted Chiang’s second collection, gathering together seven stories and one novella…” and the rest is behind a paywall. I’m wondering how many will be new! /excited

Just in case anyone missed it when it went around – Best Star Wars theory since “you need to die in front of Luke to get a ghost body”. Jar Jar Binks was a trained Force user, knowing Sith collaborator, and will play a central role in The Force Awakens. Trolling level = Epic
How Do You Paint 10,000 Paintings a Month?
“A painter with rows and rows of the same half-finished canvasses scooped up paint and went down the row. He painted an identical brushstroke on each painting, and then repeated the process. One brushstroke at a time, the paintings made their way toward completion.”
“the painters did not have set hours, and they did not clock in and out every day. In most cases, the owners let the painters fulfill orders on their own and, after checking the quality, paid the artists per painting.”
“Although painters will work together, assembly-line-style, to meet large orders, Wong writes that these situations are “intermittent.” The norm is for painters to work individually.”

“Republicans in Congress has given Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) – the head of the House science committee – authority to demand any document he wants for whatever reason.
He uses this power to create huge financial and logistical burdens on any scientist who reports conclusions he does not like – demanding years of emails and document not only from them but from anybody they may talk to.”

Trolley problem answers measured in relation to how drunk the subject is. Either “drunk people are emotionally steeled rationalists who are willing to do whatever it takes to save lives” or “drunk people are more willing to “just go with it” when a random graduate student asks them to participate in a thought experiment about killing people.” :D

I know I just linked to it a few days back, but: Over the past few years I’ve come to accept that News, like Politics, is primarily about keeping the American middle-class entertained and has little to do with the Public Good. This article confirms my biases, so I will share it.
“there turns out to be a huge market for thoughtless inflammatory contrarianism, and much less of one for anything reflective or nuanced.”
“the real problem is that these blossomings of controversy are (1) manufactured for consumption and (2) totally disconnected from any kind of meaningful action in the real world. As to point (1), it’s odd that I can get paid to think of ways to poke the internet hornets’ nest, because if I can get a bunch of people to shout about a thing, a company makes money.”
“Clickbait gets clicks. I click on it. I mean, I would have read my own article, even if I would have been bored by it and then fumed about how petty and humorless the author was.”
“It’s not that editors are bad gatekeepers, then. In fact, I’m astonished by how perceptive they are. They know exactly what succeeds.”
“there’s something brain-deadening about “current” affairs, because remaining current precludes getting in-depth background knowledge. The more time you spend trying to “stay informed,” the less informed you actually become compared with someone who doesn’t stay informed but goes and learns things.”

“Human beings are not in general Colour-blind.  The law is not Colour-blind.  It makes a difference not only what bits you have, but where they came from.”
Huge bonus points for making something understandable by extensive reference to Paranoia.
“The US Naval Observatory Web site provides information on that site about when the Sun rises and sets and so on… but they also provide it under a disclaimer saying that this information is not suitable for use in court. If you need to know when the Sun rose or set for use in a court case, then you need an expert witness – because you don’t actually just need the bits that say when the Sun rose. You need those bits to be Coloured with the Colour that allows them to be admissible in court, and the USNO doesn’t provide that.”

From Jai, who blogs rarely because he only posts when it’s perfect: Foes Without Faces.
“The enemy is out there. The enemy does not know love, or hope, or anything of what it is to be human. The enemy does not mourn its countless victims.”
“The “Mayhem” series has won over 80 advertising awards, Since launching in mid-2010, Allstate’s stock has more than doubled.”
“The US spends $16.6 billion on counterterrorism efforts every year. Terrorism, in turn, kills fewer than 10 people in the US most years. That comes out to about a bit over five million dollars per life saved. What makes us so much more determined to fight terrorism than traffic accidents?”
“Enemies are fun.”

Chivalry Isn’t Dead, You Just Don’t Know What the Fuck it is.
“See, the word “chivalry” comes from the French word “chevalier,” which comes from “cheval,” which means “horse.” Chivalry is literally just “rules for if you have a horse.” This was an important set of rules to have in chivalry times. Horses were the Blackhawk Helicopters of the Middle Ages; if you had a horse, you could absolutely kill anybody who didn’t have a horse and nobody was going to say a god damn thing. The only thing stopping you was chivalry.”

“New Yorkers have the smallest carbon footprints in the United States: less than 30 percent of the national average”
If everyone in the sprawling suburban wastelands would move into compact housing in urban centers, just imagine how much land could be returned to nature to preserve wildlife, grow forests, etc.

UC Berkeley – where if you do your job too well and you make the old guard look bad, they fire you.

“Instead of trying to figure out what his child was learning, Herrmann did what so many parents do these days: He complained about something he doesn’t understand.
The problem with the method people like Herrmann learned is that it didn’t work when the math got harder.
Instead, Herrmann wasted everyone’s time by writing a useless check and putting it on Facebook.
Because, to people like him, ignorance is hilarious.”

SF/F Review – The Traitor Baru Cormorant

 Book Club Review  6 Responses »
Nov 252015
 

the-traitor-baru-cormorantThe Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson

Synopsis: To overthrow the Empire that devastated her homeland, Baru infiltrates it to become one of its powerful bureaucrats and destroy it from within.

Book Review: The first thing you see in the book is the map (below). And right away the book lets you know this will be different from what you’re used to. Maps always show what is important to the mapmaker. In most fantasy books this is the territory of the journey. The hero’s hometown to the Stronghold of Evil. In between are national borders, the mountains that stop armies, the Dark Forest where the hero is tested. In Traitor Baru, the borders barely matter. They’re loosely roughed in. There are no major physical features, aside from the rivers that facilitate trade. What the map DOES show is political allegiances, economic ties, and resource dependence/abundance. Right away the book is telling you “This is not about wars and movement. This is about political influence, and economic power.” It’s a brilliant way to start a book. Or rather, to start THIS book.

If you like smart characters with smart opponents who manipulate their environments with whatever tools they have – tools which they often go to great lengths to make available to themselves – you will like this book. And by “environments” I do mean physical environment sometimes, but more often the social and political forces that can alter much more around you than you could alter by yourself. This is a book of out-thinking your enemy, and hard choices.

And really, the hard choices is what it all comes down to. I’ve written before about how much I love Seth Dickinson’s short fiction. One of his recurring themes (and certainly present in Traitor Baru) is “How much are you willing to sacrifice, to do the right thing?” How much will you give up to save the innocent from the corrupt? Forget silly things like your body or your life – how much of your soul will you give? Is your very humanity that important, when compared to the world you will be saving?

This theme runs a livewire through my psyche. I cannot get enough of it. Dickinson executes it well… although not quite as well as in his short stories. In his shorts he holds nothing back. The novel Traitor Baru is, surprisingly, very emotionally reserved. One fellow reader speculated that this is an effort to get us to sympathize with Baru’s life trapped in the closet. Not just about her sexuality, but about every single thing she cares about. Her world is lies upon masks upon lies, and she assumes that everyone around her lies just as much as she does. As a result she can never show true emotion, and expects that no one else does either. This makes sense as self-defense, but it hurts the emotional narrative. Another fellow reader speculated that this was necessary as a mercy to the reader, because, if we were too involved with Baru emotionally, most readers would not be able to endure the story (it is a very painful story), and especially not the gut-punch ending (seriously, the ending is fucking amazing). It’s hard enough to read even as emotionally-dampened as it is. Perhaps that’s true? But I want that pain in my fiction, I thrive on it. I was disappointed it wasn’t sharper. A final conjecture was that Baru is at least somewhat autistic, which… duh. Of course she is. That doesn’t mean the emotion needs to be held back from the reader, we’re inside her head.

Also, I really could have used some more visceral scenes of the Empire’s evil. Yes, I get it, colonialism is bad. Agreed. But “colonialism is bad” isn’t emotionally compelling, whereas “watching teeth fly and blood pool as someone kicks my father to death” is. There was a lot of the former and very little of the latter.

So, it’s not a perfect book. But it is still really good. Recommended.

6a00e54ed05fc2883301bb0889237d970d

Book Club Review: This book sparked one of the best discussions we’ve had. First, there’s simply so much to discuss. Not just about imperialism and sexuality and technological change either, but ranging across Baru’s choices, her view of the world as a puzzle, and the nature of our humanity. Is there anything that should be off-limits to sacrifice, if the rewards are great enough? At what point does certainty-of-outcomes breakdown enough that you should revert to deontology over utilitarianism? If you somehow exhaust that topic, there’s also stylistic choices that Dickinson made to be discussed–there’s plenty to say about his writing as well as about what was written. Even the people in our group who really disliked the book said this was an amazing discussion, they loved the book club meeting itself, and they were glad they read it and attended to discuss it. I’m not sure you can get a much greater endorsement when evaluating a book for book-club-suitability. HIGHLY Recommended!

Cultural Appropriation Watch! The protagonist is a dark-skinned, gay woman. Seth Dickinson is a white man. I dunno about his sexuality, cuz I don’t know him well enough for that to be any of my damn business. The Appropriation Police would not allow this book to be published. They shame their ancestors, let us hope they repent their ways quickly.

The media would create a civil war purely for the ratings…

 Musings On Present Day, WorldCon  4 Responses »
Nov 202015
 

997DVA_Al_Pacino_025…and it is our fault.

Remember Starbucks Red Cup Controversy? Where the media spent days telling us how christians are outraged that the Starbuck holiday cup is plain red instead of having christmas trees and snowflakes on it? And it turns out that it was just one christian shock-jock type, and every single real christian in America was like “What the fuck guys? We don’t actually care. Who is making shit up about us?”

Which is exactly what we liberals think every time we see a “War on Christmas” story.

But the interesting part is that there aren’t less War on Christmas stories as time goes on. Rather, they’ve expanded, so now the leftwing media has their own version, re the crazy Red Cup guy. Years ago the rightwing media found that War on Christmas stories don’t have to be true. They still generate TONS of revenue, because they emotionally charge their viewers. Now the leftwing media has found out the same thing.

As a result both sides of America become more and more polarized, viewing the “other” side as evil and/or idiotic. Over what is essentially lies given to them by their own media. It’s getting worse.

Perhaps you saw today that Donald Trump wants to put all Muslims on a national registry and issue them special identification, and he’s crossed the Nazi Line.

If you’re like me, you shared with the quote from a friend that: “if Trump got elected President, and somehow persuaded both houses of Congress to pass a “Muslims must register” bill, it would be struck down by the federal courts. But the problem here isn’t that there’s a danger of this policy being implemented in the near future. The problem is that it is currently not only acceptable but popular to openly advocate fascist ideas … his popularity says a lot of frightening things about the current American mindset”

But if you’re like me, you also have friends on the other side, who then point out that this is a massive distortion (I apologize for linking to that particularly vile news site). “It is clear from the exchange that Trump thinks Hillyard is talking about new entrants to the United States, presumably Syrian refugees. But Hillyard reports Trump’s answer as if he is talking unambiguously about Muslims already in the United States.”

Which isn’t to say that Trump isn’t both wrong and racist. But he’s plenty wrong and racist on his own, and painting fangs on him just makes our side look like fucking idiots.

But more importantly, it makes us think of him as an irredeemably evil person, and all his supporters as similarly evil, or too stupid/blind to see past their own fear. It further polarizes us into camps that think the worst possible things about each other, and don’t talk to each other. Because it makes for GREAT ratings/clicks.

America seems to be drifting ever closer to civil war, and these sorts of intentional misportrayals by the both sides is spurring it on. Seriously, how long are we going to let the media ask vague questions that could be interpreted to mirror Nazi policies, and then if someone doesn’t immediately and strongly side with the questioner, report that “they didn’t rule it out“???

The thing about devils is that they give you what you want, per your revealed preference. That’s always how the story works. That is what makes those stories compelling. You get what you deserve because the devil always is simply giving you what you want. And then the angels – who care about our stated preferences rather than our revealed ones – come and save us. The Ego triumphs over the Id.

But the Ego doesn’t generate clicks, or share things on social media. The Id does. We have created institutions that mimic the devils of myth – they are rewarded for giving us what we want, in terms of revealed preference. But we haven’t created equally strong institutions that mimic the angels of old – rewarded for giving us what we want in terms of stated preference.

Until (if?) that happens, we really need to develop an immune response to hatemongering.  Never share anything that pisses you off. Especially if it’s about someone from the other side. DOUBLE ESPECIALLY if it’s because they are doing something evil or idiotic that must be stopped before all of society is destroyed. And if we could coordinate some sort of institutional response that would punish these media companies/devils whenever they do this (seriously, government oversight to head off a civil war is a legitimate use of government power IMHO), that would be great. Maybe necessary.

Appropriating the White Guys

 Musings On Present Day, Personal  2 Responses »
Nov 032015
 

pixels movieTwo cultural appropriation notes.

1.

I attended MileHiCon over the weekend (an awesome local SF Lit con), during which time I went to a “Writing Characters with Mental Illness” panel. A relative of mine has fairly severe shizoaffective disorder, so I’m familiar with what mental illness looks like IRL, but I’m not a healthcare professional so I like to get some actual professional views on the matter, ya know? The panelists were all either suffering from mental illness themselves or professionals in the field. And I did get some use out of the panel, but not nearly as much as I could have. Part of the reason why? They spent a big chunk of time helping everyone defend themselves from charges of Cultural Appropriation. You gotta say “It’s not a disability, it’s a different-ability” sort of thing. FFS. At one point one of the panelists said “No matter what you do, some people will attack you for writing mental illness. Ignore them, please! Do it anyway! We need more characters struggling with mental illness in our fiction.”

So yeah, the CA-police are having a chilling effect, but people are pushing back. So, hooray for that?

2.

I’ve been told a few times that straight white guys will never feel the sting of Cultural Appropriation. (Actually I was told this by a straight white guy who said he’d never feel it, so he didn’t have any right to have a voice in the conversation.) I think that’s a very silly thing to claim, because there are many types of culture, and almost everyone belongs to SOME minority culture that can be “appropriated.” As proof of this I would like to submit this review of the movie “Pixels” by Movie Bob.

Movie Bob is LIVID about the appropriation of video gaming culture by one of Hollywood’s biggest douchebags, Adam Sandler. Says Movie Bob:

>“it’s so oppressively, endlessly, bald-faced cynical about the disingenuous appropriation of its own supposed reason for existing.”

“[It’s] so fucking glib and self-satisfied with its own sleazy cash-grab existence that it takes time out to make sure it also shits on the sort of more earnest, heart-felt version of the same idea that someone who gave two shits might have made”

“It plays at being this sentimental ode to glory days of classic video games, but clearly doesn’t have a fucking drop of sincere interest of what’s made these characters and imagery so enduring or even what made the game so compelling for all these years.”

“It’s always nakedly the work of a bunch of shit-gargling fuckwits with zero love or understanding of this stuff beyond the ability to sell tickets based on ‘Hey, remember Pac-Man?’”

As a video game geek myself (and old enough to have played most of these games in my childhood), I sympathize strongly with every single thing Movie Bob says. In fact, I challenge every white male video game geek who thinks Cultural Appropriation is bullshit to watch this review so they can understand what other people feel when they say their culture is being appropriated. Are you telling me to you don’t feel even a spark of anger at Sandler/Hollywood after seeing that impassioned rant? Cuz I’m not sure that’s possible.

And now, having seen the other side, reconsider your position on cultural appropriation. Don’t just take a reactionary “Screw you, I can do what I want” stand. Take a principled stand. Stand firm with “It is better to allow cultures to mix. The things that are bad about “Cultural Appropriation” are more correctly termed either “Racism” or “Being An Asshole” and should be fought as such, and the things that are good about Cultural Mixing are being destroyed by the Cultural Appropriation Police. That is why the term Cultural Appropriation is toxic. Its only real effect is to eliminate the good things that we want to keep around!”

Hate Pixels because it is shit. Don’t support Cultural Appropriation Policing, because that would destroy wonderful things like The Wizard and The Last Starfighter as well. We will accept Pixels because sharing culture and understanding between groups is more important than making sure Adam Sandler can’t shit on a culture’s values. We will not raze the commons in an effort to punish the free-rider.

SF/F Review – The Water Knife

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Oct 292015
 

water knifeThe Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Synopsis: Grimdark near future where the American Southwest collapses into low-level civil war over water.

Book Review: Bacigalupi is known for his post-environmental-collapse dystopias, and this is another fantastic entry in that style. Many of Paolo’s works carry a theme of ‘We are living in an absurdly wealthy period, where we can afford things like compassion and charity. When the easy resources dry up and we are left fighting over the remaining scraps, those who try to retain their compassion and humanity will be torn to pieces by the people willing to do what is necessary for survival. People are always exactly as good as circumstances allow them to be.’ Moreover, we’re currently able to believe any old crazy thing for that reason, but in the near future people will be forced to see reality only as it is, or die. It’s a very Hansonian view.

He differs from Hanson in that Hanson says this isn’t as bad as we think it is, and “poor people still smile”, whereas I think Bacigalupi’s message is “So let’s work hard to make sure THIS NEVER HAPPENS.” And he shows you vividly what the This is, and how it could happen. Don’t expect an uplifting story.

Bacigalupi’s writing is strong, the story never falters or lets up, and you feel like you are in a crumbling metropolis. The city itself feels like a character, with large events taking place in the background that both make for great flavor and inform and constrain the human protagonist’s actions. You realize that these people are just one small part of a large world. The human protagonists themselves are fantastically portrayed. Even when they are doing awful things you are rooting for them, because they’ve won you over with their ideals, or their fears, or simply their desperation to not be ground down and abused every single day. I sympathized deeply with every character, and in each case for a different reason.

In short, this is a very good book. Strongly Recommended.

Book Club Review: Also a fantastic book for book clubs! There is SO MUCH to talk about here! And I don’t just mean the message portion, because frankly all of us in the book club are already very much onboard with Bacigalupi’s message, so we didn’t talk about that part at all. Rather, the portrayal of humanity and what happens to us when the shit REALLY hits the fan lead to a lot of discussion over the nature of humanity, and whether Bacigalupi is a cynical misanthrope and we’re better than that, or if he’s just a realist who isn’t afraid to view the world with open eyes. (You can probably guess my position by the phrasing of that sentence). The fact that this is very near-future really drove home that this story is about us, and made a lot of people challenge his assumptions. There was a lot of talk of idealism vs circumstance, and whether we are uniquely situated to fail in situations our ancestors wouldn’t, because we are so socially isolated and insulated that the institutions of community have broken down and all we’re left with is this fragile individualism that isn’t actually worth shit in any non-modern/non-super-wealthy situation.

Plus lots of discussion about character arcs and plot elements. One of the major contributors to the discussion is that this is NOT a perfect book. It has flaws, and those imperfections add to the conversational grist as well. The discussion was so rich and interesting that we ran right up to closing time without realizing it.

One caveat – two of our members had very negative reactions to the grimness of the book, one in particular is in a bad stretch of life right now and declared she wouldn’t be reading any other works by Bacigalupi. I can’t blame her. It’s not the worst thing ever, it’s certainly not slasher horror or anything, but it may be a bit too much for some readers. With that warning – Strongly Recommended.

Cultural Appropriation Watch! The protagonists in this work are American Hispanic female, white female, and Mexican male. Bacigalupi is none of those. A couple of our bookclub members (who don’t read my blog) expressed appreciation for the diversity of the cast. It was very well done, and definitely increased the quality of the storytelling! The Appropriation Police would have us whitewash this book so it only contained white male characters (bleh) or simply not allow it to be published at all (bastards!!!). They shame their ancestors, let us hope they repent their ways quickly.

“Cultural Appropriation” censorship

 Personal, Writing  22 Responses »
Oct 222015
 

interview-with-the-vampireA literary agent I’m acquainted with recently posted “we’re getting wind that publishers are extremely wary of buying diverse books by “non-diverse” authors because they don’t want to deal with readers’ accusations of cultural appropriation.”

If I can only ever write white male middle-class characters in my stories, I will kill myself.

It’s just plain bad art too. I remember reading a book where every character read like a middle-aged Canadian male, (yes, including the teenage girl and the alien intelligence) and I was bored to tears. I want multiple perspectives from various people in my novels, and most of them will not match that of the author.

And do the people pushing this not bother thinking about the consequences of their own agendas? If gay authors can only write gay characters, women authors can only write women characters, black authors can only write black characters, etc, this hurts everyone. There will be less interesting fiction to read, and far fewer stories that any author can tell. How does it help women authors to tell Anne Rice that only men are allowed to write male POV sections?

Ugh.

Won’t Get Fooled Again

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Oct 222015
 

I keep seeing excitement about the new Star Wars, and I can forgive it from my younger friends, who weren’t around for Phantom Menace. But no one over the age of 30 has any excuse, IMHO. Do we, as a species, never learn??

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