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SF/F Review – The Circle

Book Club Review, Musings On Present Day, Personal No Responses »

Sep 142014

Synopsis: Old Man Eggers gripes about social media and kids these days not having enough concern for privacy.

Book Review: Sometimes you hate a book so much you just have to dedicate hundreds of words to expressing that hate. This is one of those books.

I said before that I’m not that great with subtlety, but holy moses does this narrative over do it! Eggers lays it on with a trowel! The first twenty pages are nothing but saying how this company is the best company EVER and Mae loves it SO MUCH and all her previous companies SUCKED and describing in detail just how great every single thing is! An eloquent speaker is shown to be really gifted not by any action on his part (he is entirely ridiculous throughout the book) but by being described as “eloquent and inspirational, so at ease in front of thousands.” Informed Abilities, yay. :/ First the believability of the prose tanked, then the believability of the characters, and then the entire world came soon after. But I’ll get to that.

I’ve also mentioned that I can’t stand plots that only exist because the protagonist is absolutely pathetic, or stupid. Mae is both. She is the most pathetic imitation of a human I’ve seen in ages. Whining, simpering, idiotic, and never once stands up to anyone for anything. When she finds out only 97% of her co-workers love her she starts jibbering about how 300 people despise her and are looking for an opportunity to actually murder her. But if anything she’s above-average for this world, because…

This story could only exist in a world populated by Jersey Shore cast members. The entire world is completely retarded, and entirely self-involved. When it’s revealed that a character’s distant ancestors owned slaves she has a melt-down, and the vast majority of the people around her abandon her because (it is said) everyone believes slave-owning is genetic. Or when the government figures it would be a great idea to allow direct voting on all issues and let a single private company be in charge of all vote counting in the nation. Because that’s exactly the kind of power governments hate holding for themselves!

This book is a modern-day Atlas Shrugged in the feverish way it must warp reality and mutilate human nature in order to make its ideological point. It is an ideological point that pertains only to an imaginary universe, and so completely fails as a wake-up-call or dire-warning or whatever it was trying to do. At least Atlas Shrugged had some damn good Competency Porn to keep me interested. The Circle just has floundering jackasses. And what is the message it’s trying to promote?

Kids these days and their damn social medias!! They’re over-sharing and destroying all privacy!! /cane-shake

I took this somewhat personally because I recognized that he was attempting to caricature my culture in the book. It’s like seeing the most grotesque straw-man of your culture being railed against because of the horrors it will impose upon us all, and realizing that someone may think this is actually representative of what anyone sane thinks. (Privacy Is Theft? WTF?)

Reminds me of NPR’s recent idiotic story about “Why Atheists Need Captain Kirk” which sparked a minor internet backlash by claiming that most atheists are “Spockians” and “in a Spockian universe there is no such thing as nature, there is just material process, particles and fields, in the void. Nor, for the Spockian, is there any such thing as wonder, not really; for what is an emotion, but a conjury of particles in the nervous system?”

Which makes me wonder if the author has ever met a single atheist. While everything in the article is technically correct, the implication is that the world is over-run with Spockians and what we really need is some Kirks to bring humanity to atheism. When in reality the Spock-ism is (at the most) a phase that teenage atheists go through for a few months when they first deconvert, and EVERYONE ELSE who actually exists in the atheist world is VERY MUCH like what the author is impassionately pleading for. It’s like Noe has never read an actual atheist, and is instead stuck with caricatures that the opposition paints of them. I believe that accounts for the vast majority of the negative reaction the article received.

This book is doing the same thing. Being portrayed in such an alien manner and then lectured at for the sins of the caricature is intensely irritating!

Obviously railing against Kids These Days has been popular for millenia, and Eggers is just jumping on the bandwagon (which, BTW, fuck you very much. Millenias are fucking awesome). But here’s the thing, I’m 34 and I don’t even really count as a Millenial. I’m barely a decade younger than Eggers is. I just happen to have friends that are younger than me! How insulated from the younger generation must he be to think this is in any way a decent portrayal?

There was a few people in our book club who really enjoyed the book, one my own age that said it was obviously a hilarious, over-the-top farce. A wacky comedy that is intentionally way out of proportion and ridiculous in order to be funny. Looking back on it, I can see that may have been the intention, but it was poorly executed. It felt much more like an Atlas Shrugged style trainwreck than a Terry Gilliam piece.

But more to the point – it wasn’t self-parody, it was distorting and mocking others. It felt like blackface. The minstrel shows may very well try to excuse themselves by saying “Look, it’s all in good fun! We know black people don’t act like this, it’s just a joke! Can’t you enjoy the comedy?” To which the only reply is Fuck You.

And on a final tangent, aren’t cautionary tales supposed to be about bad worlds? In Atlas Shrugged the entire world falls apart. In 1984 a military dictatorship controls all thought and expression. In The Circle… the vast majority of the population gets exactly the government they want, and they have the tools they need to share everything exactly the way they love to! It’s kinda a utopia for them. Yes, they’re all flaming idiots, but that was presupposed by the world and is not due to the tech we’re being cautioned against. Of the three or four people in the world who actually want privacy, as long as they aren’t friends with Mae they can live as hermits or something. When the overwhelming majority of your population is happy and fulfilled, you have kinda missed the point of a cautionary tale.

So yeah – literally incredible world, unlikeable protagonist, sledgehammer metaphors, stupid message, and pissed me off personally. I realize Eggers is laughing all the way to the bank, but obviously I’m giving this a Flaming Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: I hate to say this, but this was one of our most lively discussions this year. One saw it as hilarious parody, a couple thought the book was a wreck, a couple thought it brought up good points about privacy, and one thought it was a cautionary tale about the danger of cults. Getting a lot of people together who have strong opinions on a book, and having those opinions be greatly varied, makes for good discussion. If you can stomach the book, and you have a moderate+ spread of world-views in your book club, this makes for some really good talking. So, as much as I hated it, I must say that for book club reading: Recommended.
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The Slippery See-Saw

Musings On Present Day No Responses »

Sep 112014

The Slippery Slope fallacy is probably my least favorite fallacy ever. It seems I run into it every single time I want to talk about anything outside the norm with average people. Thanks to SMBC’s great comic on the matter, I’ve taken to slipping the slope the other way to try to demonstrate how dumb this is. Recent examples:

*Car accidents kill ~35,000 people every year in the US. 90% of accidents are attributed to human error, and self-driving cars eliminate this almost entirely. This is an easy win.

! But I really enjoy driving. Why are you taking away my freedoms to do something I enjoy? You people want to turn the world into such a safe, sterile place that all joy is drained from life and we will in a soul-sucking nanny state!

– Ignoring all other objections, what you’re saying is that you should be allowed to put others in danger for your own amusement. Why not just get rid of all traffic laws and every commute can be an action-packed Road Warrior death race? So much fun!

*It’s better for people to not have Down Syndrome. Terminating a fetus that has tested positive for Down Syndrome is a good thing.

! Down Syndrome children are people, and parents should be happy to raise whatever they’ve been given rather than trying to play god. You’ll proposing a path that will lead us to China’s gender-imbalance problem, because no one will want girls/brunettes/whatever trait.

– You’re right. We should also ban all nutrient supplements to pregnant women, because they should be happy with their natural children rather than trying to play god by making sure they gets enough folic acid.

*Death is bad. We should eliminate it.

! But the world will become over-crowded! We’ll live in a hellish Malthusian dystopia.

– We avoid that right now by letting people die of old age rather than starvation. Your answer to this problem is literally the application of death. What other social problems do you think would be best solved with wide-spread killings?

I try to phrase them a little lighter, and then follow-up with “I didn’t argue that your policy is a slippery slope toward inviting all terrorists to come onto planes with our eyes closed, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to do that to me.” Or a similar “I didn’t straw-man/slippery-slope you, please don’t do it to me.” Sometimes it works. Other times I just get “You call it a fallacy, I call it the way that the world often works.” /sigh

Still I think a constant, liberal application of slipping the slope in the other direction, every time this is encountered, may eventually make people think just a teeny tiny bit before they jump to using it. I hope I’m not just being naïve again.

Too Moral

Musings On Present Day 4 Responses »

Sep 092014

This started off as a reply to the previous post, but it’s sorta grown since then.

In the justly-famous “All Debates Are Bravery Debates” Scott starts with the story of a friend who was helped by reading Atlas Shrugged because “he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around.” I am not that friend. I’ve never met Scott IRL, though I really hope to some day. But I have a very similar story.

Since then I’ve become suspicious of moral codes that can only be upheld by gods. They will break men, I’ve watched it happen at least once, and I narrowly escaped it myself. The system is vast and terrible, and to fight more than a human-sized piece of it requires more strength than any mortal has. That’s the domain of fiction, not reality. I will try to focus on the parts I’m most concerned about, and admire and say nice things about others who are fixing other parts of it. But I can’t take responsibility for the whole damned thing.

When people look back on the past and say “OK, those guys were fixing one thing, but if they were so great why did they still have slaves, which we all know is the most awful thing ever?” they are saying that from within a system which already strongly supports their abolitionist views, and has come down on slavery like a ton of shit. It’s EASY AS HELL to be anti-slavery in this system. That part of the system is (finally!) already fixed. Back then, fighting slavery was as hard (or harder) than trying to ensure you never use any products created in sweatshops. People who internalize that sort of shame and hatred will not end up making even a small piece of the world better, they’ll end up paralyzed with self-loathing and possibly dead. Those past people had a lot going on already, what with fighting a war, forging a loose union of bickering states, and trying to implement a new form of largely untested government. If they left some parts of the social fixing to other people, by monkey, cut them some slack! I’d rather have a group working on democracy and ignoring slavery, and a group working on slavery but ignoring democracy, than two groups in existential torment deciding only purging the world in fire can have any effect.

In short, stop demanding moralities that destroy those who adopt them.

Don’t judge past people too harshly

Speculations 3 Responses »

Sep 052014

Yesterday I said people who didn’t terminate Down Syndrome fetuses weren’t individually immoral, even though they were making an immoral choice. They were misguided by a broken moral system that has failed to update to changing conditions. Most people are basically good, and they’re trying to make their way through life guided by principles that all of society has told them are Good. That’s what being good means, right?

The people who actually deserve condemnation are the leaders of the broken systems that oppose fixing things because they are personally comfortable. If you tell people they are evil, you’ve simply made an enemy. If you show them they have been misguided by self-indulgent or hypocritical rulers, they may someday become allies.

For this reason I also think we shouldn’t judge the past too harshly. You know what’s evil? Slowly torturing people to death because they were accused of being witches. But as horrific as that is, the individuals were simply trying to save their community from Satan’s clutches, and help to redeem the soul of their fallen neighbor. They thought they were doing good. Likewise, slavery was an unalloyed evil. And yet poor whites in the American south fought for the Confederacy, even though slavery was hurting them. Not only that, but many black men, some of them slaves, voluntarily fought for the Confederacy. They weren’t evil, they were simply trying to do what all of society agreed was the Good and Right thing to do. As Jai says, “Almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken.”

So when people point out that America’s Founding Fathers (should that be capitalized?) owned slaves and didn’t believe women and non-land-owners should have rights or votes, and say they are bad people, I think they’re using a bad metric. They would be bad people if they believed that, in our society. But for their time they were far ahead of the average. They were pushing moral progress forward from where it was! And that is what actually makes one Good. Accusing them of being bad would be akin to saying they are evil people because they allowed their children to die of pneumonia and infected cuts instead of giving them antibiotics. Medical science had not advanced enough for that to even be an option at the time. Likewise, moral science had not advanced enough for them to have the option of our standards at that time.

It is entirely possible that two hundred years from now we may be judged evil for eating the products of factory farms, or for eating animals at all. Are you willing to call your Auntie May the equivalent of a slave-owner for eating her chicken-fried steak every Thursday?

Changing the system is hard work, and takes decades. But it’s the only way to make things better. Things don’t suck because people are evil. People try to be good. They’re just working inside a broken system.

(or, if you wanted to summarize this post into a single tweet: “Eneasz says slavery is about as bad as eating steak.” :/ )

Dammit Dawkins! (or: twitter is for twerps)

Musings On Present Day No Responses »

Sep 042014

When asked what to do if the fetus one was carrying was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, Richard Dawkins recently tweeted “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” I learned about this via the outraged Facebooking of an in-law, who has a close friend with two Down children. Fortunately I had just written a long post about eugenics, so I was able to refer back to that and already have most of my thoughts laid out. But it took me hundreds of lines of typing to explain a <140 character tweet.

I know Dawkins doesn’t need my advice on this sort of thing, but you simply cannot post new and interesting insights on complex concepts in 140 characters. When the overwhelming majority of social moral intuition goes against you, simply being right is not enough. That statement implied that anyone who may choose otherwise, or who did, is immoral. And that results in immediate defensiveness. That tweet managed to polarize everyone into the factions of “Those who already agree with me” and “Those who don’t.” The people who could be helped by this message were immediately alienated.

To get to some decent dialog I first had to (again) acknowledge that all existing people are valuable, and this choice only applies to pre-existant potential people. Then I had to prime the ground by stating that if I loved someone who was unable to have non-Down children I “personally wouldn’t leave anyone for something like that, but back in darker ages “inability to produce healthy offspring” was considered a valid reason to nullify a marriage. Fortunately we’ve come a long way.” This was needed to get my audience to agree that moral progress is a thing that exists, and that it is good. Finally I was able to parlay that into saying that people who do choose to have Down children are actually NOT immoral, personally. Generally they are good, kind people. It’s not their fault they were misled by an archaic system into making that choice. It is the system’s fault for continuing to push ancient, out-dated moral customs. The parents are the victims, not the perpetrators. This takes some effort to say – at least a couple lines, maybe a paragraph, per point. That’s longer than 140 characters. Which is why Twitter is the worst. It’s primary use is for signaling allegiance and spreading memes. Meaningful content takes a few more words than that.

Christians are ruining marriage

Musings On Present Day, Personal 1 Response »

Sep 032014

A friend of mine just posted twice about divorce, which has brought up a lot of old emotions re my own divorce. Similar reasons are why I never want to get married ever again. So much BS baggage goes along with divorce that it doesn’t make *getting married* worth it. I’ve seen far more relationships ruined by people forcing themselves to stay together because they’re married far FAR longer than they should have been, than I’ve ever seen ruined for any other reason. The current institution of marriage is a relic of when women were property and society enforced a “You broke it, you bought it” rule that dehumanized everyone involved.

If marriages had kept up with morality they would be temporary 5-year contracts with the option to re-up for another 5 at the end. The reactionary idiots pushing to make divorce harder and harder are doing little more than destroying the ability for people to marry. Nowadays there are very few benefits to actually being married, especially if both partners work (as is the case in most relationships). But the costs of getting divorced are substantial. Unless you plan on staying with someone until you die, everyone is better off simply not getting married. I expect to live at least another ten years. I do not want to stop changing and growing, because to me that’s not far from death anyway. I do not want my partner to stop changing and growing, as I don’t have any interest in being with a breathing corpse. Thus I do not expect to stay with anyone for a decade or longer. It could happen. Sometimes people change in parallel paths, and they find they want to stay together. But counting on it is Stupid. I go into every relationship knowing it’s going to be great, with occasional rough patches, and some day in the next ten years or so it’ll probably be over and we’ll remain friends, and the two of use will jump into our next lifetime with gusto. And we won’t have had to go through a bullshit shaming ritual that society forces us through to do it.

Very few people who haven’t gone through a divorce realize how stressful and stupid they are. I expect almost everyone will have to have one before they realize marriage is a dumb idea and swear it off. So, thanks fundamentalist christians. You’re managing to destroy marriage. You are why society can’t have nice things.

/grumble

SF/F Review – Ash

Book Club Review No Responses »

Aug 292014

Ash, by Melinda Lo

Synopsis: An asexual lesbian retelling of the Cinderella story

Book Review: I’m reluctant to say bad things about this book, because it seems to have come from a sincere place. So I’ll start by saying it was nice to see some depth in the evil step-mother and step-sisters. They were still evil, but not for the sake of generic evil-doing, but for good reasons. We as readers could detest them properly, the way real shitty people deserve to be detested. :) And the imagery in the book is beautiful, Lo knows how to turn a paragraph into a painting. The important things pop out and grab you.

But that being said, I’m glad I had heard beforehand that this was a lesbian retelling, because I wouldn’t have known it until halfway through the last chapter otherwise. Not once did I get the impression Ash was attracted to the huntress. I don’t expect erotica, but even a mention that her pulse quickening would be something. Honestly, I feel more passion toward my platonic male friends than Ash did to her love interest. Which is why I said this was an asexual lesbian retelling – but in retrospect, that is unfair to asexuals. Because it wasn’t just a lack of sexual attraction or tension – Ash doesn’t seem to feel any strong emotion at any point in the book. Reading this was very much like watching Kristen Stewart act. There is only one expression, and it is always Bland.

I was also annoyed by how many times something really interesting and potentially emotionally-involving is brought up, and then is never mentioned again. The “dry, atheist philosophers” vs “earthy, nature-based spirituality” was being set up very nicely, and I thought I could get good and steamed about that, but no – nothing. It just petered away. Same with the conflict between the male and the female fairies. And Ash’s mother’s journal. And on and on. So many things that I can’t even call “missed opportunities”, because they were clearly being capitalized on! Before they are entirely forgotten.

And finally, the way Ash gets out of her obligation to the fairy at the end is simply a reinforcement of every negative stereotype of women that every MRA-douchebag has ever vomited forth, and just made me give up in complete despair. If that’s what love is, you can count me out.

But more than anything, the book was just boring, primarily because of its lack of emotion. Not Recommended

Book Club Review: Even if there had been good emotion and strong plotting and I enjoyed the story, I still don’t think this would make a good Book Club book, because it just doesn’t have anything to say. It’s a “Thing That Happened” story. It doesn’t champion any struggle, say anything about the human condition, or question any assumptions. It doesn’t even have a new take on the Cinderella story. It’s just there. Swirsky’s “All That Fairy Tale Crap” may have an unlikable protagonist, but it has more to say in a few thousand words than Ash said in a full novel. Not Recommended.
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The Impermanence of All Things

Personal No Responses »

Aug 272014

Yesterday’s post was a sort of prelude to today. At our last book club meeting we read The Left Hand of Darkness. This is considered a classic of SF. It won both the Hugo and Nebula. People still speak of it with admiration. It broke new ground and pushed the genre forward. And when I read it, 45 years later, I didn’t find much to interest me. Which is good in a way, it means that it won. The view it had been pushing has become so mainstream that it’s no longer “speculative.”

I had a similar experience with Dune.

I guess this is a consequence of being a foundational work. Others will build on what you’ve done until it reaches memetic fixation. This is probably exactly what one would WANT to happen – this is what having a large and permanent effect on the world looks like .One could argue that every act of creation is an attempt to imperfectly propagate yourself into the future.

But it also makes me sad. If two multiple-award winning foundational books can be read by someone just a couple generations removed, less than a half century later, and elicit a reaction of “Eh, not bad”…. what chance do any of us have for doing anything meaningful? Shit keeps getting better, which is great, but it also means all things fade away. A few centuries from now nothing I’ve done will matter.

I want to say that the way to stay relevant is to stay alive and keep active. Keep producing new things. But almost every major innovator has only made one great contribution, and everything else after that has been encores. How many people can you name that just keep putting out better and better work? Probably less than a dozen.

Still, it’s been done, so it’s not impossible. And the alternative is guaranteed defeat anyway. At least as long as you’re alive you can keep trying, and sometimes gain a level or two.

Why am I even here?

Personal No Responses »

Aug 262014

During my alcoholic phase I had a pretty major blackout. Not as bad as some I’ve heard of, but my worst – I found a party boring, so I left at about 9pm. When I woke up the next morning I couldn’t find my car. I asked my roommate where it was, and he informed me that I was wrong about the previous evening. I found the party boring, so I figured drinking a lot would make it more interesting. I was a complete ass for hours, until my roommate finally drove me home at 2am. I remembered nothing of that. Hearing the previous night’s details recounted was like my own personal The Hangover.

And it occurred to me – from my point-of-view, last night might as well never have happened. In my timeline that night was erased, and replaced with sleeping. What was the point of even having lived through those events?

I’ve always had a bad episodic memory. I have a hard time remembering a lot of my life. Years go by and I look back and think “What the hell happened? Where was I during that time? What was the point of living through that crap?” Years of not-drunkenness, to be clear. Years of playing video games, and reading, and surfing the net. Years that might as well have not existed.

In a desperate attempt to be relevant, to do anything of value, I started the HPMoR podcast. Because I believe in Eliezer’s vision of what humanity can be, and this seemed like a non-offensive and very fun way to help spread that, just a little. And it’s worked… not too long from now the podcast will be complete, and there will be a new thing in the world, a thing that wouldn’t have been here otherwise. I have something to look back on and say “There. That thing is a result of my living.”

That’s just the most drastic example, of course. Soon I will have a house that has been turned from a smoked-out dump to a nice place to live! Every time I work out I consider it a step toward building a body that is a nice body to live inside. I can look at old pictures, and look in the mirror, and say “I have changed a thing for the better.”

And of course now I’m starting to write as well. All this crap is hard, and I don’t spend all my time on it. I still play games or read or drink a bit, to rest and relax and recharge. But now those things are rest stops on the way to being productive. And being productive is no longer a chore, no longer work I have to trudge through until I can play again. Now it is what I do so that I matter, and play is a way to get back to doing that well. I don’t want to lose years of my life without anything to show for it again. If I go all my years and never accomplish anything, then why did I even bother living in the first place? Might as well have skipped right to the end with a jump out a window and saved myself a lot of trouble. The time for doing things is now.

How to Think about Non-Existent People

Speculations 2 Responses »

Aug 212014

Thinking about people who don’t exist is hard to do. The most emotional response I received yesterday was:

> I’m not disagreeing that there is some benefit to society when there are fewer people with severe problems, and I’m not saying I would never do something like select not to have a child with severe problems if given a choice (my husband and I talked about that when we were going through fertility treatments), I am saying that categorically saying at a societal level that those people should never exist is terrifying. And by saying that those people should never exist because their life would be too hard does in effect say that I should not exist

It seems to be what a lot of people get hung up on, because it’s very hard to imagine the counter-factual world where these people weren’t born. It’s the same argument used by every pro-lifer who trots out the adorable/smart/loving child of a mother who struggled with the abortion question but ultimately decided against it, saying “Pro-choicers say that this child should never have existed!” It works because we see a valuable person (as all person are valuable) and think “if they were aborted they wouldn’t exist” and emotionally this feels like saying “They shouldn’t exist” = “Kill that girl!!! Chaaaaarge!!!!” Which makes us squirm at the very least, if we are good people.

But when a biological process is stopped or prevented before a person can form, it is not the killing of a person. It is simply replacing them with another person. (I won’t even get into whether the planet can support a limited number of people – it’s more relevant to note that any given couple can only support a limited number of children. So choosing to bring one child into existence is denying life to another child that would have been born in their stead. The egg that released the month prior or after, perhaps.) And since almost nothing can be known of someone before they are born, in the aggregate it’s most accurate to think of the potential future-children of any given couple as undifferentiated entities. The replacing-person is best modeled as the same as the replaced-person EXCEPT for the things that can be known about them before they are brought into existence. If a genetic test shows that the egg released this month will give you a child with blue eyes, and the egg released next month will give a child with brown eyes, the question is not “Should we murder the child with the blue eyes or the child with brown eyes?” Because it is impossible to birth both of them. The question is more accurately modeled as “Do we want a baby Eneasz (or baby Steph) with blue eyes or brown eyes?” Think of the two potential children as the same potential person, differing only in the characteristics that can be determined beforehand. Thus, the question isn’t “Should we murder Mary Sue with Downs Syndrome to birth non-Downs Sally May?” it is “Should we birth Mary Sue with or without Downs Syndrome?” In which case the answer is sorta obvious.
(When taken far enough, the inability to correctly think of persons who haven’t come into existence as substitutes for persons who have, results in the conclusion that any attempt to prevent a pregnancy is morally equivalent to murder, and condoms/birth-control are history’s greatest holocaust. And, indeed, any effort to do anything with one’s resources aside from maximizing the total number of people who are born is morally reprehensible.)

And if one accepts that such a program doesn’t kill people, it only makes the people who are born better off, it means that – as hard as it is to imagine – in the counter-factual world where such a program had been around when we’d been born we’d be healthier, smarter, and have had happier childhoods. Not that we’d be dead.

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