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03 Jul 11:34

How To Live

by Tegan O'Neil
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The Twelfth and Final part of an ongoing series.
Catch up with Part One here.
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including my new podcast Tegan Reads Wookieepedia!



Arcade Fire are the most preposterous rock & roll band in existence, less an actual band than the idea of a band conjured into being for the soul purpose of expressing big emotions without the faintest hint of subtlety. I started smoking pot the day after Christmas 2015 and quit on April 20th, 2017, a week and a half shy of the one-year anniversary my “grand revelation.” I began experiencing moderate back pain in the late winter of 2017 and by spring it had become almost crippling.

By the second week of June 2017 I am correcting my final batch of papers as an instructor for the University of California, Davis. I do the math and over the last six years have read more than 1,500 student papers. They never get better, they never change, new students make the same old mistakes every quarter. At my height I am driving to Sacramento at least once a week and spending more money on pot than I can reasonably afford, and although I recognize that I am developing a serious problem I feel no urgency to remedy the matter. Towards the end of March I receive another great shock. I am by now accustomed to receiving great shocks. Every time I try to listen to Vampire Weekend I am distracted by something more interesting. That’s probably the amount of attention they deserve.

This presentation takes the form of an explication of a coincidence. Rather than simply reject this coincidence as base or vulgar synchronicity, we shall follow this congruence back to its homes, to turn over the ashes that flew from the sparks of these most unexpected frictions. Perhaps in the shape of these coincidences we can begin to discern a faint illumination, the light of an unconcealing – in the truest sense of the word – of a new thesis of history, or to be more specific, a new thesis of the future.

In the Spring I am well and truly sick of Star Wars and begin rewatching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Netflix. In June of 1985 R.E.M. release their third album, Fables of the Reconstruction. The reason I waited so long to start smoking pot is simple: my parents are lifelong pot smokers. They’ve always smoked. When I see the doctor for back pain she doesn’t seem very concerned even though I am at times barely able to stand. Back pain is another reason I am growing increasingly dependent on pot. Early in the morning of Saturday, June 17th 2017 I turn in my final set of grades as an instructor for the University of California, Davis.

With a shudder I realize one day that it is no longer shocking to acknowledge Donald Trump as President of the United States. He simply is. This is apparently what we’re doing now. I associate Arcade Fire’s Funeral with the end of the second Bush’s first term, a brief glimmer of hope when it seemed as if a shaky incumbent might just be deposed by an eminently qualified and thoroughly underwhelming technocrat. There is nothing enjoyable or interesting in this world that can’t be rendered banal by seeing your parents do it.


This coincidence takes the form of the unexpected interaction between three texts, at least one of which I can say with no fear of contradiction has never been cited in conjunction with either of its peers. The first text under consideration is an essay by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux entitled “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” dated from 2009; the second is a more familiar text – Derrida’s Specters of Marx, as famously expanded from a plenary address delivered at the University of California’s Riverside campus in April of 1993 and compiled for publication that same year; the third text, the ringer of the group, is issue #7 of Jack Kirby’s New Gods, published by DC Comics at the tail end of 1971.

Deep Space Nine – or, DS9 for convenience – is a thoroughly enjoyable show. Even though I have seen most of the run, I don’t remember it very well because it’s been twenty years. After an era of war and paranoia following 9/11, Funeral met an enthusiastic response from an audience looking for something unabashedly sentimental and enthusiastic. It was an album made by young people for young people, as opposed to the prematurely old and paranoid sounds of bands like Interpol or Spoon. Late in the spring I start a podcast for the purpose of practicing my voice.


My last day of teaching is Thursday, June 8th, 2017. I give one final lecture on The Waste Land and go over the final. The fourth song on Fables of the Reconstructionis called “Life and How to Live It.” My life changes irrevocably on October 11th, 2016 when I publish my coming out-essay, “One Hundred and Sixty Four Days” on my blog. Funeral is a good album but still tentative, hamstrung by wet production and a few weak tracks weighing down the front half. Every Arcade Fire album is hamstring by a weak first half.

The first reason I propose for offering these three texts for side-by-side comparison can best be described in rhetorical terms, as pertaining to the ways in which these three texts reveal a shared exigence across the gulf of almost forty years’ difference. To begin, all three texts are specifically and explicitly positioned as reactions to the exhaustion of dangerous and mutually destructive ideological binaries. Perhaps more importantly, all three texts represent serious attempts on the part of the authors to depict the movement away from harmful binary thinking and towards the inauguration of new ethical projects.

My podcast is called “Tegan Reads Wookieepedia” and the premise is simple: for twenty minutes at a time I read random entries from Wookieepedia, the internet’s premier fan-edited source for Star Wars lore and minutia. Learning how to smoke pot is a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. Having no prior experience with tobacco, I struggle mightily to overcome my natural resistance to smoke inhalation. After I finish my final lecture the students applaud. Students usually applaud at the end of a quarter but this time feels different. I never asked to be a role model.


After years away, falling back into the rhythms of Star Trek is surprisingly satisfying. It’s a talky show, and the volume ensures that not every episode is good – but the acting is consistently good and it’s a rare episode without something interesting to recommend it. “Life and How to Live It” is not actually a song about life advice, but rather is named after a book printed but not distributed by a resident of Athens, GA named Brivs Mekis. Every extant copy of the book was found in his house following his death. I tell myself I’m not going to cry and I don’t cry, but I only accomplish this by standing still with my hands palm down on the table in front of me. I still choke up after class talking to a handful of students who stay to thank me personally.

It is to Kirby’s text we must turn for an immediate illustration of this principle. It is not despite but because of the fact that Kirby’s narrative is framed as a fantasy parable that his work is able to inform our interpretation of these later theorists: completely shorn of any pretense of epistemological rigidity – pure fantasy, unmoored from the didactic expectations of literary realism or the putative representational limitations of the late modernist paradigm – Kirby is allowed the privilege of imagining a context in which the structural impediments of late capitalist historical time simply do not exist. For our purposes, let us regard this body of work as a kind of ideological petri dish. I do not believe it is altogether tendentious to assert that Kirby’s work, in some small way, anticipates and articulates the exhaustion of ideological difference at the summit of the Cold War. And it is in this context that we must understand the creation of Kirby’s Fourth World.

On June 8th 2017 the ruling Conservative party is dealt a stunning upset in a snap General Election called by foolhardy and resolutely uncharismatic Prime Minister Theresa May. Although the Tories remain in power as of this writing, their Parliamentary majority has been wiped out by a surging Labour party led by Jeremy Corbyn. Arcade Fire’s second album is Neon Bible, named after John Kennedy Toole’s posthumously published second novel. I am unprepared for the response after publishing “One Hundred and Sixty Four Days.” The period leading up to the event is fraught and filled with anxiety. I have no idea how anyone will react. I have no idea if anyone will care. At first I am attracted to strong sativas, desirous of altered states of consciousness over physical disassociation. Within a few months and a few hellacious bad trips I will change my orientation to indicas and swear off sativas for half a year.

Copies of “Life and How to Live It” command high prices from R.E.M. collectors, although by all accounts the book itself is racist garbage. What is most interesting to Michael Stipe is that Mekis apparently lived in a duplex where he split his time between both halves depending on his mood, as shown in the song's opening lyrics: "Two doors to go between the wall was raised today /
Two doors, two names to call your other and your own." The joy of Star Trek comes from watching a show develop a set of concepts and themes over the course of an extended run, and seeing a core of talented actors develop and define their characters within that framework. It's a not a series for instant gratification. My voice is awful. Some trans women spend a lot of money on vocal training and even surgery to develop a high-pitched speaking voice. Because my job entails speaking in front of a class I resolve simply to make it up as I go along, and the result is complete chaos. 

The name “Fourth World” is, as a point of historical fact, a completely random happenstance. For the nearest point of comparison, we shall note in passing that Charles Schulz loathed the name Peanuts, and resented until his dying day the imposition of the name on his magnum opus by United Features Syndicate. So too was Kirby’s own solo masterwork – the interconnected family of titles he produced in the early seventies for DC that came to be grouped under the umbrella term of the “Fourth World” (consisting of New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and – improbably – Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen) – given the name by accident, due to a miscommunication over the cover blurb of New Gods #4. As strange as it was, the name stuck, despite the fact that it had no clear referent in the stories themselves – there was no literal “fourth world” in the elaborate cosmology of his stories. The name did, however, carry a certain resonance in the context of the Cold War. Kirby’s epic was concerned with the disposition of warring tribes of gods whose ancient combat was superimposed over the historical conflicts of twentieth-century earth. Kirby’s “Fourth World” was, therefore, an immanent world, against which the limitations of the pallid mortal plane could only represent distant approximations.

I had believed myself to be forgotten. I didn’t think anyone still cared. As of this writing I have received over 13,000 hits on my blog to “One Hundred and Sixty Four Days,” not counting the essay being picked up by Metafilter. The problem with pot is the same problem that I had always had with other mind-altering substances: I avoided them on principle because I believed that losing control would be an unimaginably fraught event. Hot Thoughts, Spoon’s ninth album, is released on March 17th, 2017, although I receive a copy over a month early thanks to an acquaintance who has read “Gimme Some Truth.” After the release of Hot Thoughts, the idea that Spoon are the greatest rock band of the twenty-first century begins to gain currency, although I am unsure as to whether or not I am the first person to say it. Neon Bible is undoubtedly Arcade Fire’s magnum opus, the perfect distillation of everything that makes the band both interesting and frustrating.


Although Labour are unable to achieve an outright victory in the General Election, their strong showing represents such a stinging rebuke to the ruling party that the future of Brexit negotiations are thrown into doubt – although, contrary to the assumptions of many Labour voters, Labour remains as committed to leaving the European Union as the Conservatives. After publishing my essay hundreds of people contact me – in blog comments, Twitter DMs, or by e-mail – to express their support. Reading the comments on the essay left by dozens of readers on Metafilter, none of whom know me, fills me with a strange mixture of joy and dread: it has managed to touch people all across the world in a way I had never anticipated and could never have predicted. On a good day I can manage to sound somewhat like Marge Simpson. It never ceases to amuse me that “Life and How to Live It” features no kind of life advice, although another song on Fables is called “Good Advices,” and features importance guidance such as “When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.”

Kirby produced these stories during the deadly waning days of Vietnam. As a veteran of World War II who came ashore in France in the aftermath of the Normandy invasion, he had seen death in abundance. His comics, despite their putative status as action-adventure stories, were consistently antagonistic to the idea of war, even sometimes against the idea of putatively “necessary” war. Issue #7 of New Gods, a story called “The Pact!” (considered by many to represent the apogee of Kirby’s career as a solo creator) presents the origin of the great god war at the heart of the Fourth World saga. After experiencing decades of ceaseless and destructive war, the twin worlds of Apokalips and New Genesis (it should be noted that subtlety is not a sin to be laid at Kirby’s feet!) have been brought close to destruction. On a hazy battlefield in the rubble of combat, Izaya the Inheritor, greatest general of New Genesis, throws down his sword and renounces war. In his moment of greatest doubt he is confronted by a spectral figure, the literal hand of the divine who announces to Izaya the invention of a new God at the precise moment of the old order’s greatest extremity.

There was a reason I was so afraid of losing control. Something was waiting down there, in the hidden and fetid depths of my heart. On May 7th, 2017, political newcomer Emmanuel Macron is elected President of France. Although his centrist economic platform is greeted with suspicion, he is far and away preferable to his opponent, the far-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen. To my great surprise, after October 11th people I do not know reach out to me in order to come out to me. Suddenly people look to me for reassurance and I don’t quite understand why. I had been expecting that teaching after transitioning would be more difficult, but both classes I teach in the first half of 2017 go well. My classes love me and respond to me more than they ever did while teaching as an ostensible man.

At the beginning of May my industrial piercing falls out. Although it had appeared healed by then, it becomes irritated and I do not realize until it is too late that the ear has rejected the bar. It falls out in the shower as the last tiny flap of skin holding the piercing in place tears. It looks painful but all I feel is a small rip. Galaxy of Heroes resets every night at 1:00 AM. While I had been in the habit of getting high every evening around then to play the game, quitting pot leaves a hole in my schedule I subsequently fill with episodes of Deep Space Nine. Hot Thoughts is a very good album, perhaps not as good as anything from their imperial run in the Aughts, but easily as good as They Want My Soul. The album actually succeeds in endearing me more to its predecessor by showing that the somewhat more conventional late 00s indie-rock sound of their 2014 release was, in typical Spoon fashion, just another suit of clothing to put on and take off at a moment’s notice.

My voice is unsatisfactory. I sound different every day, depending on whether or not I even remember I need to sound different. (My memory sometimes makes it hard to remember.) Neon Bible is a monument to excess: every song swings for the bleachers, and there’s not a wasted inch of real estate anywhere on it. If you think there’s room for a full chorus to swell in the final moments, then the full chorus will crest like the breaking of a wave. People tell me I’m brave. People tell me my coming out has inspired them to do the same. In May of 2017 I polish up the one completed chapter of my dissertation and prepare to submit it as a Masters thesis.

Certain illusions I cherish have been demolished by recent events. I believed myself to be forgotten by friends and peers; I believed that I was an untalented writer; I believed that I was a repellent human being. As every subsequent essay in this book is published each of these cherished illusions is demolished. Neither Macron’s victory against a historically unpopular far right candidate nor Corbyn’s surprise showing against May change the world, but both show that the fight against the forces of reaction and the politics of suspicion is not yet hopeless. I fear the sum of a book of essays about my life will resemble nothing so much as Brivs Mekis’ ill-fated tract, self-important trash clogging up the walls of an eccentric house. The only thing I fear more than no one reading my words is people reading my words and taking them seriously. Hot Thoughtsis odd and exotic in the way that only a Spoon album can be. Part of it is a house record, part of it is jazzy – two new sounds for the band – but the backbone of ten effortlessly, minimally elaborate rock compositions is still irreducibly Spoon.

If we turn back from Kirby and return for the moment to our present day, we find the strangest coincidence waiting to reveal itself in the work of Meillassoux. Meillassoux has come in for a great deal of harsh criticism from leftist critics who see in his work a principled refusal to engage with the political as a category, and an obscurantist’s desire to resurrect pre-Kantian metaphysical categories for no good reason besides a puckish desire to confound Alain Badiou’s most loyal followers. While it is true that Meillassoux’s work is preoccupied with questions of ontotheology, I believe that the most important contribution Meillassoux has yet made in the field of contemporary philosophy is his insistence that questions of modern history can only be fully thought through the prism of ontotheology, or to be more precise, that answers to the problematics of late modernity can only be fully circumscribed through the application of Meillassoux’s novel invention – proleptic ontotheology, or the thesis of the non-existence of God: the simple proposition that God does not exist – yet.

Neon Bible is followed by The Suburbs, a good album that suffers for being a calculated attempt to create an Important Concept Album, the Kinks done for American kids who grew up during the brief period between the fall of the Cold War and 9/11. The Suburbs is a teenager’s idea of a profound artistic statement, and every bit as immature as the description implies. It all comes back to 9/11, doesn’t it? People fucking lost their minds and we never found them again. By the end of May even writing an e-mail to my advisor inspires great anxiety. I am able to put my head down and push through the process of one final round of edits on the chapter – it reads as if it were written by another person. I have no connection to the words and feel no compunction at gouging aggressively.



Reflektor is a hodge-podge, a double album with little in the way of a unifying aesthetic. The presence of James Murphy behind the boards shows itself in a handful of dance-inflected tracks but the sounds on display are disparate. For the first time in the band’s history the album as a whole is far less than the sum of its parts. DS9 is a good show to watch in the first half of 2017 because it’s about nothing so much as the conflict between rigid idealism and pragmatic compromise. Utopian ideals are tested and cast aside under certain circumstances as fragile and imperfect individuals are forced to deal with the consequences of longstanding colonial occupation and military expansionism, but ultimately institutions constructed for the preservation and safety of civil society are able to survive the most rigorous stress test.

In February of 2017 I travel to Reno for a conference at the University of Nevada. I present a paper positing connections between the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and Meillassoux. I write the paper in the hotel the evening before the conference, as is my habit. I am fascinated by the epistemology of fantasy and as such the ideas are interesting if undeveloped – it’s a sketch in the direction of future work which will probably never appear:

What are the consequences for human epistemology in the realm of Middle-Earth? Interestingly, Tolkien’s vision of humanity would have at its disposal the means to sidestep Meillassoux’s two great perceptual shortcomings.

1.     In the first place, a human race that was only one race of many races of sentient creatures on Middle-Earth would be unable to maintain the myth of strict correlationism. The existence not merely of other cognizant beings, but immortal elves who have interacted with the gods for thousands of years would mark human perception as definitively small, contingent, and necessarily incomplete, merely one very small blip in the “Deeps of Time.”

2.     In the second, the existence of practical immortality in the form of elves would greatly enhance the ability of humankind to understand and acknowledge the existence of ancestral realities. Living memory for humanity can only stretch back a hundred years, very slightly more. Imagine if living memory among certain special individuals stretched back not merely thousands of years, but to the creation of the planet, and indeed back beyond the creation of the world to an age before the beginning of time itself.

The conference is sparsely attended. After delivering my paper to an audience of three – all of whom appear to be waiting for the next panel to deliver their own papers – I cut out the rest of the day and wander around Reno.

I grew up on the California side of the border, in and around the Lake Tahoe area, so I spent a great deal of time in Reno as a child. In many important ways it hasn’t changed. It’s still the same washed-out desert browns and yellows, desultory daytime gambling and cheap steak lunches. The surrounding suburbs have grown out in the twenty-five years since I’d last been through, but the casinos are mostly where they used to be. The Toys’R’Us where my parents shopped for toys when I was three is still there. I walk around for a few minutes and am terribly depressed – the aisles aren’t in the same places, the toys are current. For some reason a part of me expects to see Star Wars figures from 1983 sitting on the pegs, not Captain Phasma.

I cannot elaborate on the ways in which Meillassoux offers up proof for the probability of a future God without unnecessary detours through Spinoza and Kant, detours which I furthermore am only partially qualified to illuminate. Suffice it to say for the moment that there is an aggressive misreading of Meillassoux predicated on sheer ridicule, a misreading that overtly questions the sanity of a philosophical system dedicated to belief in an avowedly nonexistent god. But Meillassoux’s thesis is not a call to religiosity. Rather, it is a call for an end to religiosity, and also an end to the ideal of emancipatory politics as a destructive force – a not unproblematic assertion, I consent. Meillassoux’s body of work – and “The Immanence of the World Beyond” in specific –  offers a reading of Marx that attempts to think the literally unthinkable by moving beyond the Fukuyaman “end of history” and towards the moment of true communism, the moment after politics: “The end of politics,” he states, “is that which proceeds from an ontological uprising that is independent of our action.” Meillassoux’s world is a world in which the boundless contingency of the universe has already spawned three previous miracles ex nihilo, in the form of matter, life, and mind. But there is a fourth world still to come, the world of a hypothetical God, not strictly necessary but eternally possible, a world into which our honored dead would long to be resurrected.

There’s a reason I don’t go to casinos, and the reason is that I shouldn’t gamble. My grandfather ruined my mother’s family with gambling and everyone in his bloodline suffers from the same compulsion. I don’t go to casinos or play slot machines because when I do my self-control falters. Unfortunately, the hotel offering conference discounts is in a casino. I limit myself to the nickel slots and thankfully manage to only lose around $50 over the two days, but I leave the casino disheartened and drive home under a cloud. When I reach Davis I smoke the last of the stash left by my partner before returning to finish her last semester at CalArts. I resolve to get my own medical marijuana license, which I do on February 28th, 2016.

It’s the evening of April 30th of 2016. I’m sitting on the edge of my bathtub smoking. I smoke almost every day. I am standing on the edge of an abyss. Everything feels wrong and I have no idea why. I’m covered in molasses, dragged to earth. I have strange ideas, strange fantasies. Nothing makes sense. I don’t know why.
   
I turn my head and hear a voice. But that’s not what this essay is about. 

And here, by means of conclusion, we find the figure of Derrida waiting to bridge these speculations. Meillassoux’s “fourth world,” in his own words, is simply justice. In summoning the specter of a hypothetical justice, we are reminded of the idea of justice as a deconstructable concept, meaning on some (tendentious / imprecise) level an ideal concept – a concept / not-concept whose existence we can only note by traces left in the wake of its imperfect incarnation. Derrida’s words at the end of the cold war are not an attempt to perform a séance for the literal specter of Marx, but to remind his disheartened audience in the wake of the Soviet catastrophe that the specter of Marx is always already present. He can’t be gone, because he never left. Justice is an inheritance, the exhortation of King Hamlet’s ghost to his wayward son to swear eternal vengeance, to right the ancestral wrongs. Is that not what Derrida means, precisely, when he opens the exordium of Specters of Marx by proposing a moment when “someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally”? We learn to live for justice, in history, as inheritors of the past – with the certain knowledge that although justice has never yet existed, it may someday.

Neon Bible is a masterpiece, seemingly because of and not despite the fact that it amplifies all of the band’s existing weaknesses to Brobdingnagian proportions. That’s the point, I think: style is all the mistakes you make when you’re trying to figure out how to do things the right way. Arcade Fire is a definitively immature band, so it is no surprise that their best work is a monument to joyful and rigorous immaturity. I behave compulsively. The same internal motor that compels me to play hand after hand of useless video poker for no reason compels me to smoke pot for hours on end. I am confronted by an unpleasant reality: I feel so much better while high that the idea of being sober no longer holds any appeal. From my position writing this towards the end of June 2017 I see a great deal of despair as a unified (if fractious) Republican government attempts to push through a radically unpopular agenda, using the spectacle of a treasonous and bumbling executive to distract a demoralized and disassociated left. Despite all of this I remain hopeful for the medium and long terms, if not the short.

I write these words in a room that is half dismantled, bookshelves and closets torn apart after six years of accumulation. I buy books, people send me books, I am drowning in books. A part of me has grown to hate books. That’s the key, you see: being high didn’t just make me feel better, it made me feel so much better that the discrepancy between my attitude when high and my attitude when sober was dramatic and distressing. I tell people not to believe anything I say, and to do the opposite of anything I have done. No one believes me.

Every trans story is different. I wanted to believe that there was nothing special about mine, that I was no different from millions of other trans folk who have lived and suffered and triumphed. But that’s not true. I am special – more to the point, we’re all special, all unique. No two trans people share the same story. This thing inside of us pulls us in different directions, forces us down different paths. Every trans story is different. Mine is not uniquely difficult. Mine is not uniquely privileged. I have suffered, but most of us do. 

Izaya is so-called the Inheritor precisely because he carries the weight of generations of unjust conflict on his back. He also inherits some dim reflection of the conditions, the pressing weight under which – and I use the word “under” specifically, because we must never forget these physical dimensions of history – we must struggle. I mentioned towards the beginning of my presentation that all three texts shared a common understanding of exigence, and it is well that I should elaborate more fully on this idea. Kirby wrote and drew in 1971, after the peak of the Cold War but long before its conclusion, right on the cusp of the great malaise of the 1970s. Derrida spoke in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. And Meillassoux? He writes in the present, our present, in a world twenty years beyond the Cold War and defined by the inexorable breakdown of political and economic systems which, in the immediate wake of the Cold War, were regarded in some triumphalist quarters as invincible and furthermore refulgent in their splendor. All three men are preoccupied, almost to the point of distraction, with illustrating the means by which we can begin to understand the notion of hope in a world defined predominantly by hopelessness.

Every Arcade Fire album plays like a concept album whose concept has been forgotten – well, that’s every concept album, really. You read what it’s supposed to be about once in a magazine and then forget about it because either the album is good enough to stand on its own or it isn’t and no amount of plot will make the songs more memorable. Neon Bible is about the end of the world told from the perspective of someone living through the present ca. 2007. It’s pretentious and preposterous and downright silly in places but it bleats and pulses like a living creature.

In 2016 I learned that everything I thought I had known about myself had been a lie, and then a few months later the same thing happened again. And then again in March of 2017 on the heels of a nervous breakdown.


I truly believed that I had no talent. I truly believed that my effectively quitting writing in 2007 was a good thing, and that getting “realistic” about my limitations as a writer was necessary and important. I truly believed no one but a few nerds here and there even remembered who I was. I truly believed I was better off teaching writing than actually writing. I truly believed that I was object of pity and scorn.

And then, after October 11th, I learned that all of this was rubbish. The lesson came abruptly, violently, and without any possibility of appeal. There was just no way for me to get around the fact that every ounce of low self esteem I had cherished over the years, every argument and critique and dismissal, every enemy I had made and every monumentally stupid and ill-informed opinion I published had not, in fact, made me a pariah.

We cannot, in this context at least, escape the conclusion that hope is an unavoidably theological sensation – and if it is not, as Derrida and Meillassoux and myself are careful to stipulate, religious in deed, then we must at least understand that the idea of hope is given shape and definition by this long association, such that it can be understood as unmistakably religious in form. Derrida states,

a messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled . . . even if it rushed headlong into an ideological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark on history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility.

Let us return to first principles: if there is to be a “fourth world,” we must be worthy of its advent. We must understand the means by which the inheritance of history translates – literally, is carried across – into responsibility. 

In May of 2017 I switch desk chairs, getting rid of the nicer stiff-back chair I bought last year in favor of my old falling down and busted chair. My back pain disappears in a week. My ear begins healing immediately after the piercing falls out – a month and a half later all that remains of a gaping hole is a slight bump in the cartilage. I order small steel cuffs to place over the top of my ear – a silver and a gold on my right side and one silver for my left, to match the rings on each hand.

In June of 2013 I give a short presentation tying together the work of three figures: Meillassoux, Jacques Derrida, and Jack Kirby. The language is ponderous and pretentious, a game attempt to replicate the tone and cadence of academic style. It’s not a good piece of writing and gets little response from the professor. What strikes me in hindsight is that as long ago as three years before my "great revelation" I find myself already rehearsing a means to actualize optimism through my writing.

That’s the game, really: how can we find our way home to hope, in the face of pervasive dread?

It is remarkably difficult to look outside of ourselves – we are straightjacketed by private perception, unable to see the world through another person’s eyes, let alone to truly imagine a world without us, either anterior or posterior to our own existence. The present seems eternal. It seems as if the only possibility for human existence is our own lives. But the world has existed for billions of years and will persist in some form for billions of years more, long after you and I and these words are less than dust.

These are hopeful ideas. Remembering that the world and time are so much bigger than you or I – these are powerful ideas.

But might we not also inherit the future as well? Derrida states that “one never inherits without coming to terms with some specter, and therefore with more than one specter.” These specters press in on us, compel us, hound us, but they also point the way towards a world of immanent and impending justice, begging us to move past the point of rupture with the old world, and into the welcoming arms of a new life.

I floundered in grad school partly because I suffered a tremendous breakdown, and partly because I felt a painful disconnect from even that material I had volunteered to study. My writing about Virginia Woolf and Henry James – the hoariest of the hoary, interesting to me for purely ontological reasons – was by scholarly necessity tentative and impoverished. There was a core of interest in the idea of epiphany, moments of revelation that burst upon human consciousness and bring with them sudden and irrevocable changes of perception. Wrapped round that central idea was dozens and dozen of layers of obfuscation and tedium – such is the nature of scholarship. As a lifetime of PTSD began to catch up with me in my early thirties and my concentration began to falter, my enthusiasm for obfuscation and tedium correspondingly waned.

Don’t look to me for lessons on life and how to live it. If I seem didactic it's only because I rehearse these lessons and ideas for my own benefit. The only lesson I can impart, the only true thing I have ever learned in all my years is the absolute necessity of hope. Nothing else matters. Without hope we are dead.

And that is where Neon Bible leaves us: the world is dying, society has crumbled, all that remains is the idea that there may be a better world somewhere else. “We know a place where no planes go / We know a place where no ships go,” they sing on “No Cars Go,” a song about falling asleep and escaping. It’s not just about falling asleep and into dreams, though – dreams represent the idea of something new, an undiscovered country undefiled by the present tense.



The significance of “No Cars Go” lies in the fact that it follows “Windowsill,” the kind of anthem that would represent the apex of any other band’s sprawling concept album –Neon Bible, however, barely clocks in at forty-seven minutes, and "Windowsill" is still only the third track from the album's end. “Windowsill” is about rejecting the present and turning aside from an inheritance of despair (“I don't want to live with my father's debt / You can't forgive what you can't forget”), all while living in the shadow of imminent ecological collapse (“Because the tide is high / And it's rising still / And I don't want to see it at my windowsill”). That track in turn comes on the heels of (“Antichrist Television Blues”), a song about media saturation during the first decade of the twenty-first century and the unpleasant confluence of sexualized media and post-apocalyptic imagery that followed 9/11 (“I don't know what I'm gonna do / Cause the planes keep crashing / Always two by two”).

And that’s the point of Neon Bible: it’s an album about the means by which history transforms an unpleasant present into the possibility of a hopeful future. It feels crazed, it feels like it’s rolling towards certain destruction at any moment – but it never quite falls apart, there’s always another crescendo just around the corner to remind the listener that sometimes the greatest hope for salvation in all the world is making a giant fucking noise.

“Between the click of the light and the start of the dream,” goes the song, carrying the listener away from consciousness and onwards to something else. It’s March of 2017 and I’m laying in bed in total darkness listening to Neon Bible, thinking about a friendship ended prematurely because I said something I shouldn’t have, desperately willing the clock to turn backwards and give me another chance at that day, another opportunity to unsay the things I said. Six weeks later my friend apologizes to me, and I am poleaxed. Another miracle, another cherished illusion shattered. 

Sometimes the world gives you a second chance.

The third track on Spoon’s 2010 album Transference, “Mystery Zone,” begins with the words, “Picture yourself / Set up for good / In a whole other life.” The song is supposedly about a swinger’s club in Houston, but the words often ring in my head disconnected from context. It’s a nice dream.

It’s the evening of June 24th of 2017. I’m sitting in my bathroom, the same bathroom where I sat and got high for over a year, smoking my way back from oblivion through a series of personal revelations. I could only have broken through an impenetrable carapace of trauma with the aid of mind-enhancing chemicals, even if said chemicals eventually became a crutch. I lean forward on the side of the tub and backwards through time, speaking the words “You’re trans” into an empty room. Is that electricity? Do my words travel backwards through time and into my own ear, precisely four hundred and twenty days earlier? I laugh for a solid minute when I realize the number. Maybe the universe operates according to a series of patterns whose logic lies beyond our ability to comprehend, and maybe “420” is just really funny. Maybe both.

Remember: sativas are a “head” high. They’re good for when you need to break open the doors in the back of your brain behind which hide all your demons. Indicas, conversely, are “body” highs, good for temporarily banishing the physical dysphoria you didn’t even know you had.

So, what now?

What is left? How do we contend with a present so impoverished of possibility that the idea of collapse seems more reasonable than change? How to explain a world where The Walking Dead seems more true than Star Trek?

I believe in miracles. I never believed in God, and I suppose I still don’t, but I do believe in miracles. How else can you possibly explain what happened to me? From one perspective I have been trans my entire life, from the very first few weeks of life in my mother’s womb when some unknown quirk triggered a short circuit in my developing endocrine system – but that’s just biological essentialism. From myperspective I wandered through life half-asleep, driving with the parking brake stuck and completely unaware of the grinding of the wheels. I didn’t know what I was, and then one day I did. Boom.

How else can you explain it? Change is the most difficult thing in the world but it’s not impossible. Sometimes it happens in a moment, sometimes the world pivots on its axis. Sometimes it happens gradually, so gradually you aren’t even aware of it. But it’s real. I thought I was dead. In hindsight I was living like I didn’t expect to see the other side of forty. That’s a hard thing to realize. The person I was had lost all hope, lost all perspective.

But sometimes you turn your head and you hear a voice speak two words that change everything.

When I was a kid I wanted to draw comic books, so I spent a few years (an eternity when you’re a kid) learning to draw, studying anatomy books and learning about different kinds of pens and pencils. And then I reached a point sometime in junior high when I realized that actually becoming good enough to make a living as a professional artist would require the kind of determination and sacrifice that I didn’t have. So I stopped drawing.

When I was a little bit older I wanted to write comic books. I still think I’d be good at it, but the fact that no one has ever asked me means I have no way of knowing and get to cherish my fantasies untouched by the harsh glare of reality.

When I got older still I realized that writing books without pictures was probably a more feasible goal. The problem is that kids don’t have anything to write about, so I wrote a lot of shit. And then when I realized the size of the gap between amateur competency and professional accomplishment I gave up because at the time I didn’t have it in me.

When I stopped writing I thought I’d be a good academic. For a little while that seemed like a good plan. However, I liked the idea of being an academic more than I actually liked being an academic. I spent a great deal of time beating myself up for my supposed failures, and that was the last step before I fell into the downward spiral whose bottom I only reached on the evening of April 30th 2016.

The world can change in an instant. I don’t have any meaningful advice to impart besides the fact that the world is more plastic than you can possibly imagine. Accept that maxim and you will understand the nature of hope. I thought I knew who I was, and then suddenly I didn’t. It hurt a great deal but it was worth every last ounce of pain.

I don’t know the future. I can’t predict whether I’m going to succeed or fail, I don’t even know what I am going to be doing. I don’t know if the Republic will stand or fall – whenever you read these words, you surely have greater insight than myself simply by virtue of living in an unknown future. Maybe my words seem woefully naïve, or maybe we really are on the cusp of a massive change for the better. Maybe neither, and we’re all still just muddling along.

As bad as things get, I always believe they can and will be better. History is pretty clear on this: it may take a week or a month or a decade or a century, but the species finds a way. Hope is the weapon. Hope is the catalyst to transform a world. 

Maybe I’ll be homeless. Maybe I’ll live in a commune. Maybe I’ll trip in the shower and break my neck tomorrow. Maybe I’ll live in a great big house surrounded by children and cats, make breakfast for my wife in the morning before she leaves for work and spend the rest of my day writing. Maybe you’re reading this years from now and I have a thriving writing career and my books are everywhere. Maybe this book is a vanity project published on Amazon and I spent my time eking out a living on freelance assignments while living below the poverty line. Maybe I’m working at Starbucks. Maybe I’m working for Lucasfilm. Maybe I’m alone. Maybe I’m surrounded by family.

All I know is that change is real and possible. Change isn’t always for the better but it can be, and sometimes the universe turns around and surprises you.

The world is pregnant with possibility. The current epoch molders and rots as endless better tomorrows vie to supplant. If my life changed, your life can change too. If my world can flip in an instant, so can our world. 

And once again I find myself procrastinating, playing for time because I don’t want to reach the end, don’t want to actually write the last words of the last essay of this book. I’ve enjoyed these essays, even – no, especially when they’ve been difficult. I’ve told my own story the only way I know how, by talking through something else as a means of skirting the real problem. Eventually I get around to what I’m actually trying to say. Eventually I get to the point.

If you’ve read this long - well, God bless. I had a number of things I wanted to say and I doubt I’ve said anywhere close to everything I need to say. I keep putting off the end because I know once I reach the end of this essay, and publish it on the site, and it is read by anyone – it’s over. It will be out of my hands, forever.

It would be nice if I could keep writing forever, perpetually pushing forward these final nine words – the final twelve, actually – for just another day, another chance to sit and think and hide. If you’re reading this now there’s a chance you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, maybe even know me from Twitter. Maybe you’ve never met me before. Maybe this book is a surprise bestseller and is being devoured and recommended by tens of thousands of people who are devoting significant chunks of their lives to hacking their way through the thick maze of my verbiage in order to . . . what? Better understand me? I’m not that interesting. Everybody’s interesting.

But it’s time. In my head I can see the finished book, sitting on a shelf, sitting in my hands, a bright red, obnoxious red cover with bold letters on the cover proclaiming the title, announcing the sum total of my accumulated life’s wisdom in fifty-point type. Maybe you’re holding it in your hands, too. It’s a simple phrase, a mantra I repeat to myself over and over again as the last year of my life changes and mutates into something unexpected and strange and awful and wonderful and terrifying and better.

I turn the book over and read the cover – nine words that spell out everything – nine words to change my life. I read and breathe and repeat to myself,  

Tomorrow is always the best day of my life.

And it is.


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 The Twelfth and Final part of an ongoing series

4. Trifles, Light As Air

Let's Talk About What We Talk About When We
Talk About Teaching Let's Talk About Love
5.  One - The Modern Age
6. Two - Slow Decay
7. Three - A Time To Be So Small

8. The Last Star Wars Essay
9. True Believers
 10. Tegan & Sara Made Me Queer
11. Someday We Will All Be Free  
12. How To Live


*
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26 Jun 22:32

Loren Janes, R.I.P.

by evanier

One of the world's greatest stuntmen, Loren Janes, died Saturday at the age of 85. Janes founded the Stuntmen Association of Motion Pictures and Television, did stunts in hundreds of movies and thousands of television shows and justifiably bragged that he never had a major injury and never broke a bone. The list of stars for whom he doubled included Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Michael Douglas, Charles Bronson, Robert Wagner, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Yul Brunner, William Shatner, Frank Sinatra and even Debbie Reynolds, Shirley MacLaine and Esther Williams. Most notably, he did stunts for Steve McQueen in most of McQueen's films.

Actually for some of us, his most notable credit was that he did stunts all throughout It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. A lot of the stunt driving was Loren Janes and in the finale, when Eddie "Rochester" Anderson flies through the air and lands in the lap of an Abraham Lincoln statue, that's Loren in blackface makeup.

He was a superb athlete, competing in the Olympics in 1956 and again in 1964. He was also a good enough actor that he was occasionally given lines of dialogue and even hired for non-stunt roles. He was still working well into his seventies.

I got to spend time with Mr. Janes at two separate events relating to Mad World and he was a charming, fascinating guy who seemed to have been on the set of every movie made in Hollywood while he was active. Someone who was with us once made the comment that in Mad World, the biggest laugh may have been when the Three Stooges show up and do absolutely nothing. Janes told us he'd doubled for Moe in Snow White and the Three Stooges and he had plenty of stories from that filming.

He often lectured about his craft and one of the key points he made was that a stuntperson was an actor; that if he doubled the star diving through a plate glass window, he not only had to dive through the plate glass window — which in itself was difficult enough — he also had to do it with the body language of the actor he was doubling. Before he doubled Kirk Douglas, he'd spend hours studying how Douglas moved…and how he moved as that character.

He was one of the best and that's why he worked so much. And I think it's interesting that most of the stunt people in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — though they spent their careers crashing cars and falling off roofs — lived to older ages than the stars they doubled. I hope the Academy includes Mr. Janes in the "In Memoriam" reel at next year's Oscars because he probably logged more camera time and participated in more memorable movie scenes than most of the actors they'll automatically include.

The post Loren Janes, R.I.P. appeared first on News From ME.

26 Jun 10:46

Legends in Concert

by evanier

This coming August 28th, Jack Kirby would have been 100 years old and many, many tributes are occurring to celebrate the man. A few of them seem a bit exploitive of the man, including a couple that might be well-intended but which suggest that some who respect his life and work do not respect his family's privacy or copyrights.

One of the tributes that I'm sure Jack would have appreciated greatly is that on July 14 at the D23 Expo in Anaheim, he will be formally designated as a "Disney Legend." The other honorees at that ceremony are Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Oprah Winfrey, Julie Taymor, Garry Marshall, Disney artists Manuel Gonzales and Clyde Geronimi, and Stan Lee. The D23 Expo is kind of like a big Comic-Con that is only about things that Disney owns.

Some Internet commenters have carped that while Jack is a legend, he is not a Disney legend; that he only worked once for the company, back when he drew a limited series newspaper strip of the movie, The Black Hole. That's true but this award is not based on that and the folks who decided to honor him probably didn't even know about it. He is being honored for being the creator or co-creator of so many characters and concepts that, with the sale of Marvel to Disney, became Disney properties.

I would like to suggest that these commenters are overlooking the fact that the Disney Company has the right and power to decide what qualifies someone to be a Disney Legend and to change the rules any time they choose. They can bestow that honor on a guy who sells churros in Frontierland if they like. They obviously decided in recent years that it can go to anyone who was important to anything that is now a Disney property, regardless of whose payroll they were on when they made their contribution.

If you think that's wrong, don't piss on Jack's honor. Write a letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger. I'm sure he'd be pleased to consider your complaint and write you a personal reply. Heck, he'll probably even send you some Disney Platinum Cards and invite you to have lunch with him at Club 33. If he does, try the Sustainable Fish of the Day and try not to wonder if it had a speaking part in The Little Mermaid.

(Interesting bit of lineage: Robert Iger is related to Jerry Iger, who was Will Eisner's partner in the early days of comic book publishing. When he was starting out, Jack Kirby briefly worked for the Eisner-Iger operation. If you want to plot the tree, Jerry Iger's brother Joe had a son named Arthur who became big in the world of book publishing. Robert Iger of Disney is Arthur's son.)

Yes, yes…originally the Disney Legends trophies went to people like the famous Nine Old Men of Disney animation and to people who actually worked with Walt or on the lot pre-The Rescuers. There aren't that many of them left so it's been redefined just as the company itself has been redefined greatly since back then. I suspect we will live to see the day when most of the public will not know that Captain America and the Hulk weren't Disney characters from their inception, just like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Floyd Norman. Over at Time-Warner, there seems to be little recognition that Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry and Scooby Doo weren't all birthed at the same studio.

Jack is now being recognized as the co-creator of Fantastic Four, X-Men, Hulk, Thor, The Avengers, Silver Surfer and a couple of zillion more. For decades, a lot of us — starting with Jack and his family — were bothered that he was not so recognized; that it was often denied that he was a co-creator at all. While I think there could (and should) be more recognition that he contributed more than just the visuals, I am utterly delighted whenever I see him credited at all. If Disney is going to do that loudly and proudly, my mouse ears are off to them. Or they would be if I had any…

The post Legends in Concert appeared first on News From ME.

25 Jun 20:42

Queensbury Rules for a modern Leadership contest

by Mark Valladares
Great, another leadership contest... just what the Liberal Democrats were crying out for. Or not, perhaps. Frankly, whilst Tim didn't handle the whole 'gay sex' thing terribly well, and a far better response was available than the one he gave, whilst he had the support of my friends in the LGBT community, I was willing to turn Nelson's eye towards the matter. It is his actions rather than his personal beliefs that actually impact on people's lives, and it seems that his record on Parliamentary votes was well nigh impeccable.

But it wasn't to be, and the grey men came for him. It's not clear who they were yet, and even less clear who exactly they spoke for, and I can't say that I'm awfully impressed. Jonathan Calder has already put it rather well when he suggests that whilst you can claim to be a democratic Party all you like, if a decision of the membership can be overturned by an anonymous cabal, you don't really have proper democratic control.

And, like Bill Le Breton, I'd like names too, if only so that I know who to hold to account. However, unless we're going to quiz every potential suspect, and we can validate what responses are given, the identity of the 'delegation' can only be conjecture, and a witch hunt would be deeply unedifying. That, of course, hasn't stopped elements of the Party in the past...

As to the succession, I know as much and as little as anyone. There are only eleven potential candidates, which does rather narrow the field, and some of those will rule themselves out as the days pass by.

I'm not minded to indicate support for any candidate at this stage. Until nominations close, the nature of the field is unknown, and whilst if given a range of choices, I might prefer one candidate over another, until offered an actual choice, I'm not disposed to providing even a glimpse of my thought process yet.

However, I would like to offer some advice to anyone out there thinking of running (in no particular order);

  1. Don't go negative. If you do, I'll assume that you don't have as much to positively offer as your campaigning might suggest. If you win, I'll think less of you, and to be honest, you need me rather more than I need you. After all, without me, and thousands like me, you lead a shell of a political party. And as for me, I could give the time and energy that I currently expend on the Party to something else, or in a different way. Oh and if you lose, you will probably have damaged the winner. I recall both Huhne vs Clegg and Lamb vs Farron achieving that only too vividly.
  2. Offer a vision. Vision is important. Yes, I want a shining city on a hill, yes I want chocolates and a long-stemmed rose. Or a pony. But definitely a vision for the Party. Have one, and articulate it.
  3. Talk to people beyond the bubble before you get elected. Find out why the volunteer Party volunteers, and tell me why it should volunteer for you. Demonstrate that you understand how the Party really works - some of the previous job holders really haven't got that, and it's made the relationship between leader and led rather prickly. I also expect you to work with the Party President and respect their office...
There's probably more that I should include, and I'll probably revisit this before too long, but one should always get some thoughts out there whilst they might be noticed and make a difference...
25 Jun 14:05

After just 3 Tory PMs in 37 years we might soon see 3 Tory PMs in just 3 (yes three) years

by TSE

The Sunday Times report

Philip Hammond is being lined up to replace Theresa May as prime minister as part of an alliance with David Davis to deliver Brexit safely.

Ministers said this weekend that Hammond should be anointed as leader before October’s party conference provided he vows to stand down after two years so that someone else can lead the Conservatives into the next election.

A former cabinet colleague has claimed the chancellor believes he is equipped to do the job. “He told me that if Theresa May could be prime minister, so could he.”

The elevation of Hammond — dubbed “Spreadsheet Phil” — would be greeted with resistance by some Eurosceptics who are suspicious of his interventions demanding a soft Brexit that puts jobs and business before controls on immigration.

But ministers believe that can be surmounted if he appoints Davis, the Brexit secretary, deputy prime minister and makes clear he is a caretaker leader.

 Under one plan gaining traction with Tory MPs, May’s successor would announce that there would be a general election after Brexit in 2019 in which the public could have a say on the final deal.

If I were Philip Hammond, I’d offer to be Prime Minister for two years, then say he’ll trigger a Tory leadership contest in 2019 in which he’d stand rather than be a placeholder Prime Minister that Mrs May is now.

What is clear following Mrs May’s calamitous decision to hold a snap election, which turned into the greatest strategic blunder since the fall of Singapore, which saw her lose David Cameron’s majority is going to cost Mrs May her job, it is now a matter of when she is toppled, not if.

At the time of writing you can get around 7/1 on Hammond as next PM and with some newer bookies you can get 8/1 on him as next Tory leader, and 5/2 on Mrs May not to be PM on the 1st of October with William Hill.

TSE

25 Jun 13:27

FAQ: PFL Edition

by Neurodivergent K
Inspired by parents, professionals, and other abled people who think that they have a right to tell us how to refer to ourselves and then get snotty when told that's inappropriate.

Q: May I humbly request you change to using person first language?

 A. No.

Q. I demand that you use person first language.

A. No. What happened to humbly requesting? 

Q. Let me tell you all about it! You must be unaware!

A. You may not. I am quite aware.

Q. But it puts the person first! It's more respectful!

A. It is not. I actively selected identity first language. Telling me how to talk about myself is disrespectful.


Q. But I need it to remind myself that my child is a person.

A. Woah there. "I can't think of my kid as a person" is really very much your problem. Why would you think that would win me over? It makes me very worried for your child.

Q. Person first language is correct.

A. No, it is not. Stop trying to tell me what to do.


Q. There is no need to be so rude!

A. Okay so you come into my space and demand I talk about myself in the way you want because otherwise you cannot remember I am a person and that isn't rude?!?


Q. I'm trying to help you by pretending I think you're a person. This is why you don't have allies! 

A. You acknowledge not thinking I'm a person and come into my space to tell me how to talk about myself. You're no ally.


Q. How will I learn anything if you don't use person first language?

 A. If you need to be reminded every other word that I'm a person, you're not quite up to the level of this blog. This is not a Disability Rights for Beginners blog.

Q. You're so rude!

A. But telling me how to talk about myself is not rude. Ohkay.


Q. You have poor social skills because you have autism.

A. I am not the one struggling with social skills here in this situation. You should be embarrassed at your behavior. I'm getting second hand embarrassment for you.

Q. So you'll be changing to person first language?

A. Piss off and don't piss back on again.
25 Jun 12:03

Adam Roberts, The Thing Itself

by Wesley
Andrew Hickey

This sounds really interesting

I’ve again collected several half-written reviews that have been sitting on my hard drive for weeks. I’m planning to make an effort to finish a few.


Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself is philosophical speculative fiction riffing on Kant’s idea of the ding an sich, or thing in itself. I’m not as smart as Kant, so I’ll summarize his argument simplistically: according to Kant we only know reality, the world outside our minds, through our senses and perceptions. The way our minds work dictates our experience of the universe. We perceive reality through certain mental structures, or categories: cause and effect, distance, space and time, quantity. We can’t think outside of the structures that shape our thoughts because they’re what we think with. We don’t know how relevant those structures are outside the human mind. Yes, there’s something real that our minds perceive as space and time, but is that what it, like, is? There’s the human experience of the thing, and then there’s the thing itself, which might be a cardboard box full of mechanical bees, or a four-dimensional version of New Jersey, or some kind of vast Jello casserole.

Cover of The Thing Itself

The Thing Itself asks: what if this were true? Literally? In the same way a typical science fiction story might ask “What if we filled a moon base with libertarians?” Speculative Philosophy is among the smaller fantastical subgenres, Adam Roberts being one of the few current practitioners. The speculative humanities are in general neglected. There’s plenty of speculative social science, but in the absence of either sci-fi gadgets or magic it’s often dismissed as “not SF.” The range of speculation SF allows itself sometimes feels oddly narrow.

Anyway, to answer the question: you’ve got a solution to the Fermi Paradox. At least according to Roy Curtius, the oddball technician sharing an antarctic research facility with our narrator, Charles. Aliens are by definition not like us; if we can’t access their frame of reference, their categories, maybe we can’t perceive them any more than we perceive the ding an sich. Roy has a plan to find them. It doesn’t end well for Charles.

At this point The Thing Itself jumps back to 1900 to follow a gay couple touring Germany in the company of a Baedeker guide and a copy of The War of the Worlds. (Not that anyone knows Harold and Albert are more than friends: the strangers around them don’t notice a relationship they’re not expecting.) Between trips to galleries and restaurants Harold keeps noticing, and immediately forgetting, incomprehensible amoeboid creatures. So apparently Roy is right. As another tourist tells Harold, “to tour a town with a guidebook in hand is to see only what the guidebook permits.”

The Thing Itself alternates chapters in Charles’s story with short stories that eventually connect to the main plot but could stand on their own. (Some have been published independently, including the first chapter, although in that version of the story “Charles” appears to be “Anthony.”) The interpolated stories are set everywhere from the 17th century to a far-future utopia, following different characters with different perspectives. It’s a crucial addition to a novel which is partly about world views and how they interact, or fail to.

Kant’s structures are, among other things, a metaphor for our everyday habits of thought. Characters in The Thing Itself repeatedly fail to perceive what their thought-structures don’t encompass: People who can’t imagine an apparently respectable 17th century magistrate is an abuser; a utopia founded on “scratching your itch” that doesn’t realize a woman who wants to experience psychopathy is pursuing something more ambitious than passing curiosity. (Incidentally, the utopian chapter is yet more evidence that, contra decades of received wisdom, utopias are not necessarily boring. Humans are weird; however perfect their society, their behavior is not perfectible. People can introduce drama anywhere. Drama is only absent from paradise if it’s defined solely as exaggerated suffering.)

In the main plot Charles is contacted by Irma, an employee of an institute trying to pull off what Roy only imperfectly managed: building an artificial intelligence to interact with the ding an sich. The AI, created by humans but not having human categories of thought, could mediate between us and the Thing Itself. More than that, Irma explains: her group thinks they can use the AI to manipulate the Thing Itself, maneuvering around the categories we call space and time. Travel through time, step straight from England to Antarctica.

Which is a cool concept. So it’s weird that at this point I put The Thing Itself down and didn’t pick it up for a week. Or maybe not so weird, because as soon as Irma shows up Charles propositions her. And propositions her again after it’s clear she’s uninterested. And spends most of the next chapter thinking less about the astonishing information being revealed to him than about how to persuade Irma into bed. To be clear, both the narrative and Charles acknowledge his behavior as bad. It’s a deliberate tactic to establish Charles as more heel than hero, and a contrast with Charles’s later glimpse of a more empathetic vision of human connection, and another restatement of a theme: Charles’s obsession is a thought-structure causing him to ignore the actually interesting things going on around him.

On the other hand… this means Charles, our narrator, is ignoring the actually interesting things going on around him. It only lasts for a chapter or two, but for that chapter or two The Thing Itself just drags. As I complained when I reviewed Anna Seghers’s Transit, what’s unique about this book is pushed aside to deal with a much-repeated and tiresome plot element. Protagonists pursuing uninterested women can and do show up in stories of all kinds; it’s a generic off-the-shelf plot element. Even done with full awareness of its problems it has nothing new to show me. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a story about a character who learns better. But it’s tedious when they’re learning a really basic lesson, like “don’t be a stalker.” I want characters to start with their basic life skills down so they can spend the story learning something interesting.

Fortunately this lasts a couple of chapters at most. Once it gets back on track The Thing Itself is brilliant. The main plot is a traditional Hitchcockian average-guy-on-the-run thriller, but it’s also not afraid to stop the action so Charles and an AI can have expository philosophical debates formatted as Socratic dialogs. I’ve said before genre writing is sometimes too much in love with “show, don’t tell.” Novels hesitant to acknowledge their themes aloud, leaving them entirely in the subtext, may risk suggesting a theme without ever actually working out a coherent argument about it. Sometimes the best way to talk about an idea is just to come out and talk.

There’s a lot going on in this novel. I’m going to end by focusing on one small idea because it’s a lovely redemption of a normally cringe-inducing pop-culture cliché: at one point Charles’s AI pal asserts one of the fundamental forces of The Thing Itself’s Kantian universe is Love. “A tad sentimental, isn’t it?” complains Charles. But it isn’t. (Or maybe it is, but in a good way. Is “sentimental” really always bad?)

I mean, yes, in a totally different story this could have been corny. What I mean are those sci-fi and fantasy stories (usually, but not exclusively, movies or TV shows) that resolve themselves through the Power of Love. Emotion, here, works like whatever comes out of a Green Lantern ring: the hero feels really hard and the ancient alien artifact lights up, or the love interest shakes off their brainwashing, or the villain just sort of evaporates in the face of love, man. The Fifth Element is an obvious example; this has also become a regular plot resolution on Doctor Who. It’s an easy–lazy, even–way to wind up the plot and the hero’s character arc in a single climactic moment. The hero doesn’t achieve something great and have an emotional epiphany. Feeling something is the achievement. Mind you, the general level of emotional intelligence among pop culture protagonists is such that maybe just recognizing and articulating their own feelings is an accomplishment.

This is all usually hand-wavy. So it’s neat that The Thing Itself successfully justifies love-as-law-of-nature by carefully arguing its way there step by step. (Another common trope in science fiction is the idea that rationality and emotion are necessarily separate; that the climax of this book’s logical, philosophical game-playing is a genuine emotional epiphany gives the lie to that idea.) In The Thing Itself’s literally Kantian universe, the world as humans experience it is shaped by human consciousness; for human beings, reality isn’t just the ding an sich, it’s that plus human thought. So if affection is a fundamental part of human thought–and the AI classes it as one of several categories of thought Kant missed–it’s a fundamental force in the human world. As the AI asks Charles, “you’re going to tell me that the Affect has no place in human consciousness?”

Of course, in reality the universes of all SF stories are constructs of human thought, aren’t they? I mean, humans thought them up. I often find science fiction and fantasy oddly cynical. (The SF actually marketed as SF, at least; SF as a whole is more complicated.) I mean, the books the word “grimdark” was invented to describe were fantasy epics, not noir thrillers or gothics. (I watch a lot of noir movies. Maybe it’s just the Production Code, but in most of them people are kinder to each other than they are in Westeros.) Science fiction and fantasy are the genres most likely to causally slaughter extras to motivate a hero or just establish a story as Serious. This may say more about my perceptions than the genre, but I feel like more SF universes than not share a basic structural assumption that most people are out to get each other and the universe itself is out to get everybody. If so, does that mean we (as fans, critics, creators, whoever) have categorized SF as being primarily about disaster and disconnection?

I’m still thinking about The Thing Itself weeks after reading it. It combines several things I’d like to read more of in SF: speculation on ideas beyond new technology or complicated magic systems; dialogue that digs into the themes for entire conversations instead of just moving the plot along. But it’s also lovely that Adam Roberts suggests compassion and human connection are part of the deep structure of The Thing Itself’s story-world, regardless of the risk that the SF audience (many of whom value ass-kicking over affect) might (unfairly) think it mawkish. It’s neat to see a wonky, intellectual SF novel unapologetically go for a bit sentimental, and pull it off.

25 Jun 11:53

10.9 The Empress of Mars

by Andrew Rilstone
Some Victorians find a crashed flying saucer. In it is a little green man; who says that if they help him, he will fly them back to Mars and let them mine for infinite wealth. He will even build them a mining machine. But he is tricking them; he really wants to defrost the Little Green Queen who is in suspended animation. This leads to a shooting war between the Martians and the Victorians. When it looks like the two groups are going to wipe each other out, one of the soldiers, who was once sentenced to death for desertion, surrenders to the Queen and invites her to kill him. This proves that huh mans are honourable (or something) and she calls the war off and sets about rebuilding her civilization. Almost immediately she gets a message from a far-away star system, saying that a fleet of interstellar space ships are coming to help them.

I wish I had come in in the middle of Empress of Mars. In fact, I wish in fact that I was a Doctor Who fan from the 1980s, coming out of suspended animation at about the half way point. Ice Warriors and Red Coats in a cave, mutually besieging each other’s base; guns going off and indistinguishable men with pith hats and mustaches crying “I am assuming command” at each other, while an Ice Queen rants things like “Sleep no more!” and “Rise my ice warriors.” No idea at all what's going on, but this is what I always hoped Doctor Who would -- just like it was before but ever so much more so. I am sure if I watch the whole episode and catch up with the last 30 years of Ice Warrior continuity it will all make perfect sense. 

But I would be working on a false assumption. I would be assuming that Doctor Who was like other TV: that scenes make sense in context; that scenes, indeed, have a context to make sense in. 

*

Battlestar Galactica created a new thing out of the wreckage of its source material. Star Wars continues to lovingly illuminate the margins of its holy texts. Cinema Star Trek is currently desecrating the corpse of its TV predecessor, but at least it’s doing so consciously and deliberately, out of some perverse parricidal hatred. The Clangers — and I will fight to the death anyone who says that the Clangers isn’t as venerable and worthy of respect as any of the above-named Big Geek Franchises — simply resumed after a pause of 43 years as if nothing had happened. I suppose you could say that it was redundant: you can’t add to perfection. On the other hand, the characters can now blink. 

What, after ten years, is Doctor Who's relationship to the series which from 1963 to 1989? What is Doctor Who for? A dozen years in, I still have no answer. I suppose "Doctor Who is a series set in a magical universe where, each week, someone has to volunteer to commit suicide in order to generate the Peace Rays necessary to defeat the baddies" might do for a definition. But it still seems paralyzed by the anxiety of influence.

I have committed myself to writing something about every week’s episode of Doctor Who, and that means that I have to think of something interesting to say each week. No one would be very pleased if I said “It was another episode of Doctor Who. It passed the time amiably. There was nothing particularly wrong with it.” 

Empress of Mars is a very good piece of Saturday night television: light, fun, stupid, entertaining. If Doctor Who were like this every week, I would be pretty happy with it; although, if Doctor Who were like this, I would probably not bother to write about it, particularly. I was perfectly happy with, say, Merlin, but I didn’t dedicate a whole lot of thinking time to it. Perhaps I am just overthinking Doctor Who. But that raises the question: what is the correct amount of thought to apply to it. Or, put another: what is the right amount of stupor in which to watch it? 

*

Metro Magazine ran a headline “Doctor Who fans delighted by classic cameo in Empress of Mars.” Maybe some of them were. But I would have gone with: "Doctor Who fans bewildered by pointless cameo in Empress of Mars.” 

There are two Patrick Troughton stories, one set in the Very Far Future, in which human scientists accidentally defrost some Ice Warriors during an Ice Age; and another one set in the Much Nearer Future where some Ice Warriors try to turn the Earth’s atmosphere into Martian atmosphere using bubble bath. There is also a Jon Pertwee story in which a group of alien ambassadors have a conference to see if a retro-medieval planet can join the Galactic Free Trade Zone. The latter story pulls off a quite nice little trick: the Doctor assumes that the Ice Warriors are militaristic fascists who have come to the conference in order to disrupt it; in fact, they have long since renounced war and want the conference to succeed. Why they do not call themselves Ice Pacifists is not explored. One of the other alien ambassadors has claws and a single gigantic eye. (It came a close second in the Doctor Who Alien That Looks Most Like A Man's Willy awards.) It is this Alpha Centuri who appears on the communication screen at the end of Empress of Mars to say “welcome to the universe” to the Ice Warriors. The voice was provided by one Ysanne Churchman who provided the voice in the original story nearly 50 years ago. She was also the voice of Grace Archer who was famously burned at the stake as a punishment for inventing commercial television. (Check this - Ed.)  This makes her, at 92, the oldest person ever to appear in Doctor Who. Like you, I said "But what about the lady who had a non-speaking part as the frozen queen in the Pirate Planet but wouldn't take her false teeth out", but she was only 76.

But why? Surely the point of the story is that the nice cowardly guy with the pith helmet has volunteered to stay behind and help the Green Martians rebuild their civilization. If a fleet of highly advanced aliens are going to come along and do it all for them, doesn't that rather takes the point away from his sacrifice? That is to say, if the message had come from Just Some Alien it would have been at best pointless and at worst detrimental to the story. But if the message comes from yer actual Alpha Centuri from Curse of Peladon, then I feel entitled to ask what follows: that the Ice Warriors in Curse of Peladon were a newly defrosted race who had more or less always been pacifists, and whose civilization had been rebuilt by the Galactic Federation? That there was a civilization on Mars, in contact with interstellar races, all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? That the Alpha Centuri of the Pertwee era is at least hundreds of years hold and has a special relationship with the Ice Warriors since their inception?

This is not a continuity gripe. I am quite happy with the invention of new continuity or the contradiction of old continuity. By all means, please, shake up the etch-a-sketch and give us a completely new Ice Warrior continuity. I am not one of those who takes personal offense when it turns out that some beloved old Star Wars comics are no longer “canon”. 

But I do want characters and scenes and alien races to have contexts. I don't think "we thought it would be cool to have three lines spoken by someone from the 1970s" is a good reason for a thing to happen in a story.

Of course, if you doing a reboot of a beloved old franchise, you are going to drop in little tips of the hat to revered previous iterations. Getting Kirk Alyn to do a cameo in the very first Superman movie, say, or wheeling on Leonard Nimoy in the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Star Trek remake. We sometimes call them Easter Eggs, little shiny things you can look for if you want to. 

The whole of this episode feels like one long Easter Egg. 

But perhaps it only feels like that to me. Perhaps this story is intended for people who have never heard of the Ice Warriors or Peladon or Alpha Centuri, or, for that matter Queen Victoria. Perhaps Doctor Who is now entirely opaque to Doctor Who fans, because all we see are allusions and references; it's position within the now ludicrously entangled web of Doctor Who. Perhaps we are supposed to be looking at the story (the story of how the man who somehow survived being hanged volunteered to commit suicide and magically melted the evil Ice Queen's heart) and hardly even noticing the Ice Warriors. You see Green Martians, I see Ice Warriors. You see a random alien whose presence makes no sense, I see Alpha Centuri from a story which went out when I was seven years old. Mark Gatiss said to himself  “Let’s do a reverse alien invasion story — where humans invade Mars. Let’s make the invaders comedy Victorians who say ‘by gum’ and ‘top hole’. And let’s have the Doctor broker some kind of peace.” And then, very much as an after thought said “I wonder if there have ever been warlike Green Martians in Doctor Who before? There have? Well, we might as well re-use those. No point in inventing new monsters for the sake of it."

Because the alternative is much more distressing. The alternative is that everyone is a Doctor Who fan now; and everyone is just excited because there are Ice Warriors and that the lady who voice Alpha Centuri is still alive. Being a Doctor Who fan is not about feeling attached to a character, or a setting, or a style of story, but to a collection of contextless, free floating symbols. 

This is a story folded in on itself; a mobius story; a story made up of allusions to other stories (which were themselves made up of allusions to other stories.) It Tomb of the Cybermen and the Hungry Earth and the Silurians and the Curse of the Mummy and pages and page of Mark Gatiss's doubtless meticulous research into Victorian cockney rhyming slang ("what a load of gammon"). It feels to much like an exercise in lining up all your Green Martian soldiers on one side of the table, and your Victorian toy soldiers on the other side of the table and playing at war, until one of the toy soldiers zaps the queen of Martians with Peace Rays and everyone makes friends. 

I enjoyed it very much indeed. 


https://www.patreon.com/Rilstone



25 Jun 11:37

The Boo Radleys: Wake up Boo!

by Jonathan Calder


Wikipedia elucidates:
Despite critical acclaim and a cult fanbase, the Boo Radleys were still largely unknown to the general public by the time the Britpop phenomenon broke into the mainstream in 1995. 
This changed when the band released the upbeat single "Wake Up Boo!" in the spring of that year. It made the Top 10 in the UK Singles Chart, peaking at number 9. The single remained on the chart for two months, by far the band's longest run for any of its singles ... [Martin] Carr describes writing the song watching The Big Breakfast after a night on acid.
The Boo Radleys were around well before Britpop, but this reminds us that the phenomenon happened under John Major, not Tony Blair.

Recent commentators have often got that wrong, just as they do not realise that punk was a reaction to Jim Callaghan's government not Margaret Thatcher's.
24 Jun 15:16

#1322; The Hard Limit of Outrage

by David Malki

He really is, but no one deserves a Phooey. Children could see that, for cripes sake.

24 Jun 15:07

everyone's grilled cheese is burnt, which is its own form of success

archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about
← previous June 23rd, 2017 next

June 23rd, 2017: I am Kickstarting a new book! It's called WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PUNCHES A FRIGGIN' SHARK and/or other stories and it's gonna be great, in my not-at-all-biased opinion!!

– Ryan

24 Jun 11:32

#91 Dinah the Aspie Dinosaur and the Arbitrary Check-Box Criteria

by Dinah

Arbitrary Check-box Criteria.png

24 Jun 11:31

Britain Adrift

by Cicero
A system where the choice of British Prime Minister is Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn is -self evidently- a system that needs reform.  

Despite the humiliation of a hung parliament, the current Prime Minister, Mrs. May, has nevertheless started the negotiation to leave the European Union. The Conservatives do not intend to stop at any halfway houses, but to leave the jurisdiction of the ECJ, and so withdraw from the customs union, the single market and essentially all the institutions of the EU. Although Brexit will cause major economic damage- not to mention trashing the national brand of the UK- it is not the most immediate problem the country faces right now. Britain is sailing into the mother of economic storms with the engine stopped and a huge argument on the bridge.

The "sombre national mood" identified by the venerable Queen Elizabeth II is rightly named.

The sense that the Brexit vote has cast Britain adrift in uncertain international waters has grown over the past year since the result became clear. yet the fact is that the vote itself was the result of clear national unease. The fact is that for decades the UK has been facing a leadership crisis.  Theresa May is hardly unique in being essentially unqualified for the job of Prime Minister. She has chosen to deal with her party's problems rather than the national interest, and so did David Cameron when he called the referendum in the first place. Both are guilty of a betrayal of the national interest, even when they proclaimed their supposed devotion to that interest. Gordon Brown, suspicious and belligerent, was equally not up to the task. Tony Blair, whatever the hope and determination he brought into power, left office reviled. There are few Prime Ministers who can be said to be truly successful, and this is not always due to their own characters. The fact is that the system of British government is not able to deliver what the politicians and the voters expect. Without wholesale reform the political system will grow ever weaker and more discredited than it is now.

The need for political reform is already obvious, but the fact is that it is already too late to avoid the economic crash. The level of household debt at around 87.6% of GDP  is still close to all-time highs, yet the ability to support this level of debt is being squeezed by surging inflation, as Sterling continues to be marked down on the basis of Brexit. The problem is that Britain now faces a triple whammy: a collapse in confidence, a rapid acceleration in inflation and a squeeze in real incomes. 

In order to stabilize Sterling, it is pretty clear that interest rates ought to rise. Yet if the Bank of England takes that decision, then house prices and consumer spending will face drastic and painful adjustments at a time when confidence is already weak. The past few months have seen a significant fiscal contraction as the impact of various tax changes has hit the market, and some consumer sectors are already reporting sharp falls in activity. Anecdotal evidence suggests that pub spending, for example, has fallen 25-30% year-on-year since the beginning of the summer. The government is taken more tax out of the economy than before, and this at  time when confidence in the UK has taken a sharp turn for the worse. If monetary policy were to turn too, then a sharp and deep recession would be unavoidable.  It may already be happening.

The problem is now that the UK economy is on a knife edge. Stagflation- that curse of the 1970s- is back, and again, as in the 1970s, the political will to tackle the crisis has been lost. All of the activity of the Conservative government, when it has any to spare from fighting itself, is focused on the 18 month timetable until Brexit. Yet the economic crisis is even more immediate. 

There is a sense of drift, that all of the comforting and familiar scene we have known since the 1980s is about to be wrecked. Some changes, the passing of the Royal generations, for example, are inevitable, but nonetheless unsettling for that. Some- our membership of the EU- are being willfully destroyed. The indifference shown by the Conservatives to the fate of the residents of Grenfell Tower until it was too late is not merely the callousness of a particular political brand, but the incompetence of an entire system. Austerity is not merely a failed policy, it is a dangerous failure. Andrea Leadsom has the gall to demand "patriotism" -the last refuge of a scoundrel- from the BBC. Yet now one year on from the Brexit fiasco it is clear that people are voting with their feet. A crash dive in the number of people wanting to come to the UK is now being coupled with large numbers of well qualified Brits choosing to leave. On top of everything else, the UK will now have to deal with labour shortages in critical sectors- truly back to the 1970s once more.

It is clear that Britain stands leaderless and bereft on the brink of a future it does not wish for and does not understand. She stands adrift on the brink of storms that will transform her  -or destroy her. 
24 Jun 08:29

Questions Unasked

by Jen
I'm fond of the principle of turning things around and considering the opposite claim. Take the number of times politicians regardless of stripe say "now is not the time for complacency". Perhaps I should pick one, wait for them to say it, and then message them every week thereafter asking, "is it the time for complacency yet?" It must be complacency's moment sooner or later, but if we are complacent about getting complacency its turn, it might never get its moment of not doing much in the spotlight because it didn't prepare.

Whatever happens in politics or elections, the party or ideology of the politician is always crucial to the moment. Whether the Liberals on one side, UKIP on the other, or the rainbow of assorted rosettes in between, however well or badly a cause has done at an election the politico will always tell you "our cause has never been more relevant or more important." Liberalism has never been more vital; the need to ensure a red white and blue Brexit has never been more pressing; the environmental challenge has never been so great; empowering business has never been so important to our nation's interests; the need for democratic reform has never been more pressing; the time for proper socialism is definitely upon us; and the NHS has never been in more peril, and the barbarian horde are at the door. It's never, ever, "well, no-one gives a monkeys about our ideology at the moment, and who can blame them as it seemed plausible in the 1950s but now it's plainly bobbins."

Similarly, I do love the questions that go unasked and what they tell you.

For instance, as I've observed elsewhere, the questioning of Tim Farron about his take on whether "gay sex" is a sin reveals the conscious or internalised homophobia of the journalists involved when there are other closely related questions that go unasked. Farron was never asked "and what about straight sex? OK, but supposing it was a sin, does being married make the difference and is that why you voted for same-sex marriage and against the spousal veto so everyone had an equal chance of sinless sex if they happened to see the world that way? What about people who deliberately buy a bed big enough for five people, and is the person who sells them the bed a sinner too for enabling that kind of fun filth? Well, what if one of the five people in question had just eaten lobster?" No, we never get that, just a question that tells us more about the journo than the answer does about the subject.

Which brings me to my motivation to write today, as we see the curse of the unasked question again in today's Sun (I know, but still) with a feature about a three-person relationship that seems to be blossoming and working well for all three and, well, not really to be news but they make for a good photo and that'll do.

Under the headline "triple threat: Married couple who added a girlfriend to their family say being in a threesome makes them BETTER parents" - yep, this is the kind of threat that doesn't seem to have anything threatening about it at all, just a 50% better chance of the kids being picked up from school - we find that "Parents-of-two Matthew, 31, and Michelle, 30, from Huntington Beach, California, met Courtney, 26" and they've all been going steady for a while. Michelle and Courtney have excellent hair: one does the pink and blue bits, the other purple, so if you put them together you kinda get a bi flag.

On the upside, it's a pretty positive poly story, though as you scroll through photos of the two women kissing it's also a reminder of how unlikely the same piece would be with more than one man in the thruple.

But it's a classic of the question unasked that reinforces a certain narrative about bisexual people. Courtney tells the paper, “It’s the best of both worlds. I love having a male and female partner and they both show love and affection in different ways.”

Now I'm sure she does and I'm sure they do. But maybe ask Matthew directly if he does too - I bet he finds some differences between Courtney and Michelle, and that they each show love and affection in different ways. But I guess asking that wouldn't fit a lazy "women are like this and men are like that" narrative, nor a tired "bisexuals need one of each to be happy". Sigh.
24 Jun 08:28

The Election, For Liberals, In Brief

by Jen
Journo: Hello, welcome to the programme. I'm Agatha Prejudiced, and with me in the studio first this morning I have the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron. Tim, thank you for coming on the programme.
Tim: Thanks for having me on, it's great to be here. (waves at camera) Hello mum! I told you I'd be on telly one day!
Journo: Now with this snap election being called
Tim: About Brexit
Journo: Yes, about Brexit, and with a crucial decision in front of the British people as to whether to stay, to go, or to do a conga along the English Channel, it's important people know what each and every one of their Liberal candidates up and down the country stand for.
Tim: Yes, and we want a second ref-
Journo: If I can just finish
Tim: -eren... sorry, go on.
Journo: And what they want to know is: is gay sex a sin?
Tim: Whu?
Journo: You believe in God, don't you. And Britain has never had a Liberal leader who believed in a deity before, apart from Gladstone and Lloyd George and ...well OK all of them apart from Clegg, but Clegg goes back to 2007 and no-one can remember the time before the crash so you're the first.
Tim: I... Sorry?
Journo: So why haven't you answered the question?
Tim: That I believe in God? Yes. Or do you mean about whether I can remember a time before 2007 because let me tell you, in 1984 Prefab Sprout released their first LP and I still remember that, I was straight down to Woollies after school...
Journo: No, that gay sex is a sin, because it is, isn't it?
Tim: Well, I've nothing against it, but I happen to be happily married to a woman so that's not really what I came on the programme to do. I thought we were going to talk about my plan for government? Which is to be in opposition, because we tried government and to be honest with you, it was a shitstorm.
Journo: For the eleventh time of asking, is gay sex a sin?
Tim: Yes. And no.
Journo: Bloody liberal.
Tim: Well, it's morality isn't it. I'm not in the running to be Pope, I mean the kind of stuff that was in Leviticus frankly it's up to individual people and their relationship with their god, if they have one, and thankfully we don't live in the kind of country where the church dictates that kind of thing to everyone - for all that some people would like it not to be that way
Journo: So it is a sin?
Tim: ....Oh, for my good mate Jesus's dad's sake. No. There. No. Happy?
Journo: And what about straight sex?
Tim: Eh... No, I think that's probably alright too. I'm a bit busy being leader of a political party to download any updates to the Bible onto my iPhone, but I'm pretty sure.
Journo: OK, but supposing it was a sin, does being married make the difference?
Tim: Well I suppose, if you thought... Can I just ask, have you read our manifesto? (waves small orange pamphlet) I was expecting I might get quizzed about that a bit and I've been boning up on the figures all night to avoid having a Natalie Bennett moment. Ask me about how many social houses you can build for a hundred million quid and what a police officer earns, go on.
Journo: (blinks, carries on regardless) So is that why you voted for same-sex marriage and against the spousal veto - so everyone had an equal chance of sinless sex if they happened to see the world that way?
Tim: Er. It could be a benefit, I suppose, I was just doing what seemed right. We would quite like proportional rep-
Journo: Aha! So what about people who deliberately buy a bed big enough for five people, and is the person who sells them the bed a sinner too for enabling that kind of filth? And what if one of the five people in question had just eaten lobster? Hmm?
Tim: (stares at ceiling for a moment) Oh I give in. Alright. This document here, this isn't our real manifesto. (takes Bible from pocket) This is the real Liberal manifesto. And it's been a bugger to edit, let me tell you, it's taken me two years staying up at bedtime with a highlighter pen and a black marker to cross through the bits that aren't policy now we've left the coalition and don't have to include the stuff Anne Widdecombe kept going on about.
(reads)
"In the beginning was the word, and the word was" (flicks through pages looking for next uncensored bit) "Leaflets".
"There shall be"... "to choose a new leader for the Nation"... "Forty days and forty nights"...."of"...  "Leaflets".
"The LORD spoke to"....."Nick"...."saying, 30 pieces of silver".... "and the tribe shall wander in the wilderness for".... "three score years and ten".... And let me just add, although we have ruled out coalitions this time, in future we would be open to negotiating that three score and ten down to just ten.
"And".... "let them be healed".... "Gomorrah".... "did not bury the coins but invested wisely".... "Amen".
So there you go. Health, long term investment, different lifestyles, freedom of movement, all the big policy areas. And you know what, I know I said I'm not in the running to be Pope, but sod it, there's never been a Pope from Preston. I hereby quit as Liberal leader and am off to the Vatican to give that a go.
Journo: Tim Farron, thank you. Now next on the programme we are delighted to have the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has made some bold remarks this week about the housing crisis and the outrage of so many people being dependent upon foodbanks. Archbishop, good morning.
Bish: Hello.
Journo: Starting with the housing challenge. You say Britain needs more homes - probably around three million of them. How much would that cost and how many of them would be affordable properties for first-time buyers?
Bish: Oh bloody hell, my job is to pontificate on morals not plan a budget. (picks up abandoned Lib Dem manifesto)  Hang on, the answer's probably in here...
23 Jun 19:27

Five things we have forgotten about Open Source.

Five things we have forgotten about Open Source.
23 Jun 19:22

Critical missing words from the Queen’s Speech?

by Zoe O'Connell

State Opening of ParliamentI noticed a couple of the usual outlets today reporting that the Queen’s speech included measures to protect LGBT+ people. So I went to check the text – and that’s not quite what it says:

My government will make further progress to tackle the gender pay gap and discrimination against people on the basis of their race, faith, gender, disability or sexual orientation.

That is a half-complete list of the protected characteristics from the Equality Act 2010. The complete list is race, faith, gender, disability, sexual orientation, age, marriage/civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity and gender reassignment.

I can understand why some of these might not be included if the topic is employment protections – but the exclusion of gender reassignment given the track record of both the DUP and some (not all, thankfully) of the Conservative Party on these issues is worrying. I hope this is merely an oversight, but it seems worthwhile keeping a close eye on any legislation that comes forward during this parliament, to make sure it is fully inclusive.

It would be very easy for someone to slip through legislation that misses or even penalises trans people while parliament is busy dealing with Brexit.

 

Update: I have now received a copy of the briefing notes for the Queen’s Speech, and whilst they do include trans-related provisions they are all in the past tense. There does not appear to be anything in here for LGB people, let alone T+!

LGB&T Equality

• We have established a £3 million programme from 2016 to 2019 to prevent and address homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in schools.

• To support transgender equality we have increased investment in Gender Identity Services and issued new guidance to prisons on the treatment and management of transgender offenders.

 

Parliamentary copyright images are reproduced with the permission of Parliament – yes, I know it’s a photo from the wrong year but free-to-use ones aren’t up yet

The post Critical missing words from the Queen’s Speech? appeared first on Complicity.

23 Jun 15:41

The Irrelevant Return of -- Captain Non Sequitur

by Andrew Rilstone
All those do-gooders who want to change the name of Colston Hall should be more concerned what is happening in Bristol and other cities regarding girls that are groomed for prostitution. Come on do-gooders - get this sorted out and not think about something that happened years ago.
            Wendy Fryer


See also: 

All those do-gooders who want children to look both ways before crossing the road should be more concerned about what is happening in the Bering Sea regarding the near extinction of the pacific walrus.
23 Jun 14:04

On That GOP Health Care Bill, and Tax Breaks

by John Scalzi

First, my initial thoughts, as rendered on Twitter.

Now, let me talk a little bit more about the part where I say “rich people don’t miss their taxes,” since I think there are people who may be reasonably skeptical about this. Warning: I’m going to talk about my money. Then I’m going to talk about other people’s money.

To begin: I pay taxes on a quarterly basis, because I’m self-employed and the IRS, alas not entirely unreasonably, questions whether self-employed people will keep track of their money for a full year in order to pay off one big tax bill. So every quarter, I pay taxes. And in each of those quarterly tax payments, I pay in taxes roughly what I grossed (and definitely more than I netted) in income from the entire four-and-half years of my first job out of college, working for a newspaper. Add up my yearly tax bill, and it’s close to what I grossed my first ten years of being a professional writer — and there was never a time in there I didn’t do okay; it was a solid continuous progression up the middle-class income ladder.

So these days, whenever I see how much I pay in taxes annually, my first thought is always something like HOLY CRAP that’s a lot of money. I could totally use that! As someone who grew up poor and has worked his way steadily up the income ladder, it’s a freakin’ huge amount in terms of the raw dollars.

And then I pay my taxes and I discover that anything I would have used that ridiculous wad of tax money for, I still have enough in my net income for. I literally cannot think of a thing I want — or need — that my post-tax income can’t handle. Because as it happens, even with federal, state and local taxes, my tax burden is reasonable. I don’t pay taxes in 1980, when the highest marginal federal income tax rate was 70%; I pay taxes in 2017, where top federal tax bracket maxes out at just under 40%. With state and local taxes, I have to break a sweat to have a total top marginal tax rate of 50% — and my real world taxes indebtedness doesn’t come anywhere near half my income, because of how marginal tax rates work and because like lots of people in my position I have a very smart accountant who finds me lots of deductions.

So even with literally the full (pre-deduction) tax burden someone in Ohio can pay — we max out all the marginal rates — there is more than enough left over for pretty much anything that we want to do, individually, as a couple or as a family. We save a lot, invest a bunch, and thus take that money out of the short-term income pool we use for bills, household spending and, uh, “consumer activity,” and we’re still just fine, thanks. I suppose it’s possible that we could spend so much of our post-tax income that we’re left with little or nothing and thus would wish we had some of the money that we paid in taxes back into our hands, but speaking from experience, this takes effort, and some willful stupidity about your money. Yes, I’m looking at you, Nick Cage and Johnny Depp. But if you’re not the sort of person who spends $30,000 a month on wine, you’re probably going to be fine.

We do just fine. The other people I know who have similar or better incomes than we have also do just fine. The ones I know with substantially better incomes than we have are also doing just fine. No one at my income level or better actively misses the money they spend on taxes, because they’re still rich after they pay taxes.

Would I like to pay less in taxes? When I look at the raw number of dollars I send to the IRS, sure. When I think about the actual impact on my day-to-day life having that money would make, versus the actual and positive impact on the day-to-day life of millions of other people, when people like me pay our taxes? Nope. I have certain (in more than one sense of that word) opinions about how those taxes I pay in should be used, and whether they are being used effectively, and whether I’m getting value for what I pay, to be sure. Those are different issues, however.

Cratering health care for millions in the United States (and crippling Medicaid in the bargain) in order to give people like me a tax cut means that we are taking something from people who need it, often desperately, to give something to people who don’t need it and may not even notice it in any substantial way. In the House version of this legislation, you have to make more than $200k to get any tax benefit from it; people with incomes between $200k and $500k a year would get a tax break of $510 on average. $510 is not a lot to get in return for asking millions of other Americans to be potentially priced out of health coverage, have lifetime insurance caps reinstituted, be denied for pre-existing conditions, get sicker and die earlier. And the roughly 95% of Americans who don’t make $200,000 a year won’t even get that.

Rich people don’t need any more tax cuts. They’re doing just fine. They will continue to do just fine. And no, their tax burden isn’t onerous. Trust me, I know. I live that tax burden daily. It doesn’t hurt. What does hurt is knowing that people I know and care for will likely die sooner and sicker than they should just so someone like me gets back a few more dollars they won’t notice. Don’t come at me with “but the rich earned those dollars.” Dude, I earned my dollars, too. I earned them in a country that helped me get where I am in part through taxes. I earned them understanding that getting rich came with an obligation to the society I live in and benefit from, an obligation discharged, in part, by paying a perfectly reasonable amount of taxes.

The motto of the United States is not, in fact, “Fuck you, I got mine.” It was, and should have remained, “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one. We’re all Americans. We all deserve the blessings this country can provide. This one is willing to pay his taxes for the benefit of the many.


23 Jun 11:32

If you were in the DUP’s shoes you’d ask for the world as well – why May’s government is bound to be held hostage

by Jon

In the UK’s Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition between 2010 and 2015, neither side could get all it wanted. Deals were struck and there was some give and take. Both sides understood the needs of the other to some extent, meaning – for example – that the Lib Dems restricted Tory euroscepticism somewhat, yet Tory-driven austerity persisted. Neither party had a strong incentive to walk away from the coalition as to do so would have looked irresponsible towards the country, and this was relevant as both parties go after the same voters in England, Wales and Scotland. The so-called ‘quad’ of Ministers – Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander – held everything together organisationally.

So why then is May struggling to repeat this with the DUP since the election on 8th June? The DUP may be smaller than the Lib Dems in 2010, and the Tories larger, but their leverage is much greater as I will explain.

The DUP yesterday – on the day of the Queen’s Speech no less – stated that negotiations “haven’t proceeded in the way we would have expected. “Conservative high command ought to stop their backbenchers whingeing about the DUP and show our party some respect” the party added. Let us also not forget that the Queen’s Speech was delayed by 2 days to try to conclude a deal between the Tories and the DUP, but then the speech went ahead anyway without a deal in place. May’s own incompetence and undue haste to deal in the 48 hours after the election could well be a factor here, but the past fortnight’s travails with the DUP are a sign of what is to come.

This Alan Travis piece is the most detailed exposé of what the DUP is demanding as a price for its support for the Conservatives, and it is no surprise that Tory backbenchers will balk at some of that. More money for Northern Ireland when English regions are struggling due to austerity? Demands about a soft border post-Brexit, calling plans to leave the Customs Union into question? Substantive changes on corporation tax and airline passenger duty? Meanwhile the only Tory to emerge from the general election with her reputation enhanced – Ruth Davidson with her 13 Scottish Tory MPs (more than the DUP’s 10) – can feel especially aggrieved, not least due to the LGBTI rights issue.

But what can the Tories actually do about any of this?

The problem as I see it is that no-one outside Northern Ireland has any leverage over the DUP. If the DUP over-demands, it faces no real downside to not achieving its ends. It can point – once more(!) – to the rest of the UK not taking Northern Ireland seriously. The forgotten province – again. Any actual practical gain for Northern Ireland will be banked and then the battle will move to the next issue.

Among the UK’s major parties, only the Conservatives ever run candidates in Northern Ireland, but they polled a measly 0.4% there in 2016. The UUP in Northern Ireland – who had traditionally had a more collaborative relationship with the Tories – have been roundly beaten in recent years as Daniel Watts points out. Twitter user @Aldamir also has some excellent thoughts here. This means none of the parties in England, Wales or Northern Ireland (that make up >97% of the UK population) can stand to profit if the DUP does not succeed with its demands.

Putting this another way, in 2010 the Tories and Lib Dems had credible threats against each other if the other one did not deal. Now the Tories have no credible threat against the DUP, and hence the Tories are in a remarkably weak position. Meanwhile every day that drags on without a deal for May is one more win for the DUP – they are doing their job in the UK press making Northern Ireland’s issues heard.

Ultimately all the DUP has to do is keep May’s government stumbling forward, and extract concessions on a case by case basis. The first case of this could be next week – if the DUP abstains on the Queen’s Speech vote the Tories will win that vote 317 to 315, close enough to give May serious jitters. Plus with the complicated rules to force a no confidence vote thanks to the 2011 Fixed Term Parliaments Act it would be entirely conceivable that May’s government cannot get much of its legislative programme through the Commons, but the DUP would choose to not topple her as they would actually like a Corbyn premiership far less. The government would be bound to a DUP-enforced stasis. While the Brexit clock is ticking.

I wondered if there was any precedent for such an odd arrangement anywhere else in Europe, and mused about it on Twitter. The consensus is that there is not – because at least some parties are fully national in the cases with strong regionalists (CSU is only in Bayern while SPD is national, PSOE does not run in Catalonia but PP does, and there was no fully different electoral region in Italy or Slovakia) while the rough parity in size of Wallonia and Flanders increases the likelihood of collaborative outcomes there. Leonardo Carella wins the nerdy award for citing French Polynesia as an example, but even there we concluded the parallel did not hold.

So the DUP might be small (in terms of MPs total) but they have the power to cause May enormous problems. They can make huge demands without any sanction if they do not see these demands achieved. At the same time they can play things to make sure May’s government nevertheless survives. The Tories can whinge about them but the critique washes over Arlene Foster and her band. And as the comparison with other European countries shows there’s no precedent from anywhere else where a tiny regional party has such sanction over a governing party.

Think about it. If you were in the DUP’s shoes you would ask for the world as well. Relying on their support is going to be a massively bigger problem that anyone is so far admitting.

The post If you were in the DUP’s shoes you’d ask for the world as well – why May’s government is bound to be held hostage appeared first on Jon Worth Euroblog.

22 Jun 15:56

You Can Call Him Al

by evanier

Someone asked for an Amazon link for Al Franken's book so they could order it and I could get my teensy commission. Here it is and thank you very much. I haven't had time to finish it yet but I'm enjoying what I've read. It is not one of those books that even politicians I support usually write which are (a) obviously ghosted and (b) all about how we're right and they're wrong and you just have to keep supporting me and supporting me and we'll save the world.

Franken is an interesting fellow and I've thought that since a time when no one would ever have believed he'd amount to anything, let alone a U.S. Senator. When I was doing variety shows for NBC, he was on Saturday Night Live. One rarely heard his name in the halls here on the opposite coast without the word "asshole" somewhere in the same sentence and often the word "smug" preceding it. He was anything but a politician, alienating people left and right, seeming to enjoy when they thought he was rude and insensitive, just so long as his career was advancing.

At the time, if you had said that guy would wind up in the senate, it would have been a joke. In fact, it would have been the exact same joke as at the end of National Lampoon's Animal House where they say that Bluto — the John Belushi character — wound up as a United States Senator.

At some point though, Franken seems to have realized that he was on a dead-end path. His partner in writing and performing was a funny but self-destructive guy named Tom Davis, and Franken finally separated from him and explored new career possibilities. How he wound up as the junior senator from the great state of Minnesota is what this book is about and it's also kind of about how he changed as a human being. I'm up to the part where he begins running for the senate and his opponents are taking many of his old jokes and citing them as examples of serious (and insane) policy proposals that he had supposedly once made. It would be like if someone claimed that Robert Klein had a physical affliction that made him actually unable to stop his leg.

I've met Franken twice. One time was when my old friend Aaron Barnhart was in town. Aaron was the TV critic at the Kansas City Star and one Friday evening, we went over to CBS Television City on a two-part mission. The second part was to be in the audience for that evening's telecast of Dennis Miller Live. The first was to visit the offices of The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder prior to that show's taping for the evening. Aaron wanted to meet one of his heroes, TV critic Tom Shales, who was a guest that evening.

I was not a fan of Mr. Shales and Aaron kind of wanted to be alone with him so he went into Shales' dressing room while I waited in an outer office with the other guest for that evening. It was Al Franken and while we chatted a bit, he was mostly talking with the guest host for that evening, a guy named Jon Stewart. I said darn near nothing as the two of them conversed but I remember thinking I was in the presence of two of the smartest people I'd ever met. I also remember thinking, "This is the guy everyone kept saying was a smug asshole?" Not that evening, he wasn't. He still hadn't thought of running for public office then but when he did, I was probably less surprised than most people.

The other time I met him was in 2003 and I wrote about it in this post. Reading it now, I can't understand why I left out part of the story. I wrote about how at the public appearance, Franken was verbally assaulted by one questioner and he offered to talk one-on-one with the guy after the event. He had a lot of copies of his book to sign before he could get around to that.

I was there with my good friend, the late Earl Kress, and with my best friend, the late Carolyn Kelly. My, how things have changed since 2003.

We got signed books from Franken and talked with him as long as we could — a matter of seconds because there was a long line of others waiting for autographed books. The guy who'd gotten so outraged at Franken was at the end of the line, still fuming and eager for his face-to-face with the not-yet-Senator. I sensed a chance of trouble and suggested to Earl and a couple of friends that we stick around. It did not seem impossible that the outraged guy might get physical and I thought that might be less likely if Franken was flanked by a bunch of us. Also, I kind of wanted to see what was going to happen.

The outraged guy was upset that something in Franken's new book — the one he was signing, the one about how some right-wing pundits fibbed and got facts wrong — was factually incorrect. I don't recall what the supposed error (or "lie") was but it seemed pretty trivial to me…one of those arguable discrepancies that you could write off to one awkward choice of words. Whatever it was, Franken gave the man way more time and respect than I thought was warranted. As it turned out, that was about all this person really wanted — to have someone actually listen to him and not dismiss him as a kook, which would have been a natural dismissal, given the way he was acting.

I am paraphrasing from memory here but as I recall, Franken said something like this: "I don't think you're right and I don't think this is a big or even a medium-sized issue but I'll look into it." And then he said — and I think his confronter liked this because he knew Franken was being candid with him — "The honest truth here is that even if I did get it wrong, there's not much I can do to correct it. I'll mention it in some public appearances if I can squeeze it in but the way our press works, corrections almost never catch up with the original error. And since no one else, including the people it's about have ever complained about the alleged error, I really don't think anyone's going to care. But you care about it obviously because you came out here and I care about it because I hate making errors…so I'll look into it and I thank you for bringing it to my attention."

If that doesn't sound like it would have satisfied a guy who a half-hour earlier was screaming and frothing, maybe I'm not recalling it with enough precision or maybe you just had to hear Franken saying it. He looked the man right in the eye and gave him all the time the guy wanted to state his case and then respond, and it did satisfy him and I was really impressed.

We had not told Franken we'd hung around as contingency bodyguards but he'd figured it out. Once the fellow was gone, he turned to us and said, "Thanks for sticking around to protect me, guys, but as you can see, I didn't need it. Besides, I used to wrestle in college. I think I could have taken him." The man had eight inches and at least a hundred pounds on Franken so we all laughed.

I've liked him ever since that moment…or maybe it would be better to say I've liked what he's turned into. I'm eager to finish the book and see how he did it.

I know there are people reading this who think that Senator Al Franken is no less the smug asshole than the putz talking about his very own decade on Saturday Night Live. If I wanted to see Donald Trump's agenda succeed, I might think so, too. Nevertheless, I'm really, really impressed with people who find it within themselves to change for the better. I think Al Franken did and that's why — never mind the political stuff — I'm enjoying reading how he did it.

The post You Can Call Him Al appeared first on News From ME.

22 Jun 14:04

Crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit

by Charlie Stross

Hi: I'm back. And a regular commenter asked me an interesting question anent the state of current US/UK politics: how much money can you make by crying fire in a crowded theatre?

Note that "crowded theatre" and "crying fire" are not to be taken literally; rather, it's a question about how much money you can make by manipulating social media to drive public opinion.

I'm going to start with the money markets: hedge funds bet big on Brexit, because they predicted that in event of a "leave" vote going through, shares in the FTSE 100 would underperform by 20%: so they shorted the entire market. However, it's a bet that, by and large, they lost money on. Rather than the FTSE 100 dropping 20%, Sterling dropped 20% and the shares continued to trade at much the same level (in the now-debased currency). Oops. Notably, billionaire Peter Hargreaves, who donated £3.2M to the Leave campaign, managed to lose on the order of £400M (warning: DM over-simplification alert—the market didn't tank, his portfolio lost value). Still, as bets go, it's a good if obvious example of crying fire in a crowded theatre for pleasure and profit: put £3.2M into sending 15 million letters to voters urging them to vote one way, aiming to profit to the tune of hundreds of millions.

Another fairly obvious example is the investment by the current Russian leadership in cyberwar ops against the perceived-as-more-competent candidate in the last US presidential election. Regardless of her other characteristics, Clinton was experienced in foreign affairs and no friend of Russia's. Russia today is primarily an oil and gas exporter, with the world's second largest (official) reserves after Saudi Arabia, and the current leadership can't help but be aware that they're vulnerable to some of the same factors that brought down the USSR —notably vulnerability to externally induced commodity price fluctuations. Clinton could have continued the transition to renewables that the Obama administration began, and applied the decreased US dependency on fossil fuel as an economic weapon against Russia (by depressing global oil prices): she had to be defeated at all costs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is full of fossil fuel connections. Oil, gas, and coal companies contributed heavily to Trump's campaign, to his inauguration, and in federal lobbying since then, with predictable results.

Anyway, those are the two big recent examples; investors pushing Brexit propaganda not because they think leaving the EU would be good for the UK but in the pursuit of short-term profit: and big fossil fuel interests (national-level actors like Russia/Gazprom and corporate actors like Koch Industries) seeking a fossil-fuel-friendly policy environment by buying targeted political campaigning and deploying cyberwar techniques against politicians perceived as being less receptive to their desire for profit.

Aside from these two examples, and also leaving aside the Grenfell Tower disaster (latest: inflammable cladding may have been used on up to 600 other high-rise apartment buildings in the UK; replacing that is going to cost billions), what other examples can you think of where you can profit by crying fire in a crowded theatre?

21 Jun 10:37

10.8 The Lie of the Land

by Andrew Rilstone
There once lived a man named Oedipus Rex
You've probably heard about his odd complex
He got an entry in Freud's index
Cos he loved his mother....


I am a couple of weeks behind with my Who reviews. So I was very tempted to just write:

10:8 The Lie of the Land

Oh, for fucks sake!

…and go on and do the Space 1889 with Ice Warriors one.

But Lie of the Land deserves a little more attention than that. It is a truly terrible story. But never has such a terrible story been constructed of such promising components. The good bits were so good, and the bad bits so appalling that I find myself wondering if there is a very clever point which I am completely missing. 

The first eleven minutes are very good indeed. It seems that, as a result of Bill’s ill-judged capitulation, the Monks now rule the earth  and everyone believes that they have always done so. This is mostly achieved through Evil Alien Mind Control Rays; but there is also a daily propaganda broadcast, presented by the Doctor, reminding everyone that the Monks are their friends. Even Bill is starting to doubt the facts of history when Nardole turns up, and they go off together to find out what the Doctor’s real motivations are.

Earth-under-the-martians stories have acquired their own grammar in Doctor Who: London always seems to revert to some combination of the blitz and the Cold  War. Everyone starts wearing knitwear. There is a Cyberman ghost in every front room or a statue of a Monk on every street corner. The bits which are not Wellsian are Orwellian, right down to vans marked “memory police” and people being arrested for “memory crimes.” The Doctor himself, when he is doing his broadcasts, is obviously intended to evoke Big Brother. 

Its all very intense and dramatic and Pearl Mackie pretty much carries it by herself. Dark, fascist future versions of England, grim prison ships, military policemen demanding to see paper, the aliens mostly in the background working through their agents: this is what Doctor Who does best. Oh, it carries me back to that glorious morning in 1972 when the cricket got rained off and they showed Dalek Invasion Earth instead. 

The confrontation between Bill and the Doctor is astonishingly good. It seems like poor Bill is having every possible rug pulled out from under every one of her feet. She gave everything to save the Doctor and now he’s become a baddie. He honestly believes that the earth is in need of a jolly good conquering. Capaldi can act a bit and Whithouse can write a bit so he makes out a good case. We honestly believe that Bill honestly believes that the Doctor honestly believes what he's saying.

So she shoots him.

And he regenerates.

Wow.

This is a proper dramatic moment. This is what New Who was invented for. This feels so much like Doctor Who and is so clearly not the kind of thing that could have ever happened in the 70s. I forgive Moffat everything. 

What do you do if your friend turns against everything he believes in? Is it like “You may be a Jihadi, and I may hate that, but you are still my son” or is it more like “If you are now a communist you are no longer the person I fell in love with." It happens in smaller ways, too. “Football is what our friendship was about. If you no longer want to go come to matches with me, I don't know in what sense we can be friends." 

Bill concludes that a Doctor who doesn’t believe what the Doctor believes is not the Doctor and executes him, which is pretty high-handed but understandable. This moment has been trailed twice before. The regeneration scene was in the “next season” teaser after the Christmas Special; and the “Bill shooting the Doctor” scene was the last thing in the “Next Time” trailer after last week's episode. 

And the solution is...

There is an episode of my beloved Superman Radio Serial (brought to you by the makers of Kellogs Pep) in which a whole series of completely inexplicable events seem to occur. Clark Kent sees Lois Lane on the other side of Metropolis even though she's been at a her desk at the Planet all day;  Perry White gives Clark a thousand dollar cheque and then denies all knowledge of it. The solution, in the final episode, is that the whole thing was a prank that Lois and Perry and Jimmy and the police were in on from the beginning. They thought they'd drive Clark to the point of insanity to celebrate his second year working at the Daily Planet. The same kind of thing used to happen quite regularly in Legion of Superheroes: people would pretend to be dead or to have become super-villains in order to give their friend challenging puzzles to solve. It happens quite often in folk tales. "I am not really dead, and I didn't really murder our entire family: it was just a test to see if you truly loved me." "Oh, well, that's all right then." Sherlock Holmes famously allowed Watson to believe he was dead so that Watson would be able to report it convincingly in the Strand Magazine; but Holmes is supposed to be a nasty misanthropic bully. (Most of the time.) The Doctor is meant to be a good guy. Never cruel and never cowardly. 

The Doctor has been pretending to go over to the dark side specifically in order to find out if Bill is under the control of the Monks' evil alien mind control rays or not. (The fact that she shoots him proves pretty definitely that she isn't.) Nardole was in on it from the beginning. All the soldiers were in on it. I think even the scary patrol who demanded to see their papers were in on it. 

And the whole thing is treated, quite explicitly, as a joke. The Very Dramatic Music which plays when the regeneration nearly happens is replaced by plinky plonky “we’ve just told a joke” music. The Doctor laughs. Nardole laughs. When it turns out that one of the soldiers accidentally loaded his gun with real bullets, rather than blanks, the Doctor treats it as a funny joke at his own expense. 

Peter can read out any old shit and make it sound convincing. Pearl can look as if here heart is breaking more or less to order. That's what they teach you at acting school. I dare say either one of them could read out a recipe for scones as if it was a letter describing the death of a loved one. Nardole is completely convincing when he tells Bill that they are going to go looking for the Doctor together, even though he knows it is only a ruse. He says it just as if would have done if it had not been a ruse. Of course he does. Because in both cases, what we had was Matt Lucas, saying the words, as well as he could.

If the script calls on the actors to follow up a really, really dramatic scene with a "ha ha we were only fooling" scene, the actors are going to work just as hard on making us believe it was all a jape as they did on making us believe it was all deadly real.

But its still a horrible trick for a writer to play on an audience. It isn't just this big dramatic scene he's undercut for the sake of a cheap gag: it's every other big dramatic scene he ever writes.

*

Doctor Who always was a little bit too geeky. Science and boffinary saved the world just a little bit too regularly. Doctor Jon spent just slightly too many episodes locked away in his lab playing with his test tubes.  It is a good idea to have told the writers of New Who that it isn't only the power of science which can save the world. Sometimes it is the power of love which does the trick. 

But this can be done in two ways: a hard way, and an easy way. The hard way is to come up with a compelling sequence of events in which the characters’ loyalty and commitment to each other is instrumental in foiling the baddies master plan. Think of that episode of Sarah-Jane when Clyde had no idea what Luke was doing, but went along with it anyway because he trusted Luke and knew he would never turn against his mates. Think of every other episode of Sarah-Jane, actually. 

The easy way is to write whatever story you were going to write anyway, but have the hero zap the villain with a Love Ray (instead of a Gamma Ray or Kryptonite Ray) in the final scene. I believe that Jack Kirby was once commissioned to draw a soft-porn comic, and came up with a story in which alien women in only slightly more revealing than usual costumes rendered male superheroes helpless by zapping them with their Sex Rays.

I do not say that a story in which you zapped Torybots with Love Beams couldn’t be made to work. Anything could be made to work. Stories in which Noble Sir Jeremy slew the Mighty Brexit Slug with the magical sword of Coalition were once relatively popular. I do say that the winding up the Monk "trilogy" with Little Billy Potts zapping Wicked McWicked the Pyramid Fairy with the Charming Charm of Motherly Love feels more like My Little Pony than Doctor Who. 

I honestly wanted to chuck things at the television.

The Monks can only invade planets they have been wholeheartedly and sincerely invited to invade. Last week, Bill wholeheartedly and sincerely asked them to invade earth. It turns out that this set up a psychic link between Bill and the Monks turning her brain into the transmitter for the evil alien mind control rays that have made everybody in the whole wide world believe that the Monks are benevolent rulers. 

This crucial piece of information is imparted by Euros Holmes -- I am sorry, by Missy -- half way through the episode. This is an astonishingly slipshod piece of plotting. Surely "This is how you defeat the Monks" should have been the piece of information which Matrix-Doctor sacrificed his existence to transmit to Real-Doctor in In Extremis? 

On the other hand, the scenes with Missy are extremely well done. Michel Gomez gets better and better the less she acts; even the camp thing (”awk…ward”) which was so irritating in Death in Heaven is now convincing and disturbing. The philosophical sparring between her and the Doctor is genuinely impressive: the idea that a reformed, benevolent Missy would still not be "good" by the Doctor's standards is worth much exploring. But in a sense, these scene are not really part of the episode we are watching; they are just "seeding" the return of Missy in the season climax.

So: the first plan is to simply kill Bill (which would make a good title for a movie). This won’t work because all the mind controlled people will only gradually realize that the propaganda they heard through the mind control rays wasn’t true.

The second plan is to leave Bill alive but brain dead, because then she’d be transmitting nothing to the other humans, rather than Monkish propaganda. The Doctor is not crazy about this plan. Neither is Bill. 

This third Plan is for the Doctor to plug his own superior mind into the Monk’s transmitter, and replace the Ministry of Truth's made up history with his own, honest version. This doesn’t work because the transmitter is too powerful even for the Doctor’s brain.

So the final plan is that Bill plugs herself into the transmitter she is already plugged into in the expectation that it will free the world but render her brain dead except that, quite unexpectedly, her love for her mother gets transmitted to everyone in the entire universe and world, overwriting the Monks’ propaganda.

The on-screen explanation goes like this:

“Oh, you clever, brilliant, ridiculous girl.”

Impossible. You forgot to say impossible.

“Look at that! All the pictures I gave you. I thought I was just being kind, but I was saving the world.”

This is not the kind of blog which generally says things like “Even when the young gay black girl sacrifices her life to save the universe, the old straight white guy will always claim the credit.” It is not even the kind of blog which says “The Doctor always has to be represented as primary world-saver, even when it makes no sense for him to be so.” It’s more the kind of blog which wonders why Bill’s love is specially pure because she has only recently found a box of pictures — why “having a visual image of a dead parent” has world-saving potential, but “cherishing a memory of dead parent without knowing what they looked like” does not.

“Bill, if there's any of you left in there, listen. You have to keep thinking about your mum, the memory you created. Her voice. Her smile.”

It’s the fact that Bill's Mum is an imaginary person which saves the world? The smile being from the photos, the voice being something she only has very distant memories of? Would the voice without the smile not have worked as well? How about the smile without the voice? 

“The Monks can't get near it. Fill your mind with it! Push it into every corner. She's filling its mind with one pure, uncorrupted, irresistible image. And it's broadcasting it to the world, because it can't help it. All those years you kept her alive inside you, an isolated subroutine in a living mind.”

A “sub-routine” is one part of a computer program. I suppose an “isolated sub-routine” is part of a computer program which can function without the rest. I suppose the idea is that a mini-program can be copied from one computer to another and that Bill’s idea of her mother is being copied from her mind to everyone else’s mind. We are simultaneously dealing with extreme reductionism (a human mind is a complex computer program and nothing more) and extreme mystical essentialism (you can literally fill your mind/soul with love for just one object.) I also fear that there is a false analogy being drawn between "uncorrupted" (as in, a computer file) and "incorruptible" (as in "the dead shall be raised").

“Perfect, untouchable.”

Is the point here that because because Bill never knew her mother, she has made up a mother more perfect than any actual woman could ever be -- that it's "the idea of a perfect mother" that the Monks can't cope with? (A bit like Descartes saying that because I can imagine a perfect God, then the perfect God must exist:? Or possibly nothing like that?) 

“She's a window on the world without the Monks. Absolutely loved, absolutely trusted. And that window is opening everywhere. A glimpse of freedom. But a glimpse is all you need. The lie is breaking. Bill's mum just went viral.”

no but no but no but no but this has nothing to do with sub routines or computer or brains its just about how much billie loves her mother and billie presumably loves her mother just as much as practically almost if not everyone than nearly everyone loves their mothers and daddies and absolute best friend evers and puppy dogs and we have seen from the family at the beginning and the man whose son is in the prison camp that people still love their families in this world so how is billie loving her mummy a window into anything at all no no no


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21 Jun 10:28

I realize that this is  all completely meaningl...

by Andrew Rilstone


I realize that this is  all completely meaningless to Americans and anyone under the age of 45.

Before we had DVDs, the BBC sometimes put out sound recordings of TV shows on "records" -- vinyl LPs. I owned a vinyl LP which contained the sound track of two episodes of "Camberwick Green". Peter the Postman (who was a very busy man) on the A side, and the Window Cleaner on the B side. I can't remember what the Window Cleaner's catch phrase was, or whether he had a song, because frankly I didn't like the B side. People climbing up ladders (and I think falling off) was way beyond my comfort zone for Mild Peril. But I played Peter the Postman (who gathers up all the letters as quickly as he can) incessantly. On one of those old-fashioned record players that were still referred to as "gramophones"; with a sort of brown leatherish case so it looked like a very small suitcase with a loudspeaker, and settings that ran to 33, 45 and 78.

My mother tells me that the midwife or district nurse who came to check up on her just after my baby sister had been born used to moan that whenever she came to the house, "Peter the Postman is a very busy man..." was always playing in the background. I am two years older than my sister, so I must have been two years old.

That's all I wanted to say. Literally my earliest memory is of Brian Cant's voice.

21 Jun 09:57

Some Statistics and a Challenge

by evanier

I started this blog on 12/18/2000 without much idea how long I would do it…and also without blogging software. What was available at the time wasn't very good and I decided to hand-code the messages here for the first few years. I had no idea I'd still being doing it 6030 days later.

Over the years, I've deleted some posts and rerun some posts. I suspect the two numbers about coincide so let's just ignore that. As of when I post this message, there will be 24,459 posts on this site, which works out to a smidgen over four per day. At this rate, I will hit the 25,000 mark on November 3 of this year. I have decided that Post #25,000 will be my response to one of our "ASK me" questions where you send in a question and I write something that I hope will answer it.

Please keep sending those in. I will continue to answer them but I'm going to save the best one I receive between now and October 15th to be #25,000. There will be an actual, tangible prize for the submitter of that question — a copy of some Groo book (my choice) signed by Sergio Aragonés and me, and if I can get them, Stan Sakai and Tom Luth. And no, second prize is not two Groo books. There is no second prize. And there's no prize if I answer your question but not as #25,000.

I'm looking for something that will prompt me to write something kinda long and of interest to most of the folks who come to this blog…and I'm probably not going to pick a political question.

Don't rush. You have plenty of time to come up with one and send it to this address. May the best Blog Reader win!

The post Some Statistics and a Challenge appeared first on News From ME.

21 Jun 09:56

Coming Soon…For Real!

by evanier

As readers of this blog are aware, my lovely friend Carolyn Kelly left us on April 9. She fought cancer until the end but there came a day when I knew she knew she wasn't going to survive. It was when she said to me, "If I don't make it, will you make sure the Pogo series is completed, just the way we planned it?" I promised her it would be.

I also promised we would maintain the same high standards she had set for the project, which was the most important non-medical thing she ever tackled in her life. Understand please that by "important," I mean important to her. The series, which is reprinting her father's classic newspaper strip in full, may also be important to you but I didn't promise you it would be finished. I promised her. Either way, there will be no more delays.

Volume 4 will be out well before Christmas of this year. It will include a remembrance of her, a foreword by Neil Gaiman and some of the most brilliant cartooning ever done. Here's the cover…

The post Coming Soon…For Real! appeared first on News From ME.

20 Jun 23:28

Southern Baptists still think of white supremacy as a ‘stain’

by Fred Clark
The Southern Baptist Convention has passed an official resolution on racism. I'm happy to report that they're against it. Alas, they also demonstrated that they don't understand what it is they're against and up against, or what it will mean for them to oppose it in substance and not just in rhetoric.
20 Jun 17:38

Politics and class in Kensington

by Jonathan Calder


This is from a Liberal Democrat News column I wrote in November 1999, before most of my readers were born.

I had been down to Kensington and Chelsea to give me something to write about help in a by-election. The Conservative candidate was Michael Portillo.

Sent out canvassing, I found that few residents were in:
So instead I talked to a council workman who was sweeping up the leaves. He soon explained my difficulty: "They'll all be at their places in the country." He also pointed out a house that had just had a million pounds spent on it. It hadn't been bought for a million, you understand, just renovated. 
"Mind you," he went on, "this is a funny area. You've got judges living here, and junkies down the road." 
"Judges and junkies: I like that," I said, thinking I might steal the line for this column.
"Judges and junkies in juxtaposition," he replied, effortlessly topping it. 
And he was right; it is a funny area. Politics in Kensington and Chelsea remains polarised on class lines to an extent you rarely see nowadays. Not a single council ward has changed hands here since 1982.
19 Jun 11:23

Tales of My Father #17

by evanier

My father died when I was 39. In those 39 years, we had very few arguments, very few fights of any sort. He was not the kind of person to yell and in those thirty-nine years, he probably yelled at me less than a dozen times…and not at all in the last fifteen or so.

I've probably said this before here about him but there were times when he almost seemed to wish I gave him more reasons to raise his voice or discipline me. I was just one of those kids who never got into trouble, never did anything really wrong, at least on purpose. He'd go to work and hear other men talking about how they had to smack their kids or ground them or otherwise punish a son in dire need of learning to behave. There was so little of that with me that he sometimes felt he wasn't being a proper father.

This is not to say he never got mad. He hated his job and worked in a bureaucracy that was sometimes very harsh or disrespectful of its employees so there was plenty there to holler about. He just couldn't find many reasons to get mad at me. Also, he had Joe Pyne.

Joe Pyne was a commentator-host on radio and TV at the time, and in some ways a role model for most folks who now do political-type radio shows. More than a decade ago on this site, I wrote…

Joe Pyne inspired a couple of generations of TV and especially radio personalities who learned that getting people pissed off was good for the ratings. I never met Mr. Pyne but the guy who used to cut my hair used to cut his, and you tend to trust your barber. He said that Pyne was, indeed, an angry, one-legged man who was always yelling about everything, but that the guy clearly laid it on thick and deliberately for his broadcasts. Like a lot of folks in radio, he found an act that worked for him and he worked that act for all it was worth.

Pyne was big on TV and radio in Los Angeles in the sixties, and I could never understand why some people went on his show or called in. He was generally Conservative but his overwhelming concern seemed to be contempt for his guests, no matter what they said. To the extent he had a political philosophy, it seemed to be mostly anti-freeloader. He was pro-police, pro-military, pro-gun ownership, etc., but he was also pro-union, at least when the union was actually representing the interests of working men and women. I don't think anything enraged him more than the concept of welfare…and not just for the poor or minorities. Unlike a lot of people who loathe welfare, he was also against various government subsidy programs that he thought functioned as welfare for the wealthy, and quite willing to rip even Republican leaders who were responsible for that kind of thing.

For a time when my father was dropping me off at school on his way to work, we used to listen to Pyne on the car radio. Even though I was pretty Conservative in those days, I thought Pyne was a jerk on many fronts, seeing Commies where they weren't any and presuming that if you were under the age of 21, you were almost certainly a worthless, dope-smoking hippie. It amused me that he was always railing against people (especially young people) who allegedly shunned honest work…this, while he was making a small fortune via what struck me as very easy, dishonest work. Pyne then did his A.M. radio show from a little studio in his bedroom at home. Often, he was lying in bed in his jammies, yammering insults and telling people to go out and get a real job. My father did not see the irony or amusement. Pyne simply enraged him…but he listened, and I guess that was the point.

I never understood why my father, who had stress enough at work, insisted each morning on turning on the Pyne program. Back then, there were plenty of channels on the radio that played music…lovely, non-controversial, non-inflammatory music. I think the appeal was that every so often, some caller would sneak in and give Pyne a real argument and point out the asininity of one of his positions — but that didn't happen often. In any debate, the host has a secret weapon which I suspect all hosts of such shows use at times. Many clearly use it a lot.

You can win any argument if you have a magic button that mutes your opponent, especially if you know how to use it so it doesn't sound like you cut him off. It's not hard to make him appear speechless because he couldn't find the words to reply to you. Pyne would sometimes delight in insulting a caller and hanging up on him but he'd also sometimes do the trick where he'd quietly cut the guy off, ask him to offer some proof of what he said or name an example…and then after a bit of silence, he'd say, "See? You can't come up with any, you jerk!"

My father really hated Joe Pyne. He didn't hate a lot. He hated Richard Nixon and most of the Republican leaders of that day, and he hated Joe Pyne. That was about it.

Oh — and Art Linkletter. Mr. Linkletter was a TV host who once on some show said something my father interpreted as "Really, all that matters in life is making as much money as you can, and there's nothing immoral about anything you do that makes you money, and if other people get hurt, that's too damn bad for them, and you shouldn't care about them because if they're not rich themselves, they aren't really human beings. They're more like dogs and, gosh, who wouldn't kill a dog if you could make money doing it?"

I am exaggerating…and my father didn't think Linkletter actually said those words or anything close but my father heard him say something — perhaps many somethings — that suggested that was the Linkletter credo in life. My father's awful job was that he dealt with tax evaders for the Internal Revenue Service so he encountered people who actually felt like that. He didn't make many jokes but one time, we were watching an adaptation of Mr. Dickens' A Christmas Carol and near the beginning when Scrooge was saying that the poor should just all die and decrease the surplus population, my father pointed at the screen and said, "I think I had a case on that guy."

What he hated about his job was that no one was ever glad to see him. If my father called on you, you were in trouble. You owed the government money, you had to pay and you had to work out a payment schedule. He was more-or-less Good Cop, warning you that if you didn't settle with him, he would have to turn the matter over to Bad Cop — another division which would seize your property and/or threaten jail time. Once in a while, he had to do the seizing himself.

Some people would cry and sob and tell him — and he often knew this to be absolutely true — that they were destitute, unable to even feed themselves or their families. And now, here was this man telling them that they had to come up with a couple thousand dollars for Uncle Sam. If you are a person of decency and compassion, as my father was, how would you like to be in his position a couple times a week?

In other instances, he dealt with people of fabulous wealth who could easily have bought one less Picasso that week and more than paid off their delinquent taxes, but who were like Leona Helmsley, the hotel heiress who supposedly told one of her many housekeepers, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." As often as not, those people would wind up paying very little or even zero. They all seemed to have a friend high in the government — sometimes, it was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan themselves. They'd call the friend, the friend would call someone also high up in government and the tax bill would disappear or be settled for nickels. Once, my father was forced to write a written apology to say he'd made a mistake to think the person who actually owed millions owed anything.

Like I said: How would you like to be in that position a couple times a week? But having grown up in the Great Depression and having no particular marketable skills, he was afraid to look for anything else.

Some of our best father/son time came when he drove me to school in the morning, dropping me off and then heading off to work.

In his last years, and especially when he was hospitalized, we talked with absolute honesty…and it was father and son but it was also two adults. He was amazed and proud that his son had built a career doing something he loved…and in my particular profession. My father would have loved to have been a writer but probably didn't have the skill and he definitely didn't have the temperament to deal with two downsides. One is that a writer faces occasional (sometimes, frequent) rejection. As a young man, he'd tried out for one writing job and the turndown left him devastated and unwilling to try again.

The other downside is that for most writers, income can be highly unpredictable — how much you'll make and when they'll actually pay it to you. The upside of working for the Internal Revenue Service was that there was a guaranteed check every Friday for X dollars.

X wasn't a lot but it paid all the bills with a few bucks left over. He told me many times how he never understood how I could sleep at night, not knowing how much money — if any — I'd receive next week.

Not long before he had that last heart attack, he began telling me over and over how much he loved dropping me off at school — at high school and especially at U.C.L.A. He loved our conversations which often were about why Joe Pyne was full of shit this particular morning, as opposed to why he was full of shit on previous mornings. Then he loved watching me get out of the car with my notebook and scurry off to theoretically get a little bit smarter and more likely to make something of myself.

One time, he said, "I always loved that moment and I'd enjoy it as long as I could before my ulcer kicked in." Because once I was out of the car, he was no longer driving me to school. He was heading in to work…so his stomach would constrict and there'd be that little hurt in it, not knowing how he'd be kicked right there that day but feeling fairly certain there would be at least once kick.

I had not made the connection before. Seeing me going off to class, believing I'd do better than he had…that was one of his rewards for doing that terrible, terrible job each day.

We talked about that a couple times and one day when he was in the hospital, he surprised me by saying, "It always bothered me when you seemed ashamed to have people see your father dropping you off at school." My brain and voice responded in unison with a loud "Huh?" That thought never occurred to me. Not once…and I told him so. "When did I ever do that?"

He said, "When I dropped you off at U.C.L.A. I always offered to drive onto the campus and take you right up to your first class but you always insisted I let you off outside the campus."

Did you ever find yourself in a misunderstanding that could have been and should have been cleared up decades before? Let me explain this one…

The turf has changed a bit since 1970 when I went there but U.C.L.A. was and is a huge place with many entrances onto its grounds. There was one at the corner of Westholme and Hilgard and I always asked my father to let me off at that corner. From there, I could walk about ten steps onto the campus and turn right to go down a pedestrian walkway (i.e., a passageway on which cars could not drive) that took me straight to the building where my first class of the day was held. It was very easy and I liked the short walk, which also took me past some vending machines were I'd sometimes buy a bag of chips or pretzels to eat later in the day.

Had he driven onto the campus, the roadway immediately veered to the left — away from the walkway and the vending machines and the building I was trying to reach — and it went nowhere near my destination. Anywhere he'd let me off would have meant a much longer walk for me (and no pretzels) and then it would have been very confusing for him to find his way off the campus.

I thought I'd explained that to him several times back in '70…but now there we were in his hospital room nearly a quarter-century later and he was telling me, "I thought you were just saying that. I thought you were ashamed that your father was driving you to school."

I went over it with him one more time and he said he understood now…but some ideas, you just have to blast out of some minds. I went home and found an old map I had of the U.C.L.A. campus and a bit of the surrounding area. I drew up an enlargement a yard-wide of the relevant area and took it in to him the next day.

"Look," I said. "This big blue line shows how if you let me off outside the campus, I could walk down this little pathway, stop at the vending machines here and then go right to English 101. This red line shows you where we'd have wound up if I let you drive me onto the campus."

He stared at it and it was probably my tenacity more than my cartography that convinced him it was just as I said. "I guess I had it all wrong," he muttered.

I moved his I.V. stand over so I could get up real close to him and look him straight in the face. I said, "Is there anything else I ever did that still bothers you? Something we never discussed? I've apologized for a number of things and we buried those as issues between us. Think hard. Did I spit up on you when I was two? Did I forget to take the trash out once when I was fourteen? Is there anything else like this — anything! — that we need to talk about?"

He thought for a long minute or so then said, "You told me once you were up for a writing job on that TV show…that Maude thing. That was a good, successful show. Why didn't you take that job?" That was twenty years earlier.

I said, "They hired some other writer instead of me."

He smiled and said, "Oh. In that case, there's nothing else." Then he added, "Except you did spit up on me a lot when you were two. And three. And four. And five…"

Gee, I had a great father.

The post Tales of My Father #17 appeared first on News From ME.

17 Jun 10:12

10.7 The Pyramid at the End of the World

by Andrew Rilstone
I think we now know what is wrong with Moffat-Who. I think we always did know what was wrong with Moffat-Who, but we can now sum it up in two words.

Magic Clocks. 

I am familiar with the idea of the Doomsday Clock, if only because of Watchmen. Some scientist dudes got together in the Cold War and conceived a conceptual clock which shows how close we are to blowing ourselves up. (It’s currently set at 2 minutes to midnight.)

And I suppose that a group of Space Monks — who know absolutely everything that there is to know about the earth — would also be familiar with the clock, and might use it to threaten the human race. 

But (obviously) the scientists who run the imaginary clock only move the little hand backwards and forwards based on stuff they know. The clock can’t take into account a hungover scientist accidentally releasing a killer virus. But I suppose, just possibly, the Space Monks might use the concept of the conceptual clock to threaten the earth with. So the humans would see the clock move forward and say “The Space Monks have told us we are one second closer to Armageddon than we were at the beginning of the episode; they must know something we don’t.” But everyone in the episode acts if the doomsday clock is some neutral arbiter which literally knows how close we are to the literal end of the world…

And here comes the good bit. The Space Monks make everyone's phone and computer show the Doomsday Clock time as opposed to the actual time. (The implications of that aren’t explored. Considering how worried we were about the year 2000 date problem, I can’t help thinking that if every clock in the world stopped telling the time, there be some major logistical problems. With airline timetables, if nothing else.) But get this. We are very clearly shown the time changing on people’s analogue wrist watches. How does that work? Watches like that aren’t connected to any interwebs. Some Magic Force must be physically turning the mechanism backwards on every wristwatch in the world simultaneously.  

The Not-We won’t understand why this is an issue. You have a magic telephone box that can take you back to 17th Century London, they will say; why can’t you have a magic space monk who can turn millions of individual wrist watches backwards? 

Part of the answer is that you are allowed to use something completely mad as a premise for your story, but not as a little device within it. “Once upon a time a fairy waved her little screwdriver and all the clocks in the world stopped…” might be a good starting point for a story. (We don’t ask the mechanism by which Midas transformed everything he touched to gold: we are too interested in following through the tragic consequences of his reckless wish.) But it’s not something you can drop in and not discuss any further. There were a hundred more believable ways the Space Monks could have told everyone that the world was about to end. 

The other part of the answer is that the difference between magic and science is a very subtle, but very important, part of the internal ambiance of Doctor Who. Completely mad things happen but they are completely mad things which feel as if they might possibly have a logical explanation, even if we aren't quite sure what it is. I don’t know if I could perfectly define the line, but I can pretty accurately tell you when a thing is on the wrong side of it. A scientist inadvertently releasing a bacteria that can destroy all life on earth: OK. A Space Monk curing the Doctor’s blindness, instantly and perfectly, by remote control, with a wave of the hand: not OK. Using the fabulous technology of the TARDIS to make the computer link to 428 CCTVs go down simultaneously: OK. Using the undefined power of the Space Monks to change the time on every wrist watch in the whole wide world: not OK.

One definition of the line might be that a silly, cartoon-strip, Saturday night, good guys vs monsters space opera TV serial story allows and include technology which is sufficiently advanced that it is indistinguishable from magic, but forbids and excludes actual miracles. 


Some of these problems may possibly be resolved in next week's episode, or in the Season Climax. It may turn out that we are playing a game of nested realities, and the Monks' miraculous ability to levitate nuclear submarines should be taken evidence that the Doctor and Bill are still inside a computer game. But I have an overwhelming sense that Moffat knew which pictures he wanted to draw and which synthetic moral dilemmas he wanted characters to fudge their way out of, and glued everything together with whatever gobbledegook was lying around at the time.

And, in fairness, the pictures are absolutely lovely. The Doctor walking across the desert to the pyramid; the Space Gods confronting him at the door. The Doctor playing guitar in the TARDIS. The bottle and the glasses breaking. Bill and Penny walking through late night streets. The Monk's nerve center, with the glowing strings of cause and effect (although Doctor Who rather stole that from Harry Potter and Harry Potter rather stole it from the Ring Cycle).

And I like the structure very much indeed. The Alien Gods have come to declare the End of the World and the earth’s military is gathered around the Mother Ship — but we keep flashing back to a very ordinary day in the office for two very ordinary scientist and instantly see that the End of the World isn’t happening where everyone thinks it is happening. I just wish that this beautiful structure had an equally beautiful story hanging off it.

*

I buy the idea of the Doctor as scientific adviser of UNIT. I don’t actually know how all the nations of the world world could arrange an extra-national force for dealing with aliens, given that all the nations of Europe can’t even arrange a free trade zone without arguing about it; but I feel that it is the kind of thing which all the nations of the world might have a god at doing. I don’t buy the idea that the Doctor can become the President of Earth at the drop of a jelly baby. Being President, as opposed to advising Presidents, is obviously not the Doctor’s modus operandi.(He actively ran away from being President of Gallifrey.) Why would anyone who knew the Doctor well enough to want his help suppose for one moment that that was the kind of help he would be willing to give? No-one treat him like President, and he doesn’t seem to exercise Presidential powers, although he does get to fly around in a big plane. The soldiers and the UN guy treat him as a super knowledgeable person whose advise they ought to pay a heckuva lot of attention to. Like everyone always treats the Doctor, in fact. 

We keep being told that when weird stuff happens on earth, everyone immediately forgets about it. Bill has never heard of the Daleks, even though the Daleks have invaded the earth at least several times in her lifetime. But for there to be some procedure by which Theresa May can snap her fingers and say “All of the UKs financial, military and intelligence resources are controlled by the Doctor, without parliamentary scrutiny or the Queen signing off on them” an awful lot of MPs and civil servants would have to remember the Daleks and the Cybermen and the giant haddock in the Thames. 

Never mention Torchwood. (Seriously. Never mention it.)

I don’t think that the Winston Churchill of Victory of the Daleks or the Van Gogh of Vincent and the Doctor are accurately historical representations of those particular persons. But they are presented to us as if they were real and as if we are meant to treat them as real. That's the whole fun of those kinds of episodes: well, of course Doctor Who and our greatest ever Prime Minister would be old mates. But the minute the "President of Earth" thing is invoked, everything in the episode becomes consciously less realistic, consciously more one dimensional, consciously more like a child's game of soldiers. I assume that Moffat means it to have exactly the opposite effect. 

*

How was the Space Monks' simulation supposed to have worked? Are we supposed to imagine that, by running simulations of human history, the Space Monks can find out that a particular human scientist will break her glasses on a particular day of the week? I can see how they can determine that the human race will definitely wipe itself out with a virus at some point between 2015 and 2020; but that a silly accident will cause it to happen on a particular day… not so much. Are we subject to that level of predestination? (Was it not Stephen Hawking who remarked that even if you had a perfect theory of everything, you still wouldn't be able to extrapolate from physical laws what was going to be on the cover of Vogue magazine next March.)

Come to think of it, their simulation includes the Doctor, and includes the fact that he’s been on the mining station and lost his sight, and includes the fact that he is hanging out with Bill Potts and not some other human lady companion....which means that they must also know that he’s temporarily exiled to earth as Missy’s Guardian… they must, in short, have been running a simulation of the whole universe.

Which seems like a lot of trouble to have gone to.

*

The Space Monks want to invade the Earth. But they can only invade planets which they have been invited to invade. The leader of the United Nations and the leaders of the various armies surrender: but their motives are not pure — they are surrendering out of fear, or tactically. So the Space Monks turn them into pillars of salt. But when Bill realizes that if she doesn’t surrender, the Doctor will die, she hands Earth over to them. Willingly. I was rather reminded of Curse of Fenric, where Ace’s faith in the Doctor nearly allows the Haemovores to conquer the Earth. Dr Sylvester saves the day by being really horrible to Ace so she loses her faith in him. I rather wish that Dr Peter had given Bill the same treatment.

I get that some Doctor Who aliens are fairy tale buggaboos with magic shticks, I really do. The Weeping Angels can only move when no-one is looking at them. Everyone forgets the Silence a few seconds after they have seen them, unless they make marks on their bodies, and possibly even then. If there were a well established or well foreshadowed Monster called The Gift Bringer who could only invade planets that he’d been invited to invade (and tricked planets into inviting him in a different ingenious way each time we met him, like Mr Mxyzptlk) I would be quite able to accept it. 

But the Space Monk's “You have to consent” power is too nebulous. I don’t understand what it means. There is talk about establishing “a link”; there is talk that the aliens understand that they have to rule through love, not through fear. It seems like everything is being made up on the spot to force Billie to the moment where she has to choose between the Earth and the Doctor. 

Bill chooses [SPOILERS FOLLOW] the Doctor over the earth. "You're an idiot" she explains "You are the stupidest idiot ever. But I'm not going to let you die. This planet needs you. So I'm making an executive decision. I'm keeping you alive", which is as much as to say, being interpreted "You can't die. You're too nice, too brave, too kind and far, far too silly." Bill has turned, within six weeks, from a not particularly well educated young woman who knew her sci-fi tropes to a generic new who girl, Rose V, entirely defined by her love for the Doctor. 

The Doctor’s side of the equation is even more contrived. We have to accept that two scientists could inadvertently create a virus that would destroy all life on earth; and we have to accept that the Doctor can’t stop an earthling lab from venting the death virus into the air because “it’s on automatic” and we have to accept that the Doctor’s sonic glasses can do anything except read text. But the drama has some pace and some bite. And the Doctor’s relationship with the sober scientist is actually fun to work. Character chemistry covers a multitude of plot holes.

Plot holes I can live with. It's plot ladders I object to. Plot glue. The sense that we are clambering from scene to scene over improvised scaffolding; the sense that bit of the story are being arbitrarily glues together simply in order to give Bill her Big Companion Moment.  

*
So. We have spent one whole episode finding out that the Space Mummies have simulated the whole history of earth to plan for an invasion. And we have spent another whole episode finding out that what they learned from the simulation was that Bill’s love for the Doctor was the only thing pure enough to allow them to conquer the earth. Next week we will have one of those Earth Under the Martian stories, where the earth has already been conquered and the humans have got to figure out how to rebel, like Dalek Invasion of Earth and the Tripods. Everything depends on that being big enough and convincing enough to make the last two episodes seem worth the effort.







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