Andrew Hickey

 

Playground

A set of children's swings moves slowly back and forth in the humid breeze. Behind them stands a long building, its windows hung with flowers and birds folded from colored paper.

Mounds of dirt are heaped around a dark opening to the east. It appears to be a shelter of some kind.

Several small children are happily chasing dragonflies north of the swing set. Turning south, you see a group of adults (schoolteachers, by the looks of them), wearily digging another shelter like the first.

A little girl races between the swings, hot on the trail of a dragonfly. She trips and sprawls across the sand, laughing with hysterical glee. Then she sees you.

At first, you're sure she's going to scream. Her eyes dart back and forth between you and the teachers; you can see a cry forming on her lips.

Suddenly, the umbrella in your hand catches her eye. You watch her expression soften from fear to curiosity.

>examine girl
The girl is a cute four or five years old.

The girl can't keep her eyes off the umbrella.

You've noticed a faint sound coming from somewhere overhead. The girl turns to stare at the sky.

>girl, hello
The girl blinks uncomprehendingly.

The sound overhead grows louder. There's no mistaking the drone of aircraft.

The girl looks at you expectantly and tries to pull you towards the shelter.

Muttering with exasperation, the teachers drop their spades and begin to trudge in the direction of the shelter.

One teacher, a young woman, sees you standing in the sandpile and shrieks something in Japanese. Her companions quickly surround you, shouting accusations and sneering at your vacation shorts. You respond by pointing desperately at the sky, shouting "Bomb! Big boom!" and struggling to escape into the shelter.

This awkward scene is cut short by a searing flash.

On August 6, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the second atomic bomb ever to be exploded in the history of the world — and the first to be exploded in anger — on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, piloted this time by Major Charles Sweeney, dropped another — the second and, so far, the last ever to be exploded in anger — on Nagasaki; it’s this event that Trinity portrays in the excerpt above. On August 15, Japan broadcast its acceptance of Allied surrender terms.

The cultural debate that followed, condensed into four vignettes:

In the immediate aftermath of the event, the support of the American public for the bombings that have, according to conventional wisdom, ended the most terrible war in human history is so universal that almost no one bothers to even ask them about it. One of the few polls on the issue, taken by Gallup on August 26, finds that 85 percent support the decision versus just 10 percent opposed. Some weeks later another poll finds that 53.5 percent “unequivocally” support the country’s handling of its atomic arsenal during the war. Lest you think that that number represents a major drop-off, know that 22.7 percent of the total don’t equivocate for the reason you probably think: they feel that the United States should have found some way to drop “many more” atomic bombs on Japan between August 6 and August 15, just out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Newspapers and magazines are filled with fawning profiles of the “heroes” who flew the missions, especially of their de facto spokesman Tibbets, who comes complete with a wonderfully photogenic all-American family straight out of Norman Rockwell. He named his B-29 the Enola Gay after his mother, for God’s sake! Could it get any more perfect? Tibbets and the rest of the Enola Gay‘s crew march as conquering heroes through Manhattan as part of the Army Day Parade on April 6, 1946. The Enola Gay becomes a hero in her own right, with the New York Times publishing an extended “Portrait of a B-29″ to tell her story. When she’s assigned along with Tibbets himself to travel to Bikini Atoll to possibly drop the first Operations Crossroads bomb, the press treat it like Batman and his trusty Batmobile going back into action. (The Enola Gay is ultimately not used for the drop. Likewise, Tibbets supervises preparations, but doesn’t fly the actual mission.)

Fast-forward twenty years, to 1965. The American public still overwhelmingly supports the use of the atomic bomb, while the historians regard it as has having saved far more lives than it destroyed in ending the war when it did and obviating the need for an invasion of Japan. But now a young, Marxist-leaning economic historian named Gar Alperovitz reopens the issue in his first book: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. It argues that the atomic bomb wasn’t necessary to end World War II, and, indeed, that President Truman and his advisers knew this perfectly well. It was used, Alperovitz claims, to send a message to the Soviet Union about this fearsome new power now in the United States’s possession. The book, so much in keeping with the “question everything your parents told you” ethos of the burgeoning counterculture, becomes surprisingly popular amongst the youth, and at last opens up the question to serious historiographical debate in the universities.

Fast-forward thirty years, to the mid-1990s. The Smithsonian makes plans to unveil the newly restored Enola Gay, which has spent decades languishing in storage, as the centerpiece of a new exhibit: The Crossroads: The End of World II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Cold War. The exhibit, by most scholarly accounts a quite rigorously balanced take on its subject matter that strains to address thoughtfully both supporters and condemners of the atomic bombings, is met with a firestorm of controversy in conservative circles for giving a voice to critics of the bombing at all, as well as for allegedly paying too much attention to the suffering of the actual victims of the bombs. They object particularly to the charred relics from Hiroshima that are to be displayed under the shadow of the Enola Gay, and to the quotations from true-blue American heroes like Dwight Eisenhower voicing reservations about the use of the bomb. Newt Gingrich, the newly minted Republican Speaker of the House, condemns the Smithsonian and its director, Martin Harwit, as “cultural elites” telling Americans “they ought to be ashamed of their country.” Tibbets, still greeted as a hero in some circles but now condemned as an out-and-out war criminal in others, proclaims the proposed exhibit simply “a damn big insult” whilst reiterating that he feels not the slightest pang of conscience over what he did and sleeps just fine every night. In the end the grander ambitions for the exhibit are scuttled and Harwit harried right out of his job. Instead the Smithsonian sets up the Enola Gay as just another neat old airplane in its huge collection, accompanied by only the most perfunctory of historical context in the form of an atomic-bombing-justifying placard or two.

Fast-forward another ten years. On November 1, 2007, Paul Tibbets dies at the age of 92. The blizzard of remembrances and obituaries that follow almost all feel compelled to take an implicit or explicit editorial position on the atomic bombings, which are as controversial now as they’ve ever been. Conservative writers lay on the “American hero” rhetoric heavily. It’s the liberal ideologues, though, who become most disingenuously strident this time. Many resort to rather precious forms of psychoanalysis in trying to explain Tibbets’s lifelong refusal to express remorse for dropping the bomb, claiming that it means he had either been a sociopath or deeply troubled inside and holding himself together only through denial. They project, in other words, their own feelings toward the attack onto him whilst refusing him the basic human respect of accepting that maybe the position he had steadfastly maintained for sixty years was an honest, considered one rather than a product of psychosis.

If support for the atomic bombings of Japan equals mental illness there were an awful lot of lunatics loose in the bombings’ immediate aftermath. If we could go back and ask these lunatics, they’d likely be very surprised that people are still debating this issue at all today. Well before 1950 the history seemed largely to have been written, the debate already long settled in the form of the neat logical formulation destined to appear in high-school history texts for many decades, destined to be trotted out yet again for the bowdlerized version of the Enola Gay exhibit. Japan, despite being quite obviously and comprehensively beaten by that summer of 1945, still refused to surrender. But then, as the Smithsonian’s watered-down exhibit put it: “The use of the bomb led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. Such an invasion, especially if undertaken for both main islands, would have led to very heavy casualties among American, Allied, and Japanese armed forces, and Japanese civilians.” The bombings were terrible, but much less terrible than the alternative of an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which was estimated to likely cost as many as 1 million American casualties, and likely many times that Japanese.

For a sense of the sheer enormity of that figure of 1 million casualties, consider that it’s very similar to the total of American casualties in both Europe and the Pacific up to the summer of 1945. Thus we’re talking here about a potential doubling of the the United States’s total casualties in World War II, and very possibly the same for Japan’s already much more horrific toll. The only other possible non-nuclear alternative would have been a blockade of the Japanese home islands to try to starve them out of the war, a process that could have taken many months or even years and brought with it horrific civilian death and suffering in Japan itself as well as a slow but steady dribble of Allied casualties amongst the soldiers, sailors, and airmen maintaining the blockade. For a nation that just wanted to be done with the war already, this was no alternative at all.

Against the casualties projected for an invasion or even an extended blockade, the 200,000 or so killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki starts to almost seem minor. I’d be tempted to say that you can’t do this kind of math with human lives, except that we did and do it all the time; see the platitudes about the moderate, unfortunate, but ultimately acceptable “collateral damage” that has accompanied so many modern military adventures. So, assuming we can accept that, while every human life is infinitely precious, some infinities are apparently bigger than others (Georg Cantor would be proud!), the decision made by Truman and his advisers would seem, given the terrible logic of war, the only reasonable one to make… if only this whole version of the administration’s debate wasn’t a fabrication.

No, in truth Truman never had anything like the debate described above with his staffers — unsurprisingly, as the alleged facts on which it builds are either outright false or, at best, highly questionable. Far from being stubbornly determined to battle on to the death, Japan was sending clear feelers through various diplomatic channels that it was eager to discuss peace terms, with the one real stumbling block being the uncertain status under the Allies’ stated terms of “unconditional surrender” of the Emperor Hirohito. Any reasonably perceptive and informed American diplomat could have come to the conclusion that was in fact pretty much the case in reality: that many elements of this proud nation were still in the Denial phase of grief, clinging to desperate pipe dreams like a rescue by, of all people, a Soviet Union that suddenly joined Japan against the West — but, as those dreams were shattered one by one, Japan as a whole was slowly working its way toward Acceptance of its situation. Given these signs of wavering resolution, it seems highly unlikely that an invasion of Japan, should it have been necessary at all, would have racked up 1 million casualties on the Allied side alone. That neat round figure is literally pulled out of the air, from a despairing aside made by Truman’s aging, war-weary Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall engaged in a similar bit of dead reckoning, based on nothing but intuition, and came up with a figure of 500,000. Others reckoned more in the range of 250,000. The only remotely careful study, the only one based on statistical methods rather than gut feelings, was one conducted by the Army that estimated casualties of 132,500 — 25,000 of them fatalities — for an invasion of Kyushu, 87,500 casualties — 21,000 of them fatalities — if a follow-up invasion of Honshu also became necessary. Of course, nobody really knew. How could they? The only thing we do know is that 1 million was the highest of all the back-of-the-napkin estimations and over four times the military’s own best guess, meaning it’s better taken as an extreme outlier — or at least a worst-case scenario — than a baseline assumption.

The wellspring for the problematic traditional narrative about the use of the atomic bomb is an article which Henry Stimson wrote for the February 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine. This article was itself written in response to the first mild stirrings of moral qualms that had begun the previous year in the media in response to the publication of John Hersey’s searing work of novelistic journalism Hiroshima. Stimson’s response sums up the entire debate and the ultimate decision to drop the bombs so eloquently, simply, and judiciously that it effectively ended the debate when it had barely begun. The two most salient planks of what’s become the traditionalist view of the bombing — Japan’s absolute refusal to surrender and that lovely, memorable round number of 1 million casualties — stand front and center. This neat version of events would later be enshrined in the memoirs of Truman and his associates.

Yet, as we’ve seen, Stimson’s version of the debate must be, at best, not quite the whole truth. I want to return to it momentarily to examine the biggest lie therein, which I consider to be profoundly important to really understanding the use of the bomb. But first, what of the stories told by those of later generations who would condemn the use of the bomb? They’ve staked various positions over the years, ranging from unsubstantiated claims of racism as the primary motivator to arguments derived from moral absolutism: “One cannot firmly be against any use of nuclear weapons yet make an exception in the case of Hiroshima,” writes longtime anti-nuclear journalist and advocate Greg Mitchell. Personally, I don’t find unnuanced tautologies of that stripe particularly helpful in any situation; there’s always context, always exceptions.

By far the strongest argument made against the use of the atomic bomb is the one that was first deployed by Gar Alperovitz to restart the debate in 1965: that external political concerns, particularly the desire to send a message to the Soviet Union, had as much or more to do with the use of the bomb than a simple desire to end the war as quickly and painlessly as possible. While the evidence isn’t quite as cut-and-dried as many condemners would have it, there’s nevertheless enough fire under this particular smokescreen to make any proponent of the atomic bombing as having merely been doing what was necessary to end the war with Japan at least a bit uncomfortable.

It was the evening of the first day of the Potsdam Conference involving Truman, Stalin, Winston Churchill, and their respective staffs when Truman first got word of the success of the Trinity test. Many attendees remarked the immediate change in his demeanor. After having appeared a bit hesitant and unsure of himself during the first day, he started to assert himself boldly, almost aggressively, against Stalin. Suddenly, noted a perplexed Churchill, “he told the Russians just where they got on and off and generally bossed the whole meeting.” Only when Churchill got word from his own people of the successful test did all become clear: “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday…”

There follow Potsdam in the records of the administration’s internal discussions a disturbing number of expressions of hopes that the planned atomic bombings of Japan will serve as a forceful demonstration to Stalin that the United States should not be trifled with in the fast-approaching postwar world order. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in particular gloated repeatedly that the atomic bomb should make the Soviets “more manageable” in general; that it would “induce them to yield and agree to our positions”; that it had given the United States “great power.”

But we have to be careful here in constructing a chain of causality. While it’s certainly clear that Truman and many around him regarded the bomb as a very useful lever indeed against increasing Soviet intractability, this was always discussed as simply a side benefit, not a compelling reason to use the bomb in itself. There were, in other words, lots of musing asides, but no imperatives in the form of “drop the bomb so that we can scare the Russians.” Truman’s diary entry after learning of the Trinity test mentions the Soviets only as potential allies against Japan: “Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan explodes over their homeland.”

If we consider actions in addition to words the situation begins to look yet more ambiguous. Prior to Potsdam the United States had been pushing the Soviet Union with some urgency to enter the war against Japan, believing a Soviet invasion of Manchuria would tie down Japanese troops and resources should an American-led home-island invasion become necessary. The Truman administration also believed a Soviet declaration might, just might, provide the final shock that would bring Japan to its senses and cause it to surrender without an invasion. But in the wake of Trinity American diplomats abruptly ceased to pressure their Soviet counterparts. The Soviet Union would declare war at last anyway on August 8 (in between the two atomic bombings), but the United States, once it had the bomb, would seem to have judged that ending the war with the bomb would be preferable for its interests than having the war end thanks to the Soviet Union’s entry. The latter could very well give Stalin postwar justification for laying claim to Manchuria or other Japanese territories, claiming part of the spoils of a war in which the Soviet Union had participated only at the last instant. An additional implicit consideration may have been the conviction of Byrnes and others that it wouldn’t hurt postwar negotiations a bit to show Stalin just what a single American bomber could now do. The realpolitik here isn’t pretty — it seldom is — but what to make of the whole picture is far from clear. The words and actions of Truman and his advisers would seem ambiguous enough to be deployed in the service of any number of interpretations, from condemnations of them as war criminals to assertions that they were simply doing their duty in prosecuting to the relentless utmost of their abilities their war against an implacable enemy. Yes, interpretations abound, most using the confusing facts as the merest of scaffolds for arguments having more to do with ideology and emotion. I won’t presume to tell you what you should think. I would just caution you to tread carefully and not to judge too hastily.

In that spirit, it’s time now to come back to the biggest lie in Stimson’s article. Quite simply, the entire premise of the article is untrue. Actually, there was no debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be used on Japan.

Really. Nowhere is there any record of any internal debate at all over whether the atomic bomb should be dropped on Japan. There were debates over when it should be used; on which cities it should be used; whether the Japanese should be warned beforehand; whether it should be demonstrated to the Japanese in open country or open ocean before starting to bomb their cities. But no one, no one inside the administration ever even raised the shadow of a suggestion that it should simply be declared too horrible for use and mothballed.  Not even among the scientists who built the bomb, many of whom would become advocates in the postwar years for atomic moderation or abolition, is there even a hint of such an idea. Even Niels Bohr, who was frantically begging anyone in Washington who would listen to think about what the bomb might mean to the future of civilization, simply assumed that it would be used as soon as it was ready to end this war; his concern was for the world and the wars that would follow. Interestingly, the only on-the-record questioners of the very idea of using the atomic bomb are a handful from the military who had no direct vote on the strategic conduct of the war in the Pacific, like — even more interestingly — Dwight Eisenhower. Those unnoticed voices aside, the whole debate over the use of the atomic bomb on Japan is largely anachronistic in that nobody making the big decisions at the time ever even thought to raise it as a question. The use of the bomb, now that it was here, was a fait accompli. I really believe that this is a profoundly important idea to grasp. If you insist on seeing this conspicuously missing debate as proof of the moral degradation of the Truman administration, fair enough, have at it. But I see it a little bit differently. I see it as a sign of the difference between peace and war.

The United States has visited war upon quite a number of nations in recent decades, but the vast majority of Americans have never known war — real war, total war, war as existential struggle — and the mentality it produces. I believe that this weirdly asymmetrical relationship with the subject has warped the way many Americans view war. We insist on trying to make war, the dirtiest business there is, into a sanitized, acceptable thing with our “targeted strikes” and our rhetoric about “liberating” rather than conquering, all whilst wringing our hands appropriately when we learn of “collateral damage” among civilians. Meanwhile we are shocked at the brutal lengths the populations of the countries we invade will go to to defend their homelands, see these lengths as proof of the American moral high ground (an Abu Grahib here or there aside), while failing to understand that what is to us a far-off exercise in communist control or terrorist prevention is to them a struggle for national and cultural survival. Of course they’re willing to fight dirty, willing to do just about anything to kill us and get us out of their countries.

World War II, however, had no room for weasel words like “collateral damage.” It was that very existential struggle that the United States has thankfully not had to face since. This brought with it an honesty about what war actually is that always seems to be lacking in peacetime. If the conduct of the United States during the war in the Pacific was not quite as horrendous as that of Japan, plenty of things were nevertheless done that our modern eyes would view as atrocities. Throughout the war, American pilots routinely machine-gunned Japanese pilots who had bailed out of their stricken aircraft — trained pilots being far, far more precious a commodity to the Japanese than the planes they flew. And on the night of March 9, 1945, American B-29s loosed an incendiary barrage on Tokyo’s residential areas carefully planned to burn as much of the city as possible to the ground and to kill as many civilians as possible in the process; it managed to kill at least 100,000, considerably more than were killed in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and not far off the pace of Hiroshima. These scenes aren’t what we think of when we think of the Greatest Generation; we prefer a nostalgic Glen Miller soundtrack and lots of artfully billowing flags. Our conception of a World War II hero doesn’t usually allow for the machine-gunning of helpless men or the fire-bombing of civilians. But these things, and much more, were done.

World War II was the last honest war the United States has fought because it was the last to acknowledge, at least tacitly, the reality of what war is: state-sponsored killing. If you’re unlucky enough to lead a nation during wartime, your objective must be to prosecute that war with every means at your disposal, to kill more of your enemy every single day than he kills of your own people. Do this long enough and eventually he will give up. If you have an awesome new weapon to deploy in that task, one which your enemy doesn’t possess and thus cannot use to retaliate in kind, you don’t think twice. You use it. The atomic bomb, the most terrible weapon the world has ever known, was forged in the crucible of the most terrible war the world has ever known. Of course it got used. The atomic bombings of Japan and all of the other terrible deeds committed by American forces in both Europe and the Pacific are not an indictment of Truman or his predecessor Roosevelt or of the United States; they’re an indictment of war. Some wars, like World War II, are sadly necessary to fight. But why on earth would anyone who knows what war really means actually choose to begin one? The collective American denial of the reality of war has enabled a series of elective wars that have turned into ugly, bleeding sores with no clear winners or losers; somehow the United States is able to keep mustering the will to blunder into these things but unable to muster the will to do the ugly things necessary to actually win them.

The only antidote for the brand of insanity that leads us to freely choose war when any other option is on the table is to be forced to stop thinking about it in the abstract, to be confronted with some inkling of the souls we’re about to snuff out and the suffering we’re about to cause. This is one of the services that Trinity does for us. For me, the most moving moment in the entire game is the one sketched out at the beginning of this article, when you meet a sweet little girl who’s about to become a victim of the world’s second atomic-bomb attack. Later — or earlier; chronology is a tricky thing in Trinity — you’ll meet her again, as an old woman, in the Kensington Gardens.

>examine woman
Her face is wrong.

You look a little closer and shudder to yourself. The entire left side of her head is scarred with deep red lesions, twisting her oriental features into a hideous mask. She must have been in an accident or something.

A strong gust of wind snatches the umbrella out of the old woman's hands and sweeps it into the branches of the tree.

The woman circles the tree a few times, gazing helplessly upward. That umbrella obviously means a lot to her, for a wistful tear is running down her cheek. But nobody except you seems to notice her loss.

After a few moments, the old woman dries her eyes, gives the tree a vicious little kick and shuffles away down the Lancaster Walk.

That scene breaks my heart every time I read it, and I’m still not entirely sure why.

I like the fact that Trinity goes to Nagasaki rather than Hiroshima. The Hiroshima attack, the more destructive of the two bombings in human lives by a factor of at least two and of course the first, normally gets all of the attention in art and journalism alike. Indeed, it can seem almost impossible to avoid emphasizing Hiroshima over Nagasaki; I’ve done it repeatedly in this article, even though I started out vowing not to. “We are an asterisk,” says Nagasaki sociologist Shinji Takahashi with a certain bitter sense of irony. “The inferior a-bomb city.” Nagasaki wasn’t even done the honor of being selected as a target for an atomic bomb. The B-29 that bombed Nagasaki had been destined for Kokura, but settled on Nagasaki after cloud cover and drifting smoke from a conventional-bombing raid made a drop on Kokura too problematic. An accident of clouds and wind cost 50,000 or more citizens of Nagasaki their lives, and saved the lives of God only knows how many in Kokura. As the Japanese themselves would say, such is karma. And such is the stuff of tragedy.

If I were ever to publish a second edition of Spacetime and Geometry — unlikely, but check back in another ten years — one thing I would like to do would be to increase the number of problems at the end of each chapter. I like the problems that are there, but they certainly could be greater in number. And there is no solutions manual, to the chagrin of numerous professors over the last decade.

What I usually do, when people ask for solutions and/or more problems, is suggest that they dig up a copy of the Problem Book in Relativity and Gravitation by Lightman, Press, Price, and Teukolsky. It’s a wonderful resource, with twenty chapters chock-full of problems, all with complete solutions in the back. A great thing to have for self-study. The book is a bit venerable, dating from 1975, and the typesetting isn’t the most modern; but the basics of GR haven’t changed in that time, and the notation and level are a perfect fit for my book.

And now everyone can have it for free! Where by “now” I mean “for the last five years,” although somehow I never heard of this. Princeton University Press, the publisher, gave permission to put the book online, for which students everywhere should be grateful.

If you’re learning (or teaching) general relativity, you owe yourself to check it out.

Labour activists and left leaning commentators have been bemoaning how unfair it is that ever since the Scottish referendum, the SNP have been going around claiming that because Labour campaigned together for the No side they are just the same as the Tories.

The SNP have indeed been claiming this and this has almost certainly added impetus to their recent surge leaving Labour (if the polls are to be believed) at risk of losing a majority of their Scottish held seats.

It is ridiculous that Labour would be considered to be exactly the same as the Tories just because they happened to be on the same side in a particular campaign. It's the sort of stupidly simplistic argument that we see far too often in politics.

But I am afraid my response to Labour on this is "Ah Diddums".

Because "Labour are exactly the same as the Tories" in Scotland is pretty much identical to  "The Lib Dems are exactly the same as the Tories" in the whole of the UK, a line Labour has been pushing since 11th May 2010. A claim which is equally as ridiculous that just because a party is in coalition with another party that means they are now exactly the same party.

I for one am delighted to see Labour being hoist by their own petard in this way.

It’s hard to know what to think of things like this.  There’s something to be said, I suppose, for being reminded that Seattle, where I live, is indeed a liberal bubble, its progressive policies and forward-thinking politics an aberration even in the left-leaning Pacific Northwest, and that much of the rest of Washington state is populated by militiamen, tea party types, and other self-identified American patriots.  And I do like to keep up to date on what armed hysteria the gun right is whipping itself into, so I can plan my day accordingly; like the people involved in the protest, I am an owner of multiple firearms, but unlike them, I am not a brain-damaged paranoiac, so it’s useful to be informed about what lunatic degree of terror a perfectly harmless piece of legislation has instilled in these dolts.

The specifics of the ‘protest’ certainly provide lots of opportunity for amusement.  The ever-present huckster element manifests itself in the sale of “FIGHT TYRANNY — SHOOT BACK” gimme caps, reputedly to raise bail money; alas for the poor hat-hawker, no arrests were made, and he was forced to keep all that money for himself.  The way the hapless crowds were thwarted from their eager act of well-armed civil disobedience by the authorities merely locking the doors is a fine illustration of why the right has never really gotten the whole idea of protest and prefers a nice comforting dose of authoritarianism.  And the images of these brave freedom fighters wandering aimlessly through the halls of power trying to find someone who wants to listen to them, huddling in the porticos to avoid getting rained on, and hunkering down outside the governor’s mansion praying to Jehovah to smite someone already are highly comical.

Perhaps the biggest laugh/gasp combination comes from this quote from aging Tumwater sad sack Dave Grenier:  “What’s the world coming to when there are people who want to break the law and they won’t let you do it?”  Mr. Grenier is present at a protest, ostensibly of the government he believes has lately turned tyrannical, and he seems not to have a clue as to how the government works.  One shudders to think of what his conception of law enforcement must be, as he does not seem to understand that its very foundation is not letting people break the law when they want to.  (A supplemental giggle can be had from Monroe-based elected official Elizabeth Scott, who, after a show-us-your-tits display of top-grade pandering wherein she flashed her pistol to the hooting crowd, claimed “I carry at least one gun every day because a cop is too heavy and a guard is too heavy.”  Rep. Scott might wish to visit Seattle more often, as we employ police and security officers capable of moving under their own power, who need not be carried around.)

But the real tell here, the one that has had me in a spin since at least the days of the Clinton administration when the right seemed to make a tectonic shift from merely oppositional to downright eliminationist, came from her colleague in the Washington state house, Rep. Matt Shea of Spokane Valley.  Shea is another Tea Party blatherer, and notorious at the state house for his deranged violent outbursts; aside from his loopy political ideas, which include fanatical gay-bashing, he pulled an illegal and unlicensed gun during a traffic incident, has a track record of public and domestic outbursts of anger against fellow elected officials and his Russian bride, and, during his tour in Iraq with the Army National Guard, he was disarmed and referred for psychiatric counseling by his commanding officer for reckless behavior.  In other words, just the sort of fellow you want wandering around the capitol building with a loaded gun.

According to reports, Shea “gave a fiery speech that included a list of more than 20 grievances against the government, including militarization of police, high taxes, surveillance programs, Sharia law, and restrictions on guns”.  One could quibble on specifics here; it’s odd that someone so virulently opposed to gay marriage would not find Sharia law so objectionable, and it’s very odd to hear a private citizen armed with an assault rifle complain about the militarization of the police.  But the real puzzler is that this isn’t a politician focused on an issue; it’s a politician, as so many on the right have become, blowing a scattershot load, shotgun-style, of exaggerations, lies, mischaracterizations, ignorance, and outright fantasy all over his electorate and hoping something sticks.

For all of their flaws, the Democrats, from the ever-shrinking labor left to the mainstreamed big-business technocrats who have held office since the 1980s, at least try to focus on actual issues — problems that really exist, and about which something at least theoretically can be done.  Unemployment, income disparity, low wages, corporate corruption, monopoly power, workplace safety, pollution, alternative energy research, science funding, educational reform, police brutality, financial regulation — whatever one’s position on these issues, they are real.  They can be observed and measured; their effects can be gauged, their existence can be seen, and the efficacy of attempts to steer them in one direction or another can be at least loosely graded on a variety of criteria.

But not only do so many of today’s Republicans deny the reality of the observable and indisputable issues, preferring a hands-off approach to virtually every economic problem, pretending vaccination is a matter of personal choice and not public health, and flat-out denying the existence of things like climate change; they also replace them with issues that are pure invention.  Taxes are still low at the federal level, both in comparison to other highly developed countries and in comparison to our own history — and Washington doesn’t have a state tax.  Sharia law is a pure fantasy in America, as much based in political reality as dragons or moon-men — and in Washington, we’re demographically more likely to be forced to swear fealty to the emperor of Japan than we are to become subject to Sharia law.  Despite the seeming daily occurrence of gun murders and mass shootings, not a single piece of meaningful gun control legislation has been passed by the federal government in decades — and the one passed here in Washington was exceptionally mild and had widespread popular support.

The whole foundation of the Tea Party movement was that the American government had become so alienated from the ideals and goals of its people, that it had so abrogated the Constitution, that it represented an excrescence on the nation that needed to be expunged, no differently than our initial overthrow of the British.  But despite its long life, not a single one of its dire predictions have come true — not a single one. Where is the Islamization of America we were assured was imminent from the Kenyan usurper Barack Hussein Obama?  Where are the roving gangs of inner-city thugs, transformed by federal fiat into an army of goons to enforce his dictatorial proclamations?  Where, indeed, are those dictatorial proclamations?  Where are the padlocked cattle-cars transporting patriotic dissenters to FEMA concentration camps?  Where are the blue-helmeted U.N. battalions, forcing socialist wealth distribution down our throats at gunpoint?  Where is even a single one of the doomsday prophecies uttered daily by these rubes and hustlers?  Obama has less than a year left in office.  Even his signature program of health care reform doesn’t clear the bar of being unconstitutional; hell, he didn’t even manage to get insurance companies out of the equation, let alone come up with death panels or abortion on demand or strip-mall Mengeles or whatever other science-fiction nonsense these two-bit cretins have been fulminating about for the last seven years.

Why people continue to buy into the ramblings of a political party whose program consists of outtakes from The Turner Diaries is the subject for another column.  But when people ask me why I am so hard on my fellow Democrats — why I save my strongest criticisms for liberals — this is why.  The political struggle is being presented as a battle between bad Democrats and worse Republicans, with my vote, I am assured, either committed to the former or given, by default, to the latter.  But to my ears, the Republicans literally have no argument to counter.  They are trafficking in pure illusion, describing the political stakes in Fairyland; they have nothing to offer me that is worth arguing against.  The battle should be between better or worse solutions to real problems, not between actuality and delusion.  I’ll continue to focus on the problems of labor and the left; as far as the right goes, wake me when they talk about something real.

It isn’t easy, being a god.

This website was founded on the principle that we, as gods, are facing a world where being an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity is a very different thing than it used to be.  In a time where civil rights, social justice, feminism, and diversity rule the day, we shouldn’t simply enforce our wills by altering the very fabric of reality the way we did back in olden times (even though we could, if we wanted to).  Let’s face it — we’re always going to be gods.  And we always want to be good, especially if we get to define what that word means.  But are we always going to be good gods?  And who even decides that?  Answering those questions is what this website is all about, and also ad revenue.

If you’re lucky enough to be a god (although we think gods make their own luck, especially gods of luck), then you’ve probably asked yourself questions like these plenty of times in the past.  What should I accept as burnt offerings if my girlfriend is vegan?  Why do my worshipers demand omnipresence from me when they know I can’t be everywhere at once?  Does embracing polytheism mean I have to hang around those weird-smelling ladies who are super into midwifery?  What’s a good way to make subjugation of women sound cool and hip?  If I get to order the killing of cartoonists, can I start with the guy who does Momma?  We know that, omniscient or not, you need the answers to these questions, without ever questioning your essential nature as lord and master of all creation.

That’s why we started the Good God project.  We looked around the internet and saw too many Lokis and not enough Thors.  We wanted there to be a place for truly decent gods to discuss their thoughts, their ideas, and yes, their feelings.  We knew that you wanted to do more than fulfill the traditional “deity” roles of unleashing plagues, monitoring the fall of sparrows, and issuing post-mortem eternal judgments; you wanted someplace to talk about the things gods aren’t supposed to talk about.  Why you’ve never quite been able to carry off a beard, and what you should do about it.  How you can never keep track of all the rules about genital malformation.  Whose name you’re supposed to call out during sex.  Where to find really good craft cocktails on Mount Olympus.  When it’s appropriate to discuss that one recurring fantasy you have about running into Amaterasu at a spa weekend without making it seem like you have some kind of Asian fetish.

The Good God project will bring you the best from our editorial staff, consisting of two Olympian gods, three Norse gods, an ancient Babylonian deity, two former staffers for the Huffington Post, and Devang, who works for our angel investor.  We’ll also be taking reader submissions (please, no cuneiform) to get the best of what you’re thinking when you aren’t running the engine of the world or righteously smiting the men who lay with other men without even sharing their best grooming tips.  We’ll have an entire section on sports tailored specifically for you, a being of such vast and unimaginable power that all human life is but a passing vapor in the air.  And, of course, TV recaps.

In our first issue alone, we brought you Opochtli’s essay on bass fishing on Lake Baccarac, Hermes on drone warfare and how it should impact your selection of smartphone apps, Gulki — the Wendic god of cross-dressing — on cross-dressing in ancient Polabia, Will Lietch on the Cardinals’ chances of signing Jesus Christ for the 2016 season, and Zeus on how it’s not really rape if you transform yourself into a songbird or a beam of light first.  We also brought in Krishna to live-blog the Grammys, and to explain how it’s impossible for him to be racist because his skin is blue and that’s why it’s okay he used that word to describe Kanye West so many times.  And we’re partnering up with some of the finest sites on the web to bring you such award-wanting numericles as “16 Divine Powers You Didn’t Know You Had That Can Get You Laid” and a viral video of a little baby trying on a mitre pretiosa and accidentally breaking its neck.  All this for the low price of less than thirteen Philistine foreskins a month!

The Good God Project.  Because you don’t have to be a good man to be a great god.

Race relations seem to be at the forefront of the current plan to drag America kicking and screaming back to the mid-19th century, so this sort of thing is fascinating to me.  Clemson’s black students have long complained that the university underfunds their programs, fails to hear their grievances, doesn’t give them a voice on campus, and brushes off incidents of racial provocation; the whole thing culminated in this sorry display from one of the university’s upstanding (white) fraternities.  Such is the climate that led to the recent push to change the name of Clemson’s main building, which, of course, the college administration declined to do, offering up the familiar explanation that sure, Ben Tillman might have been a questionable guy by today’s oh-so-sensitive standards, but he did a lot for the school, and he’s part of our history, and, hey, what are you gonna do?

Since people in power and the press that thinks its job is to toady people in power as much as possible don’t feel it is particularly important to tell the truth, a bit of a history lesson might be in order here.  The post-Civil War state of South Carolina found itself, much to the dismay of well-off landowners and the white supremacist elite, in a nightmare of its own making:  thanks to their own massive enslavement of blacks, the voting majority, once those slaves became freedmen, consisted of former slaves who were highly unlikely to vote in the interests of their former masters.  Realizing that representative democracy (that is to say, the most sacred principle on which America was founded) was about to bite them in the ass, they decided the best thing to do would be to stop democracy dead in its tracks, in a very literal sense.  At first, the legislature tried to ban blacks from voting altogether, and instituted flagrantly unconstitutional laws to deprive them of political influence.  When that didn’t work, under the guise of ‘rifle clubs’, the white elite formed racist militias — by every definition of the term, murderous terrorist organizations — and intimidated, assaulted, and killed any blacks foolish enough to believe the North’s victory in the war would mean any improvement in their station.

Into this swamp of violent oppression rode Benjamin Ryan Tillman, one of the most repulsive, base, grotesque human beings to ever hold elected office in the United States.  Tillman was a notorious white supremacist; he railed against the idea of having to pay his former slaves a wage, and forced them into onerous work contracts that kept them poor and without options — slavery by another name.  He hated blacks and openly railed against them as subhuman animals at every opportunity, and subjected his workers to the lash even though it was no longer legal to do so.  Most critically, he joined with the Sweetwater Sabre Club and the Redshirts, two of the most notorious terror gangs of the time, and took part in the massacre of black voters, militiamen, and even elected officials.  He oversaw the brutal murder of dozens of blacks in South Carolina, and personally killed at least half a dozen himself.  All of this came after the Civil War, when the law of the land recognized his victims as true American citizens with all the rights of an American; but democratically elected officials, upstanding soldiers who served their country, and innocent civilians attempting to exercise their Constitutional right to vote, Tillman murdered them all.

This is not history that is in dispute.  It is a matter of plain and well-documented fact.  Tillman himself bragged, not only of his contempt for blacks, but of his outright murder of them, until the day he died, including the entire duration of his terms as the governor of South Carolina and a United States senator.  Lest anyone assume it excessively hyperbolic to refer to him as a terrorist should know that the description came from Tillman’s own mouth; he constantly boasted of his violence against blacks, making no secret of his contempt for decency, civility, and democracy.  “We tried to overcome the (black) thirty-thousand majority by honest methods,” he lied, but discovering it to be a “mathematical impossibility”, he decided to “recover our liberty by fraud and violence”.  Years later, in his autobiography, he frankly stated that “the purpose of our visit to Hamburg (where seven black militiamen were murdered) was to strike terror”.  Two months later, he led his men into Ellenton, where as many as a hundred blacks were slaughtered, including a state senator.

So, when African-American students today complain about having to daily walk past a building named for this monster, they’re not talking about merely a figure in history who was susceptible to the ordinary bigotry of his time and place, or someone lucklessly entangled in the dismal economics of a slave state, or even a more outspoken than normal Southern white supremacist.  They are talking about a man who was considered a violent thug even by the standards of the day; a self-admitted terrorist who led groups of armed rebels in a deadly campaign to overthrow the legitimate government, suppress the fair functioning of democracy, and grind their fellow countrymen into the dirt; a man who not only owned their ancestors, but once he was no longer allowed to do so, commenced to murdering them in numbers that exceed the bodycount of any mass murderer.

This is the armed terrorist of whom Clemson’s (white) Vice-President of Student affairs referred to as part of “the history of Clemson, and you can’t change the history”.  This is the multiple murderer that the local news refers to as “a person with a background of prejudice”.   This is the anti-democratic racial supremacist Kevin Hart is referring to when he says “it’s a tradition at Clemson University”, and tells us that “what we should really be focusing on” is “all he did for Clemson”.  But this view of history requires a moral relativism leagues beyond that of the most leftist postmodernist:  it is a fantastical whitewashing that claims no crime is too heinous, no massacre is too horrific that it can’t be balanced out if the perpetrator did something nice for white people.  Neo-Confederates and Civil War revisionists will point to the corruption and greed of the postbellum South, but Reconstruction never wreaked anything near the havoc on innocent people that Ben Tillman did all by himself, let alone the combined horrors of hundreds of years of chattel slavery.

No one is asking that Benjamin Tillman be erased from historical memory.  What the black students of Clemson are asking is that he be recognized for the monster that he was, and that, instead of being held up as a benefactor to education, he be presented in the historical record as what he was:  a terrorist, a bigot, and a killer.  Charles Manson is certainly in no danger of being scrubbed from our collective memory; we simply aren’t going to focus on the fact that he was charismatic and could write a catchy tune and name a city park after him.  Adolf Hitler will never be forgotten by history, but we have sensibly chosen to remember that the terrible things he did far outweigh the fact that he kick-started the German economy, and have wisely decided not to go around naming schools after him.  Asking that a murderer be called a murderer, and not glorified by forcing the descendants of his victims to walk, heads bowed, around a multi-million-dollar structure erected in his name, is not a elimination or a distortion of history; it is an admission and a recognition of history in a country that is increasingly forgetting how to do so.

(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time)

A few people have asked my opinion about “memcomputing”: a computing paradigm that’s being advertised, by its developers, as a way to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.  According to the paper Memcomputing NP-complete problems in polynomial time using polynomial resources and collective states, memcomputing “is based on the brain-like notion that one can process and store information within the same units (memprocessors) by means of their mutual interactions.”  The authors are explicit that, in their view, this idea allows the Subset Sum problem to be solved with polynomial resources, by exploring all 2ⁿ possible subsets in parallel, and that this refutes the Extended Church-Turing Thesis.  They’ve actually built ‘memcomputers’ that solve small instances of Subset Sum, and they hope to scale them up, though they mention hardware limitations that have made doing so difficult—more about that later.

A bunch of people (on Hacker News, Reddit, and elsewhere) tried to explain the problems with the Subset Sum claim when the above preprint was posted to the arXiv last year.  However, an overlapping set of authors has now simply repeated the claim, unmodified, in a feature article in this month’s Scientific American.  Unfortunately the SciAm article is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant passage:

Memcomputing really shows advantages when applied to one of the most difficult types of problems we know of in computer science: calculating all the properties of a large series of integers. This is the kind of challenge a computer faces when trying to decipher complex codes. For instance, give the computer 100 integers and then ask it to find at least one subset that adds up to zero. The computer would have to check all possible subsets and then sum all numbers in each subset. It would plow through each possible combination, one by one, which is an exponentially huge increase in processing time. If checking 10 integers took one second, 100 integers would take 10²⁷ seconds—millions of trillions of years … [in contrast,] a memcomputer can calculate all subsets and sums in just one step, in true parallel fashion, because it does not have to shuttle them back and forth to a processor (or several processors) in a series of sequential steps. The single-step approach would take just a single second.

For those tuning in from home: in the Subset Sum problem, we’re given n integers a₁,…,a_n, and we want to know whether there exists a subset of them that sums to a target integer k.  (To avoid trivializing the problem, either k should be nonzero or else the subset should be required to be nonempty, a mistake in the passage quoted above.)

To solve Subset Sum in polynomial time, the basic idea of “memcomputing” is to generate waves at frequencies that encode the sums of all possible subsets of a_i‘s, and then measure the resulting signal to see if there’s a frequency there that corresponds to k.

Alas, there’s a clear scalability problem that seems to me to completely kill this proposal, as a practical way of solving NP-complete problems.  The problem is that the signal being measured is (in principle!) a sum of waves of exponentially many different frequencies.  By measuring this wave and taking a Fourier transform, one will not be able to make out the individual frequencies until one has monitored the signal for an exponential amount of time.  There are actually two issues here:

(1) Even if there were just a single frequency, measuring the frequency to exponential precision will take exponential time. This can be easily seen by contemplating even a moderately large n.  Thus, suppose n=1000.  Then we would need to measure a frequency to a precision of one part in ~2¹⁰⁰⁰. If the lowest frequency were (say) 1Hz, then we would be trying to distinguish frequencies that differ by far less than the Planck scale.  But distinguishing frequencies that close would require so much energy that one would exceed the Schwarzschild limit and create a black hole!  The alternative is to make the lowest frequency slower than the lifetime of the universe, causing an exponential blowup in the amount of time we need to run the experiment.

(2) Because there are exponentially many frequencies, the amplitude of each frequency will get attenuated by an exponential amount.  Again, suppose that n=1000, so that we’re talking about attenuation by a ~2^-1000 factor.  Then given any amount of input radiation that could be gathered in physical universe, the expected amount of amplitude on each frequency would correspond to a microscopically small fraction of 1 photon — so again, it would take exponential time for us to notice any radiation at all on the frequency that interests us (unless we used an insensitive test that was liable to confuse that frequency with many other nearby frequencies).

What do the authors have to say about these issues?  Here are the key passages from the above-mentioned paper:

all frequencies involved in the collective state (1) are dampened by the factor 2^-n.  In the case of the ideal machine, i.e., a noiseless machine, this would not represent an issue because no information is lost.  On the contrary, when noise is accounted for, the exponential factor represents the hardest limitation of the experimentally fabricated machine, which we reiterate is a technological limit for this particular realization of a memcomputing machine but not for all of them …

In conclusion we have demonstrated experimentally a deterministic memcomputing machine that is able to solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time (actually in one step) using only polynomial resources.  The actual machine we built clearly suffers from technological limitations due to unavoidable noise that impair [sic] the scalability.  This issue can, however, be overcome in other UMMs [universal memcomputing machines] using other ways to encode such information.

The trouble is that no other way to encode such information is ever mentioned.  And that’s not an accident: as explained above, when n becomes even moderately large, this is no longer a hardware issue; it’s a fundamental physics issue.

It’s important to realize that the idea of solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time using an analog device is far from new: computer scientists discussed such ideas extensively in the 1960s and 1970s.  Indeed, the whole point of my NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality paper was to survey the history of such attempts, and (hopefully!) to serve as a prophylactic against people making more such attempts without understanding the history.  For computer scientists ultimately came to realize that all proposals along these lines simply “smuggle the exponentiality” somewhere that isn’t being explicitly considered, exactly like all proposals for perpetual-motion machines smuggle the entropy increase somewhere that isn’t being explicitly considered.  The problem isn’t a practical one; it’s one of principle.  And I find it unfortunate that the recent memcomputing papers show no awareness of this story.

(Incidentally, quantum computing is interesting precisely because, out of all “post-Extended-Church-Turing” computing proposals, it’s the only one for which we can’t articulate a clear physical reason why it won’t scale, analogous to the reasons given above for memcomputing.  With quantum computing the tables are turned, with the skeptics forced to handwave about present-day practicalities, while the proponents wield the sharp steel of accepted physical law.  But as readers of this blog well know, quantum computing doesn’t seem to promise the polynomial-time solution of NP-complete problems, only of more specialized problems.)

The DSM is written mostly by academics, which is why it gets so excited about distinctions like schizoid personality versus schizotypal personality. If it were written by clinicians, it might better reflect the sort of cases that make it into a hospital.

There would, for example, be an entire chapter on the scourge of ‘My Boyfriend Broke Up With Me’ spectrum disorders. More attention would get paid to the plague of chronic ‘I Got Angry At My Dad And Told Him I Was Going To Kill Myself To Freak Him Out And He Overreacted And Called The Cops And Now Here I Am In Hospital But Honestly I Didn’t Mean It’. Society would finally wake up to the epidemic of ‘I Wanted To Take My Medicine But My Hand Slipped And I Somehow Took The Entire Bottle All At Once Even Though I Would Never Do Something Like Intentionally Overdose’. And the sufferers of ‘This Patient Probably Has Some Kind Of Complicated Neurological Problem But Neurology Is Tired Of Trying To Figure It Out So They Have Declared It To Be Psychiatric’ might at last get some relief.

But the biggest change to the medical lexicon would be the introduction of ‘Poverty NOS’.

I recently got a patient, let’s call him Paul…

(all of my patient stories are vague composites of a bunch of people with details changed to protect privacy)

…who was in hospital after trying to hang himself. He said he was so deep in debt he was never going to get out. He’d been involved in a messy court case, had to hire a lawyer to defend himself, lawyer ended up running to the tune of several thousand dollars. He was a clerk at a clothing store, barely made minimum wage, maxed out his credit cards, then maxed out other credit cards paying off the first credit cards.

He didn’t seem to have major depressive disorder, but when someone comes in admitting to a serious suicide attempt, procedure says he gets committed. He wasn’t thrilled about this, saying if he missed work then he might lose his job and this was just going to make him further behind on his payments, but I checked with my attending and as usual the answer was “admit”.

Something especially bothered me about this case, and after thinking about it I’ve figured out what it is.

It’s not just that the psychiatric hospitalization won’t help and might hurt. That’s pretty common. The ‘My Boyfriend Broke Up With Me’s, the ‘I Got Angry At My Dad’s, unless they have some underlying disorder all of these people get limited value from the psychiatric system and tend to just sit in hospital for a couple of days, go to some group therapy, get asked a hundred times if they’re depressed, then go home. And then they’re still broken up with their boyfriend or still have a terrible relationship with their dad and the same thing’s going to happen again.

In this case, it was that – well, the guy is a minimum wage worker from inner city Detroit. He didn’t tell me exactly how much money this debt was, but from a couple of numbers he mentioned I got the impression it was in the ballpark of $5000. That might not seem like an attempt-suicide level of money to some people, but to this guy with his job the chance of ever paying it off seemed low enough that it wasn’t worth waiting and seeing.

So what bothered me is that psychiatric hospitalization costs about $1,000 a day. Average length of stay for a guy like him might be three to five days. So we were spending $5,000 on his psychiatric hospitalization, which was USELESS, so that we could send him out and he could attempt suicide again because of his $5,000 debt which he has no way of paying off. And probably end up in the hospital a second time, for that matter.

I assume that since he was poor, Medicaid paid his hospital bill. I’m not complaining that the cost of the hospital bill was added to his debt, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, although in some other cases it would be. I’m complaining that here’s this guy, so desperate for money that he wants to kill himself over it, and he has to sit helplessly as we throw thousands of dollars at getting a parade of expensive doctors and nurses and social workers to talk to him, conclude that yup, his problem is definitely that he’s poor, and then throw him back out. I feel like this fails to be, as the buzzwords say, “patient-centered care”.

Problem is, you don’t have to be an economics PhD to realize that “give $5,000 to anyone who attempts suicide and says they need it” might create some bad incentives.

I have no good solution to this. Offering people who are so poor they want to kill themselves very expensive psychiatric care seems maybe a little better than doing nothing. But it also seems insulting, patronizing, paternalistic, wasteful, and occasionally heartbreaking.

And this is why I can never decide whether to identify as a libertarian or a liberal. On the one hand, top-down institutionalized bureaucracies seem so ridiculously inefficient at solving problems that it’s an outrage and a disaster. On the other hand, there are a lot of problems that really need solving, they don’t seem to have solved themselves yet, and governments are the only entity with enough coordination power to attempt the task.

Solution there, it seems to me, is to create unimpoverishable populaces. I think if we were to implement a Basic Income Guarantee we might save more money in psychiatric care than we think – since we compete with the prison system to be the warehouse for people who can’t make it out in the world and nobody knows what to do with. It might produce some of the same kind of savings as giving the homeless people houses. If I got fired because we’d solved all the problems relating to poverty, and the population of seriously mentally ill people was too small to support the current number of psychiatrists, that would be a pretty neat way to go.

#850, 11th March 2000

I can’t remember, did I cry when I heard about Madonna’s “Pie”? To claim I did would be a lie, in fact I likely smiled. A dance-pop version of one of the great rock totems, by an artist on a creative roll, teamed with one of the most sympathetic producers of her career? How could it possibly fail to enrage my foes and gladden my friends? In my head existed a version of “American Pie” that had a shot at being a great single, and would at least end up a marvellous joke. Yet neither outcome came true.

The question of whether or not Madonna screws up “American Pie” is easily answered: yes. How it goes wrong for her is a bit more interesting. But most intriguing of all is what she saw in it to make her want to try. Yes, Rupert Everett put her up to it. But Madonna’s discography is not otherwise chock-ful of bad singles recorded as favours to actor mates. She is 41 at this point, a remarkably shrewd individual at a career high in terms of creative control: even if this is a complete whim, it’s a whim she carried through. Why?

To find out I need to dig into what, exactly, the original “American Pie” was. Don McLean’s lament for the death in 1958 of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper, most simply. (And it does a touching, clumsy job at that: “Bad news on the doorstep / I couldn’t take one more step.”) Of course that’s only the beginning. He turns that inciting incident into a kind of myth-cycle for the entire 1960s, told through a series of riddles and coded references to the era’s pop artistocracy. Which led to the song’s enduring appeal to some people who’d lived through that decade (or wished they had): not just a validation, but a puzzle-book, a thing to be “interpreted”. And by the same token, “American Pie” became widely hated by many born after that, whose response to eight minutes of jesters and quartets and whisky and rye was, roughly, “Why do I care about this shit?”

Looked at now, “American Pie”’s status as a boomer rosetta stone is a little embarrassing, but also fascinating. Even by the CD era, let alone the Spotify one, the references seemed dreadfully on the nose: “The birds flew off with a fallout shelter / Eight miles high and falling fast”. What can the answer be, O Sphinx? But in 1972 these might have played as genuine riddles, triggers for memory and reinforcements of the importance of what had happened: the sense that rock could be – deserved to be! – treated as legend. Even so the pile-up of call-backs is overwhelming, drowning most of the song’s sense. There’s a term from comics and sci-fi fandom for this particular impulse to lard a work with continuity references, determinedly excluding the not-we from the party: fanwank. And “American Pie” is sixties fanwank of the purest kind.

But every fan also has an agenda. Between the too-many lines of “American Pie” are buried schisms and debates. We’re listening, after all, to a history of the 60s in which the music is already dead, killed not when the Beatles broke up but around the time they met. “American Pie” is as much a ghost story as a celebration, and there’s a vengeful purism to McLean’s take on rock music and its decade. In some ways he toes baby boomer orthodoxy – the sixties end at Altamont – but in others he’s a heretic: the most visceral part of the song comes when he watches, furious and bitter, as Mick Jagger dances onstage, and names him Satan. Buried here is an earlier question – what has happened to the magic of rock’n’roll? – a split among the fifties and sixties generation themselves, which the party of “American Pie” seemed to be losing by the time the song was recorded. The song’s side of the schism, I’d say, holds that rock’n’roll hit teenage perfection in the mid-50s, and the sixties saw its decadence and decline. “American Pie” loves the sixties, breathes the sixties, but in this one crucial way has more in common with its haters than its fans.

Madonna, in a theological dispute between Buddy Holly and Mick Jagger, is surely of the devil’s party. But despite my initial excitement, I don’t think she was exactly trolling when she made it (and McLean gushed over her version anyway). I doubt she had much respect for “American Pie”’s meandering retread of sixties pop history, but she certainly had a use for it. In 1999 she’d enjoyed a large, worldwide hit with “Beautiful Stranger”, another Orbit production from the second Austin Powers movie. “Stranger” was a triumph – Orbit’s production managed to capture and update a swirling essence of sixties pop and clubland without actually sounding much like anything from those days. In a stroke she’d done what years of dogged Britrock effort had failed to: successfully modernise the 1960s.

So why not try and hit that spot a second time, with a song absolutely steeped in the era? William Orbit’s arrangement on “American Pie” isn’t as dense as the techno-psychedelic pop sheen he gave “Beautiful Stranger”, but its gyrating keyboard line, occasional hints of fuzz bass, and synthesised Rickenbackers suggest he’s going for a similar hit of lightly retrofied bliss. But it doesn’t work: “American Pie” is comparatively lifeless, and the instrumental touches that seemed like delightful presents to the listener on “Stranger” feel like awkward marking time here, waiting for a misguided song to end.

Does the problem lie in Madonna’s editing? She strips out most of the blind-item content – a wise move – to leave stuff about music and dancing and a bit of religion: her chosen territories. That isn’t a bad way to cut the song – especially as it positions her as the keeper of music’s flame within the record – but even trimmed a lot of McLean’s lyrics are still too idiosyncratic for another singer to get much grip on. What can Madonna do with “I was a lonely teenage broncin’-buck / With a pink carnation and a pick-up truck”? Her best, but the singer and the song don’t fit.

The wider issue, though, is the translation of folk-rock into dance-pop. McLean’s lines are long and rangy, and an acoustic accompaniment gives him space to stretch, play with the cadences, tell a story, even if it is a dumb story full of smarmy riddles. William Orbit’s elegant, clockwork productions are inimical to that, pushing McLean’s words back into line and tempting Madonna into the regulated, autocue reading she gives. Even the song’s very good lines – “I know that you’re in love with him / Cos I saw you dancing in the gym” – get swallowed up by the metre, and Madonna barely bothers to lend them any expression. The restrained, trained singing voice she used on “Frozen” and “Substitute For Love” lets her down badly here. Ultimately, “American Pie” works – for good or bad – as a shaggy dog tale its singer believes in. If this was the only version that existed, nobody would even hate it.

There’s a final mistake, too, in following “Stranger” with this. “American Pie” is a song based on the idea that the sixties mattered – that the details of their story and struggles were vital. “Beautiful Stranger”, and Austin Powers for that matter, are assertions that the sixties now matter only as an aesthetic. They treat the decade the way the hippies treated the Victorian and Edwardian era: a look, a texture, little more. It was an inevitable shift, and a relief. Covering “American Pie” – reducing the ultimate sixties-as-content record to a sixties-as-aesthetic one – might have been a smart way of underlining that, but the song beats her, forcing her to relive a fight she really has no interest in. She knew it, too – “American Pie” was left off the next Greatest Hits record, and even her successful partnership with Orbit wouldn’t last much longer. Time, once again, to move forward.

"Gothic" by Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson

If "Shaman" was an ambitious misfire, "Gothic" is the story where Legends of the Dark Knight finally came into its own and fully embraced its remit. It's important to remember that, back in 1989, there really wasn't much in the way of a track record for Batman stories like this. The three models for "mature readers" (I'm putting that phrase in necessary scare-quotes) Batman stories that LotDK was initially pulling from were 1988's The Killing Joke, 1987's "Year One," and 1986's The Dark Knight Returns. The same year that LotDK premiered also saw the release of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum graphic novel. The idea of a Batman story designed to be read by an audience that didn't include young children was still new. We take it for granted now that many - if not, unfortunately, most - Batman stories currently published just aren't appropriate for kids. But back then the idea was, pardon the pun, novel, and it was this revelation that served as the inspiration for hundreds of subsequent "Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore" headlines. It was a strange idea for many, many people to wrap their heads around.

Even though "Shaman" lacked the Comics Code seal, there was nothing in the story that would have proved problematic for the Authority. Denny O'Neil was an old hand, and even though the story was concerned with "heavy" themes such as myth, cultural theft, and ritual murder, it was still essentially a Batman story of the kind that could have been told at any point in the previous twenty years, just told with a darker color palette. Not so "Gothic." This was a story that couldn't have been told with pre-1986 Batman. The violence, the intensity, the presence of explicit violence and (not so explicit but still upsetting) sex was new. It didn't go as far as Arkham Asylum, but it also wasn't anywhere near as abstruse. Although many of Morrison's early habits were well in place, the story was more brutal and direct than its more highbrow cousin. This was a murder mystery that touched on child murder, sexual abuse, satanism, and rape in the course of its unraveling.



Morrison has written many Batman stories in his career, and much of his later work is prefigured in "Gothic." For one, Morrison wasn't afraid to cross the line separating Batman's mundane crime-ridden Gotham from the kind of supernatural horror elements exemplified by the story's villain, Mr. Whisper. The idea that Gotham is somehow a genuinely haunted, specially cursed placed was one that would become more and more central to the mythos. Now it's often a given that Gotham city, rather than merely an exaggerated vision of 1970s urban hell New York, contains some kind of Mephistophelian affinity to the literal hell. (For modern examples, see Snyder and Capullo's Batman, as well as Batman Eternal.) Morrison also introduces the idea that Thomas Wayne was a deeper and more significant figure in Gotham history than previous writers had intimated. And finally, even though "Gothic" is close to being a straight horror story, Morrison also has fun mixing and matching a few motifs from previous Batman eras: in the midst of a heavy supernatural mystery, he finds time to strap our hero into a Rube Goldberg deathtrap straight out of the 1960s TV show. The idea that all of Batman's diverse and thematically inconsistent histories coexisted as parts of the character's development was one that Morrison would return to later.



The story begins with the a series of murders of Gotham's most powerful criminals. In desperation these criminals turn for protection to Batman, who scoffs at their attempts at negotiation before setting out to hunt the killer himself. (Oh, yeah, I guess these are spoilers for a 25-year-old Batman story?) Morrison performs an extremely clever maneuver here: in the early pages he leads the reader to believe the story will focus on the crime lords being hunted and killed by some mysterious force. But it turns out that the crime lords' purpose in the story is mainly to give Batman (and the audience) a red herring. The actual plot has little to do with the mob bosses. Mr. Whisper is killing them, but more out of boredom while sitting around Gotham waiting for his real plan to kick in.

The "real" plan actually involves a 300-year old serial killer who made a deal with the devil, and his plan to murder every man, woman, and child in Gotham as a means of escaping this obligation. There are allusions peppered throughout, from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, the latter of which he would return to in the second arc of The Invisibles. Meanwhile, the catalyst for Mr. Whisper's crusade of vengeance against Gotham's underworld is revealed to be, basically, the plot of Fritz Lang's M. Morrison here is still operating very much in the mode of fellow "British Invasion" writers Moore and Gaiman - processing literary and artistic influences in a very literal-minded way, plucking plots and themes directly from older works to create a thick metatextual stew. Morrison would, of course, largely outgrow this tendency over the course of the next decade, with the aforementioned Invisibles acting as his own version of The Sandman, a means for a young creator of digesting and reflecting a large mass of influences through the lens of familiar genre fiction signifiers. Like Moore and Gaiman, Morrison would become a far more subtle writer with age, but his earlier work retains a pleasing density sometimes missing from his later, more streamlined efforts.



If anything could be said to account for the story's relatively low profile compared both to other early attempts at "mature readers" Batman stories and in the context of Morrison's well-plumbed oeuvre, it may be Klaus Janson's art. Janson is, it must be said, an acquired taste, a master of mood and setting (he can draw castles and gothic cathedrals for days), whose figurework often suffers from a merely expressionistic relationship to reality. I happen to like Janson's art, the occasional strange potato-head notwithstanding. Something Janson gets which many more superficially polished artists do not is how to make a fight seem painful and punishing without also appearing pretty: the brawl between Batman and Mr. Whisper that takes up much of the story's last issue is brutal, with broken bones and bloody knuckles, and Batman facing down an opponent who may be nowhere his match in terms of martial skill, but simply can't be stopped, not even by a speeding subway train. It's exhausting to read, and Janson's Batman - far from the invincible paragon he is often portrayed as - feels the rattle of every blow.

"Gothic" isn't a perfect story, despite its many virtues. Some of its defects are still present in Morrison's work down to this day: for instance, pacing can seem a jumble. Each episodic set-piece is exquisitely measured by Janson, but the episodes themselves can seem abrupt. The series' mandate of tying each adventure so closely to the "Year One" era results in a questionable continuity implant that sees Thomas Wayne on the verge of solving a series of brutal child murders on the very day he's shot and killed (while also raising the question of whether or not the Waynes' murder was as random as believed, which carries regrettable implications for the character's origin). The same over-enthusiasm that made Arkham Asylum interesting and frustrating in equal measure can be discerned here, even if Janson's art provides a much firmer grounding for the writer's earnest digressions. Arkham Asylum is ultimately redeemed not despite but because of its excesses - it's a ludicrously overstuffed, ungodly pretentious monstrosity that works because of its deep commitment to every overwrought and underbaked bit of juvenile psychodrama. There isn't nearly as much at stake with "Gothic", and Morrison is far more restrained. Despite the surprisingly cosmic scope, at its root it's still a murder mystery with a bit of supernatural horror thrown in for good measure. If the story seems to overreach at times, its portrait of Batman is perfectly balanced, a human, fallible hero who nonetheless manages to triumph in the face of unearthly evil due to his demoniacal singularity of purpose.

There are 2.3 million Americans in prison or jail. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison. There are 2.7 million minors with an incarcerated parent. The imprisonment rate has grown by more than 400 percent since 1970.

Pick a stat, any stat. They all tell you the same thing: America is really good at putting people behind bars.

It’s supposed to help the country reduce crime in two ways: incapacitation — it’s hard to be a habitual offender while in prison — or deterrence — people scared of prison may do their best to not end up there.

But recent research suggests that incarceration has lost its potency. A report released this week from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law finds that increased incarceration has had a very limited effect on crime over the past two and a half decades.

At incarceration’s current elevated levels, the effect of more incarceration on crime is not statistically different than zero. It’s no longer working.

(I’m an economics fellow at the Brennan Center and a co-author of the report along with lawyer Lauren-Brooke Eisen and researcher Julia Bowling.)

And yet crime has fallen. Violent crime is down 50 percent since 1990. Property crime is down 46 percent.²⁹ It’s tempting to draw a connection there: As incarceration rose sharply, the crime rate plummeted. So one must be responsible for the other. But as you’ve read many times at FiveThirtyEight, correlation is not causation. According to the data analysis, the relationship between incarceration and crime wasn’t much more than a coincidence.

Here’s how incarceration has changed over the past 100-plus years of U.S. history:³⁰

In 1970, there were just shy of 200,000 Americans in prison. Today there are more than 1.5 million — 496 prisoners for every 100,000 people. That’s more than in any developed country. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, the imprisonment rate in Russia is 467. In the U.K., it’s 148. In France, 102. In Germany, it’s 76. In Japan, 50.

It’s because of these elevated levels that we’re likely to see diminishing returns. If we assume — fairly!³¹ — that the criminal justice system tends to incarcerate the worst offenders first, it becomes clear why. Once the worst offenders are in prison, each additional prisoner will yield less benefit in the form of reduced crime. Increased incarceration — and its incapacitation effect — loses its bite. And at its world-historic level, it’s not surprising that it would’ve lost nearly all of it.

The Brennan Center report is hardly the first to recognize this possibility. Few have quantified it, though,³² as Steven Levitt pointed out in a 2004 paper. “Although the elasticity of crime with respect to imprisonment builds in some declining marginal returns, the actual drop off may be much greater. We do not have good evidence on this point.” Basically, he’s saying we know what to expect, but at the time we didn’t have the results to back it up.

But the evidence is growing. The new Brennan Center report ran a regression analysis on crime and all sorts of variables that might affect it: incarceration, police employment, median income, unemployment rates, alcohol consumption, age and racial makeup, etc. The regression model allows the relationship between incarceration and crime to vary as incarceration varies, thus fully accounting for the possibility of diminishing returns.³³

And diminishing returns are what we saw. Crime rates dropped as incarceration rates rose, for a time, but incarceration’s effect on crime weakened as more people were imprisoned.³⁴ An increase in incarceration was responsible for something like 5 percent of the decrease in crime in the 1990s, when its levels were lower, but has played no meaningful role since. If I were speaking to a fellow economist, I’d say the incarceration elasticity of crime is not distinguishable from zero. At a cocktail party, I’d say that crime no longer responds to changes in incarceration.

Nationwide, incarceration has been relatively flat in recent history. Since 2000, the imprisonment rate, while high, is up just 1 percent. However, individual states have had widely varying experiences. And there we found anecdotal evidence of diminishing incarceration returns in the states as well.

Fifteen states have experienced decreases in property crime and incarceration rates since 2000. Those states are in the shaded region.

A similar pattern emerges for violent crime. Of the states that reduced incarceration, only two saw an increase in violent crime. Thirteen saw decreases. Again, states in the shaded region saw drops in crime and incarceration.

Many of these states are big: California, Texas, New York, Michigan. Notably, these states decreased their incarceration rates for very different reasons. California, for example, faced a Supreme Court-mandated “realignment” to address prison overcrowding. Prisoners were shifted to local jails, and their release was encouraged. Texas, on the other hand, was more proactive, appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars for prison alternatives such as substance abuse programs, drug courts and mental illness treatment.

These charts aren’t proof of diminishing returns, but they’re evidence of it. A state’s change in incarceration is not strongly linked with its change in crime; one doesn’t seem to have much to do with the other. Since 2000, adding more prisoners in a state has been associated with having more crime. (A simple linear regression shows a mild positive relationship between changes in imprisonment and changes in crime.) This is consistent with everything else we’re seeing: Diminishing returns have rendered additional incarceration impotent.

Evidence of incarceration’s diminishing returns can be found outside of big data sets and regression models, too. It can also be found via a natural experiment. A report from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project compared the prisoner releases from California’s realignment with similar releases in Italy, following clemency legislation passed by the Italian Parliament. California saw no discernable change in crime. Italy saw a spike in crime. The reason? California’s incarceration rate was high, and Italy’s was low. Italy hadn’t yet experienced dramatically diminishing returns.

The Brennan Center report also tried to grasp what caused the crime decline. If it wasn’t increased incarceration, what was it? The short answer: We don’t know, and neither does anybody else.³⁵

But there’s one promising factor we did uncover: policing. It’s fairly well-established that as the number of police in a city rises, crime in that city falls. Much more mysterious is how police techniques affect crime rates. To explore policing, we turn from states to cities, and to a program called CompStat.

CompStat began with a New York City transit police lieutenant mapping subway crime by hand. It was effective, so the system was computerized and implemented throughout the NYPD in 1994. It has since been adopted in cities across the country, with departments gathering data and mapping crimes. This both increases the information available to police and allows for additional accountability on the part of officers.

Below, you’ll see how a few big American cities’ crime rates changed four years before and after they introduced CompStat.³⁶

These are a selected few cities, but their experiences aren’t atypical. In most cases, the introduction of CompStat is associated with an accelerated drop in crime or the reversal of an upward crime trend.³⁷

After controlling for police numbers and time- and city-level factors, we found that across the board — violent, property, even homicide — there was roughly a 10 percent crime reduction associated with the introduction of a CompStat program. We only considered the 50 most populous cities — 41 of which have CompStat in some form — so it’s not immediately clear what the aggregate effect on nationwide crime has been or could be. But it’s potentially meaningful.³⁸

All of this to say, crime trends are complicated. Surely no one is complaining about the recent decline, but no one fully understands it either. One thing is becoming clear: Increased incarceration’s role was minimal.

[Content warning: Polyamory, race]

The best reporting on social science statistics, like the best reporting in most areas, comes from The Onion:

CAMBRIDGE, MA—A Harvard University study of more than 2,500 middle-income African-American families found that, when compared to other ethnic groups in the same income bracket, blacks were up to 23 percent more likely. “Our data would seem to discredit the notion that black Americans are less likely,” said head researcher Russell Waterstone, noting the study also found that women of African descent were no more or less prone than Latinas. “In fact, over the past several decades, we’ve seen the African-American community nearly triple in probability.” The study noted that, furthermore, Asian-Americans.

I thought of this today because a bunch of people have accosted me about the article There’s A Big Problem With Polyamory That Nobody’s Talking About. “Scott, you’re polyamorous! What do you think of this?”

As per the article, the big problem with polyamorous people is:

…their whiteness. And that standard of whiteness not only erases the experience of people of color; it reflects the actual exclusion of these people in poly life and communities. […]

A white, affluent image that reflects a troubling reality: A 2013 survey of polyamorous people from online groups, mailing lists and forums found that almost 90% of the participants identified as Caucasian. People of color, especially black polyamorists, report feeling “othered” and excluded in poly environments such as meet-ups, with women feeling especially at risk of being objectified and fetishized as an exotic sexual plaything.

“I interviewed a black couple who went to a poly group, and they were definitely preyed upon, in a sense,” said Marla Renee Stewart, Atlanta-based founder of Velvet Lips, a sex education venue.

The article constantly equivocates between “the problem is that polyamory is too white” and “the problem is that the media portrays polyamory as too white”, which is kind of a weird combination of problems to be discussing in a media portrayal. But it seems to eventually settle on a thesis that black people really are strongly underrepresented.

For the record, here is a small sample of other communities where black people are strongly underrepresented:

Runners (3%). Bikers (6%). Furries (2%). Wall Street senior management (2%). Occupy Wall Street protesters (unknown but low, one source says 1.6% but likely an underestimate). BDSM (unknown but low) Tea Party members (1%). American Buddhists (~2%). Bird watchers (4%). Environmentalists (various but universally low). Wikipedia contributors (unknown but low). Atheists (2%). Vegetarian activists (maybe 1-5%). Yoga enthusiasts (unknown but low). College baseball players (5%). Swimmers (2%). Fanfiction readers (2%). Unitarian Universalists (1%).

Can you see what all of these groups have in common?

No. No you can’t. If there’s some hidden factor uniting Wall Street senior management and furries, it is way beyond any of our pay grades.

But what I noticed when I looked up those numbers was that in every case, the people involved have come up with a pat explanation that sounds perfectly plausible right up until you compare it to any other group, at which point it bursts into flames.

For example, Some people explain try to explain declining black interest in baseball by appeal to how some baseball personality made some horribly racist remark. But Donald Sterling continues to be racist as heck, and black people continue to be more than three-quarters of basketball players.

Some people try to explain black people’s underrepresentation on fanfiction websites by saying that many of them have limited access to the Internet. Okay. Except that black people are heavily overrepresented on Twitter, making up double the expected proportion of that site’s population.

Some people try to explain the underrepresentation of blacks in libertarianism and the Tea Party by arguing that these groups’ political beliefs are contrary to black people’s life experiences. But blacks are also underrepresented in groups with precisely the opposite politics. That they make up only 1.6% of visitors to the Occupy Wall Street website is no doubt confounded by who visits websites, but even people who looked at the protests agree that there was a stunning shortage of black faces. I would have liked to get current membership statistics for the US Communist Party, but they weren’t available, so I fudged by looking at the photos of people who “liked” the US Communist Party’s Facebook page. 3% of them were black. Blacks are more likely to endorse environmentalism than whites, but less likely to be involved in the environmentalist movement.

Some people try to explain black people’s underrepresentation on Wall Street by saying Wall Street is racist and intolerant. But Unitarian Universalists are just about the most tolerant people in the world – nobody even knows what they do, just that they’re extremely tolerant when they do it – and black people are in Unitarianism at lower rates than they’re on Wall Street.

And the article on polyamory suggested that maybe polyamorists’ high-flying lifestyle and expensive play parties price out black people. Forget for a moment that I’ve been poly for three years and had no idea this high-flying lifestyle existed and kind of feel like I am missing out. Forget for a moment that as far as I can tell “play parties” are a BDSM term with no relationship to polyamory. In my experience polyamory draws from the same sort of people as atheism, and atheism is very white even though not believing in God doesn’t cost a cent.

This entire genre seems to be a bunch of really silly ad hoc arguments by people who aren’t talking to each other. I would guess most of the underrepresentation of black people in all of these things are for the same couple of reasons.

First, some of these things require some level of affluence – I know I just said that didn’t explain polyamory, but I think it explains some others. For example, bird-watching requires you live somewhere suburban or rural where there are interesting birds, want to waste money on binoculars, and have some free time. Swimming requires you live in an area where the schools or at least the neighborhoods have pools.

Second, Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs says you’re not going to do weird things to self-actualize until you feel materially safe and secure. A lot of black people don’t feel like they’re in a position where they can start worrying about where the best bird-watching is at.

Third, the thrive-survive dichotomy says materially insecure people are going to value community and conformity more. Polyamory is still pretty transgressive, and unless you feel very safe or feel sufficiently mobile and atomized that you don’t care what your community thinks about you, you’re not going to feel comfortable making that transgression. Many of these things require leaving the general community to participate in a weird insular subculture, and that requires a sort of lack of preexisting community bonds that I think only comes with the upper middle class.

Fourth, black people might avoid weird nonconformist groups because they’re already on thin enough ice in terms of social acceptance. Being a black person probably already exposes you to enough stigma, without becoming a furry as well.

Fifth, we already know that neighborhoods and churches tend to end up mostly monoracial through a complicated process of aggregating small acts of self-segregation based on slight preferences not to be completely surrounded by people of a different race. It doesn’t seem too unlikely to me that a similar process could act on hobbies and interest groups.

Sixth, even when black people are involved in weird subcultures, they may do them separately from white people, leading white people to think their hobby is almost all white – and leading mostly white academics to miss them in their studies. I once heard about a professor who accused Alcoholics Anonymous of being racist, on the grounds that its membership was almost entirely white. The (white) professor had surveyed AA groups in his (white) neighborhood and asked his (white) friends and (white) grad students to do the same. Meanwhile, when more sober minds (no pun intended) investigated, they found black areas had thriving majority-black AA communities.

Seventh, a lot of groups are stratified by education level. Black people are only about half as likely to have a bachelor’s degree. This matters a lot in areas like atheism that are disproportionately limited to the most educated individuals. Polyamory also falls into this category – the most recent survey found 85% of poly people had a college education, compared to 30% of the general population (!). 30% of poly people had a graduate degree compared to only about 10% of the general population and only about 3% of blacks. There has to be a strong education filter on polyamory to produce those kinds of numbers, and I think that alone is big enough to explain most of the black underrepresentation.

Eighth, people of the same social class tend to cluster, and black people are disproportionately underrepresented among the upper middle class. Most of these fields are dominated by upper middle class people. The nickname for weird self-actualizing upper middle class things is “Stuff White People Like”, and this is not a coincidence. [EDIT: Commenter John Schilling says this better than I – a lot of these groups are about differentiating yourself from a presumedly boring low-status middle class existence, but black people fought hard to get into the middle class, or are still fighting, and are less excited about differentiating themselves from it.]

So I think positing that black people feel “fetishized as an exotic sexual plaything” in the poly community is unnecessary. Black people are underrepresented in the poly community for the same reason they’re underrepresented in everything in the same vague circle as poly. Heck, black people are even underrepresented in the activity of complaining about black people being fetishized as exotic sexual playthings – check out Tumblr’s racial demographics if you don’t believe me.

The eight points above add up to a likelihood that black people will probably be underrepresented in a lot of weird subculturey nonconformist things. This is not a firm law – black people will be overrepresented in a few weird subculturey nonconformist things that are an especially good fit for their culture – but overall I think the rule holds. And that’s a big problem.

A few paragraphs back I mentioned that Occupy Wall Street was had disproportionately few minorities. Here are some other people who like to mention this: Michelle Malkin. The Daily Caller. American Thinker. View From The Right. New York Post. American Renaissance.

All of these sources have something in common, and it’s not a heartfelt concern for equal minority representation.

Likewise, you know who’s got an obsessively large collection of resources on the underrepresentation of minorities in atheism? Conservapedia (Western Atheism And Race, Racial Demographics Of The Richard Dawkins Audience, Richard Dawkins’ Lack Of Appeal To The Asian Woman Audience, etc, etc, not to mention the very classy Richard Dawkins’ Family Fortune And The Slave Trade.)

Here it is easy to see that “you have low minority representation” serves as a stand-in for “you’re racist” serves as a stand-in for “you suck”. So here’s the problem:

In theocracies ruled by the will of God, people will find that God hates weird people who refuse to conform.

In philosopher-kingdoms ruled by pure reason, people will find that pure reason condemns weird people who refuse to conform.

And in enlightened liberal democracies where we “tolerate anything except intolerance”, people will find that weird people who refuse to conform are intolerant.

And if blacks are underrepresented in weird nonconformist groups, and nobody mentions that this is a general principle, that’s making their job way too easy.

So here’s why this article annoys me. In the midst of black underrepresentation in everything in the same ontological category as polyamory, people bring up black underrepresentation in polyamory and suggest it’s because poly people are “objectifying” and “preying on” them, positing that “there’s a problem” with “a standard of whiteness that erases people of color” in the polyamory community.

We know from OKCupid statistics that (mostly monogamous) white men are very reluctant to date black women, but monogamous people don’t have to listen to well-meaning friends going up to them and saying “So, you’re mono, I hear the monogamous community has a racism problem.”

But now I and other polyamorous people are going to have to answer one more round of annoying questions about “You’re polyamorous? Isn’t that a bunch of racist nerdy white dudes?”

A couple of years ago, Subterranean Press released a “super bundle” of short stories and non-fiction books from me, perfect for completists who want to get lots of stuff of mine for a nice, low price. SubPress has revived the super bundle for a limited time with three new works in it: “To Sue The World,” a short story set in the Redshirts universe (those of you who saw me on that book tour will remember me reading it with Wil Wheaton, Paul Sabourin and other friends); “Lock In Lost Chapters,” featuring two chapters from a previous (and unreleased) version of the novel Lock In; and The Mallet of Loving Correction, my second collection of Whatever entries. All for $8.99, and all DRM-free.

Why release it now? Because Subterranean Press wants to give the proceeds to a local non-profit: A fencing studio (that’s the fencing with swords, not with, uh, fences) which is looking to upgrade its facilities and programs. I can get behind that, so I’ll be donating my share as well. So, it’s a chance to get a lot of cool stories at a good price while helping folks.

Here’s the whole list of contents for the SubPress Scalzi Super Bundle:

• To Sue the World (an original, very short Redshirts story available nowhere else)
• Muse of Fire
• Mallet of Loving Correction
• Lock In, Lost Chapters (available nowhere else)
• How I Proposed To My Wife: An Alien Sex Story
• An Election
• Judge Sn Goes Golfing
• Questions for a Soldier
• The Sagan Diary
• The Tale of the Wicked
• The God Engines
• You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop

Again: This is available only for a limited time (about two weeks), so if you want it, come and get it. Thanks!

“Twenty-eight minutes past,” said Felix, looking at his watch.  "Nothing."

The Doctor consulted the black plastic Casio with a broken strap that she kept in her pocket.

“I make it 3.26,” she said.  "Any moment now."

They were standing behind some empty flower tubs at the centre of a roundabout.  Every now and then a car would swoop past, but essentially they were alone.  A spray of chilly drizzle floated all around them.  It was almost frozen, and felt curiously oily.  Each droplet turned as bright gold as a cinder as it flew under the beams of the street lamps.

They'd left the TARDIS stuck half-way out of an Off Licence several streets away.

"How do you know there's a roundabout around here?" Felix had asked.

"If we walk far enough in any direction," the Doctor had replied, "we're bound to come across one.  Roads need to diverge, you know."

And, sure enough, a roundabout had eventually presented itself.  It was deserted, so they had strolled across the broad ring of tarmac to the little grassy hill at its centre.

And there they stood, side by side, like strangers waiting for a bus.  They did not speak for quite some time.

"Are you sure you've got this right, Doctor?" asked Felix at last, who was feeling wet and sick and cold, and increasingly sure that the Doctor was playing some kind of game, the aim of which was to fob him off.

"The instructions were quite clear," she replied tersely.

"But I thought one had to wait at a crossroads at midnight," said Felix.

"That's if you're waiting for the Devil.  We're not."

"I don't think we're waiting for anyone," said Felix sulkily.  "I think you have been misleading me.  Again."

It was a little while after this that they checked the time.  As they did so, a figure appeared on the other side of the roundabout, riding a bicycle.  The bicycle and its rider emerged from a patch of darkness between street lamps, without having entered it first.  The pedaling figure seemed simply to have formed itself from the darkness.  It began rolling slowly around the roundabout in what looked like a cloud of mist.  It had swerved into view and trundled up onto the centre of the roundabout almost before Felix and the Doctor had realised what was happening.

The Doctor consulted her Casio again.

"Twenty-seven minutes past three in the morning," she announced, waggling her Casio in Felix's face, and sounding more smug than Felix had ever imagined possible.

Felix did not respond.  His attention was fixed on the thing that had just appeared in front of them.

One cloven hoof remained upon a still pedal.  The other rested on the ground.  It made the wet grass sizzle and steam and char.

“Shall we finish the argument later?” asked Felix in a hoarse whisper.

"Just because you're losing..." muttered the Doctor.

The creature stepped off its bike and leaned it against a flower tub.  It was short - though still taller than Felix - and stocky.  Its legs bent backwards like the hind legs of a goat.  Every visible inch of its skin - or rather his skin, because the creature was clearly male - was a dark, lava-like red.  The red was coated with a thin layer of fine white hair, which had a silkiness to it that was oddly disturbing.  The creature's fingers ended in long, black, tapering claws.  He had a long and goatish face, and glowing yellow eyes with vertical slits for pupils.  His long nose ended in widely flared nostrils which overflowed with yet more white hair.  A white goatee beard pointed forwards from his chin in a curled tuft.  It looked like a beckoning finger.

He was wearing the uniform of a postman, very much like that worn by Herr Beckmann, the postman who had cycled around Felix's home village in Germany in the years of his childhood... except that it also reminded Felix of the drivers who had brought post to his section of trench.  The resemblance was undeniable, if more than slightly offset by the cloven hooves that emerged from the trousers where boots should have been, and the two conical horns which stuck out through the top of the peaked cap.

The creature had a large leather satchel slung over one shoulder.  A long, red, forked tail swished back and forth behind him, occasionally wrapping itself around one of his legs like a snake climbing a tree.  It looked worryingly prehensile.

Both Felix and the Doctor drew back.  Not so much because of the appearance of the apparition as because of the waves of heat, and the smell of brimstone, which radiated from him.

“This is all very literal,” said the Doctor under her breath, sounding bored.

The creature cocked his head on one side.  He looked down and seemed to notice his body for the first time.

“Yes,” he rumbled thoughtfully to himself in a voice that sounded like the cracking of faraway thunder, “it is literal, isn’t it?”

He turned back to the Doctor.

“You must be a very literal minded person,” he boomed.  His mouth split open in a grin, revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth.  "Surprising, given everything I've gathered about you... Doctor."

If the Doctor was dismayed or surprised at being recognised, she gave no sign of it.  She simply flicked the brim of her top hat in acknowledgement.

"I suppose you've read about me," she said, sounding even more bored than before.

"Indeed," said the entity, "you turn up in correspondence a lot more often than most people... and in such varied correspondence too, sent by such varied people in such varied places, over such lengths of time.  And so much of the correspondence about you seems to end up in my hands..."

"I imagine Felix is responsible for the shape of your current iteration," said the Doctor lazily.  "I should've expected it after I told him we were going to see the Mailer Daemon."

The Mailer Daemon bared his teeth in amused satisfaction.

"You're very good at changing the subject," he boomed.

“Do you mean, Sir, that you would appear different if I had been expecting something different?” interrupted Felix, addressing the creature and pointedly ignoring the Doctor's implied insult.  He was determined not to let this encounter get sidetracked.

For a while, the Mailer Daemon seemed to consider his reply.  He trotted from side to side, looking down at Felix, his tail swishing.

“I am a metaphor,” he said at last.  “Reality is metaphorical, therefore metaphors are real.  But metaphors are still made by people.  No matter how real they are, or become.”

He fell silent and gazed at them haughtily, as if expecting applause.

“Well I’m certainly glad we cleared that up,” said Felix.

“I can look how I please,” said the entity, almost kindly, as if relenting, “but I have so much work to do, I tend not to concentrate on my appearance.  I often find that I have unwittingly adapted myself to the expectations of those I meet.  Not that I meet many people face to face.  I generally prefer to manage my business out of sight, behind the scenes.  And, of course, when I am not within sight of someone, I don’t really look like anything at all.  It is your perception of me which creates my physical presence.”

“It sounds as though you are admitting to being an hallucination,” said Felix.

“Such beautiful English," said the Mailer Daemon.

"Thank you," said Felix.

"I am made of words,” said the Mailer Daemon, shrugging, “which is why I appreciate such things.  And, to answer your point: all things that are made of words are, in a sense, hallucinations."

He watched them for a moment.

“Most things are made of words,” he added as an afterthought.

"We're being lectured on epistemology... or is it phenomenology... by a metaphor," said the Doctor.

“The word ‘metaphor’ means ‘to carry meaning’,” said the Mailer Daemon.  “I carry meaning… literally,” and he twitched a shoulder to indicate the satchel which dangled from it.  Felix noticed for the first time that it seemed to be bursting at the seams with papers and parcels and bundles.

“What are they?” asked Felix, pointing.

“Meanings that have been displaced,” said the creature sadly,  “Failures of communication.  Subtexts nobody picked up on.  Messages that were never sent, or which went astray.  Copied and cut paragraphs which were accidentally never pasted.  Crossed-out sentences.  Things that circulated for years, never arriving anywhere.  Things addressed to people who were not known at that address.  Things returned to sender.  Lost letters.  Lost emails.  Emails which were sent and then deleted unread.  Things that failed to happen because words never travelled from one place to another.”

"Lots of spam in there, I imagine," said the Doctor.

Felix didn't know what to make of this remark, but waited to see if he could pick up a sense of what was meant by listening to more of the conversation.

“No,” said the Mailer Daemon flatly, and with an unmistakable touch of pride.

“Why not?” asked the Doctor, “doesn’t spam have meaning?”

“Not all meanings are worth saving and curating,” said the Mailer Daemon.

“Who are you to decide?” asked the Doctor, with a sprinkling of frost in her voice.

“I am the Mailer Daemon,” said the Mailer Daemon simply.  “If I didn’t decide, who would?  I exist because these things need deciding.  The sheer weight and volume of the decisions which needed to be made was what brought me into existence.

“Besides,” he said, looking intently at the Doctor and raising a white eyebrow at her, “haven’t you ever made similar decisions?”

The Doctor blinked.

“Perhaps,” she said, after a moment, "But I only read things that are addressed to me.”

Felix wondered if that was even close to being true, or whether - like many of the Doctor's ethical pronouncements - it was meant as a general statement of principle, to be upheld when possible and discarded if necessary.

“And," continued the Mailer Daemon, "when things - for whatever reason - don’t reach anyone who has the right to decide, that’s when I take on the responsibility of caring for them.  Nothing should ever be entirely lost."

"On that subject," said the Doctor, affecting a sudden breeziness, "my friend here was wondering..."

"I can speak for myself," interrupted Felix, who was nevertheless pleased that the Doctor had remembered he was there, and that he had an agenda of his own.

The Doctor held up an apologetic hand and turned away slightly, though Felix could sense her continued close attentiveness.

Felix turned to the Mailer Daemon.

"Sir, do you have anything in there..." he glanced meaningfully at the creature's satchel "...addressed to me?"

"Oh yes," said the Mailer Daemon immediately, "I do.  As the Doctor already knows."

The Doctor said nothing.

The Mailer Daemon opened the satchel and plunged one of his arms down into it.  His arm disappeared into the satchel far further than he should have been able to, which made the Doctor's lips twitch in amusement.  After a few moments of rummaging, he drew out a single letter clutched in his red, clawed fist.

The letter was old and faded and crumpled, and the creature's hand was making it wilt with heat, but Felix recognised the colour of the envelope, and the handwriting scrawled across it.

"This was sent to you from Germany, from the village where you grew up, from a few streets away from your family home.  It was the last letter sent to you from that particular address.  It was sent only a few weeks before you..." and here the Mailer Daemon flicked his yellow eyes up at the Doctor "...went missing in action."

"Why did I never receive it?" asked Felix, who was feeling tremulous with the thumping of his heart.

"The lorry carrying this batch of letters... went astray in some heavy fog," said the Mailer Daemon.  "It wandered too close to a British machine gun emplacement.  The bullets ignited the petrol in the tank.  It happened the very same day that a British ship carrying letters from Dover to Calais was sunk by a German submarine.  That was a busy day for me."

Felix held out his hand.

"May I?" he asked.

"Of course," said the Mailer Daemon. "It is yours, after all."

He started to hand over the letter and then paused.

"But be careful, young man," he said, glancing up at the Doctor again, and then back down at Felix with a thoughtful furrow in his red brow, "some things are lost for a reason."

Felix hesitated.

“Are you saying I shouldn’t read it?” he asked.

“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” replied the creature, “that’s not my job or my business.”

He glanced at the Doctor yet again.

"It's nobody's business but yours," he said.

"I'm his friend," said the Doctor, suddenly striding forwards, flushed and passionate.

Felix looked around at her and, seeing the care in her eyes, he felt all his annoyance with her melt away.  But he also felt fear rising inside him.  It was confirmed.  There was something in the letter that she didn't want him to know.  Not for sinister reasons, but for reasons of compassion... which was, if anything, worse.

"Roads must diverge, you know," said Felix, looking into the Doctor's eyes.

The Doctor subsided unhappily, thrusting her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket.

Felix turned back to the Mailer Daemon and held out his hand again.

“I always knew deals with the devil had catches,” he said.

“I'm not the Devil," the Mailer Daemon growled sadly.  "The Devil is always in the details.”

And with that, he handed over the envelope.

Greetings, Audiofiends!  I'm stepping away from my usual WFMU Comic Supplement posts today to point to a few audio-centric websites that I still regularly use. Naturally, many fine pages disappear or go dormant, but these are some that have remained robust for many years (and one interesting newbie).

Many pages feature rarities that are so long out of print and obscure that they are one of the only sources of the material, while others are more of a 'listening room' where you can stream or download material to judge whether to buy it from a vendor legitimately.

Here are my top five current favorites:

 Allen's Archive of Early and Old Country Music, whose title pretty much sums up the contents. Terrific old vinyl in various genres, and occasional lovely collections of 78rpm records. Cover artwork, occasional label art, good information when he knows it. This has been a wonderful resource over the years, and is great for experimental downloads - surprise yourself with some unfamiliar stuff.

Willard, here, used to run a fantastic Harry Nilsson page that is much missed since it's untimely departure last year. His Wormhole page is a currently awesome resource for listening to some hard-to-find oddities and bonus tracks by a very wide variety of artists and styles (as well as videos). Plus he really knows his material and does his homework.

Lonesome Lefty is another site specializing in old-timey folk and country material. They seem to be based out of Canada or somewhere way up North as a lot of the records come from up there. Lots of liner notes from Lefty accompany all posts so that you are always well-informed about the album in question.

Our pal Uncle Gil spins loads of different types of records, with a decided slant towards vintage R&B and early rock and roll, but you never know what will turn up in here. Many surprises. Worth a good dredge every so often. Another site that puts up a steady stream of new material all the time. This one is perhaps based in Europe somewhere, as the pressings seem to almost all originate overseas, which makes for some nice unusual versions of records.

And lastly, our newcomer to the daily-posting-of-vinyl-records scene:

This one just started up on January first, and threatens to put up a different record every day. So far, the selection is thrift-stor-ey and cool, and the downloads are high-quality for the most part and include well-scanned and edited cover artwork.  No information given - just slabs of wax served up hot.  I'm enjoying this page a lot so far, they have showcased several favorite records of mine in the short time they have been online. And I thought that WFMU people would appreciate the "365 Days" aspect of this site (is there a connection with us-? Your guess is as good as mine).

Basic Hip Oddio 365

Enjoy, peoples! And I'll see you next time at the WFMU Comics Supplement.

Comments:  mindwreckertv@gmail.com

The correlation between bigotry and stupidity has been widely observed but also, I think, largely misunderstood.

Consider, for example, the recent illustration of this correlation from the great state of Vermont, as summarized by Doktor Zoom:

Here’s a sweet little story of Democracy in Action. A bright eighth grader writes to her state legislator with an idea for a law: Vermont doesn’t have an official Latin motto, so why not adopt one? And for that matter, make it a reference to history? Neato!

So state Sen. Joe Benning — a Republican who was actually trying to do a good thing, which he has probably learned to never try again — introduced a bill to adopt the motto “Stella quarta decima fulgeat” — “May the fourteenth star shine bright.” Because Vermont was the 14th state, see? Benning noted that when Vermont briefly minted its own currency, it was engraved with “Stella Quarta Deccima,” so the phrase had real historical cachet.

And then Burlington TV station WCAX put the story on its Facebook page with the headline, “Should Vermont have an official Latin motto?” and all Stupid broke loose when morons thought that Vermont was knuckling under to a bunch of goddamned illegal immigrants.

Charles Topher collected some of the most vivid examples of the xenophobic backlash:

There were hundreds of similar responses. All just as angry, aggrieved and resentful toward some vague, imaginary Other. Hundreds of examples of hundreds of Vermonters expressing the same jaw-dropping ignorance and stupidity.

The correlation between bigotry and ignorance seems obvious here. Hundreds of eager volunteers have stepped forward to demonstrate their own defiant combination of the two.

One theory to explain this correlation, then, would be to say that bigotry is an expression of ignorance. Or, in other words, to say that ignorance causes bigotry — to say that those who are ignorant will tend to be hateful (or, more precisely, that those who are ignorant will tend to be fearful and that those who are fearful will tend to be hateful).

If we accept that theory, then we must commit ourselves to education. Education is the antidote to ignorance, and therefore education could be the antidote to bigotry.

But what if what we’re seeing here from these angry anti-Latinists isn’t simple ignorance? What if it is, instead, actual rank stupidity?

The distinction matters. Ignorance, after all, is a universal aspect of the human condition. None of us can know everything. Our essential human finitude means, for all of us, that the number of things we don’t know will always exceed the number of things we do.

But we have evidence here that these Go Back to Latin-land commenters are displaying something more serious than simple, innocent ignorance. Their anger, grievance and resentment prove that cannot be the case. That emotional investment shows us that this is a subject about which they claim to be concerned — a matter that they have given their attention and focus. If their anger is genuine, and they are truly concerned, then we cannot conclude that their enduring ignorance is simply a matter of inexperience — of not knowing any better. It must be, rather, an inability to know any better — an inability to perceive, comprehend and absorb the clear facts that are right in front of their nose.

That means what we’re seeing here is not ignorance, but stupidity. Education can be an effective way of banishing ignorance, but stupidity is impervious to it. Education may be a remedy for bigotry caused by ignorance, but it will prove useless against bigotry resulting from stupidity.

The good news, though, is that there’s another possible explanation, another theory to explain the correlation seen here between bigotry and ignorance/stupidity. It could be the case that cause-and-effect flow in the other direction. The stupidity we’re seeing here could be an expression of the bigotry on display.

Or, in other words, it could be that bigotry causes stupidity.

I think there’s evidence to support this alternative theory — evidence provided by the very same indignant Vermonters making the audaciously stupid comments about the state’s proposed Latin motto.

Those comments, please note, aren’t just a little bit stupid. This is an astonishing breed of off-the-charts stupidity. It’s the kind of stupidity that makes you wonder how it’s possible that these people are able to tie their own shoes, to feed themselves or to cross a busy street without getting killed (presuming, for the sake of argument, that Vermont has any busy streets). And yet most of these people, in other contexts, seem surprisingly capable of intelligent behavior.

What we see here, in other words, is the kind of stupidity that we might expect from people with a diminished mental capacity, yet it comes from people who otherwise show that they do not have a diminished mental capacity. What they’re displaying, then, is not a lack of mental capacity, but a rejection of it. They are choosing to be stupid — choosing to behave as though they were stupid.

Thus it seems that bigotry is not the product of diminished mental capacity. Rather, bigotry forecloses mental capacity. It constrains and limits it artificially.

That means, in turn, that education is not the antidote to bigotry. The opposite is true. Bigotry is the antidote to education.

You may be wondering why I described this as good news. I think it’s good news because it means that bigotry is a consequence of a moral choice. And that means that bigotry can be cured by making a different choice.

We shouldn’t over-simplify this. The chosen stupidity of bigotry is, like all choices, conditioned and qualified and shaped by a thousand variables — education, ignorance, environment, nurture, experience, lack of experience, etc. And, like all choices, it is shaped above all by prior choices.

But we shouldn’t over-complicate this either. Those choices still matter. Bigotry, hate and resentment are always an option, but they are never the only option.

So the Supreme Court refuses to block Gay Marriage in Alabama and we have a lot of officials down there vowing civil (or maybe even uncivil) disobedience. You're going to see a lot of analogies to the time then-governor George Wallace stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama and vowed to disobey federal orders for desegregation.

It's worth remembering that, first of all, Wallace lost that battle and later practically begged people for forgiveness for his stance. It's also worth noting that several of his biographers have stated that Wallace never believed in segregation; that he only believed in doing whatever would make him popular in his state and at that moment, standing in that doorway made him very popular…even if he didn't stop what he pledged to stop.

Alabama. They can't stop it in Alabama. I continue to be amazed…pleased but amazed. I really thought it would take decades for this to happen.

I don’t always like being proved right. When I wrote about hope earlier this week, there was still a little part of me that thought I might be proved wrong and things might turn around. Our politicians might all have suddenly been infected by a desire to spell out positive visions for the future, but sadly the virus that does that doesn’t exist in our universe as yet, and all we get is the drab and the banal.

Yet again, we got more slogans to add to what sounds like an attempt by a particularly uninspired management training weekend to come up with the most generic slogans possible, things that are too bland to be included in mission statements. ‘Finish the job and finish it fairly’ is the latest attempt at non-differentiation from people who’d advertise tea by claiming it was less caffeine than coffee, but more taste than water. If all you can do to distinguish yourself is claiming ‘slightly different than X and Y, but not by too much!’ then is it any wonder no one wants to pay attention to you?

That’s why we end up with headlines like this. Look, I know the Important And Serious People who write newspaper columns and hang around the Westminster lobby like nothing more than to talk about the deficit and the minutiae of post-election taxation rates, but “Lib Dems propose £8bn in tax rises to reduce deficit” is not a message to excite or motivate anyone. Rather than promising a better nation, it’s merely asking people to work as though they were in the early days of a better budget strategy. It’s expecting people to be somehow inspired by the rhetoric of managerialism, despite all the evidence suggesting that it’s the last thing that inspires people. People like to leave work behind at the end of the day, and a politics that represents all the worst of it isn’t going to inspire anyone.

I’m not going to claim that previous Lib Dem general election campaigns were examples of unalloyed genius in political campaigning, but they at least gave people something positive to latch on to as a promise of better days to come. Now, there’s no one doing that, and instead the election is threatening to turn into a series of dull people reading out PowerPoint slides comprised entirely of the dullest buzzwords possible, then wondering why all the audience has slipped out to go to the pub.

It’s still only February, but we may have a winner in the Silliest Idea Proposed In A 2015 Political Column contest. Step forward Australian Herald-Sun columnist Tom Elliott with this:

There is a solution. Let’s agree on a set of truly important problems — mounting debt, population growth, lack of jobs, rising health care expenditure, inefficient welfare and an inadequate defence force — and appoint a committee of eminent and competent Australians to sort it out.

A benign dictatorship if you will.

This committee would consist of experts in their fields without political axes to grind. It’d need at least five years to complete its tasks during which time elected governments could administrate, but take no major decisions.

There is of course a giant paradox in the middle of this proposal in which he fails to actually consider by what sort of process people might come to agree what the ‘truly important problems’ are, or how they might go about appointing the ‘committee of eminent and competent Australians’ who’ll do something about these problems. One might suggest that this could be done by a process in which those who want the job of running the country set out their idea of what they think the problems are, how they’d solved them and then the public – perhaps through some kind of voting process – could choose between them.

(He also appears to believe that Britain suspended elections several years before WW2 began, but we’ll let that slide)

The thing of interest here isn’t that someone who imagines he wants a dictatorship can only express that in democratic forms, but rather the discontent with the notion of democracy itself. It’s the sort of thing that flares up occasionally, usually in late night talk and often couched in democratic terms like this. The thought is usually expressed not in needing a coup or anything as vulgar like that but as a desire for a strong leader who’ll cut through the crap and get things done (the same sort of arguments that are often used to advocate for elected Mayors in Britain). It’s the typical frustration at ‘the system’ that somehow blocks problems getting solved, coupled with a belief that all problems are easily solved by putting the right person in place to do it.

In short, and perhaps fitting more with the times, what’s proposed isn’t so much a coup as the installation of a new model of management. It’s perhaps a legacy of the cult of management that pervades so much of our modern experience, that the assumption isn’t regarded as completely laughable. We hear so much about how a change in management will supposedly rescue an organisation, that it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that the same rules must surely apply to how the country is run – bring in some ‘experts’, and they’ll magically find the answers that no one else has been able to. (I think I’m obliged by blogging law to link to Chris Dillow at this point)

However, while this is a silly column, it doesn’t mean that it’s not revealing something interesting about the state of political discourse. It shows that we’ve reached a point in the cycle where it’s acceptable to muse on whether there may be more efficient ways to run things than democracy, which is something that often follows big economic crises (see the 1970s and 1930s for more). Just as we’ve seen European governments replaced by technocrats and overseen by troikas, the notion is that the forms of democracy can stay, but the actual distribution of power will be changed completely – or, in some views, the true distribution of power will be revealed as the deep state rises and exercises its power overtly. Just as Colin Crouch argues with his idea of ‘post-democracy’, we’re not likely to see any sudden, dramatic or violent end to democracy, more a gradual whittling away as the technocrats and the managerialists take more responsibilities away from the democrats for safe keeping. We’ll still get to vote for whoever gets to tell us the bad news, but the real decisions will be made far away from us.

Does it have to be like that? No, but I’m getting the feeling that we’re going to need to begin to properly fight that vision of the future if we’re going to prevent it coming about.

[seen on the New York Times’ editorial page, February 6 2065, written by one “Dr. Mora LeQuivalence”]

It’s 2065. Not giving your kids super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy isn’t your “choice”. If you don’t super-enhance your kids, you are a bad parent. It’s that simple.

Harsh? Maybe. But consider the latest survey, which found that about five percent of parents fail to super-enhance their children by the time they enter kindergarten. These aren’t poor people who can’t afford super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy. These are mostly rich, highly educated individuals in places like California and Oregon who say they think it’s more “natural” to leave their children defenseless against various undesirable traits. “I just don’t think it’s right to inject retroviral vectors into my baby’s body to change her from the way God made her,” one Portland woman was quoted by the Times as saying earlier this week. Other parents referred to a 2048 study saying the retroviral injections, usually given in the first year of life, increase the risk of various childhood cancers – a study that has since been soundly discredited.

These parents will inevitably bring up notions of “personal freedom”. But even if we accept the dubious premise that parents have a right to sacrifice their children’s health, refusing super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy isn’t just a personal choice. It’s a public health issue that affects everybody in society.

In 2064 there were almost 200 murders nationwide, up from a low of fewer than 50 in 2060. Why is this killer, long believed to be almost eradicated, making a comeback? Criminologists are unanimous in laying the blame on unenhanced children, who lack the improved impulse-control and anger-management genes included in every modern super-enhancement designer baby gene therapy package.

There were over a dozen fatal car accidents on our nation’s roads last year. The problem is drivers who weren’t enhanced as children and who lack the super-reflexes the rest of us take for granted. This is compounded when they drink before getting on the road, since unenhanced people become impaired by alcohol and their already inferior reflexes deteriorate further. Since the promise of self-driving cars continues to be tied up in regulatory hassles, we can expect many more such needless deaths as long as irresponsible parents continue to consider science “optional”.

And finally, there was a recent outbreak of measles at Disneyland Europa – even though we thought this disease had been eradicated decades ago. Scientists traced the problem to unvaccinated tourists. They further found that all of these unvaccinated individuals were unenhanced. Lacking the cognitive optimization that would help them understand psychoneuroimmunology on an intuitive level, they were easy prey for discredited ideas like “vaccines cause autism”.

So no, super-enhancing your kids isn’t a “personal choice”. It’s your basic duty as a parent and a responsible human being. People in places like India and Neo-Songhai and Venus which suffer from crime and disease make great personal sacrifices to get their children to gene therapy clinics and give them the super-enhancement designer baby gene injection that ensures them a better life. And you start off in a privileged position in America, benefitting from the superenhancement of millions of your fellow citizens, and you think you can just say “No thanks”?

So I don’t want to hear another word from the “but my freedom!” crowd. Unenhanced kids shouldn’t be allowed in school. They shouldn’t be allowed to drive. They shouldn’t be allowed in public places where they can cause problems. And parents who refuse to enhance their children should be put in jail, the same as anyone else whose actions lead to death and suffering. Because not super-enhancing your kids isn’t a “choice”. It’s child abuse.

Mora LeQuivalence is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Facebook University. Her latest book, “A Flight Too Far”, argues that the recent Danish experiment with giving children wings is a disgusting offense against the natural order and should be banned worldwide and prosecuted in the International Criminal Court. It is available for 0.02Ƀ on Amazon.com

Related: Transhumanism Is Simplified Humanism, Alicorn’s Alternate Universe Social Justice Series

An overseas pixel-pal sent me a link to a Daily Mail (UK) piece on the Davos Forum a few days back. I think he expected me to be tickled by the second half of the headline:

Harvard professors warn ‘privacy is dead’ and predict mosquito-sized robots that steal samples of your DNA

—but predictably, it was the front end of that sentence that got under my skin. And on the off chance that the headline hadn’t hammered the point home with sufficient force, the bullet points beneath beat the horse to death:

• Researchers told Davos that privacy is already non existent
• Say technology will allow governments and insurance firms to steal DNA
• Also claims the same technology could help eradicate disease

It’s a tired old story— or at least it seems old, possibly because we’ve heard it so many times. Hell, you’ve heard it repeatedly even here: about that story in Wired, the self-proclaimed cutting-edge voice of the tech-savvy, offering up a token lament for the Cloud’s lack of security before telling us all that there’s no going back so we might as well just get used to it. (Late-breaking update: and sweet smoking Jesus, they’re at it again.) Robert Sawyer debating at the Gallen Symposium, leading off with Scott McNealy’s infamous claim that “You already have zero privacy: get over it”, and proceeding to claim that this was a good thing, something that would make the world a better place.   Not to mention our old buddy David Brin.  But the Daily Mail’s bullet points— and the story that followed— show pretty much the textbook talking points you’ll find in all such arguments:

1. You have no privacy;
2. There’s no way to regain your privacy;
3. But hey, that’s actually a good thing! Think of all the great travel recommendations Google will be able to serve up, once it can read your mind! Think of all the diseases we can cure and contain, now that everyone is being tracked! Think of all the lost puppies we can find!

It’s especially easy, these days, to believe the first two points at least. Over in the UK, after the overwhelming rejection of the so-called “Snooper’s Charter”— a law that would have forced ISPs to monitor their customers’ online activity and turn it over to pretty much anyone who dressed up like one of the Village People— politicians are still trying to sneak the same damn provisions into different pieces of legislation, hoping that one of these days no one will notice. Here in Canada, the Harper Administration has just tabled a new Bill to Keep Us Safe From Jihadists by, among other things, expanding the surveillance state, reducing civil rights protections, and making it illegal to “promote terrorism” online (which is especially troubling when you remember that “terrorists” is a term that now includes environmental activists). I was chuffed, earlier this week, to see Techdirt harken back to the fears I posted last October on this very ‘crawl. I only wish it had been under happier circumstances.

Naturally, all this extra power comes 100% Oversight-free!, which should be a surprise to no one. What’s more interesting, perhaps, is that CSIS (Canada’s spy agency) is not getting any extra money to go along with the bigger club. They’ve already admitted that they don’t have anywhere near the budget to deal with their current watchlist; there’d seem little point in giving them even more tewwowists to spy on when they can’t handle those already on their plate. This has led some to suggest that the bill is more about electioneering than security, that its purpose is to make anyone who opposes it look “weak on terror” in an election year. It’s not really meant to work.

Perhaps. But that presupposes that Islamic extremists are actually the target of the legislation, and not just the pretext. You don’t need a greatly expanded budget if you’re going after, for example, Amnesty International activists. Or pipeline protestors.

Plenty of people have called Harper evil. I don’t know of anyone who ever called him stupid.

Meanwhile, down in the US— the country that started it all, with its pervasive and mind-boggling surveillance of friend and foe alike— those in power are finally talking about passing laws to rein in unchecked— well, encryption, actually. Because they don’t like it when they can’t spy on us, and they especially don’t like it when companies like Apple and Google— late to the party as they may be— finally wake up to the fact that there are better ways to attract customers than selling them out to every Sheriff Bubba who knocks at the door without a warrant. They don’t like the fact that end-to-end encryption is catching on, that the system is reconfiguring itself so that admins won’t be physically able to comply with Bubba even if they want to. The FBI wants to ban encryption, at least the gummint-proof kind. The Justice Department fears that giving citizens too much privacy will result in a “zone of lawlessness” in which bogeymen might flourish. “Tor obviously was created with good intentions,” admits Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general, “but it’s a huge problem for law enforcement. There are a lot of online supermarkets where you can do anything from purchase heroin to buy guns to hire somebody to kill somebody, there are murder for hire sites.”

It’s the go-to rationale for every peeping tom without a warrant: what if terrorists are planning their next daycare-center bombing on bittorrent? What if the plans for the next Parliament shoot-up are right there in someone’s iPhone and we can’t see them? Don’t you know that TOR is 80% pedophiles?

Won’t someone think of the children?

You have to admit: as hypothetical arguments go, it’s pretty much unassailable. If we can’t unlock all the doors, how do we stop evildoers from plotting behind them? The problem is that this argument applies as much to literal doors as to metaphoric ones. There’s no difference in logical structure between Tewwowists might be plotting via encrypted emails and Tewwowists might be plotting in your kitchen. If you agree that the spectre of potential evildoing is sufficient cause to let the government go through your mail without a warrant, how can you then deny them the right to check out your basement on a whim? Are evil deeds are any less nefarious when plotted offline?

It’s worse than a slippery slope. It’s a slippery step-function; the first concession gives everything away.

Which leads to a simple metric I use to assess the claims put forth by wannabe surveillers: simply relocate the argument from cyber- to meatspace, and see how it holds up. For example, Leslie Caldwell’s forebodings about online “zones of lawlessness” would be rendered thusly:

Caldwell also raised fresh alarms about curtains on windows and locks on bathroom doors, both of which officials say make it easier for criminals to hide their activity. “Bathroom doors obviously were created with good intentions, but are a huge problem for law enforcement. There are a lot of windowless basements and bathrooms where you can do anything from purchase heroin to buy guns to hire somebody to kill somebody”

If you remain comfortable with such arguments even when brought down to earth— well, enjoy the Panopticon. I know a few SF writers whose work you might like.

And yet, oddly, I take heart from these things.

I take heart from the fact that the the Free World is trying to curtail freedom at every turn. I take heart from the endless attempts of the UK, the US, and Canada to pry into our private lives and put webcams in our toilets (because you never know when someone might try to avoid prosecution by flushing a bag of coke down the john, you know). I take heart from PRISM and the Snooper’s Charter and Bill-C-whatever-number-they’re-up-to-this-week— because they put the lie to those stories in Wired and the Daily Mail and the New York Times, they put the lie to all those journos and pundits who would tell us that privacy is dead. It gives me hope.

Because if privacy is really dead, why are so many still trying so hard to kill it?

Please note: Under the DSM V, the concept of Asperger’s syndrome no longer exists. It is now simply referred to as Autism. Throughout this post, I use the word "Asperger's" because it's more frequently associated with the word "mild" but my comments here apply equally to both Asperger’s syndrome and autism. 


You see it all the time on web forums,  things are going smoothly until a parent somewhere pipes up with the phrase, "I have a son who is mildly Asperger's. ..." and from there on, the group dissolves into two factions. One is continuing to remain loyal to the original purpose of the group, providing support and advice while the other is offended and is either busily discussing the semantics of the word "mildly" or tearing strips off the poor person who used the turn of phrase. It's also a turn of phrase that some people on the spectrum use to refer to themselves although this is much less  common. 

What is "mild Asperger's and why do some parents find it so necessary to use it to describe their children? Why do people with Asperger’s syndrome become so annoyed over the use of the term? What is really being said and what is really needed?  Hopefully this post will answer some of these questions. 


The Binary status of Asperger’s Syndrome 
One of my readers recently said that "saying that you are mildly Asperger's is like saying that you are mildly pregnant". This is a very good analogy. Much like pregnancy, Asperger’s syndrome has a "binary state". It can be on or off, there is no other state.



People's lives can be affected to varying degrees by Asperger’s depending upon various conditions but if you don't have Asperger's now, you're not going to develop it later in life. It may be recognized as a pre-existing undiagnosed condition but you either have it or you don't.

Similarly, if you have Asperger's syndrome now, you may find that over time you learn to mitigate many of the worst symptoms but that doesn't mean that you no longer have Asperger's syndrome. 

Autism and Asperger's syndrome are lifelong conditions. 


What do Parents really mean when they say that their child is "mildly Asperger's" or mildly autistic? 

Parents who refer to their child's condition as mild are generally saying two things;

1. In my opinion, my child seems to be coping better than others with the same label
2. I don't agree with, or haven't fully accepted the label.

Both of these streams of thought are problematic.


Coping Ability 
The ability to cope with anything is not a linear progression.  It’s patchy.  People cope better on some days and worse on others. In the best cases, there’s a small progression towards better coping but even then it’s usually only visible in the long term view of day-to-day “two steps forward, one step back” style progression.

It’s also pretty easy for one particularly bad day to set coping ability right back to zero.


One of the best analogies for understanding the way coping ability varies with kids with Asperger’s syndrome is to think of it as being a similar process to a person coping with depression due to the loss of a loved one.

Some days are better than others. Some days, particularly special days, like birthdays and family gatherings, are worse. On the whole though, there’s a gradual "healing process" at work. For example, comparing special days from one year to another, the impact should ideally lessen… This is similar to the way a child with autism learns to moderate their responses to cope with the world around them.

Of course, a subsequent loss can set everything right back to where it started -- In the case of a child with Autism/Asperger's, this could be a traumatic event, for example a very public meltdown in front of friends, a new bully at school or even just a change of circumstances, such as "moving house".

Coping doesn't mean Healing.
People don’t “heal” from Asperger’s syndrome or autism but they do learn coping skills.  For example, they may learn about a social faux pas which violates social norms and draws unwanted attention.  The first couple of times this happens, it will cause a lot of pain (embarrassment). They may learn to avoid that pain by not repeating the activity.

A good example of this was a boy at my school when I was five. He dropped his pants to his ankles while standing at the public urinal and he had to endure taunts from his peers for months afterwards. Needless to say, he learned that it wasn't the most appropriate behaviour.

This isn't healing, this is simply learning the social norms required to cope with everyday life. 

Parents who look at other people’s children and assume that their child is able to cope with their autism more effectively aren't doing themselves any favours. A child’s ability to cope will greatly depend upon their situations, experience and environmental factors, such as loud music or smells, which are outside of their control.

Coping can’t be ranked because it’s not something linear. It’s situational.


Acceptance of the Label
It’s not essential that a label be accepted in order for a child to get the attention they need, (see my post on Special-ism: When Parents Disagree – Focus on Treatment). It does help however, when discussing matters relating to your child.



Parents who say their child has mild autism or mild Asperger’s however are really saying; “He may have this label, but he is NOT like THEM.  "Them" being “Rain Man” or other “apparently classic” depictions of the label. They’re trying to say; “my child is better” - and they're doing this for their own sake, not for their child.

This is both insulting for others with autism and damaging for the child. It suggests that the parents are very judgemental and that they aren't open to trying behavioural exercises which work for other children on the spectrum.


What is really needed? 
Unfortunately, these types of ignorant comments come across as very insulting to others on the autism spectrum . They can often provoke heated debates about the nature of this "mild" Autism and sometimes these can escalate into arguments or even a refusal to provide support; don't forget that many of the best practitioners in special needs have children on the spectrum - or are on the autism spectrum themselves.

It's understandable that people feel the need to lash out against insulting remarks but this doesn't help the child on the spectrum. They need support and understanding. It doesn't help the parents either as the use of the term "mild " suggests that they're either new to it all, or they're not coping well.

Correction is not needed here, merely gentle coaxing.

It doesn't matter what words parents want to use provided that their child is receiving appropriate early intervention.  Once parents and child are on this path, understanding should follow naturally.

Mike Huckabee is out there lately attacking Gay Marriage. I understand that the guy's running for president and he can't get near the nomination without the support of the extreme right, which is lukewarm at best to him. Actually, I doubt he can get near the nomination with their support but that's a separate discussion. Anyway, he's talking a lot lately about wedding cakes.

It's amazing how much of the argument against Gay Marriage is about wedding cakes. I just read a bunch of sites and speeches opposing same-sex wedlock and I was noticing how much the case against it has evolved. It used to be that letting Adam marry Steve would bring down The Wrath of God upon the Earth and destroy us all. Then after quite a few Adams married quite a few Steves and nothing of the sort happened, the dire result was the annihilation of Straight Marriage, which also somehow hasn't occurred. So now, the horrendous consequence of Gay Marriage is that somewhere, someone with a cake decorator is going to have to write two male or two female names on the same application of frosting.

Huckabee also says that expecting Christians to accept marriage equality is "like asking someone who's Jewish to start serving bacon-wrapped shrimp in their deli." No, Mike, it's like expecting someone who's already serving bacon-wrapped shrimp to not refuse to sell it to anyone who walks into their deli with money. You know…the way we don't let realtors say they won't sell to a black or Hispanic family that's financially qualified.

The former governor of Arkansas would probably make the argument that being gay is not the same as being a racial minority and in some ways, it isn't. In this way, it is. When asked if homosexuality is a "choice," Huckabee usually dodges or double-talks. Saying it is is just going to get him the inevitable "When did you decide to be straight?" question which makes that position look foolish. Saying it isn't just makes the analogy to racial discrimination fit better.

He usually opts to talk about how he has many "gay friends," which makes me wonder how a gay person could be friends with Mike Huckabee. I suspect the gay people he knows are more like acquaintances he doesn't know very well. That's if they exist at all. Could you be friends in any meaningful sense with someone who often said that you lead "an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle?" and was not deserving of equal rights?

Like I said, I don't think Huckabee has a chance at the nomination. I don't even know why he's running. It's not, like some of the others, to get a good job on Fox News. He had one and he gave it up to run. Maybe he thinks that if enough people see him as a hateful bigot, he can steal Donald Trump's job on Celebrity Apprentice.

Thanks for tagging along with me on this tour of the Seattle Pinball Museum!  You all have been a great group, and it’s been a real treat strolling through the history of the silver ball with you.  We’ve seen some of the all-time classic machines during our walk, but before we conclude our little adventure, I thought I’d show you the flip side of those golden greats.

Time was, when a proposed pinball game wasn’t up to snuff, it would warrant no more response than a politely worded letter from the Rejection Department headed up by Don Francis Bally, the great-grand-nephew of the Godfather of Pinball, who suffered from an intolerance for sub-par machines, and also severe fructose malabsorption.  But on rare occasions, a below-average board would not only get past the pitch phase, but actually end up in production.  Usually recalled after consumer complaints, injuries, or class-action lawsuits, these machines became the rarest of collectors’ items, their extremely limited production run making them extremely valuable despite their lack of popularity.  Make sure you keep to the center of the aisle, as some of these machines are highly dangerous and prone to spontaneous combustion.

Over on my left, you’ll see the first machine in the Pinball Hall of Shame, 1967’s MEAT THE BEETLES.  Designed to cash in on the tail end of Beatlemania, this was rushed to production without having secured any of the proper licensing rights, resulting in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit from Capitol Records.  The same haste resulted in a lack of availability of Beatles songs for the admittedly innovative recorded soundtrack that would sound off during bonus play, meaning the manufacturers had to make due with a selection of cut-rate covers by an upstate New York three-piece called “The Buffaleadles” as well as a handful of Herman’s Hermits tracks.  Additionally, though the backbox featured a convincing replica of the infamous Yesterday and Today ‘butcher’ cover, licensees were encouraged to stock it with real meat, resulting in a repulsive odor and pest problems after a few weeks of play.

Now if you look to my left, you’ll see…oops, sorry, son, don’t touch, this one’s a real bastard…you’ll see 1973’s notorious 3-D CREATURE FEATURE.  Billed as the world’s first three-dimensional pinball machine, it raised eyebrows from fans who asked if all pinball machines were not, in fact, three-dimensional already.  The manufacturer explained that the machine was considered 3-D because of its lack of playfield glass, meaning the player could “interact” with the ball in unprecedented ways.  Unfortunately, most of these ways involved grievous injuries, as the large number of ramps and spring-loaded holes resulted in 371 broken noses, 14 lost eyeballs, and a staggering number of taped-together eyeglasses.  Players prone towards tilting particularly took it on the chin — quite literally — and the machine was made with subpar Namibian rubber on the bumpers, which was prone to breakage and left players across the country with serious welts and facial scarring.

One of the most beloved video games of the early 1980s, FROGGER did not make a successful transition to the world of pinball machines.  1983’s FROGGER:  THE PINBALL GAME had the same graphic design, the same premise, and the same music as its arcade counterpart, and manufacturer Konami felt that its fidelity to the original would be its salvation.  Instead, it turned out to be its damnation, as the pinball board featured an almost identical game-play to the video version as well.  A series of dozens of slow-moving flippers would painstakingly creep across the playfield, gradually allowing the player to flick a green, frog-like pinball through a cluttered field of moving car-shaped bumpers.  While there was some enjoyment to be had in eventually reaching the other end of the field and scoring generous points, the average of nine and a half hours it took to play a typical game was not considered worth it by most players.

Williams had a smash hit with its PINBOT machine, spawning a run of successful spin-offs, including THE MACHINE:  BRIDE OF PINBOT and the casino-themed JACK*BOT.  That luck reached its end in 1997 with the unimpressive debut of SON OF PINBOT.  While keeping with the fantastic sci-fi themes of its predecessors, it let down fans of the franchise when it was revealed that the offspring of Pinbot and The Machine was simply an industrial mining robot; the sole feature of the playfield was a drop target reading “PROCESS ORE? Y/N”, and the player would receive one point for hitting it.  In addition to the dull game-play, it was considered a poor value at 50 cents a game.  Williams’ defense that sophisticated robotics were expensive to maintain was not met with an understanding reception.

Cashing in on the mid-1990s craze for movie-themed solid-state electronic pinball machines with original voices and flashy computerized displays, Midway followed up the wildly popular ADDAMS FAMILY game with 1992’s HOWARD’S END.  Though based upon a critically acclaimed film that won multiple Oscars, players soundly rejected it.  Common complaints were that the mournful score by composer Percy Grainger was “depressing”; the gameplay, based on the intricacies of the British social class system, was “incomprehensible”, and that the voice acting, which cost the company millions of dollars, was not effective, as players found Anthony Hopkins voicing subtle disapprobation and Emma Thompson gravely intoning “Yes, yes, well, that will have to do, then” unhelpful.

Similarly, the pricey but elaborately designed WWE:  TABLETOP THUNDER was meant to capitalize on the mania for Vince McMahon’s hugely popular televised sports entertainment empire, but it, too, suffered from poorly planned fidelity, sketchy game-play, and McMahon’s own litigious nature.  The playfield was well-designed, with lots of kinetic action, exciting graphics, and a realistic soundtrack with plenty of original voiceovers by real WWE superstars.  However, players balked at the way the game simulated actual wrestling, with ‘heel turns’ resulting in in-play balls being confiscated and never returned, and the ‘Distracted Referee’ feature, where as many as a million earned points would simply not be recognized by the machine’s motherboard.  The game was also constantly out of commission as the WWE chairman would constantly order recalls of the machine to delete the images and voices of wrestlers who had fallen out of favor with management or failed to renew their contracts.

Finally, our latest addition was a gamble that failed:  the Koch-Brothers-funded MITT ROMNEY PRESIDENTIAL PINBALL FUN AMUSEMENT TOY was mass-produced based on a failed prediction of the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, and has now been donated en masse to impoverished pinballers in West Africa.  It may be just as well, as many players in Sierra Leone and Liberia complain that the machine simply fails to recognize their pressing the flippers if their net worth is under $275,000 per year.