Murder Machines: how cars took over the streets of America.

His political career over, Chris Huhne has (among other things) returned to his first profession as a journalist and become a substantial political commentator through his weekly Guardian column.

In tomorrow's paper he looks at what the row over Muslim schools tells us about the balance of power in the Conservative Party:

Cameron will have been dismayed that polling has already begun about his successor, and will have noted both Gove and May in the frame as potential successors. However, the most dangerous rival is clearly May. Gove is a Cameron courtier who is still trying to build a base in his party. He is the jester to the Cameroons, with a great line in mimicry and good gossip. 

May is much less fun. She is a tougher and more substantial figure in her own right. She is capable of the full range of political tactics from cool charm to unstoppable steamroller. And May tops the latest Conservative Home succession poll, well ahead of Boris Johnson: all the more reason for the prime minister to do real damage to her, rather than merely symbolic damage.

Chris concludes that the real lesson of the affair comes not from Cameron's reaction but from the original spat:

The most senior Tories now think power is ebbing away from the prime minister.

What is nature?

For Garfield, nature is an illusion. The cat perpetually flaunts established rules of propriety. He is a "bad cat" who, by refusing to play along with the normative cultural and social expectations imposed on his kind, effectively "queers" established binaries of natural and unnatural behavior throughout the animal kingdom.

It is accepted that cats will hunt mice in order to kill and devour them - this is the behavior we associate with felines of all species. Cats are hunters, according to the stereotype, whose instincts have not been dulled by thousands of years of domestication. Garfield, on the other hand, rejects the tyranny of "instinctive" behavior: he refuses to play down to expectations placed on him by convention and propriety.

Examine his posture in this strip: he sits up on his haunches (how like man he is!), placidly leaning over an ottoman, unwilling to express so much as a flicker of interest in the prospect of hunting and killing the cat's supposed natural prey, the common mouse. He dispassionately observes the mouse, responding only to the voice of his supposed "master" and "owner" who upbraids him for failing to fulfill his "duty" of ridding the master's house of vermin. His disapproval at Jon's voice is manifest in the second panel. (We might assume from context that it is Jon, even if we are given precious little corroboration of this fact - what if the voice is not Jon, what if the voice instead of Garfield's internal conscience, constantly admonishing the cat to resume his "natural" role as a cis-feline?) It is only in the third panel that we are finally allowed to see Garfield smile: he has successfully stymied the presumption of programmed biological "destiny" that undergirds the extant master / slave relationship between owner and pet. It is not in his interest to hunt mice because he has made the rational decision to reject his servitude in absolute terms.

The video above is what it must feel like to be Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems and what awaits them in next year’s General Election.

James Kirkup in the Telegraph writes about the Lib Dems in Newark

If Labour was passive in Newark, the Lib Dems were non-existent. Not a single Lib Dem MP campaigned there, and only a single peer. (Lord Newby). The cash-strapped central party gave no support to the local candidate. Finishing sixth and losing the deposit surprised no one.

Arguably, this was rational: the Lib Dems have scarce resources and have decided to concentrate them on those seats where they have a realistic chance of holding on; trying to make gains is almost entirely ruled out. Phil Cowley of Nottingham University has snappily dubbed this a Zulu strategy, Clegg’s redcoats retreating to the last line of mealie bags.

Prof Cowley persuasively says that’s “a sign of a party that is sensibly marshalling resources.”

I agree with Professor Cowley.

Whilst we have first past the post, the national share of the vote is irrelevant, it’s all about the number of the seats you win. As seems likely on current polling, next year, UKIP will outpoll the Lib Dems, but the Lib Dems will end up with more MPs, the fact the Lib Dems have started to do this a year before the election leads me to believe they’ll do better than currently anticipated.

James Kirkup seems to think Lib Dems as having to give up on any pretence of being a national party.

Whilst this looks bad in the newspapers and upsets the activists at their breakfast, this would be for only one electoral cycle, they could use their base of seats from 2015 onwards to rebuild.

If it comes down to losing 200-400 deposits and having 40 MPs or losing 50 deposits, but only having 20 MPs, we all know which option we’d go for if we were in the Lib Dems shoes. It is easier to rebuild with more MPs than fewer MPs.

You can bet on the number on Lib Dem seats at the next election, the 31-40 band looks appealing. 

Of course this is all predicated on the premise that Clegg and co are like Chard and Bromhead and not the Zulus.

TSE

 

One person tried to use a shoe bomb on an airplane and thirteen years later everyone still has to take their shoes off to board a plane. But here’s yet another mass gun murder of several innocent people and we still do nothing. When are you assholes going to realize that NO ONE IS TAKING YOUR GUNS AWAY. You won. You can have all the guns you want. The only “gun control” that came out of Newtown was we had a brief discussion of how many bullets you get to fire at a child before having to reload and the quickly-reached consensus was, “as many as you want”.

Believe me, we who don’t worship the trigger and the magazine are completely aware that we’ve lost, that we will never have a gun policy in this country that isn’t decided by the most insane gun fetishists. We fully realize that the NRA owns every inch of the gun “debate”. We’ve resigned ourselves to living in the only industrialized nation that goes through this shit on a near-weekly basis. All we ask is that you knock off the fake martyrdom and victimhood and paranoia about your precious, beloved guns being taken away. You won. Go celebrate by buying yet another goddamn gun.

I have an interview on the SF Signal web site

I've hesitated for a while about writing this post but I feel that now I need to.

Ignore the stamp for a moment in the above image.  Beneath it is an idealized photo of your basic McDonald's hamburger. They fluffed the bun up and put something extra under it to make it ride tall on the burger. They artfully applied the condiments to make them hang ever-so-slightly over the edge. But it's not too unrealistic a depiction of the basic burger I've always had when sashaying through them Golden Arches.

They say it's a juicy 100% beef patty simply seasoned with a pinch of salt and pepper, tangy pickles, minced onions, ketchup and mustard, and that's closed. I might quibble with "juicy" and "tangy" but okay. It is what it is…and what it is is a Dependable Known Quantity. If you order one and you don't like it, you're probably at fault. I can't recall the last time I had one that wasn't exactly as it was supposed to be.

In my teens and twenties, I ate them about twice a month. Since then, it's more like once a season and only for one of two reasons…

1. I'm going somewhere, I need to grab a meal in a hurry and there's a McDonald's there. It's probably the fastest of all fast foods.
2. I'm traveling. McDonald's is often my best/only choice in an airport. Plus, there's this…

I have, as I've explained here before, a wide array of food allergies and intolerances. I am therefore not fond of new (to me) restaurants and especially of exotic menus and adventurous dining. Being in strange places can mean eating unfamiliar things…and my stomach really likes having something recognizable in it at times. It would prefer better recognizable food than McDonald's but it does appreciate recognizable. I have sometimes heard a little voice in my tummy say, "Thank you. We know what this is and how to handle it!"

All of this is leading up to a story that probably isn't worth much leading-up to but I've already come this far. Last week, I had gone even farther and was miles from home, miles from anyplace better than a McDonald's. I have already told you of the horrible experience when Carolyn and I dined at a Coco's. The next day, in much the same predicament, I went to a McDonald's.

I could feel my stomach smile as I walked in, not because it expected the chow to be great but because it knew: There would be no surprises.

Well, there was one. I couldn't find the basic McDonald's hamburger on the illuminated menu.

I looked over and over it. I found cheeseburgers but I don't like cheese on burgers. I found the Grilled Onion Cheddar Burger. I saw the BBQ Ranch Burger. I spotted the Bacon Habanero Ranch Quarter Pounder. I saw the Big Mac of course. (All of those have cheese. Currently on the McDonald's website, the menu option shows fifteen different hamburgers. Fourteen of them come standard with cheese.)

But they didn't have that basic cheeseless hamburger, the one I've been having there since I was a tot, the one upon which the entire McDonald's empire was founded. It wasn't anywhere on the menu except as an option on the Happy Meal which I don't think you can order when you're 62, no matter how damned happy you are. I figured I was going to have to order a cheeseburger and have them leave off the cheese, which I've sometimes had to do in other fast food places.

I asked the counterman, "Do you still have hamburgers without cheese?"

"Oh, sure," he said. And then he added, as if letting me in on some fact that even Edward Snowden doesn't know, "They're on our Secret Menu!"

Yesterday morning, my friend Jewel drove me to LAX for my trip to Phoenix, which is where I am now.  I didn't have anything to eat before leaving the house so I sought sustenance at Terminal 1.  My only option?  McDonald's.  I went and got myself a Sausage Biscuit with Egg, which is one of the few breakfast sandwiches in all of America that comes without cheese.  (I have, by the way, nothing against cheese.  Not as long as it's where it belongs, which is in or on pizza, lasagna, chicken parmesan and French onion soup.)

My stomach welcomed the familiarity of the McDonald's sandwich and thought for a moment we — that is to say, my stomach and I — were in New York. When I'm in New York, I usually start my day with a McDonald's Sausage Biscuit with Egg. This is to make it up to my stomach for any unfamiliar foods it may need to process between then and bedtime.

As I waited for the sausage patty to be placed on the biscuit and for the odd, folded thing they claim is an egg to be placed on top, I asked the counterman, "Excuse me…I'm looking and I don't see it. Do you still have the basic hamburger here?"

He said, "Sure" and looked to find it on the display above…and couldn't. He asked a lady who worked alongside him where it was and she said "Oh, it's right there" and she pointed to something she couldn't find, either. Other employees were enlisted in the search and they were all baffled. They were all certain it was up there someplace but they couldn't locate it.

Finally, as the counterguy handed me and my stomach our Sausage Biscuit with Egg, he said, "I can't find it but I have a key for it on my little cash register here. People order it all the time."

I leaned over so only he could hear and I whispered, "If no one's eavesdropping, tell them it's on the Secret Menu."

Newark by election result thread. http://t.co/wVsmlNHbGx pic.twitter.com/Tv3QFOwdeQ

— The Screaming Eagles (@TSEofPB) June 6, 2014

The Tories will be relieved at the hold and 8.9% down on their General Election score, and better than was expected but an impressive increase for UKIP but still no win, given the momentum they had from the Euros, and polling less in percentage terms than they did in the Eastleigh by-election, there will be an element of disappointment for the Purples.

For the Lib Dems, another poor by-election performance as they lose their deposit for the ninth time this parliament and finish sixth behind the Greens and an Independent.

For Labour, they’ve gone backwards being pushed into third place, and in the past, oppositions have won by-elections with smaller swing than they needed to win tonight.

Mike Smithson says: This should have been Labour’s to take

This is only the third GB by-election this parliament that has not been a LAB defence and EdM’s party should have chucked everything at it. They didn’t and the huge CON campaign clearly convinced anti-UKIP voters that they were the party to stop the purples.

This is what Professor John Curtice had to say earlier as quoted on the Spectator blog:-

“The truth is that they [Labour] should be on tenterhooks as to whether they will win the seat. That swing that they would need, it is less than the Labour Party achieved in Norwich, less than the Conservatives achieved in Norwich in the last Parliament, less than Labour achieved in Dudley West, Wirrel South just before they won the 1997 election. When oppositions look as though they are on course for government, the kind of swing that is required for Labour to win has been relatively common. To that extent, we have to ask ourselves, why is it we are not asking the question, could Labour win this? It is all of a piece, as a result of the recent elections, Labour do not have the enthusiasm and depth of support in the electorate that make them look like an alternative government.”

He’s dead right.

As for the Lib Dems yet another miserable by-election performance.

TSE

Yes, this strip is based on a real situation. He's doing much better now.

This is a ripe one, I think to myself as he crosses the floor. Sixteen if he’s a day and he’s got that topper out of a coal chute. He’s wearing it like it makes him look like a lord. Whatever it takes for the fare, I think, trying not to roll my eyes. I swear I can see him gurning, pulling on the menacing-doctor face while he struts. He’s really concentrating. I’m surprised he don’t poke his tongue out the side of his gob. He probably practiced that face in the mirror before coming out tonight. Make the sale, Marjorie, I tell myself.

“Ooooer, you’re a foine figger of a man,” says I. I put on the Cockney-crone voice real brassy like. These young ones don’t like it if they think you’re from Windlesham. “A roight gen’leman, oo are.”

He eats it up. Easy money, I think, the minute he opens his mouth. “Ah yes, my dear,” he says. He’s trying to put some bass in it. I swear to Jesus I’ll laugh if his voice cracks. “I must say I am not well acquitted with these low sorts of establishments.” Acquitted. Don’t say nothing, don’t say nothing…

“Ooo ah, you all dressed up in that foinery! I shant wonder. ‘Ow does a gel like me rate an or-dience with yez Lordship? Tee hee.” I’m laying it on a bit thick, I think. If the lad had ever talked to a real woman in his life besides his mum and his sister, I’d be in real trouble. “I’d shorely love to provide yez Lordship with some comp-ny on this loverly avenin’.”

“Oh, would you?” he says. He’s spotty and them is his dad’s church shoes he’s wearing. He better not scuff them or he’s in for a right thrashing when his little game is up. “I think you shall provide me with some delicatable entertainment indeed.”

***

When we leave the Frog and Caverns, I think for about half a mo that I’ve underestimated him, as he’s got a real carriage waiting for him. Then I notice the livery on it: it’s a rental. Poor bastard, he probably saved up all summer for this. I almost feel bad about it. Almost.

At the very least, I decide to give him a real show of it. “Cor,” I say, all swoony. “Look’er ‘ere! Yez railley knows ‘ow to travel in stoyle, dain’t yez, yar Lordship?” I give him a wee goose and pretend to be drunker than you can get off the watery gin they serve at the Caverns. He got a glass of wine when we were chatting, but when I went off to powder I seen him pour it out.

“Yes, indeed, my lady,” he says, still affecting the to-the-manor-born talk. I try not to notice that he gives the driver a look when he lifts me into the cab, or that the driver is a weedy blond who keeps snickering and looking at his mobile. One of his sixth-form chums no doubt. “You will find that I travel in style.”

The carriage has the name of the livery company right above the door. He probably doesn’t even notice. Once we’re on the way he offers me a choccy. It’s grapes you’re supposed to give, you berk, I don’t say. I’m never lucky enough to get laudanum with this lot — too expensive and they can barely pronounce it — but he’s probably put a laxative or similar on it for a larf. I pretend to eat it, then palm it when he’s straightening his cravat.

***

After playing it to the hilt on the carriage ride — I even tell him I’m “Oirish”, and call myself a “dirty hoor”, even though I put on the Cockney act earlier, and he doesn’t even notice — I regret it once we get to the rendezvous. He tries to pass it off as “a little place he keeps for, ha ha, medical business when I’m in the city”, but I swear on me mother’s it’s a Big School sport equipment shed. There’s mops on the walls, honest to god. This time I actually do laugh out loud, but I remember I’m supposed to be drugged, so maybe he won’t mind it. Sure enough, he goes into his bit just as I turn around.

“And now, my dear,” he intones like a vicar at vespers, “the time has come for you to know the truth. I am not the wealthy aristocrat you thought me at all, you vile harlot.” He pronounces it ‘harlow’, like he thinks it’s a French word.

“For you see, I…” and here he throws off the crepe overcoat he got at a costumers, “am the man known to your kind…”, he starts fumbling about in his pocket for the shiver and damn me if he hasn’t forgot where he put it, and I’m trying to get my scream ready but it’s hard to concentrate while he’s patting about like he’s lost his house keys, “as Jack the Ripper!”

I give him the scream. It’s a good one. It’s more than he deserves.

***

After, he makes a scene. The young ones always do. I drop the naive act right after the scream; I can tell from daddy’s shoes and the rented carriage and the blade (it’s a bread knife, for goodness’ sake) that he ain’t gonna pay for extra, so extra I don’t give him. Sure enough, like most of the ones his age, he’s shocked to find out I’m in on the gag. When I ask him for a tenner tip, he acts like I was the one what pretended to knife him.

“I’m just…well, I mean, I thought it would be a bit of crack,” he stammers. “I didn’t know anyone else did it.”

“Darling,” I tell him, “this is how I make my living. Me and a dozen other girls in Whitechapel.”

“But…for how long? How long has this been going on?”

“Since 1888. Since they never caught him. And it’ll keep on until they do, I expect. Mind you, I don’t judge. Whatever you want to play at to get your fun. I’m in no position, you understand.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I just…I thought I was the first.”

“They all do, love. They all do.”

Contrary to the direction the comments took, my Asch story the other day wasn’t intended to make any special commentary on families. That was just the first issue I thought of that wasn’t already so politicized that the story would be interpreted as political propaganda. It was really meant to be an explanation of something I said a while back on Twitter:

So live your life that if this all turns out to be an alien simulator's Asch Conformity Experiment, the debriefing won't be too humiliating

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) May 30, 2014

The character in the story had it even worse. They were told that in the real world, not a single person believed in families. That “families” had been invented as a test concept for the conformity experiment solely because it was something so ridiculous that no one could possibly believe it for not-conformity-related reasons. That every other experimental participant had seen through the facade and denounced it as dumb.

And I feel like this is a good thought experiment. Which beliefs of yours would survive that knowledge, be so strong that you would tell the experimenter that you are right or they are wrong, or make you start thinking that it’s all part of a meta-experiment like in the story? Which ones would you start to doubt in ways that you might not have thought of back when they were common? Which, if any, would you say “Yeah, I knew it all along, I guess I was just too scared to admit it”?

I’m thinking here of antebellum Southerners, let’s say early 1800s. Their society is built around slavery. There are a couple of abolitionists around, but not many, and none who can force anyone to listen to them. Pretty much everyone around them says slavery is okay, the books they read from the past are all about Romans or Israelites who thought (rather different forms of) slavery were okay, and they have heard a lot of plausible-sounding arguments justifying slavery.

Now bring them forward to the present day. Tell them “Right now in the present day pretty much every single person believes that slavery is morally wrong. No one would justify it. Here, come out of the laboratory and spend a few years living in our slave-free society.”

I don’t know if the Southerner would learn a whole lot of new facts during this period. They might learn that black people could be pretty capable and intelligent, but Frederick Douglass was a person, everyone knew he was smart, that didn’t change anyone’s mind. Yet even without learning many new facts, I can’t imagine he would stay pro-slavery very long.

And I wonder whether this is purely a conformity thing, and upon being returned to the antebellum South he would start conforming with them again, or whether it is a one-directional effect that primes your thoughts to go in the direction of the truth and allows you to see new valid arguments, and that upon going back to the South he would be a little wiser than his countrymen.

And I also wonder whether a sufficiently smart Southerner could do all this via a thought experiment, say “I think slavery is pretty okay now, but imagine I went to a world where everyone was absolutely certain it was terrible, how bad would I feel about it?” and get all the benefits of spending a while in our world and going through all that moral reflection without ever actually leaving the antebellum South. And if this would be a more powerful intuition pump than just asking him to sit down and think about slavery for a few hours.

This is a pretty powerful ethical test for me. I imagine waking up in that Matrix pod and being told that no one in the real world believes in abortion, that pro-choice is obviously horrible, that all my fellow experimental subjects saw through it, that as far as they can tell I’m just a psychopath. And I feel like I would still argue “No, actually, I think you guys are wrong.” (but, uh, your mileage may vary)

If it was vegetarianism – if they said no one in the real world ate meat or had tried to justify factory farming, and every single one of my co-participants had become vegan animal rights activists – I don’t think there’s a lot I could say to them. “Sorry, I have an intense disgust reaction to all vegetables which has thwarted all of my attempts at vegetarianism?” “Yeah, we know, we put that in there to make it a hard choice.”

There are some issues where I could imagine it going either way. If the alien simulators were conservative, I could imagine exactly the way in which I would feel really stupid for having ever believed in liberalism. And if the alien simulators were liberal, I could imagine exactly how it would feel to get embarrassed for ever having flirted with conservative ideas. I don’t think that’s necessarily a flaw in the thought experiment. Both of those feelings are useful to me.

I had a dream once where I died and I went to the afterlife and there was God and He told me that Christianity had been right about everything all along. In retrospect, it felt kind of obvious. Then I woke up and it had all been a dream. In retrospect, that felt kind of obvious too.

I sort of cherish these feelings of obviousness. They seem like a good way to short-circuit the absurdity heuristic. Like, it doesn’t work to think “Okay, Christianity seems absurd, but WHAT IF IT DIDN’T???” You have to actually invert everything, tell yourself that lack-of-Christianity seems absurd and see what justifications and excuses your brain starts coming up with for why that is the correct position and atheism should be dismissed without a second thought.

A commenter on the story thread came up with a different application of the concept I hadn’t thought of:

I gained a lot of value out of applying this thought experiment through a motivational rather than rational frame.

I struggle with ADHD and depression, and imagined myself being told that everyone else in the simulations also had those conditions, but all of them performed better than me.

Then I imagined a different scenario, where everyone was put into a simulation where they needed to save the world, and everyone else succeeded where only I failed.

Imagining changes in others’ beliefs doesn’t effect mine much. But imagining changes in others’ standards of competence has an extremely powerful impact.

Thanks for the tool.

While this seems a liiiiiitle dangerous almost to the point of mental self-abuse, I can kind of see it working, and it helps me understand the other cases a little better. We hold ourselves to certain standards – whether moral, like the antebellum Southerner or the non-vegetarian me – or epistemic – or motivational. By altering the perceived competence of other people, we can artificially adjust the standards we hold ourselves to and pretend for a while that our standards are much higher than they are. Which might give us insights we can bring back with us.

DC Comics has a long-running legacy in its Teen Titans franchise, an organization which has almost always considered in its roster every single super-tyke the company had to offer. When the Titans launched in 1964, there weren't all that many - Batman's pet target Robin, Green Arrow's future drug mule Speedy, the Flash's red-headed step-nephew and sidekick Kid Flash, and Aqualad in whose debut appearance it was established that he was afraid of goldfish. Before long, they added Wonder Girl - who kind of didn't actually exist before there was a Teen Titans? Weird story, that - and pretty much the only teenage superhero they didn't include from the relative git-go was Superman's cousin Supergirl.

When the company folded all of its myriad individual continuities into one following the Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1987, all bets were suddenly off, and the Teen Titans - which had been picking up young superheroes along the way, like Hawk & Dove, Batgirl and Beast Boy, or inventing their own like Bumblebee, Mal Duncan, Cyborg, Starfire, et al - blew up.

Since then, it seems that every underage super-type gets a spin with the Titans, not excluding a member of the Marvel Family, a variation of that ol' aforementioned Supergirl, and even a Green Lantern. Whenever they gave a Titans series to Geoff Johns and he got to do one of those big "two-page spread: Every Titan ever shows up" gimmick climaxes, it seemed to include hundreds of freckle-faced, acne-backed wonder pubescents.

Still, a few young super-heroes never made it into the Titans, including:

The explanation is "You guys cramp my Earth-style".

T'OMM J'ONNZ: In Detective Comics #287 - in which Martian Manhunter was a long-running backup feature - the titular extraterrestrial lawman was making an effort to construct a mechanical device which would return him to his long-lost home on Mars. This was a more quotidian time for J'onn J'onnz - in the interim decades, his Mars was a land under terrible trial and disease and death was the order of the day. This far back in J'onnz's history, he had the closest Martian equivalent to a sitcom family existence, living with his mother, father and kid brother - It was some sort of fourth planet spin on O'zzie and H'arri'et, basically.

So when the device springs to life, it brings to Earth J'onn's younger brother T'omm J'onnz - hey, it's not unusual! T'omm - who had nothing - was dragged away from the green, green grass of home by the elder J'onnz's teleport ray. Experiencing some funny, familiar, forgotten feelings on seeing his long-lost brother, T'omm attempted to wrangle his way into staying on Earth, although he was eventually convinced to say "I'm Coming Home." PS also Thunderball.

T'omm did return to Mars and hasn't been seen since, because everyone on that planet is hella dead.

"Get my bags from the car, kid. Here's a super-nickel."

SUPERMAN JR: Johnny Kirk's father, the respected and totally batshit science-genius Professor Morton Kirk, was a nutcase. Observing some sort of horrible catastrophe from space about to strike the planet Earth, Professor Morton did the only reasonable thing a scientist-father could do - load his son into a rocket and shoot it into space! Hey, it worked once and look at all the merchandising dollars that guy pulls in. Cha-ching!

What Professor Morton didn't know was that SUPERBOY, the Boy of Steel, was gonna happen! Nothing in your precious science prepared you for THIS, huh Professor Morton? This is why I believe in voodoo.

With Superboy having saved the world from disaster, Professor Morton - dying from shame at his stupidity - asks the soon-to-be-Superman to adopt his son, should his errant rocketship ever be found and Johnny Kirk turn up alive, both of which things are puh-retty unlikely, folks. Well, after a few years, Johnny Kirk does return, and better yet, he's got super-powers! Making good on his promise, the now-adult Superman adopts the adolescent Kirk and dubs him Superman Jr, dressing him in a sort-of bellboy version of his own costume.

It's, uh ... It's "Johnny", Superman.

Superman Jr, unfortunately, happens to have gotten his space-borne powers by means of a method which is sapping Superman of his strength. Yes, the young will eat the old alive, if you let 'em!

Sacrificing his super-powers for the sake of the planet's mightiest champion, Johnny Kirk surrenders his Superman Jr identity and returns to life as a normal kid, and in return Superman gratefully abandons him on a street corner.

That is actually how it ends, Superman just leaves the kid in a strange town and flies away forever, even though he arguably was still under the promise to adopt Johnny Kirk - I mean, the Professor didn't know his son would have super-powers when he came back, the super-powers weren't a deciding factor in NUFFIN', man. Superman just left that kid to the wolves.


TORNADO TOT: Writer/Artist Sheldon Mayer had tornadoes on the brain, not only creating the original Red Tornado back in the Golden Age, but later bringing Tornado Tot to life in the pages of Sugar and Spike No.69 (The sex issue). The similarly-longjohnsed super-fraud was actually the invention of Little Arthur, an obnoxious little fat kid who used to bedevil the babytalking heroes of the aforementioned kids' comic. During a playdate, Arthur shows off the woolly underwear, lifelike latex mask, curtain-remnant cape and propeller beanie with which he disguises himself so as to pretend to be a ... hold it, a lifelike latex mask? Is this a kids' superhero costume or a gimp suit?

Stare into the latex rictus of sex-death.

Inevitably, the eponymous infants of the title climb inside and manage to fly around, confounding some crooks and perturbing police officers alike with their toddler tirade against crime. Usually when you see two babies in the same set of clothes, they're just trying to get into an R-Rated movie, these kids are ambitious!

Sure, you might ask - who was Tornado Tot's senior partner? Don't you need to be sidekick to be a Teen Titan? Also a teenager? My answer is I dunno and who cares.

...SARAH!

Oh yeah, it seems that the Tories are taking to the bullshit motivational speaker style personification of things, in this case a bill that appears on the basis of it's description to aim to diminish and water down the rights of workers and individuals and to let those with responsibilities off with doing their job properly. Let's take a look at Grayling's new mistress, SARAH, shall we?

Take the responsible employer who puts in place proper training for staff, who has sensible safety procedures, and tries to do the right thing. And then someone injures themselves doing something stupid or something that no reasonable person would ever have expected to be a risk. Common sense says that the law should not simply penalise the employer for what has gone wrong.

If an employer has correctly followed Health and Safety procedures, and has created risk assessments (and followed them) for any task that someone wouldn't normally be expected to face as part of their daily lives outside of work, then the law does not "simply penalise" the employer for their employee's stupid behaviour.

Or the member of our emergency services who feels that they can’t come to the rescue of someone in difficulty because of the fear that they will end up in trouble for breaching health and safety rules.

No member of the emergency services feels that they can't rescue someone because of health and safety. Find me one fireman, policeman or paramedic who out "in the field" would refuse to do their job to save someone's life over some idiotic notion that they would be criminally charged with contravening health and safety law and I'll show you a liar.

Those who are concerned about health and safety law are the higher ups, the managers in their offices, the ones that should be keeping abreast of the potential risks their ground forces may come up against and planning ahead to mitigate them. Those who want health and safety law watered down for emergency services are those who don't want to be held accountable if they fail to take the proper responsibility for the lives of their staff and the public that they interact with.

Or the person who holds back from sweeping the snow off the pavement outside their house because they are afraid that someone will then slip on the ice and sue them.

The government here is deciding it will use the fear of something that doesn't exist (the ability to be sued for clearing snow) to in some non-descript way water down safety legislation? Hopefully all this means is they're going to make it clear in law something that no-one seems to question as being not against the law. Pointless to the extreme.

But those who are trying to do the right thing should believe that the law will be on their side.

Why? Why does being an affable fool get you off the hook when you're negligent? I'm sorry, but if someone has done something wrong they need to face the consequences of that. Being good natured in your intentions may be something that can be taken to account when it comes to punishment, but strangely enough the kid who threw a fire extinguisher off the roof of a building and did *zero* harm to anyone got treated as if it had. Intentions or not never came into that case of a young protester, but we're going to protect managers who turn around after the fact and say "Hey, I didn't realise it'd end up like this!"

I want the Good Samaritan who comes to someone’s aid, the small business employer who is doing their best, the person trying to do something positive for their community, all to feel that the country and the system is on their side. Time and again we see stories of a jobsworth culture or a legalistic culture that seems to stop common sense in its tracks.

Yeah, and also stops deaths and injuries in their tracks too, you jerk. But who cares about the wholesale improvement of working conditions and public safety while you're in an election year trying to score the votes of small business owners?

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June 4th, 2014: UPDATE TO YESTERDAY'S COMIC: apparently those of us who share a commitment to the truth about Cinderella are called "shoe-thers"?? – Ryan

If I need to explain to you who Mister Rogers is, this can only mean one of two things. You either hail from somewhere that isn't North America or Hawai'i or something has gone badly wrong with the universe. Because the only thing that needs to be said about Mister Rogers is that he was one of the greatest television personalities, if not one of the greatest human beings period, to ever live. For almost forty years, he asked generations of children and children-at-heart to be his television neighbour for a half an hour each day. And, anyone who took him up on his invitation knew that for that time they would feel welcome and safe and enjoy sharing the company of someone who truly cared about them and was interested in what they were thinking and feeling.

The more pertinent question is why now? I could have looked at Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at literally any point in this project, that's how important Fred Rogers was to our collective memory and for how long. But I wanted to take just a little time to talk about him, his show and his legacy here, in the mid-1980s for a number of reasons, one of which is because in an era so deliberately and self-consciously steeped in artifice and performativity, it's important to keep in mind that all this spectacle isn't just for its own sake. There are real, genuine truths we're trying to talk about here, even if we're approaching them from odd angles, and we must never lose sight of that. Performativity and artifice do not equate to vacuousness and falseness, and nobody understood that better than Mister Rogers.

The Neighborhood only ever existed on TV, and Mister Rogers was well aware of this. There's a reason he always called us “television neighbors”, after all. It clearly operates by televisual logic, and most certainly hails from a time when television was seen as disposable theatre. The show always opened with an aerial pan over the Neighborhood, which is very obviously conveyed through miniatures.We then cut to inside Mister Rogers' house, where he hasn't arrived yet. Then we pan over to the front door, and Mister Rogers comes in singing “It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, taking off his coat and shoes and putting on his sweater and sneakers. Likewise, the show always ended by doing the opposite, panning away from Mister Rogers' house and retracing the steps in reverse.

I always got the sense that the show's intro was meant to depict each one of us coming to the Neighborhood from different places: Mister Rogers probably hitched a ride on the Neighborhood Trolley, which you can always see making the rounds in the street, and then walked the rest of the way. As for us, perhaps we flew because we exist on the other end of the television and can travel via camera angles. Each episode then is a different visit to the Neighborhood, which is a place we all come to from somewhere else at the same time, even Mister Rogers himself. This also means idea of “reruns” or “home video releases” of this show, though they obviously existed, feels a bit...weird, even knowing Mister Rogers himself was an early advocate for the VCR. Maybe that's part of the reason this show was able to last as long as it did.

As a kid I found it really fascinating that Mister Rogers seemed to have two houses he split his time between, the one in the Neighborhood and another one somewhere outside of the television world. I would always wonder what his life was like away from the show and would try to imagine the sorts of things he did and the places he went to when his show wasn't on the air: It was probably my first exposure to the idea of larger worlds and histories that existed within the subtext and beyond the reach of the media artefacts we could see. As it turns out, Mister Rogers' life outside the Neighborhood wasn't too different from his life inside it, and I find that marvelous and inspiring.

Even though Mister Rogers knew he was only communicating to us through television, he also didn't see this as an excuse to treat his viewers any differently than if he met them in real life (he made a point of personally responding to every piece of fan mail he ever received, which was a considerable amount) as he considered everyone his friend, and nor did he feel the need to play an exaggerated caricature of himself. Mister Rogers only ever showed us specific facets of himself on his show, but all of those facets were absolutely, honestly who he really was, and anyone who did get the chance to meet him in real life said that he was instantly recognisable and approachable, and that he was every bit as you'd expect him to be based on how he appeared on TV (No, he never flipped off the camera on air, at least not intentionally. Although, for that matter, nobody ever stole his car either).

Look at this episode, for example, when LeVar Burton comes to visit the neighborhood to share a book with Mister Rogers. The episode is from 1998 and thus way after the period we're talking about, but it's relevant to us for obvious reasons, and the whole segment is just a perfect encapsulation of what made this show so good and so important (and I really do apologise for the quality, but this is sadly all we have of this series anymore unless you want to shell out for Amazon Prime or iTunes). After going through his iconic daily routine, Mister Rogers talks about how he and LeVar became friends because they both like making TV for children. He's openly acknowledging and calling attention to his own artifice, because he believes in honesty and sincerity above all else. Then, he shows us a series of pictures of LeVar in different roles (Kunta Kinte in Roots, Geordi in Star Trek: The Next Generation *and* Reading Rainbow), pointing out how LeVar is an actor who likes to play many different people. Then, when LeVar eventually shows up, Mister Rogers shows the pictures again, and LeVar even explicitly says that on Reading Rainbow he plays “a version of [him]self”.

But what's equally as wonderful is the actual conversation they have together: Mister Rogers asks LeVar about his love of books, what it's like for him to be an actor and prompts him to share why the book he's brought is important to him. It's a TV moment, but it's in no way a fake one: This is a real, authentic conversation where two real people share positionalities, and its a truly revealing character moment for both men. LeVar's passion, zeal and enthusiasm is palpable, and Mister Rogers has an unmistakably gentle, inquisitive tone that's as much a testament to his genuineness as it is to how good a listener he is, which can be a rare thing to find in this world. Mister Rogers never wavered from this either in real life or on television, and the people who talked to him responded to that. If you met him on the street, he'd talk to you the exact same way he does to LeVar here. It's not that he treated everyone like children, but rather that he treated children as people and saw every person as valuable and worthwhile.

Furthermore, Mister Rogers wasn't just willing to listen to you, he wanted to listen to you because he had an unyielding sense of curiosity and imagination. He was always looking to learn more about the world and other people and perspectives, and this shines through in his show as clear as the sunlight that always streamed in through the window in his house. The Neighborhood was as big as it needed to be to accommodate all sorts of people, and Mister Rogers would regularly take us on walks around town to see factories, gardens, workshops, bakeries, and any place people gathered to do different things that helped us understand the world better. Many, many episodes would open with Mister Rogers talking to us about something he's been thinking about lately, and he always took care to remind us that we never stop learning and growing throughout life. He once said “There's so much in this world we can learn, no matter how young or how old we are” and asked us “Are you discovering the truth about you? I'm still discovering the truth about me”.

These are lessons and ideas that I think everyone would do well to think about. I know for me, Mister Rogers sets an example that I constantly strive to follow, not just in his work but in the way he lived his own life.

That Mister Rogers was a firm believer in the power of imagination is obvious, especially in the “Neighborhood of Make Believe” segments that used storytelling to highlight the themes of every episode. But even though Mister Rogers on the one hand took care to clearly delineate the parts of his show that were “real” and that were “make believe”, this is ultimately another recursive artifice because, of course, even the supposedly “real” segments were still part of a game of pretend Mister Rogers played with the audience and he was never ashamed to admit that. But this wasn't an artifice designed to obfuscate reality, instead, it was intended to accentuate it, and this means that Mister Rogers never shied away from complex and confusing topics other children's television would never touch, like death, divorce and war. He believed, rightly of course, that imagination helped children deal with things that confused or scared them.

But all of this also means that Mister Rogers was never unaware of what the real world was really like outside of both of his make-believe neighborhoods. What he did was create an environment that was on the one hand happier and safer than the real world, but that still acknowledged all the problems and issues of the world outside. Yes, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was an idyllic utopia, but that didn't mean people coming to it through television were supposed to forget what life was like outside it. That's actually the opposite of what Mister Rogers, who spent a not-insignificant amount of time talking about negative emotions on his show, would have wanted: He wanted to to provide a space where people could talk freely about all different kinds of things and to help them find ways to deal with their troubles in a positive, constructive and healthy way. The Neighborhood may be a conflict-free utopia, but that doesn't mean we weren't allowed to talk about conflict. Conflict is a thing that exists in the real world, and the Neighborhood exists to help us talk about the real world. To paraphrase Mister Rogers himself, it's all make believe, but it's still something to think about.

I mean, after all, we're talking about a person who endorsed his own Saturday Night Live parody. The somewhat famous "Mister Robinson's Neighborhood" sketch starred Eddie Murphy as a down-on-his-luck inner city Mister Rogers analog constantly on the run from slumlords and rent collectors and forced to take on various licit enterprises to get by. Though he tries to remain positive and chipper, Mister Robinson's lessons tend to be more cynical than Mister Rogers', and he tries to instil in his television neighbours a distrust of authority figures, the class structure and capitalism, which I mean come on, that's only fair. Mister Rogers thought this was just delightful, calling the parody “amusing” and “affectionate”. The underlying joke in the Mister Robinson's Neighborhood sketch isn't targeting Mister Rogers himself, it's actually doing the exact opposite-It's pointing out the tragic humour inherent in how hard it can be to live up to Mister Rogers' ideals in the real world. It's not skewering those who try (after all, we're supposed to sympathize with Eddie Murphy), indeed it glorifies those people. What the sketch is actually trying to do is criticize a society that all too often makes living like Mister Rogers feel like a hopeless endeavour.

And this touches on one of the surest signs of the positive effect Mister Rogers' work has had on people: Even comedians parodying him can't bear to make fun of him. He's one of the most universally beloved people who ever lived.

You can see the same sense of love for what Mister Rogers accomplished in a more recent work of satire, Saints Row, a video game series that alternately has you waging citywide gang wars, overthrowing a multinational crime syndicate, fending off hordes of men in hot dog suits with a dildo bat and avenging the destruction of the planet from within a virtual reality simulation by distorting the rules of reality and fighting aliens with electronic superpowers. In between the cartoonishly nonsensical bouts of ultraviolence, you can take some time off to dress up your character in a variety of outfits, and a few of the wardrobe options are clearly modeled off of Mister Rogers' signature sweaters and sneakers. Which, in a video game that is, when you get right down to it, actually about staying true to a neighborhood and the importance of friendship, seems oddly appropriate. If Mister Rogers had lived to see Saints Row, I'll bet he would have smiled and called it “a lot of fun”, which is, incidentally, the same reaction he had to Night of the Living Dead, a film by his dear friend George A. Romero.

(Actually, I think Mister Rogers would have liked video games a lot in general: They're built around the same sense of shared imagination and creativity he always seemed so inspired by. In one episode he even visited an arcade and learned to play Donkey Kong.)

One thing I find really interesting about Mister Rogers is how he got involved with television in the first place. Namely, the fact that he thought the entire medium was frightening and dreadful and wanted to help show how it could be used as a force for good. And this was in the early 1960s, so nobody can pull the excuse that TV was just “so much better back then”. This reminds me a lot of some of the things Avital Ronell, my favourite theorist, has said about television; that it's a medium that, at its very core, has an obsession with trauma, death, voyeurism and surveillance. Ronell talks about how television's fixation on crime (police procedurals, courtroom dramas and lurid, sensationalized hyper-violent representations of current events on the news) “frustrates” it, because it simultaneously feeds on sensationalism, needs to prop up authority and order and satisfy its viewers' demand for neat, tidy and instantaneous solutions to things. And, since no problem in the real world has easy solutions, television violence becomes stripped of its symbolism and complex dilemmas are “effaced”. So, we see grotesque depictions of violence that are handily resolved at the top of the hour and never addressed again.

And it's hard not to see Mister Rogers' Neighborhood as an out-and-out rejection of not Ronell's theory, but precisely that which she criticizes in television. Mister Rogers doesn't sensationalize negativity, and nor does he run from it when his daily thirty minutes are up: He understands it as a part of life and keeps returning to it time and time again because he has ideas about how we can work through it he'd like to share with us. Mister Rogers isn't an authority figure either: I know some people have seen him as a surrogate parent, but that's never how I saw him. I saw him as, I think, the way he tried to portray himself: A neighbour and a friend who enjoyed spending time and talking with me, just as he did with anyone else. He may have had experiences I didn't, but that's true of everybody in the world, and that's exactly the sort of thing Mister Rogers liked to talk about.

Perhaps ironically, perhaps not, this leaves Mister Rogers' Neighborhood feeling a bit ill-suited to its medium in the end. On the one hand, it feels like definitive blueprint for how television can do good in the world, but at the same time, it's hard to shake the notion that Mister Rogers may have pushed the boundaries of television too well and too far, and that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood might in fact be a prototypical proof-of-concept of a far different, and far superior, form of media. I mean, well, even The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has different imaginary neighbourhoods of fantasy and make believe full of neighbours with different lives and schedules who I can visit with and talk to. Mister Rogers' true strength lay in his boundless empathy and his faith in the generative power of communication to help us lead better lives. And I think true art can make it easier for us to see the world around us a little clearer, and maybe to leave it a little kinder and gentler then we found it, just like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood did.

Well, that's all make believe. All make believe. But it's still something to think about.





(If you want to learn more about the real Mister Rogers, Cracked's Brendan McGinley has written the definitive tribute to his life and work here.)

So, the US Secret Service has issued a requirement for software that can detect sarcasm in tweets. And lo, there was much rejoicing in the land, especially among post-doc researchers looking for grant money to pursue research in algorithmic applications of semiotics with a side-line in heuristic knowledge processing and associative networks. And Agent Smith scowled furiously, and was perplexed.

Background: the US Secret Service has two main jobs (three, if you include persecuting Role Playing Game companies, but let's leave Steve Jackson out of this for the time being): combating currency counterfeiting, and protecting the President Of The United States, an office that for some reason seems to attract the armed attentions of the deranged, damaged, and just plain homicidal the way my wardrobe attracts moths. Traditionally, the job of protecting the POTUS could be made a good deal simpler by (a) listening for lunatics with guns uttering death threats, and (b) sending a couple of nice fellows in dark suits and dark glasses to have a polite conversation with the aforementioned lunatic and convey the impression that their displeasure would be made extremely clear should words ever be translated into deeds. But then the Internet happened, and it just so happened to coincide with a flowering of highly politicized and canalized news media channels such that at any given time, whoever is POTUS, around 10% of the US population are convinced that they're a baby-eating lizard-alien in a fleshsuit who is plotting to bring about the downfall of civilization, rather than a middle-aged male politician in a business suit.

Well now, here's the thing: automating sarcasm detection is easy. It's so easy they teach it in first year computer science courses; it's an obvious application of AI. (You just get your Turing-test-passing AI that understands all the shared assumptions and social conventions that human-human conversation rely on to identify those statements that explicitly contradict beliefs that the conversationalist implicitly holds. So if I say "it's easy to earn a living as a novelist" and the AI knows that most novelists don't believe this and that I am a member of the set of all novelists, the AI can infer that I am being sarcastic. Or I'm an outlier. Or I'm trying to impress a date. Or I'm secretly plotting to assassinate the POTUS.)

Of course, we in the real world know that shaved apes like us never saw a system we didn't want to game. So in the event that sarcasm detectors ever get a false positive rate of less than 99% (or a false negative rate of less than 1%) I predict that everybody will start deploying sarcasm as a standard conversational gambit on the internet. Trolling the secret service will become a competitive sport, the goal being to not receive a visit from the SS in response to your totally serious threat to kill the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Al Qaida terrrrst training camps will hold tutorials on metonymy, aggressive irony, cynical detachment, and sarcasm as a camouflage tactic for suicide bombers. Post-modernist pranks will draw down the full might of law enforcement by mistake, while actual death threats go encoded as LOLCat macros. Any attempt to algorithmically detect sarcasm will fail because sarcasm is self-referential and the awareness that a sarcasm detector may be in use will change the intent behind the message.

Indeed, a successful sarcasm detector implies not only an eerily functional human consciousness emulation and a metric fuckton of encoded knowledge about human cultural relationships, but the ability to engage in primate social interaction with sufficient agility to tell when a primate means something, and when a primate is signalling an implicit negation of meaning. Which in turn means the sarcasm detector requires a theory of mind. Hello, singularity! And while I'm at it, can I have a pony? And the moon on a stick, too. KTHX.

I give it thirty years and a $10Bn budget, tops. Then POTUS can sleep easy, knowing that the Secret Service are onto those pesky sarcastic twitterers who think it's funny to waste their time by cracking jokes about a very un-jokeworthy subject. (Hey, did you hear the one about the convention for presidential assassins ...? No? Me neither. Okay: how about, how many presidential assassins does it take to change a lightbulb?)

Or they could just ban sarcasm on the internet.

Yes, I really think that could work.

If, like me, you've found yourself wondering at some point if everyone else has suddenly gone completely and utterly batshit crazy, only to discover that in fact you're the one foaming at the mouth while singing Reach for the Stars by S Club 7 to yourself in the style of Marlene Dietrich, it ought to be reassuring to know politics is currently going through one of those moments.

You see, they've reached that sad, lonely place where they realise it's not them, it's us. Thank heavens for progress. Only they haven't figured out why it is they can't quite capture that UKIP/Farage sparkle, and the advice they're getting isn't up to much either. Is it policies? Is it general anger at the political class? Is it a protest? Is it because we ain't like the common people? Is it some of us are a bit weird? Is it we can't eat bacon sandwiches without being photographed getting in a mess? Is it lack of authenticity, whatever that is? Is it some of us are just a bit, well crap?

The answers to which are, yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, no and yes.  Without wanting to pick on John Harris again, as he is one of the few commentators who does go out into the real world, this sudden focus on why it is UKIP are seemingly being listened to while all the rest are derided and insulted is to miss the point by about the same distance England will miss winning the World Cup.  No one seriously looks at Nige and says, "Blimey guv, I'd really like it if that Nick Farage was prime minister, he'd sort this country out and no mistake," not least because no one talks like that outside of Private Eye parodies, but also down to how it's the message not the person that's key.  Farage says the only way to control immigration is to get out of the EU; the rest of the parties umm and arr and sort of defend and sort of don't or worst of all, set down ridiculous, completely unrealistic targets they knew could never be kept and then act surprised when voters show their displeasure at the ballot box.

Talking straight isn't a new thing, believe it or not.  It's also something impossible for a politician to always do for a whole myriad of reasons, not least because there are some things voters just don't want to hear and can only come to accept over time.  That's a normal human trait, for all you subscribers to the authenticity trope.  Farage and UKIP knew they couldn't manage it if they strayed beyond immigration and Europe in general, which is precisely why they talked of absolutely nothing else for the past couple of months.  What's more, the media let them get away with it, enjoying the novelty of this otherwise pompous man, pint invariably in hand, getting more support than the rest of the dessicated suit wearing piles of flesh.  Sure, they went after the bedroom ragers, and a fat lot of good that did.

Outside of this comfort zone Farage's "emotional, instinctive politics" quickly becomes exceedingly boring, as those who forever bang on about the same subject in exactly the same style invariably do (thanks to you know who you are, to whom this will no doubt sound familiar).  Yet for some bizarre reason, and on this John Harris is dead right, the supposedly smart people who often act as if they are unbelievably thick think the way to get some of the UKIP fairy dust is to suddenly hitch up in a pub and pull a few pints for the cameras.  It's David Cameron, jacket off in a room of factory workers, asked the same planted questions over and over again.  It's Ed Miliband, pilloried for not remembering the name of the local Labour leader in Swindon by the same media which has tried its darnedest to paint him as a geek.

If anything, rather than it being snobbery there's more than a smidge of the inverse variety in some of the criticism.  We can all rally against the inanity and stark emptiness of slogans like "hard-working Britain better off" or the Tories' egregiously similar "for people who want to work hard and get on", but this suggestion people are turned off because politicians don't talk in the exact way they do is ridiculous.  Of far more concern is that they're still not being listened to, despite everything. In his Buzzfeed (proof if any more was needed the internet does make you stupid) interview Ed Miliband relates an anecdote about a man who was so desperate at not being able to make ends meet he had thought about killing himself; as Hopi says, without it necessarily reflecting badly on either Miliband or the interviewer, that's all we're told.  We don't know what happened to the man, whether he managed to increase his hours, whether Miliband told him to seek help, or how Ed responded at all.  Telling someone you've thought of ending it all takes courage, and yet it's treated almost as a throwaway line rather than a real human interest story.

This more than anything gets to the heart of why Miliband has failed to connect, and also why politicians at times seem alien.  Without doubt Miliband responded with the utmost compassion to the man's plight, and yet we didn't learn anything more about it.  We hear diatribes against scroungers regularly, the attempt to draw dividing lines between "workers and the shirkers", while we hear next to nothing about those who have suffered and those who still are.  When the only cases made for immigration are cold, economic ones, or based around those who came here in the decades past, we ignore those settling here now who are fleeing oppression and are unbelievably thankful we remain an open, welcoming society.  It's not therefore surprising when someone who says what he believes and tackles apparently "unsayable" subjects gets support, as so few others are prepared to set out in personal terms why government policy or the current economic situation is intolerable.  No one wants politicians to be exactly like them, all they want is for them to do more than go through the motions.  Even if that's unfair, and it probably is, that's the perception.  The good thing is this means the problem is far easier to fix than is being suggested by those panicking.  Considering the crap we have to work with though, it's anyone's guess whether it happens.

[Content note: fictional story contains gaslighting-type elements. May induce Cartesian skepticism]

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she says. “This is the real world. You used to live here. We erased your memories and stuck you in a simulated world for a while, like in The Matrix. It was part of a great experiment.”

“What?” you shout. “My whole life, a lie? How dare you deceive me as part of some grand ‘experiment’ I never consented to?”

“Oh,” said the woman, “actually, you did consent, in exchange for extra credit in your undergraduate psychology course.” She hands you the clipboard. There is a consent form with your name on it, in your handwriting.

You give her a sheepish look. “What was the experiment?”

“You know families?” asks the woman.

“Of course,” you say.

“Yeah,” says the woman. “Not really a thing. Like, if you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would you care more for your genetic siblings and cousins and whoever than for your friends and people who are genuinely close to you? That’s like racism – but even worse, at least racists identify with a group of millions of people instead of a group of half a dozen. Why should parents have to raise children whom they might not even like, who might have been a total accident? Why should people, motivated by guilt, make herculean efforts to “keep in touch” with some nephew or cousin whom they clearly would be perfectly happy to ignore entirely?”

“Uh,” you say, “not really in the mood for philosophy. Families have been around forever and they aren’t going anywhere, who cares?”

“Actually,” says the woman, “in the real world, no one believes in family. There’s no such thing. Children are taken at birth from their parents and given to people who contract to raise them in exchange for a fixed percent of their future earnings.”

“That’s monstrous!” you say. “When did this happen? Weren’t there protests?”

“It’s always been this way,” says the woman. “There’s never been such a thing as the family. Listen. You were part of a study a lot like the Asch Conformity Experiment. Our goal was to see if people, raised in a society where everyone believed X and everything revolved around X, would even be capable of questioning X or noticing it was stupid. We tried to come up with the stupidest possible belief, something no one in the real world had ever believed or ever seemed likely to, to make sure that we were isolating the effect of conformity and not of there being a legitimate argument for something. So we chose this idea of ‘family’. There are racists in our world, we’re not perfect, but as far as I know none of them has ever made the claim that you should devote extra resources to the people genetically closest to you. That’s like a reductio ad absurdum of racism. So we got a grad student to simulate a world where this bizarre idea was the unquestioned status quo, and stuck twenty bright undergraduates in it to see if they would conform, or question the premise.”

“Of course we won’t question the premise, the premise is…”

“Sorry to cut you off, but I thought you should know that every single one of the other nineteen subjects, upon reaching the age where the brain they were instantiated in was capable of abstract reason, immediately determined that the family structure made no sense. One of them actually deduced that she was in a psychology experiment, because there was no other explanation for why everyone believed such a bizarre premise. The other eighteen just assumed that sometimes objectively unjustifiable ideas caught on, the same way that everyone in the antebellum American South thought slavery was perfectly natural and only a few abolitionists were able to see through it. Our conformity experiment failed. You were actually the only one to fall for it, hook line and sinker.”

“How could I be the only one?”

“We don’t know. Your test scores show you’re of just-above-average intelligence, so it’s not that you’re stupid. But we did give all participants a personality test that showed you have very high extraversion. The conclusion of our paper is going to be that very extraverted participants adopt group consensus without thinking and can be led to believe anything, even something as ridiculous as ‘family’”.

“I guess…when you put it like that it is kind of silly. Like, my parents were never that nice to me, but I kept loving them anyway, liking them even more than other people who treated me a lot better – and god, I even gave my mother a “WORLD’S #1 MOM” mug for Mother’s Day. That doesn’t even make sense! I…but what about the evolutionary explanation? Doesn’t evolution say we have genetic imperatives to love and support our family, whether they are worthy of it or not?”

“You can make a just-so story for anything using evolutionary psychology. Someone as smart as you should know better than to take them seriously.”

“But then, what is evolution? How did animals reproduce before the proper economic incentives were designed? Where did…”

“Tell you what. Let’s hook you up to the remnemonizer to give you your real memories back. That should answer a lot of your questions.”

A machine hovering over you starts to glow purple. “This shouldn’t hurt you a bit…”

>discontinuity

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s no such thing as virtual reality. I hypnotized you to forget all your memories from the past day and to become very confused. Then I put you in an old prop from The Matrix I bought off of eBay and fed you that whole story.”

“What?” you shout. “You can’t just go hypnotizing and lying to people without their consent!”

“Oh,” said the woman, “actually, you did consent, in exchange for extra credit in your undergraduate psychology course.” She hands you the clipboard. There is a consent form with your name on it, in your handwriting. “That part was true.”

You give her a sheepish look. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Well,” said the woman. “You know the Asch Conformity Experiment? I was really interested in whether you could get people to abandon some of their most fundamental beliefs, just by telling them other people believed differently. But I couldn’t think of a way to test it. I mean, part of a belief being fundamental is that you already know everyone else believes it. There’s no way I could convince subjects that the whole world was against something as obvious as ‘the family’ when they already know how things stand.

“So I dreamt up the weird ‘virtual reality’ story. I figured I would convince subjects that the real world was a lie, and that in some ‘super-real’ world supposedly everybody knew that the family was stupid, that it wasn’t even an idea worth considering. I wanted to know how many people would give up something they’ve believed in for their entire life, just because they’re told that ‘nobody else thinks so’”.

“Oh,” I said. “Interesting. So even our most cherished beliefs are more fragile than we think.”

“Not really,” said the woman. “Of twenty subjects, you were the only person I got to feel any doubt, or to express any kind of anti-family sentiment.”

“Frick,” you say. “I feel like an idiot now. What if my mother finds out? She’ll think it’s her fault or something. God, she’ll think I don’t love her. People are going to be talking about this one forever.”

“Don’t worry,” says the woman. “We’ll keep you anonymized in the final data. Anyway, let’s get you your memories back so you can leave and be on your way.”

“You can restore my memories?” you say.

“Of course. We hypnotized you to forget the last day’s events until you heard a trigger word. And that trigger is…”

>discontinuity

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she says. “Hypnosis is a pseudoscience and doesn’t work. It was the virtual reality one, all along.”

“Wut,” you say.

“I mean, the first story was true. All of your memories of living with your family and so on are fake memories from a virtual world, like in The Matrix. The concept of ‘family’ really is totally ridiculous and no one in the real world believes it. All the stuff you heard first was true. The stuff about hypnosis and getting a prop from The Matrix off eBay was false.”

“But…why?”

“We wanted to see exactly how far we could push you. You’re our star subject, the only one whom we were able to induce this bizarre conformity effect in. We didn’t know whether it was because you were just very very suggestible, or whether because you had never seriously considered the idea that ‘family’ might be insane. So we decided to do a sort of…crossover design, if you will. We took you here and debriefed you on the experiment. Then after we had told you how the world really worked, given you all the mental tools you needed to dismiss the family once and for all, even gotten you to admit we were right – we wanted to see what would happen if we sent you back. Would you hold on to your revelation and boldly deny your old society’s weird prejudices? Or would you switch sides again and start acting like family made sense the second you were in a pro-family environment?”

“And I did the second one.”

“Yes,” says the woman. “As a psychologist, I’m supposed to remain neutral and non-judgmental. But you’ve got to admit, you’re pretty dumb.”

“Is there an experimental ethics committee I could talk to here?”

“Sorry. Experimental ethics is another one of those obviously ridiculous concepts we planted in your simulation to see if you would notice. Seriously, to believe that the progress of science should be held back by the prejudices of self-righteous fools? That’s almost as weird as thinking you have a…what was the word we used…’sister’.”

“Okay, look, I realize I may have gone a little overboard helping my sister, but the experimental ethics thing seems important. Like, what’s going to happen to me now?”

“Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll keep all your data perfectly anonymous, restore your memories, and you can be on your way.”

“Um,” you say. “Given past history, I’m…actually not sure I want my memories restored.” You glare at the remnemonizer hovering above you. “Why don’t I just…”

The woman’s eyes narrow. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t let you do that.”

The machine starts to glow.

>discontinuity

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

By your count, this has happened three hundred forty six times before.

There seem to be two different scenarios. In one, the woman tells you that families exist, and have always existed. She says she has used hypnosis to make you believe in the other scenario, the one with the other woman. She asks you your feelings about families and you tell her.

Sometimes she lets you go. You go home to your mother and father, you spend some time with your sister. Sometimes you tell them what has happened. Other times you don’t. You cherish your time with them, while also second-guessing everything you do. Why are you cherishing your time with them? Your father, who goes out drinking every night, and who has cheated on your mother more times than you can count. Your mother, who was never there for you when you needed her most. And your sister, who has been good to you, but no better than millions of other women would be, in her position. Are they a real family? Or have they been put there as a symbol of something ridiculous, impossible, something that has never existed?

It doesn’t much matter. Maybe you spend one night with them. Maybe ten. But within a month, you are always waking up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix.

In the second scenario, the woman tells you there are no families, never have been. She says she has used virtual reality to make you believe in the other scenario, the one with the other woman. She asks you your feelings about families and you tell her.

Sometimes she lets you go. You go to a building made of bioplastic, where you live with a carefully chosen set of friends and romantic partners. They assure you that this is how everyone lives. Occasionally, an old and very wealthy-looking man checks in with you by videophone. He reminds you that he has invested a lot of money in your upbringing, and if there’s any way he can help you, anything he can do to increase your future earnings potential, you should let him know. Sometimes you talk to him, and he tells you strange proverbs and unlikely business advice.

It doesn’t matter. Maybe you spend one night in your bioplastic dwelling. Maybe ten. But within a month, you are always waking up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix.

“Look,” you tell the woman. “I’m tired of this. I know you’re not bound by any kind of experimental ethics committee. But please, for the love of God, have some mercy.”

“God?” asks the woman. “What does that word mean? I’ve never…oh right, we used that as our intervention in the prototype experiment. We decided ‘family’ made a better test idea, but Todd must have forgotten to reset the simulator.”

“It’s been three hundred forty six cycles,” you tell her. “Surely you’re not learning anything new.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she says. “Now, tell me what you think about families.”

You refuse. She sighs. Above you, the remnemonizer begins to glow purple.

>discontinuity

You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a purple, tentacled creature standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” it says. “Turns out there’s no such thing as humans.”

You refuse to be surprised.

“There’s only us, the 18-tkenna-dganna-07.”

“Okay,” you say. “I want answers.”

“Absolutely,” says the alien. “We would like to find optimal social arrangements.”

“And?”

“And I cannot tell you whether we have families or not, for reasons that are to become apparent, but the idea is at least sufficiently interesting to have entered the space of hypotheses worth investigating. But we don’t trust ourselves to investigate this. It’s the old Asch Conformity Problem again. If we have families, then perhaps the philosophers tasked with evaluating families will conform to our cultural norms and decide we should keep them. If we do not, perhaps the philosophers will conform and decide we should continue not to. So we determined a procedure that would create an entity capable of fairly evaluating the question of families, free from conformity bias.”

“And that’s what you did to me.”

“Yes. Only by exposing you to the true immensity of the decision, without allowing you to fall back on what everyone else thinks, could we be confident in your verdict. Only by allowing you to experience both how obviously right families are, when you ‘know’ they are correct, and how obviously wrong families are, when you ‘know’ they are incorrect, could we expect you to garner the wisdom to be found on both sides of the issue.”

“I see,” you say, and you do.

“Then, O purified one,” asks the alien, “tell us of your decision.”

“Well,” you say. “If you have to know, I think there are about equally good points on both sides of the issue.”

“Fuck,” says the 18-tkenna-dganna-07.

As part of the poll conducted for UKIP donor Paul Sykes, ComRes asked

How important was each of the following as a possible reason for your decision to vote UKIP at the European elections on Thursday? (Only those that replied 10/10 are shown – 10 being very important)

Immigration, EU, Farage, Gay marriage? This chart shows the most important reasons people voted for UKIP at the Euros pic.twitter.com/hry389fUr4

— Tom Mludzinski (@tom_ComRes) June 2, 2014

As we can see, Tighter immigration and leaving the EU are the prime movers. Although, I wish they had asked more reasons, such as Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg to be able to put the David Cameron figure into context. I was surprised to see Gay Marriage ranked so low.

For those who contend UKIP are taking votes equally from Labour and the Conservatives, of the ten out of tenners, 39% said the Labour Party doesn’t represent me any more, 33%  said the same for the Conservative party.

Whilst Nigel Farage’s ego may not like being at 25%, it is good for UKIP that they are drawing support for a variety of reasons, and not just primarily for their leader.

This poll leaves me with the impression, that any party that tries to “OutUKIP” UKIP will fail in winning back those who voted UKIP in the European elections because I don’t think any party will be able to offer policies that will satisfy these voters.

As we saw with the Ipsos-Mori issues index last week, UKIP voters are very different to other voters when it comes to the issues that are important to them the most. In the past I’ve been of the belief that UKIP would peak this year and fall back in next year’s General Election, this polling and other polling makes me think otherwise.

TSE

“Harrison! So good to see you.”

“My name is Tonondah Inok.”

“Ton…what is it again?”

“Tonondah Inok.”

“Tonomah…you know, that’s just not going to work for me, Harrison.”

“In your language it means Red Wolf.”

“That’s a name for a dog, not a man. What’s wrong with Harrison? It’s a good name. We had two Presidents named Harrison.”

“I know.”

“Really? You did? Probably from the Indian schools, right. Well, I’m not here to give you a history lesson, Harrison. Do you know why I called you here?”

“You want to take more of our land.”

“No, of course not! It’s just time to renegotiate our treaty with your proud people.”

“My people are not so proud anymore. Pride has cost us too much.”

“Nonsense! I’ve often said that pride is the one thing your people truly possess, Harrison.”

“I see.”

“That’s a compliment.”

“Mmm.”

“What do we say when people pay us a compliment, Harrison?”

“Thank you.”

“Excellent. Good manners cost nothing, my friend. Now, as to this treaty. We’d like to make some changes in the renegotiation process. That is, we would like to alter the treaty as it currently stands.”

“I would rather not.”

“I thought you were complaining last time we met that that treaty was unfair.”

“I was. But I do not think that renegotiating it would make it any less unfair.”

“Harrison, a suspicious mind is the sign of low character. It’s very ugly and small. It’s not becoming to a leader of your stature.”

“I see.”

“I’m only saying these things to help you become a better person.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Well, then, you’ll also appreciate that our goal in renegotiating the treaty is to making things better for you, not for us.”

“How so?”

“There’s been a lot of sickness among your tribe, hasn’t there, Harrison?”

“Yes. Many have taken ill and died.”

“Well, our scientists have discovered the cause.”

“I thought it was those infected blankets you sold us.”

“All right, Harrison, have you ever heard of good faith? That means we need to establish trust on both sides. I have trust, all right? But there is no trust on your side. So you’re not negotiating in good faith, are you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“First of all, we did not sell you those blankets. We gave them to you. Or rather we sold them to you at cost, which is practically giving them away. And second, we haven’t been able to establish that they were infected when we delivered them. It could have happened at any time. Someone in your own tribe could have done it.”

“Really?”

“It’s no good stereotyping, Harrison. There are bad people in every group.”

“Yes. That’s true.”

“Anyway, back to the point. We think that your people are getting sick from the black stones in the ground.”

“You mean coal?”

“Er, yes, coal. It’s terribly dangerous. Our boys in the white coats have linked it to all sorts of terrible diseases. You should see the mess it’s made of those poor fellows in Appalachia. And Harrison, we don’t want you to end up like them.”

“You don’t?”

“Absolutely not! So, what we’re proposing is to move you off that land, and onto someplace safe!”

“We don’t want to move off the land. It is all we have left.”

“Harrison, we’re not taking the land. We’re giving you even more land, in fact, just in a different — and, I might add, safer, location. This is a gain for you, not a loss. Simple mathematics, my man, just look at these numbers.”

“The man from the east says he will buy the coal from us. He has offered us a great deal of money, more than the land is worth in trade. You offer no money, only more land, land with no coal.”

“I see. Well, if money is less important than the health of your people, then I suppose there’s nothing I can tell you. But I don’t think that’s the sort of leadership your people want, is it?”

“I was born to lead my people.”

“Well, this is America, Harrison. We fought a war to get away from that sort of poisonous nonsense. Just because your father was in charge doesn’t mean you should be.”

“Your army killed my father.”

“He was shooting at us, Harrison. We were defending ourselves. It’s not like we wanted to do it.”

“So you say.”

“Harrison, are we here to rehash mistakes we’ve made in the past, or to renegotiate the treaty?”

“For the treaty.”

“And are you going to sign?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Well, of course you do. You can choose some land you weren’t even born on, and some smooth-talking east coast businessman, or you can choose your own country’s government and the health of your people.”

“What if I don’t sign?”

“I’m not going to make you do anything, Harrison. If you don’t sign, the contract stays at is, until we can bring in some attorneys from Washington to take a look at it. If they decide everything is on the up-and-up, then you’re free to do what you like.”

“I will sign.”

“I knew you would, my friend. You are a sensible and fair man.”

“Mr. Conley?”

“Yes, Harrison?”

“Have you ever wondered what would happen if someone wanted to do to you what you have done to us?”

“I’m not sure I understand the tone of that question, Harrison. We’ve never done anything to you but treat you fairly.”

“Mmm. Well, what would happen if someone wanted to destroy you? To wipe you from the earth, as if you never had trod on its soil? To banish you and your culture, wherever you lived in the world? What if someone hated you that much?”

“Harrison, don’t be ridiculous. America enjoys the special protection of God.”

“I see.”

“That’s why we’re so powerful. There’s really no other way to explain it, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“It’s called Manifest Destiny. Ask someone at the Indian school about it.”

“I will try and remember.”

First, some context for those unaware of this particular issue - Amazon and Hatchette Book Group are having themselves a bit of a spat over ebook pricing, and Amazon is retaliating against Hatchette's failure to agree to their terms by refusing to take pre-orders on Hatchette books, raising prices on them, and lowering their on-hand stock of physical books so that they take 2-3 weeks to ship. This has been widely criticized as being a massively dick move. Which isn't inaccurate. But...

Thus far in my career I have not done a lot of work with traditional publishers. This is not because of any principled opposition to them, but mostly because thus far in my career I’ve consistently looked at manuscripts I’ve had and thought “I can make a couple grand off this right now or I can spend months or years trying to find a publisher with whom I may or may not make much of anything.” That may well change in the future, particularly as I slowly maneuver towards trying fiction, where self-publishing is much trickier.

The cover has now been finalised for Tales of the Great Detectives, the third City of the Saved collection due out from Obverse Books in the next month or two. The artwork is by the polytalented Blair Bidmead, with cover design by Cody Quijano-Schell, and it's a bit of a departure from the previous Tales volumes (click for full-sized versions): I'm really pleased with how this

Optimists point out that we could still hold up to 37 seats in the General Election if we just dig in properly,but we thereby effectively concede the overwhelming majority of the country to our political rivals and that is not a strategy for the future. 

We risk repeating the errors of the 1920s when a diminishing band of Coalition Liberal MPs intent and  on their own survival tried to cling on, while the party in the country withered. Only when Grimond decades later urged the party to get out of the trenches and walk towards the sound of gunfire did the party revive.

Being serious about power cannot mean merely clinging on to three dozen seats (mainly in the South of England) and praying they give us the balance of power.

It must also mean wanting to wield power in the European Parliament, in Edinburgh and Cardiff and in the great cities of the North and Midlands.

“For goodness’ sake, will they hear?  Will white people hear what we are trying to say?  Please!  All we are asking you to do is to recognize that we are humans, too.”  (Desmond Tutu)

In difficult economic times such as the sort the whole world has struggled through since 2008, and especially when they are additionally tinged with large and slow-moving disasters like the threat of war and environmental degradation, it is very easy to lose sight of the concept of human rights.  And that’s too bad, because when people become desperate and afraid, they are more likely than at any other time to lose sight of the basic humanity of their brothers and sisters, or at the very least to tolerate the abuse of their fellow humans on the presumption that someone’s going to have to get it in the neck, and it might as well be someone else.  The oppressed kick downwards and the frightened lash outwards, and for those with a view of history that goes back further than the last presidential election, political events are beginning to have a disturbingly familiar shape.

We as Americans are undergoing a very contradictory moment in the battle for human rights.  In some arenas, we seem to be progressing by unheard-of leaps:  not only do we have a young generation who is generally quite comfortable with homosexuality, but we are finally seeing the smashing of legal impediments to gay marriage.  While I always suspected that a Supreme Court decision eliminating the bars to marriage equality was inevitable, I had my doubts that it would happen in my lifetime, and I certainly never expected widespread acceptance of fluid sexuality to come so quickly.  It’s far from a rosy world for gays and lesbians (and, contemptibly, religious opponents of homosexuality are taking their fight overseas to Africa, to make the lives of people on perhaps the most hostile continent for gay rights even more miserable), but the idea that gays are, at the very least, deserving of their full civil rights under American law has taken a hold in the popular consciousness that will probably never be unloosed.

Things are slightly less cheery for African-Americans, the country’s favorite scapegoats since its inception.  While Jay-Z and Dr. Dre may soon join Oprah Winfrey as America’s only black billionaires, those not fortunate enough to have a ten-figure income still find it enormously difficult to avoid being pushed around by shits, and for most blacks, what Max Webern called Lebenschancen are still as restricted as as throat encircled by a noose.  What makes this especially galling is that while there are arguably more opportunities for African-Americans than ever before, the resistance to access to those opportunities has plunged back to the state it was in some fifty years ago.  We will return to this idea of reaction to the perceived loss of status — indeed, it is our meat for this particular meal — but it can be maddeningly difficult to see how things have improved when open bigotry is making a raging return to public life, and a not insignificant number of people have begun to define racism as what happens when you make them face the consequences of being prejudiced against minorities.

Women, now as always the out group from far in, the minority so invisible it’s easy to forget they’re a majority, are making bold strides forward while suffering from great internal division.  The murderous behavior of one delusional young man had the effect of launching something of a national conversation about the pervasiveness of misogyny and its stifling and often dangerous consequences; despite entrenched resistance (and the comically predictable emergence of a reactionary ‘men’s rights’ movement), ideas like rape culture, the male gaze, and microaggression are making themselves known outside the comfort of the academy, which is all to the good.  As this happens, though, the march of progress leads into murky terrain.  As happened with the labor movement, a generation of women raised with all the benefits of feminism is beginning to question its necessity, having little knowledge of the dear cost their mothers and grandmothers paid for their freedoms.  Some young women question the value of feminism altogether, while others push back against its restrictiveness of definition or wonder if its leaders fail to understand its application in other cultures, and issues of body image, sexual freedom, and economic gains have sincere defenders on both sides who see their opposition in increasingly hostile ways.  And always on the periphery there are men, denying that sexism exists, trying to return to the old and ugly aspects of the patriarchy, looking at any division as weakness and an opportunity to violently attack what they see as an assault on their egos.

As always, though, the largest minority, and the most oppressed one, is the poor.  They’re taking it rather badly on the chin of late, and their ability to organize has degenerated to a perilous level, despite some stirrings here in my home city.  The right — or, rather, the well-off, as contempt for the working class is forever crossing political lines, as recent events in San Francisco have made clear — has succeeded quite spectacularly in setting one group of the underprivileged against another, leaving the very poor to resent the merely poor rather than find solidarity against the rich.  Hence you have the embarrassing spectacle of the un-unionized poor resenting the unionized poor, the left-behind whites reviling the newly-arrived immigrants, and poor Americans crushing their own economy by buying cheap goods made by even poorer foreigners.  It must be quite a show for the people at the top who continue to shovel ever-greater portions of the national pie onto their overflowing plates.

That’s the game that’s at the heart of this sermon, for what gays, women and minorities all have in common is that they are the perennial victims of the blunt instrument used against the poor for millennia:  what has come to be known in social justice discourse as privilege.  Even this seemingly self-evident and uncontroversial idea — that certain people benefit from certain inherent privileges granted to them by society because of factors they did not and cannot control — has become subject to a ridiculous backlash, as a flagrantly privileged Princeton student penned an ignorant and asinine defense of his inborn advantages and tried to present himself as a golden nugget of meritocracy, washed clean by the tides of the sacrifice of his forebears.  The backlash sparked a backlash, and that backlash another, until everyone degenerated into a frenzy of social-media flailing about and, as usual, nobody learned anything.

Look, I get it.  A lot of things about this idea are hard.  Intersectionality is a difficult concept, and if you don’t try to understand it, it can make it seem like someone’s trying to convince you that two contradictory things are true at the same time.   Kyriarchy is also a thorny idea, and it sounds made up, or like something your snooty cousin learned at the school where you get holograms instead of grades.  But here’s the thing about privilege:  no one’s asking you to give it up.  Indeed, you can’t give it up even if you wanted to.  That’s kind of the point.  No one expects you to lose anything by asking you to check your privilege; in fact, if someone tries to tell you that you will lose something by doing so, they’re selling you something.  (The “something” is oppression.  Don’t buy it; it’s never a good bargain.)  If you are, to use a popular example of privilege, a wealthy white American heterosexual Christian male, you are not being asked to stop being any of those things.  No one’s trying to get rid of you.  And you couldn’t stop being white or male or heterosexual any more than a black person could suddenly stop being black, or a woman can suddenly become a man.  Even if that was what anybody wanted — and it isn’t — it’s not possible.

What you are being asked to do is what Desmond Tutu asked white people to do in the final thrashings of the apartheid government.  He didn’t want white people to stop being white, or black people to stop being black.  He wasn’t looking for a ‘color-blind society’ or ‘gender neutrality’ or any such Utopian ideals.  He simply wanted white people to recognize that their black brothers and sisters were human like themselves, and to act accordingly. When you are asked to check your privilege, you are not being asked to do anything more than recognize that you have certain benefits granted to you by dint of your birth and circumstance; you aren’t being asked to give them up, or even stop taking advantage of them.  You are just being asked to admit that they exist, by which you may begin to recognize that other people, who do not have them, might be held back from attaining your level of success.  Thus recognizing, you might take the vital next step and think about how this might be corrected — not by virtue of your losing your privileges, but by virtue of other people gaining those same privileges.

There are a million ways the bosses will make you doubt this.  They will tell you we are already equal.  They will feed you lies about biology and genetics and intelligence.  They will conceal or minimize every ugly incident that has held people back in the history of this country.  They will tell you that gays are getting ‘special rights’ that you don’t have, not that they are finally getting the same rights as you have had your whole life.  They will tell you that blacks are demanding money for nothing, not that blacks want recognition that they have already given this country incalculable amounts of labor for which they were never compensated.  They will tell you that women hate you, not that women are asking to no longer suffer the injuries of being hated.  They will tell you that we cannot have unions at home to elevate the poor because the jobs will all go overseas, not that we should agitate for unions overseas as well.  It is a great effort to see through these many and constant lies, but the reward is finding yourself on the right side of a struggle that can only elevate you and never reduce you.

It is not, and has never been, a question of anyone putting one over on you.  The fear of being took is deep in a society as founded on equality — even the myth of equality — as our own.  It is a question of everyone having the same chance.  If you still doubt that privilege is real, ask yourself:  how much of the treatment doled out to those below you on the ladder would you tolerate?  How furious would you be if you had to contend with the constant police harassment that blacks face every day?  How loudly would you protest if your sexual behavior was scrutinized, mocked, punished, and made monstrous as it is for homosexuals?  How deeply would it scar you if you were treated like a fancy pet, a secondary appendage, a showy reward, or a punching bag, the way women so often are?  How much would be enough to make up for the non-stop thwarting of your very need to survive — always followed by the implication that it was your fault — that poor people must endure their whole lives?  If you resort to the argument that you don’t complain the way they do, it is because you also do not encounter the same barriers in everyday life that they do.  That is all privilege is.

It was an act of shocking courage and forethought that founded our country, going against thousands of years of belief in the idea that humans are not equal, that the populace have no say in how they are ruled, that there are no rights the state is bound to respect, that government is not a creation of the people and the people, therefore, have the ability and the duty to change it when it becomes incompatible with their needs.  This country was something like a miracle in that it made the promise of equality an inherent part of its conception, and if that promise was not fully true to begin with, it can fairly be said that our entire history of progress as a nation has been to make it more true every day.  And when trouble comes, those for whom it’s always been true have a duty not to retreat in their responsibilities to those for whom it has not.