Andrew Hickey

Once again it’s time to tell the men of the Internet not to threaten to rape and murder people. You’d think that this only needs to be said a few times, if at all, but nope, the message still hasn’t gotten through.

What are men threatening rape over this time? A woman felt a comic book cover was executed poorly. In doing so, she also had the audacity to tell a man how breasts work, as if simply walking around with a pair of them gave her any kind of authority on the matter. Still, a woman spoke slightly negatively about some nerd thing and sure enough the rape comments followed.

Here’s an article on Comics Alliance about the whole idiotic mess. Surprising no one, I have a few things to say about this.

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Unfortunately the comics discourse remains extremely dire in most spaces, particularly in the ineffectively moderated message boards of the Internet. In a comments thread nearly 600 posts long (as of this writing), Janelle’s innocuous piece inspired all manner of questions beyond the content of her article: suspicion as to her “true” motives, speculation about past professional and personal relationships, accusations of political agendas, and outright sexist hatred.

Really, that kind of crap is in the comment thread? Why? Why are we just leaving it to fester there? The article goes on to say that we all have to take responsibility in calling out behavior that furthers this, but the behavior of providing a space for misogynistic trolls to vent their spleens without anyone telling them to take it elsewhere, that we don’t need to call out. We already know not to read the comments anywhere, so why even have them? You can’t say you want to improve Internet discourse and also run an unmoderated anonymous comments section. The two are not compatible.

But since these are commercial sites, that discussion is moot. (The author of that post, in a tweet to someone else, said that if he owned CA, it wouldn’t have comments, but he doesn’t, so it does.) Despite the well-deserved reputation of comment sections they’re still considered mandatory on advertising-based sites, as they drive page views.

But the other, darker problem, is that when it comes to comics and videogames and such, these loathsome trolls aren’t invaders who’ve come in to spoil everyone’s fun; they’re the audience. They’re not there because they heard a woman was getting lippy and needed a talking to, they’re there because they’re the regular patrons. We don’t like these crude, sexist assholes, but we really need them to look at this gallery of Captain America toys so we get paid.

Here’s a current “Top Commenter” on that article:

Another “Top Commenter” is currently concerned about that perennial MRA bugbear, false rape accusations. I’m aware that “Top Commenter” probably means quantity more than quality but again, the comments section is apparently a welcoming home for these people, regardless of what the articles above them say. They certainly haven’t been made too uncomfortable to post this kind of garbage by the community.

An this is not just this site, or comics, this is the nerd world in general. At any moment there are several discussions over on BGG in which some white guy is worried about feminazis stealing his Precious Bodily Fluids. I don’t need to tell you about the videogame world. This happens so often in nerd-dom that it’s fair to ask if it’s an essential part of it.

So let’s bring this around to my usual stomping grounds: the problem is, when it comes to nerd audiences, you are expecting thoughtful behavior from an audience which is regularly encouraged not to think. Current nerd culture, despite what Wil Wheaton thinks, is not about intellectual curiosity, it is about mindless consumption. It’s “turn off your brain”, it’s “I liked it for what it was”, it’s “not as bad as I was expecting”, it’s “shut up and take my money”. It is specifically designed to avoid any kind of serious thought, and that goes double for one’s own actions. You cannot pander to that audience and then expect thoughtful reactions. As I’ve said before on this subject, you can’t regularly serve dog food and then wonder why all these dogs keep showing up.

And that’s not just on these discussion sites, that’s on creators and producers as well. As long as you keep offering a world in which young white straight men are the center of the universe, in which balloon-bodied women exist solely as eye candy (that occasionally kicks someone because “strong”), in which sarcastic nihilistic assholes are the heroes, then you can’t be shocked when these boneheads make up your audience. You keep giving loud and proud asshole creators like Frank Miller, Dave Sim, Orson Scott Card, and others regular work because they move units. Creators who have been accused of all sorts of misconduct get a bye if their books are well-liked (does anyone remember who the big name writer was a few months ago whose name came up?). Bonehead money spends just like any other.

Why do misogynistic trolls feel safe and comfortable in the nerd world? Because it’s built for them. They scream when a woman rolls her eyes at ridiculous tits because by god those ridiculous tits are FOR THEM and how dare anyone think to deny them the ridiculous tits that they have coming to them. If nerd companies honestly don’t want these assholes around they should have no problem alienating them and telling them to get lost, that they’re not wanted. They’ve certainly gotten a lot of practice doing that to everyone else.

The new issue of Liberator was waiting for me when I got home. Which means it is time for another week with Rutland's most celebrated fictional peer.

Monday

Lunch with a Conservative acquaintance who, being of a moderate bent, is not happy with the way things are going in his party.

“When Cameron came on the scene I had high hopes of him: all those huskies he kissed at the North Pole and that windmill on his roof. Now it’s all changed. Did you hear that he has asked five Estonians to write our next manifesto?”

I agree this does not sound a good idea, pointing out that we Liberal Democrats once entrusted the task to Lembit Opik – with the most unhappy of results.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South-West 1906-10.

The Independent reports:

History will be made this week when Jenny Willott, the Business minister, becomes the first Liberal Democrat woman to sit at the cabinet table. 

In a significant step forward for gender equality in the party after the Lord Rennard scandal, Ms Willott has been given attending cabinet status. Although she does not have full cabinet minister rank, the 39-year-old will take her seat this Tuesday alongside the new women's minister, the Tory MP Nicky Morgan, to make a presentation on coalition efforts to close the gender pay gap. ...

In her new role secured by the Deputy Prime Minister, Ms Willott will promote more family-friendly workplaces and tackle issues around discrimination. She is to attend the Cabinet when issues related to shared parental leave and workplace rights are on the agenda.

Congratulations to Jenny, who is acting as maternity cover for Jo Swinson. Jo is expected to return to her post later it the year.

Because the Independent links Jenny's promotion to what it calls "the Lord Rennard scandal", Lib Dems tweeters have already been told off by a Prominent Liberal Democrat for retweeting it.

But the truth is that women had far too little prominence in the party long before Chris Rennard became news. It is a great shame, for instance, that we have not had a woman Lib Dem cabinet minister by now. So it is good to see something being done about this.

More generally, Nick Clegg needs to beware of the idea that his inner circle represents an elite cut off from the rest of the party gaining traction with members.

At the very least, we do not want the next leadership election to be a contest between two men who attended the same public school.

It's unacceptable there's a loophole allowing paedophile "training manuals", that's why I want to protect children by making them illegal.
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) April 27, 2014

I suppose this is the natural culmination of the last 20 years of social policy.

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April 23rd, 2014: Guys, The Midas Flesh #5 comes out today! AHHH. It's the comic I'm writing about oh I don't know KING MIDAS IN SPACE WITH DINOSAURS and this issue is a big one. You can read a preview here! And you can pick the book up at your local comic book shop, or download a digital version instead (/ ALSO??) Check it out! One year ago today: some days you write the comics and some days the comics write you – Ryan

Nick Spitzer’s radio program American Routes has two hours of and with Van Dyke Parks and Tom McDermott. Listen here: Creole Eyes and Classical Ears: Van Dyke Parks and Tom McDermott.

A Parks thought:

“I would prefer to have recognition in my lifetime. The hell with immortality. Who needs it? I don’t. I would love to have the riches that come or the sustenance that comes from an easy life in the arts. But that is not to be. And at the age of seventy-one, all I can say is, I’ve had enough, and I’m grateful, because enough to me is plenty to go on.”

Related reading
All OCA Van Dyke Parks posts (Pinboard)

[I always thought it was roots. Heard, not seen.]

Nigel Farage is a phoney. Scrutinise him and he'll crumble. Don't expect the BBC to.

Sorry I've been quiet: blogging took a back seat last week because I needed time to recover after Satellite 4, the Eastercon, and had some additional travel—family time—and then a different writing project bit me hard and wouldn't let go.

There is, in this field, a rarely sighted beast known as an "attack novel". An attack novel is one that jumps you from behind and won't let go until you've written it. Sometimes that's a really useful thing; but at other times, it's a nightmare. Now, for instance. I'm working on book 3 of a trilogy with a deadline of September 1st, so now is absolutely not the time to go haring off on a side-project. Anyway, I did that last year—while blocked on book 1 of this self-same trilogy I was mugged by a Laundry Files novel and wrote the first draft of "The Armageddon Score" in a frenzy of hypergraphia: 109,000 words in 18 days, of which the first 50,000 words came out in two hours less than a wall-clock week. (I now consider myself to be disqualified from NaNoWriMo in perpetuity.)

To be mugged by one attack novel during a trilogy is an accident, but to have the same problem twice bespeaks an underlying problem. In my case, the problem is that everything I've written since "Palimpsest" in 2007 (that's when I wrote it, not when it was published) has been a sequel to, or in series with, something I began in 2007 or earlier.

This isn't to say that there's no originality in anything I've done since then. But to be so fettered by prior art imposes limits on creativity. So when I realized this, a couple of weeks ago, I was just laying myself wide open to an attack novel.

Good news for my editors: there is no attack novel. What there is, is a Scrivener project with copious notes, a detailed scene-by-scene outline, a bunch of characters, a setting, the first chapter, and a detailed book proposal ... for a gothic haunted house fantasy about mortgage anxiety among the Millennials. And now it's back to work on "Invisible Sun", which is either book 3 of "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" or book 9 of "Merchant Princes" the original series, unless you're British in which case it's book 6. Sigh.

I anticipate that as soon as I've got the trilogy out of the way this one's going to catch fire, unless I'm bitten by another left-field attack novel in the meantime. And this is why I have not had time to blog since Tuesday.

#784, 21st February 1998

Virtually everything I said about Aqua’s success and Europop also applies to Celine Dion, except at gargantuan scale. Longing is as universal as dancing, after all, and on “My Heart Will Go On” Dion produces the most straight-line expression of yearning she can, a record whose emotional aim is unmistakeable whatever your language, national or musical heritage. It was huge everywhere, but in Europe especially its conquests would make Napoleon blush.

This targeted globalism might account for Dion’s heavier accent and phrasing – “Luff wass when I lufft you” and so on. The trace inflections on “Think Twice” have become full-blown exaggerations, emphasising how she’s not a native English speaker but far harder to specifically place. Sound like you belong nowhere, and maybe you belong everywhere. In his landmark book Let’s Talk About Love, which has become an inevitable companion to any chat about Celine, Carl Wilson raises the idea of schmaltz as a key to Dion’s appeal. Wilson identifies in schmaltzy songs a tradition of “ethnic outsiders who expressed emotions too outsized for most white American performers but in non African-American codes”.

Translated to Britain, where the “color line” operated differently, we’re back to the heaving, sobbing, light opera sentimentality of David Whitfield and Al Martino, the very dawn of the charts. But even here schmaltz is still, as Wilson posits, an immigrant emotion: ‘hot-blooded’ foreign music expressing things too large and florid for the sophisticated (or repressed) English culture to handle. Emphasis English, not British: England treats the rest of the United Kingdom as a source of on-tap emotion, wildness, mysticism, and so on. That goes double for Ireland, where “My Heart Will Go On” is drawing much of its musical schmaltz from, and England at the end of the 90s is fascinated by Ireland: its comedians, its boybands, its economy, its bonhomie, and, yes, its sentiment.

So a reading of “My Heart Will Go On” as schmaltz in an English context absolutely works. But you don’t need that explanation for its specific hugeness, here or anywhere, since it had the happy circumstance of being bolted on to the end credits of the highest-grossing film of all time. With audiences sniffling already, the simplicity and directness of “My Heart Will Go On” – not to mention it’s third-chorus wham of a crescendo – is as foolproof a purchase trigger as you could imagine. It sold 15 million worldwide – if iTunes had been around back then, ready just as you left the theatre, it might have sold twice that.

The interesting thing, though, is how so many people involved with the song thought it was a bad idea. James Cameron had to be talked into using it, and Celine Dion didn’t want to record it and laid her vocals down as a one-take demo. Did they feel it was too gross, too manipulative? It’s possible. Their hunches, in any case, were commercially completely wrong – but aesthetically a lot more defensible. “My Heart Will Go On” is not, by my lights, a good record.

But where does it go wrong? Not in hugeness – world-cracking balladry is nothing to be ashamed of. Not the performance, either – it’s a stirring tune, and Dion’s singing before the song peaks is an interesting study in how someone with a powerful voice projects hurt and weakness, with a fluttery, restrained thinness until she’s able to roar on the climax. My problem is its lack of imagination and ambition. Which seems an odd charge to level at such an epic record, but for me “My Heart Will Go On” is too universal – there’s no twists of language or sentiment here, no musical surprises, nothing to make this feel like an individual human experience to relate to. “Think Twice”, “Total Eclipse”, “The Power Of Love”, and many of the other megaballads felt like ordinary feelings exploded to epic size, their vulnerabilities intact: “My Heart Will Go On” feels like an epic hunting around for a feeling wide enough to fill it. But it’s also too specific – because obviously it is about individuals, Jack and Rose, Kate and Leo. It’s as parasitic a record as “Men In Black”: you have a ready-made story to fill the epic up. But if you haven’t seen Titanic – and I haven’t – the song is an empty vessel.

I blogged last night on Jesus' Wife and her Ugly Sister, picking up on Christian Askeland's devastating post, Jesus had an ugly sister-in-law, in which he drew attention to the the Coptic Gospel of John fragment that emerged from the same collector at the same time as the Jesus' Wife Fragment.  Askeland noted that this fragment, which is in the same hand as the Jesus' Wife Fragment, is clearly a forgery.

Alin Suciu, Christian Askeland finds the "Smoking Gun", helpfully illustrated how the verso of the John fragment was clearly copied from Herbert Thompson, The Gospel of St. John According to the Earliest Coptic Manuscript (London: British School of Archaeology in Egypt, University College, 1924), line breaks and all.

What I would like to present here is the same kind of graphic illustrating how the recto of the John fragment copies from Thompson.  Often in this kind of work, a graphic is worth a thousand blogged words because it enables one to see the point quickly and straightforwardly (click on the pic for a larger version):

Herbert Thompson's Gospel of St John, page 7 (left); Coptic John fragment recto (right), illustrating how the forger copied every second line of this text of John 5.26-30, line breaks and all

Thompson's edition is based on the Cambridge Qau Codex and like Grondin's Interlinear Gospel of Thomas that appeared to have been used for the Jesus' Wife Fragment, it is available online.  It is not clear from the ETANA website when the PDF was uploaded, but the properties of the PDF itself show that it was created in 2005 and modified in 2008, well within the time frame for the presentation of these fragments to Prof. Karen King.

The graphic above should speak for itself but essentially the point is this: the forger appears to have copied mechanically every other line from the Thompson edition.  Every line break is the same.  It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too.

Everyone was shocked this week to learn that right-wing gun-nut, “militia” hero and anti-American “patriot” Cliven Bundy is also a frothing racist white supremacist who believes “Negroes” were “better off as slaves.” And when I say that everyone was shocked, I mean of course that no one should have been surprised even slightly, because duh.

Here are Bundy’s comments — which were delivered voluntarily at a press conference, in public, as reported by Adam Nagourney of The New York Times:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

This is from a man who has recently become Fox-News-famous for his refusal to pay for grazing his cattle on public land. Cliven Bundy, in other words, is wholly dependent on “government subsidy.” The mythic “welfare queens” in Cadillacs and Ronald Reagan’s fantasy nightmare of “strapping young bucks” buying steak with food stamps paid for by white people don’t actually exist, but there is such a thing as welfare fraud and Cliven Bundy is what it looks like.

As Paul Waldman notes, everything about this Bundy yahoo suggested that we already knew what he would say if he ever admitted what he thinks he “knows about the Negro”:

When conservatives looked at Bundy, they saw not just a white guy, but also a cowboy, and that particular brand of character who waves an American flag while fighting the American government (in his case by stealing public property). And they saw lots of guns, which also told them he was their kind of people. Everything about him told them he was their kind of guy. And I’m sure if liberals had thought about it, they would have said, “I’ll bet this guy has some colorful ideas about race.” Conservatives would have protested that that’s a vicious and unfair stereotype. But in this case it turned out to be true, and how.

One couldn’t help but be reminded of the mini-controversy over Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson back in December, who got in trouble for some comments that were quite similar to Bundy’s. In Robertson’s case, he didn’t reach all the way back to slavery. He just said blacks were happier during the Jim Crow days of his youth: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once…they’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.” Sarah Palin admitted that she didn’t even know what Robertson had said even as she was loudly defending him against unfair liberal attacks. Why? Well, because he too was her kind of people — Southern, Christian, gun-loving, liberal-hater. What else do you need to know?

As Cliven Bundy shows, you need to know more than that. … If you’re going to construct your politics around defining who “us” and “them” is, don’t be surprised when your new allies have some rather sharp beliefs about “them.”

Anyone care to guess what Cliven Bundy thinks about LGBT people? Do you think we even need to ask?

Kevin Drum marvels that Bundy’s Klan-eruption seems to have caught many of his Republican admirers by surprise:

Conservatives should never have rallied around Bundy in the first place, but if they’re even minimally self-aware about his particular niche in the conservative base, surely they should have seen something like this coming and kept their distance just out of sheer self-preservation. But apparently they didn’t. They didn’t have a clue that a guy like Bundy was almost certain to backfire on them eventually. They seem to have spent so long furiously denying so much as a shred of racial resentment anywhere in their base that they’ve drunk their own Kool-Aid.

At the very least, you’d think Republicans would have learned to put their Bundy-Robertson-Nugent faction on a three-second broadcast delay, so that whenever they say something like “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Jews” they could cut the mic.

Somewhere in America, perhaps, there is a perpetually angry white guy who loves his guns and hates the government and yet is not also a flaming racist bigot. Somewhere in America, perhaps, there is an “anti-government” militia enthusiast whose seething resentment of supposedly extravagant “government handouts to the poor” is not driven by racial animus. But such men, if they exist at all, are very rare exceptions.*

Cliven Bundy was poster-boy of the moment for the loves-guns, hates-government strain of white conservatism. That movement traces back to the terrorist backlash against Reconstruction and it remains inextricably intertwined with white supremacy.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “Prick a movement built on white supremacy and it bleeds … white supremacy”:

Whether it’s the Senate minority leader claiming that America should have remained legally segregated, a beloved cultural figure fondly recalling how happy black people were living under lynch law, a presidential candidate calling Barack Obama a “food-stamp president,” or a campaign surrogate calling Barack Obama “a subhuman mongrel,” the preponderance of evidence shows that modern conservatism just can’t quit white supremacy.

This is unsurprising. White supremacy is one of the most dominant forces in the history of American politics. In a democracy, it would be silly to expect it to go unexpressed. Thus anyone with a sense of American history should be equally unsurprised to discover that rugged individualist Cliven Bundy is the bearer of some very interesting theories.

Consider this yet another reminder that “intersectionality” may be a new term, but it’s a very old idea. The reactionary right has always been intersectional.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

* Yes, you can find extreme cynics like the late Lee Atwater who embrace all of that anti-government, guns, militia, anti-”welfare” (for those people) rhetoric based on a disinterested political calculus. For Atwater, promoting racist ideologies was “nothing personal.” His main motive didn’t seem to be personal animus, but rather his belief that racist voters were a key component of the tribal coalition he needed to build to secure political power. Atwater, in other words, was a racist even though he may not have believed that racism was true. (It’s possible he did, and it’s possible he didn’t, but the bottom line was that he didn’t care whether or not it was true. He only cared if it “worked.”)

Never fact yourself.

ME, ON A PODCAST: "I think 'This Town Will Never Let Us Go' is the most 2004 book imaginable. It couldn't have been written in 2003, it couldn't have been written in 2005."

E-MAIL CORRESPONDENT: "It was written and released in 2003."

ME: "Oh."

If there are two great bugaboos of the American conservative weltanschauung, they are the idea that socialism might ever possibly accomplish something unachievable by unfettered capitalism, and the idea that black people might actually be good for something other than forced labor.  These terrors have manifested themselves in a number of ways over the years, both individually and together, but recently they have found combined expression in an idea that has acquired a curious amount of credibility even amongst people we do not normally think of as slavering right-wing lunatics.  That idea is that the reason other countries (specifically those of western Europe) have found any success whatsoever in running a country along socialist lines is that they are ethnically homogenous.  Were they to be a racially rambunctious land like the good ol’ melting pot that is the U.S. of A., they would not be able to experience such small advantages as they have by their unholy trifling with market forces.

It’s a pretty sneaky argument, and even a convincing one at first blush, particularly if you are someone with very little knowledge of history and demography, and only a rudimentary understanding of what is meant by such words as “race”, “ethnicity”, “diversity”, and “minority”.  It allows you to indulge a number of pleasant conservative fantasies — primarily, that an economy in which the state is allowed to restrict the unrestricted rampage of the invisible hand could never possibly succeed if it were not placed under the most delicate of glass bubbles — while engaging in a bizarre kind of racial stereotyping, and at the same time, implying it is the more socialist countries of the People’s Republic of Europea who are the real racists, a bunch of milky-white honkies who can only sustain their Marxist fantasia because they don’t have the hard-nosed realities of an unruly mob of ethnic underclassmen to contend with.  American capitalism has rather taken it on the chin of late, and so this story is getting repeated more and more often.

Of course, it’s nonsense.  Not only is it nonsense, it’s nonsense on every level of interpretation, and it’s ill-meaning nonsense to boot — that is to say, it is not only a mistake, but it is a pernicious mistake, backed by deliberate distortions that can only have a malignant effect.  It is dispelled easily enough on a surface level by a simple look at recent shifts in demographics and how they correlate to similar movements in the global economy; but to really understand what a clumsy lie it is, you have to look beyond simple numbers and into the murky swamps of history and language.

But to begin at the beginning:  while it is true on a very narrow definition of the word that Europe is less racially diverse than the United States, it’s not by much.  If we accept (and more on why we shouldn’t later) that ethnic diversity is defined by the presence of what are sometimes termed “visible minorities” — that is to say, people who are ‘nonwhite’ to the eye of a white person — then yes, America is less ‘white’ than Europe. But first of all, it’s not by much. According to the most recent census, America is still 72% ‘white’; this is a lower number than it’s ever been, true, but it’s still a significant majority, and it’s not enormously less white than Europe.  The 10 largest countries in Europe by population, by most accounts, are Russia, Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and the Netherlands.  Their ‘white’ populations, given the most generous interpretation of that label, are 97%, 94%, 87%, 85%, 92%, 86%, 98%, 98%, 89%, and 90%.  That’s a lot of ofays, to be sure, but a monolith it is not.  Even Sweden, both the whitest and the most  socialist of Eurotopias (and the best-governed nation on Earth, according to the free marketeers at The Economist), does not manage to reach 99 44/100ths percent pure white.

This simple-minded accounting, imperfect as it is, doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story.  In most European countries with a generally socialist-democrat view of governance, the rise of liberalism and the blooming of the economy has coincided with a growth in ethnic and racial diversity.  In other words, the more diversity has increased, the more the government has put into social programs, and the better the economy has responded — exactly the opposite of the pattern we would expect to see if the conservative argument that socialism can only thrive under conditions of extreme homogeneity was true.  Even taking into account the setbacks experienced by European welfare states after the recent economic turmoil and subsequent turn towards “austerity” measures, many countries — particularly France, Ireland, Spain, and the Scandinavian nations — have seen their economies improve at the same time they see a boom in their nonwhite/non-native populations.  It’s also extremely deceptive to focus solely on Europe when we have such a good counter-example right across our own border:  Canada has recently overtaken America as the country with the wealthiest and most robust middle class in the world, and their racial makeup (76% ‘white’) is far more similar to that of the U.S. than it is to any European country.

But even if it hadn’t been illustrated time and again that diversity improves the economy rather than weakening it, and that socialist economies consistently score higher in both quality of life and economic prosperity, this whole approach is based on a fundamentally flawed conception of diversity and a complete misunderstanding of multiculturalism.  Americans, for example, have been trained to think of diversity in an extremely narrowly focused manner, largely based on racial conceptions of ‘color’; when we speak of Europe’s lack of diversity, we largely mean that they do not have a lot of black people.  Even if we expand our definitions, we tend to conceptualize diversity on color lines:  we speak of ‘whites’, ‘blacks’, ‘Asians’, and ‘Latinos’ (and, if we are particularly generous, ‘Indians’) as if these were absolute ethnic identities instead of largely arbitrary hodge-podges of convenient demographic shorthand.  For many years in America, for example, what we now call ‘Latinos’ or ‘Hispanics’ were not considered different from what we call ‘whites’; in fact, census forms from the turn of the century through the 1920s refer to them as “whites of Spanish ancestry”.  Similarly, in Europe (as in the U.S.), Arabs, Turks, and Persians are considered ‘white’ for the purpose of demography.  But culturally, Muslims — who comprise a major factor in European immigration — are no more considered ‘white’ by white Europeans than are black Africans.  Most Germans do not consider Turks to be of the same ethnic group as themselves, even if they both count as ‘white’ on the census form; likewise with North African Arabs in France.  If one considers only ‘whiteness’ in calculating the racial makeup of Europe, a very different picture emerges than if one considers the different treatment given to Turks, Arabs, North Africans, Central Europeans, and South Asians, for example.

Beyond that, even ‘whiteness’ is a very contentious concept. In the last century alone, a number of groups we reflexively think of as ‘white’ today were not considered to be part of the Anglo-Saxon family tree:  among others, Slavs, Irish, Levants, Roma, and European Jews were thought of as something completely other than ‘white’ until they were ‘promoted’ in response to the arrival of more visible minorities.  When one includes immigrants and non-natives in the definition of diversity, those European percentages drop even more precipitately.  Almost no country in Europe has maintained anything like ethnic purity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries; Poland, for example, has one of the most ethnically ‘pure’ populations not because it is a hotbed of homogeneity, but because two foreign occupiers — the Nazis and the Soviets — conspired to deliberately leech it of its ethnic diversity.  Ukraine, another predominately ‘white’ country, is far more diverse than most Americans can conceive, because they are taught only to see color when thinking of ethnic diversity; a mere glimpse at recent headlines ought to be enough to dispel any notion that Ukraine is an ethnically homogenous country.

The more one looks at historical patterns of migration, immigration, expulsion and colonialization, the more absurd this notion of Europe as a bastion of ethnic purity, and therefore of easy social management, becomes.  Does the foment of racial dissimilarity obviate the possibility of government intervention in the economy?  Tell it to Yugoslavia.  Is Russia, with its vastly white population figures, ethnically unified?  Far from it:  it is home to as many as 160 ethnic groups, speaking dozens of languages and displaying vast differences in religion, culture, and physical appearance.  China has over 50 ethnic groups and the Uyghur alone — Turks in ethnic origin and Muslims by religious practice — number more than the population of New York City.  Indonesia features over 300 ethnic groups and twice that many languages, and displays a diversity stunning in its breadth and depth; yet the people making the argument under discussion would lump them all under the dull blanket of “Asian”.  One single nation — India — boasts so much linguistic, genetic, religious, and cultural diversity that only the entire continent of Africa (“black”, says our capitalist racial expert) can surpass it.

Let us have no more of this balderdash.  America is not uniquely diverse; Europe is not ethnically homogenous; and a lack of multiculturalism does not correspond whatsoever to the success or failure of social democracy.  These are the fantasies of people whose ideas about race and about socialism are more the product of ignorance and fear than of any honest study of history or society.

The character of Hannibal Lecter has had a difficult journey over the years.  The charming, terrifying psychiatrist and serial killer has made his creator, Thomas Harris, very rich, and has become what is known in our media-savvy age as a ‘franchise’, but the artistic merit of that franchise is a decidedly mixed bag.  Harris’ novels themselves have degenerated from a crafty blend of psychological horror and police procedural down to fan-servicing potboilers; the films made from his work have ranged from outstanding (The Silence of the Lambs) to absysmal (Hannibal and Hannibal Rising), with Michael Mann’s Manhunter, a stylish but clumsy adaptation of Red Dragon, ranging in the middle.

It has become fashionable to minimize Anthony Hopkins’ iconic take on the character because it was, after all, just as world-devouring and monstrous as Hannibal himself, but I think this is unfair.  Certainly Hopkins ate up the whole screen in his indelible performance in The Silence of the Lambs, but he also managed to capture much of the character’s essential qualities (his intellectual charm, his cruel rigor, the easy way he insinuates himself into his victims’ heads).  Was he over the top?  Certainly, but only as much as the role required.  It would only be a problem if he greatly overshadowed everyone else in the film, and that is certainly not the case; excellent work was turned in by nearly everyone in the cast, from Jodie Foster’s exceptionally sensitive performance to Ted Levine as the twisted Buffalo Bill to minor players like Frankie Faison, Kasi Lemmons, and Tracey Walter.  One of the most tightly controlled performances is given by Scott Glenn as Foster’s superior, the calculating F.B.I. profiler Jack Crawford.

In Bryan Fuller’s excellent new television series Hannibal, that role goes to the perpetually outstanding Laurence Fishburne, who imbues it with some of Glenn’s quiet dignity, but ramps up his authority (the few times Fishburne barks commands, you come to understand that Crawford got to where he is through something more than just talent) and introduces a subtle line of regret with the greater role given to his wife Bella, dying of cancer at too young an age.  (Bella is played with great will and dignity by Fishburne’s actual wife, Gina Torres, and the character is wisely expanded from the books.)  The greater scope of the series allows Fuller to do what is only sometimes hinted at in the books and elsewhere:  question Crawford’s judgment, and let us see how his desperate passion to save lives leads him to make reckless gambles that might achieve the exact opposite end.

Crawford was played elsewhere by Harvey Keitel and Dennis Farina — the role has never lacked for talent — but Glenn’s sad silence comes from somewhere that kept him from repeating it.  Before filming, John Douglas, the special investigator on whom the character was based, played Glenn an audio recording of the actual torture and rape of the teen victim of a pair of particularly repugnant serial killers, hoping to bring the actor into the mindset of a decent man who had to deal with such horrors every day; it so disturbed Glenn that he walked away from the role for good, and almost quit midway through filming.  Hannibal has many failings, one of which is that the serial murders are so artful, so abstracted from any hint of this sort of real human suffering, that it is nearly impossible to care about the victims on any level whatsoever.  (This particularly undercuts the story when, midway through the second season, one of Crawford’s team, the determined Beverly Katz, becomes a victim of Lecter; we are clearly meant to have a more emotional reaction, but we’ve almost been trained not to by constant exposure to the painterly affectations of the many victims of the show’s absurdly high population of mass murderers.)

This is hardly Hannibal‘s only flaw.  Its plots are beyond absurd; as has been noted elsewhere, it portrays Baltimore as a city where serial murders are as common as jaywalking, but where, it seems, only a handful of law enforcement agents are assigned to solving, let alone preventing, them.  Even when they are effective (as with Amanda Plummer’s well-meaning new age therapist), the killers-of-the-week are ridiculously implausible, and the nature of police procedure is subordinated to plot necessity to a laughable degree (Will Graham openly confesses to trying to have Hannibal Lecter murdered, for example, and suffers no legal repercussions — indeed, he is released from confinement after doing so).  For all the highfalutin therapeutic talk and focus on the psychology of criminal behavior, psychiatry itself is portrayed as something very like sorcery — halfway between telepathy and mind control, and practiced by unbalanced grandees from treasure-stuffed towers and moldering dungeons.

So why is the show so goddamn good?

Part of it is the much-ballyhooed visual style of the show.  Combining gorgeously imagined body horror in a highly artistic manner with food porn, enthralling environmental effects, and a fascinatingly powerful combination of modern and retro set and costume design, Hannibal is an astonishing thing to simply look at.  Its muted but deep color palette, moody use of architecture, and innumerable classical references in both cuisine and homicide make it a treat to look at, and everything is attenuated in such a way that even some of the most repulsive scenes of violence –such as this week, when a murder victim was found sewn inside of a pregnant horse — are riveting to look at.  It’s amazing they can get away with such high levels of gore on a network show, but they do so by never making it seem excessive, even when it clearly is.

The storytelling makes good use of its various tools — metaphor, meaning and foreshadowing are particularly well-employed, even if they have a canyon’s width and a puddle’s depth – inasmuch as the audience is willing to accept their service to an inherently lunatic narrative.  The theme of this week’s episode, that, in Hannibal’s words, “it feels good to do bad things to bad people”, could neatly encapsulate the series as a whole; it’s hardly breaking new ground to point out that the abyss gazes also, but Hannibal manages to sell the idea with great style and aplomb, if not much conviction.  The moral weight of the story is tissue-thin (and rests almost entirely on Jack Crawford’s burly shoulders), but it does considerably better work in showing how easy it is for sympathy and empathy to become commingled, and how difficult it is to put yourself in someone’s shoes without also putting them in your head.  It was an easy sale from the beginning that Will Graham might himself be the kind of maniac he is so good at hunting, and if the show gave Freddie Lounds a little more depth, it might make a point of showing that her belief that Will is a dangerous lunatic isn’t merely self-serving.  One of the cleverest tricks the narrative pulls in this regard, as well as one of its finest winks to fans of the franchise, is taking the ‘first principles’ speech (delivered by Hopkins in Silence to Foster) out of Hannibal Lecter’s mouth and putting it, almost word for word, in Graham’s; so identical are their mindsets, one merely emptied of any moral pull, that they are constantly thinking alike, and increasingly using the world as chess pieces in a game only they are playing.

But it’s really the performances that elevate the show to greatness, and save it from being merely a thing of surface perfection.  Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham is intensely damaged as a human being, so genuinely terrified by his gift at first that he doesn’t know what kind of a man he is; once he finds out, he’s almost inadvertently become his mirror image.  Raul Esparza brought a sophistication and insight to Dr. Chilton absent in prior portrayals, Aaron Abrams and the delightful Scott Thompson never fail to amuse, and while Caroline Dhavernas hasn’t been given a great deal to do with her character, she at least displays a wounded sensitivity, an ability to relate to the deepest damage in everyone that places her, both emotionally and physically, in harm’s path.  The smaller performances (particularly Gillian Anderson, who, as Hannibal’s cagey ex-therapist, did more with body language than most actors do with their entire being) have been good enough to entrust the creators with the forthcoming stories we know a bit better.  And Mads Mikkelsen is a stunner as Hannibal Lecter; taking bits and pieces of the best of previous performances (Brian Cox’s shrewd strategic calculation and alien cruelty and Anthony Hopkins’ vicious intelligence and disarming charisma) while bring his own utterly disarming presence, along with a motivation the character previously lacked:  he is a genius child or an extraterrestrial tyro, gifted with uncanny insight into human minds and using it to shake them around like bugs in a box.  In a show that is all about manipulation and deceit, it is these actors and our trust in them to deliver, often above their material, that has made Hannibal worth watching in a dreary overabundance of serial killer melodrama.

 

We are a Christian nation. Many years before Scotland or England existed (and thus many more years before the United Kingdom as is appeared), Christian Kings ruled on these isles. And even before them we were briefly under the influence of the Roman empire, whose Christian beliefs were late to appear but quickly spread. Visited by soon-to-be saints, and an important part of Christian medieval Europe (and Christian medieval empires), we really can't pretend our little islands aren't steeped in Christianity.

Our villages and towns are adorned with elaborate churches, crucifix gravestones and pubs named after saints, Bishops and monks. Important local and national history is often set against important moments involving religion: Thomas à Becket, the Reformation, the Armada, the Glorious Revolution, the Jacobites and even Catholic emancipation come together to form the tapestry of our national narrative.

When one visits a new town or city as a tourist you will almost always find yourself in the ruins of a monastery, in a cathedral or being regalled by tales of some saint or pilgrimage that visited the spot you are standing on.

Just as Buddhism and Spiritism are intrinsic to Thailand's way of life, and Hinduism influences so much in India, our very cultural outlook and morality is based on Christianity (though we rarely even aspire to live up to things I see as great virtures, such as turning the other cheek). And, above all else, our head of state is also head of an established Christian church which, unlike any country other than Iran, has seats in our legislature put aside for its clergy.

So when David Cameron barks on about us being a Christian nation he isn't completely wrong. To pretend otherwise is delusional.

But let us not pretend that this is the only narrative. We have, for many years, had a proud history of non-conformism within the Christian faith which has lead to an openness towards other faiths and non-belief that marks us out as one of the most tolerant countries on Earth. Our people are diverse and faith is a complicated, and currently waning, theme in modern Britain. To describe ourselves as a Christian nation without a whole list of caveats is to greatly misrepresent our country and insult a large number of citizens.

And that is where David Cameron just goes too far. He doesn't just want us to acknowledge the fact that yes Christianity has been a foundation on which this United Kingdom has been built, he also insists we ponder the benefits to us it has brought. And Christianity has brought us benefits (I'd much rather live here, in a western nation, than pretty much any other I could name). But to ponder its benefits without considering its problems is a fundamentally flawed and misty-eyed approach.

Christianity brought us divisive tribal politics (and wars) whose affects we still feel to this day (especially in places like Northern Ireland and Glasgow). It brought us morality laws that greatly reduced individual liberty and free thought. It allowed, and allows, unelected agents of a minority religious organisation to influence our laws. It has caused deaths through war, murder and execution in such numbers that every citizen of this nation should be ashamed.

So yes we are a Christian nation. This gives us a fascinating history, some pretty buildings, a few decent cultural traits but also a whole heap of trouble that probably outweighs the benefits. So let's try and move forward and do things better so that we live in a country with greater religious freedom, less murder and happier people.

Because you asked, that’s why.

* Tor has decided to place the entire Wheel of Time series into the Hugo voters reading packet, which has surprised many — that’s 15 books, which is a hell of a lot of reading — and I think has convinced some others that this year’s Best Novel Hugo race might be over before it begun. Well, I have a couple of thoughts here.

One, good on Tor for committing the entire series to the voter packet: The nomination is for the entire series, so voters should read the whole thing and decide whether, in sum, it is worthy. Having it available in the packet for those who have not yet attempted the series is going to be useful for that aim.

Two, I think it presents a risk to the series’ overall chances, as opposed to just placing A Memory of Light into the packet. First, because, Jesus: Fifteen books. I suspect some people who haven’t already committed to the series are just going to look at that mass of 4.4 million words and go, “uh, yeah, no,” and that will be that. Second, fifteen books are fifteen different chances for the series to fail for any particular reader. Again, if you’ve not already bought into the series, this will not necessarily be a positive.

Three, while having all the books in the series in the voter packet might be an impetus for people to get a supporting membership to the Worldcon (along with, you know, everything else in the packet), it doesn’t follow that those people will then automatically turn around and vote for the series. It’s reasonable to posit that the people who are most likely to vote for the series are already invested in the series, i.e., they already have the books, in which case their presence in the voter packet is nice but not necessary. New people coming in may be attracted by the sheer bulk of the series, but they may also decide it’s not their thing (see points one and two) and prefer one of the other nominees.

Add those up, and there’s an argument to be made that having just the final installment of the series in the packet would have been the less risky proposition.

So yeah, don’t assume having the whole series in that packet is a net positive for the series’ Hugo chances. Tor putting the whole series in the reader packet is the correct thing to do. It’s not a slam dunk, however.

* On the subject of Wheel of Time, Brandon Sanderson writes a very good piece on the series’ nomination, both to the fans of the series and to those who are coming to it from elsewhere, essentially asking both groups to set aside any prejudices they have for or against the series and to make a principled choice in terms of the Hugo. Good for him, because he’s correct; the series should be judged on its merits, and he’s the right person to make that argument to both assumed camps.

With that said, I think we need to be careful with the assumption that the only people who nominated Wheel of Time as a series are the people who are in the tank for the series and only the series. There are five slots for each category on the Hugo nomination ballot; very few fans, I suspect, nominate only one work in the novel category. I find it difficult to believe there is no overlap between WoT fans and fans of the Ann Leckie, Charlie Stross, Mira Grant and Larry Correia’s nominated novels — and if there is indeed no overlap at all, then that doesn’t bode particularly well for WoT’s chances, given how the Australian Rules ballot works.

So again: Let’s not assume a WoT slam dunk.

* Indeed, with regard to the novel, let’s recognize the strengths each nominee brings to the table: Ancillary Justice has been nominated for just about every major science fiction award this year — Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, BSFA, PKD —  and is arguably the most talked and praised science fiction novel of 2013. Neptune’s Brood is classic Charles Stross, and a very good novel of hard(er) SF, which is always popular, and Charlie is also the only UK nominee on the novel ballot, which doesn’t hurt when the Worldcon’s in London. Parasite continues Mira Grant’s novel nomination streak, is scary as hell and a damn fine read. Warbound is the surprise in the field (which is not bad), entirely different from the other nominees (also not a bad thing) and, as has been established, has its own passionate set of fans.

So once more: Let’s not count the Hugo novel chickens before they hatch. We might all be surprised — and surprise here would not a bad thing.

* I’ve been asked if I intend to read all the nominees this year. I do — some I have already read, and the rest I will get to when the Hugo voter packet comes out, if not sooner. My own particular reading style for nominations is to read until I get bored, at which point I stop. If I get to the end, then it means I wasn’t bored, so that’s good. I then rank the works that did not bore me, by various criteria including (but not limited to, and not in equal amounts) story, writing quality and emotional impact. Sometimes this requires tough choices. Sometimes it doesn’t.

When I note that I don’t always read a nominated work to the end if it bores me, some folks question whether that strategy is fair. My response: Hell yeah. If a work is boring, it’s fair to put it down — fair to me, at least, since I didn’t sign on to be bored. I don’t care if it might “pick up at the end” or whatever; if the writer didn’t pick it up at the beginning, I’m not sure why I need to do all that heavy lifting. I get bored pretty quickly; nominated works shouldn’t give me the chance to get bored.

(Mind you, as I sow, so do I reap — which is to say that if someone reading my work for the Hugos, etc gets bored with it, I am perfectly fine with them chucking it and moving on to the next thing. That’s life, people!)

* Also, no, I don’t plan to publicly comment on what I think of each of the nominated works (other than the generally positive things I’ve said about the novel nominees above) until after the award ceremony at least, no matter how fun some of you might think it would be if I did. Other people can take up that task. I will merely say what I’ve said before: If you’re voting on the Hugos this year, consider simply judging the works on their own merits. I don’t think you’ll go wrong if you do. In fact, I’m pretty sure you won’t.

 

Mallory Ortberg offers a terrific guide to “Pre-code Movies Worth Watching,” wherein she solidifies her status as one of my favorite people on the Internets with her take on I Am a Fugitive From a Chain-Gang:

My absolute favorite film of all time, bar none. You have to see it. YOU HAVE TO SEE IT. Oh, God, I want to give away the ending so bad, but I won’t, even though it’s been over 80 years. It’s one of the most absolutely harrowing endings in film history, and completely unthinkable for a studio film to end on that kind of a note at the time. There’s a hiss and a whisper and footsteps in the dark and an admission of something that’s impossible to believe. Oh, God, watch it yesterday and call me when you’re done so we can talk about it for hours.

The code of “pre-code” was the Motion Picture Production Code, a long, “touch not, taste not, handle not” list of guidelines and taboos from the Hollywood studio censors outlining what topics and depictions were off-limits.

Ortberg’s survey offers some helpful (and funny) categories, starting with “Worth Watching For Any Reasons” and then descending into others such as “Less Well-Known Remakes,” “If You Want to Get Into Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Racial Dynamics,” “Ugh, If You Must, They’re ‘Important’ But I Hate Them,” “If You Want to Take a Deeply Uncomfortable Journey to Another Time,” and ”Worth It for the Titles Alone.”

Oh, those titles. Here’s Wikipedia’s long list of pre-code movies — a list that could easily provide all the band names we’ll ever need for the next decade.  A small selection, just from those released in 1933:

• A Shriek in the Night
• Air Hostess
• Ann Carver’s Profession
• Beauty for Sale
• Broadway Through a Keyhole
• Ecstasy
• Ex-Lady
• Girl Without a Room
• The Mayor of Hell
• Midnight Mary
• The Past of Mary Holmes
• Roman Scandals
• She Done Him Wrong
• She Had to Say Yes
• Should Ladies Behave
• The Sin of Nora Moran
• The Secret of Madame Blanche
• The Song of Songs
• When Ladies Meet
• The White Sister
• Wild Boys of the Road
• The Woman Accused
  

Those titles seem to have functioned the way the movie rating system functions today. They may not have had such a thing as an “R-rating” in 1934, but I think audiences knew what they could expect from movies with titles like Fugitive Lovers, Massacre, or The Road to Ruin.

A survey of pre-code movies is an excellent antidote to much of the nonsense we sometimes hear about “old-fashioned morality.” Our grandparents’ generation is sometimes said to have lived in a more innocent time, before America went to Hell in a handbasket and began abandoning traditional morality. But it turns out our grandparents were lining up at the box office to see movies like She Couldn’t Say No or The Unholy Three.

Those pre-code movies are a good reminder that much of what gets glibly described as “traditional morality” was actually really, really immoral. I don’t just mean that people back then were titillated by stories they regarded as immoral. That’s always been true and probably always will be true. That’s the transgressive allure of the lurid, and there’s a sense in which it does as much to reinforce the prevailing morality as any moral code.

But the larger problem isn’t that people back then often transgressed against their “traditional morality.” The larger problem was that traditional morality itself was, in many ways, deeply perverse — it celebrated evil and injustice as exemplary rectitude while condemning and forbidding much that was good and beautiful and true.

Here’s Mallory Ortberg, again, describing an example of this, from the 1930 extravaganza Golden Dawn:

Fortify your spirit before giving this one a chance. It’s about a white woman kidnapped and raised by “African natives” (the setting never gets more specific than “colonial Africa”) who falls in love with an Englishman but can’t marry him until she’s able to decisively prove that she’s not biracial. Most of the “natives” are played by English actors in blackface, and the happy ending comes about when the lead character is released from a sacrificial ceremony for being “pure white,” so gird your loins if you decide to watch it. OH. And it’s a musical. So.

But then the film industry came up with the Hays Office and the Motion Picture Production Code to enforce moral standards.

Take a look at that code, particularly at it’s lists of “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls,” and you’ll see that it simply codified that same traditional immorality. Here, to get specific, are items No. 6 and No. 11 from the “Don’ts” — things that “shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated”:

6. Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races)

11. Willful offense to any nation, race or creed

No. 6 tells you all you need to know about No. 11 — what was meant by it and how it was applied. That 11th Don’t conveys an admirable sentiment of respect for every “nation, race or creed,” but it was constricted by the unstated, unexamined, almost unconscious assumptions that put that prohibition against any depiction of “miscegenation” five slots higher on the list. Thus the bad parts of “traditional morality” prevented even the good parts from being any good.

But before we congratulate ourselves for our relative enlightenment, we should remember that the dangerous tricky thing about unstated, unexamined, and (almost) unconscious assumptions is that they are all of those things. We don’t fully know we’re making them when we’re making them.

And we’re making just as many of them as Hays or Breen or Comstock or any other notoriously myopic moral censor of the past.

We have overcome and corrected some of the immoral blindnesses of “traditional morality” — 84 percent of white Americans no longer think there should be a law against interracial marriage, and that has been the majority view since way back in 1996 (!). But there are plenty of other blindnesses and unstated assumptions from traditional morality that we continue to suffer from — as well as some new ones we’ve come up with to add to the list, probably. For me, personally, for example, there’s the obvious moral blind-spot regarding …

I can’t finish that sentence yet, but I’ve no doubt that a generation from now others will have no trouble doing so. It may turn out to be a very long sentence.

The Motion Picture Production Code has not aged well because no moral code ages well. Every attempt to codify morality that goes beyond “love is the fulfillment of the law” or “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind” is bound to be shaped by all of the blindnesses and the assumptions of the people and the age that produced it. So every moral code will therefore have omissions and oversights, and will also include horrors that have no business being included. And just like in the MPPC’s list of “Don’ts,” those omissions and horrible admissions will wind up skewing even the good bits that might seem unrelated to them.

Whenever you question the “traditional morality” of any moral code that’s not aging well, you’ll be accused of lawless anarchy and antinomianism. “So you think anything goes” they say. They don’t mean it as a question, so they won’t wait for, or allow, an answer. And thus they’ll never understand the point.

The point isn’t that we should once and for all destroy all moral codes. The point is that we should perpetually be destroying them so that we can perpetually replace them.

Moral codes are things that perish with use. They have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety and severity, but they don’t age well. Test everything, hold onto the good.

As you may already know, British Pathé has made an archive of 85,000 films available through YouTube. I’m not sure how I found my way to this one. From 1940, it’s George Formby singing one of his signature songs, “The Window Cleaner”:


Did you notice what was going on in the first two seconds? Those are the ukulele chords at the end of The Beatles’ “Free as a Bird,” played a half-step down. That tag also appears at the end of the Formby favorite “Mr. Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now” (in the proper key of D: B♭7, A7, D). I knew that the end of “Free as a Bird” was a tip of the hat to Formby, but I didn’t know that the hat fit so perfectly.

It’s not a Formby sample at the end of “Free as a Bird”; by all accounts, it’s another George, Harrison, Formby fan and devoted ukuleleist, who plays those chords. According to the George Formby Appreciation Society, the man on stage at the end of the “Free as a Bird” video is Formbyite Alan Randall.

And as every Beatles fan should already know, the voice at the end of “Free as a Bird” that sounds as if it’s saying “Made by John Lennon” is John’s voice in reverse, speaking the Formby catchphrase “Turned out nice again.” That phrase is the title of a Formby film. And “It’s Turned Out Nice Again” is a Formby song.

Here’s a page with a link to George Harrison playing and singing a Formby song. And here’s George at home, playing Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s “A Shine on Your Shoes,” ending with the tag. And here’s a clip of George and Jeff Lynne on banjo-ukes. The tag’s at 2:54.

I love the Internets.

[“Mr. Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now” is not nearly as offensive as I had feared. But proceed at your own risk. How do I know that the George-at-home clip is in fact George? The footage is included in an iPad app about his guitars. At iTunes, the clip is visible at the top of the Video Vault screenshot.]

Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, has kindly made his Hugo-nominated story "Opera Vita Aeterna" available as an ePub here (many online links for other Hugo nominees are listed by John DeNardo here).

I'll save discussion of the story's literary merits to my review of all the nominees in this category; for now I want to indicate some areas for linguistic improvement, specifically in the use of Latin in the story. There are a number of slightly odd usages, and three that I spotted which are flat-out wrong. Going in reverse order as they appear:

1. Towards the end of the story we are brought to a room called the "Cella Mundus", the chamber of the world. But "Cella" normally means a small room, and this one is very big; also, "Mundus" should be genitive "Mundi".
2. The central character belongs to a body called the "Collegium Occludum", presumably the hidden college. There is no such word as "Occludum" in Latin; the writer should have written "Occlusum". (I see that Occludus is the name of the home planet of the Death Spectres in Warhammer 40k; perhaps this is the source of the confusion.) "Occlusus" is closer in meaning to "closed up" than to "hidden", but in fairness that may have been the intended meaning.
3. The title itself, "Opera Vita Aeterna", is wrong. Though the phrase is not actually used in the story, it's fairly clear that it is intended to mean "The works of an eternal life". However, the long-lived protagonist completes only one work in the story, albeit a long one in many parts, so "Opera" should be "Opus". In addition, "Vita Aeterna" should be genitive (the same error as "Mundus" above), so that would be "Opus Vitæ Æternæ". Finally, of course, the use of "eternal" in this context to refer to a long-lived being in the world of the living jars as being rather different from its normal context in Church Latin to refer to the afterlife; it might have been better to choose another word entirely.

I hope these pointers are useful to anyone else who wants to write a story with the odd Latin phrase thrown in, particularly if one of those phrases is given prominence by putting it in the title.

(I was also surprised to read that the monks in the story had three books of "approved apocrypha", surely an oxymoron.)

You can, of course, vote for the Hugos yourself by joining this year's Worldcon, Loncon 3, here.

Here in Detroit, there is debate and concern over the possibility that the city’s bankruptcy might obligate it to sell off masterpieces in the local art museum. Is solving a temporary financial problem really worth the cultural impoverishment of the city?

Yes. From Marginal Revolution:

Consider “The Wedding Dance,” a 16th-century work by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Detroit museum visitors have enjoyed this painting since 1930. How much would it cost to preserve that privilege for future generations?

A tidy sum, as it turns out. According to Christie’s, this canvas alone could fetch up to $200 million. Once interest rates return to normal levels — say, 6 percent — the forgone interest on that amount would be approximately $12 million a year.

If we assume that the museum would be open 2,000 hours a year, and ignore the cost of gallery space and other indirect expenses, the cost of keeping the painting on display would be more than $6,000 an hour. Assuming that an average of five people would view it per hour, all year long, it would still cost more than $1,200 an hour to provide the experience for each visitor.

So the question of “should Detroit keep this painting?” reduces to “does the average visitor to the art museum derive $1200 in value from seeing this particular painting?” which is very close to “would you pay $1200 for a ticket to an art museum that only had this painting in it?”

(other people may be more cultured than I am, but I find when I’m in an art museum I spend about ten seconds looking at each painting before moving on to the next one. So for me, at least, the cost is $120 per second of viewing time)

In If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made Up Statistics, I endorse trying to think quantitatively – not because we are always very good at quantifying things, but because sometimes just the attempt to quantify things makes the right answer so drop-dead obvious that whatever errors you make won’t change things one way or the other.

In the comments on MR people object that maybe some of the numbers in the calculation are a bit off, and that’s probably true. But just by trying the first numbers we think of, we realize we’re three orders of magnitude away from the spot where this would be a hard problem. And our numbers aren’t that off.

And this is why I continue to identify as consequentialist even though consequentialism is very hard and we can never do it exactly right. You don’t need a complete theory of ballistics in order to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Since I’m already being all soulless and analytical, let me just come out and say it – sell every piece of art in Detroit, but hire skilled forgers to make exact copies of them for a couple of hundred dollars each. You’ll have made billions of dollars, and the Detroit Art Museum will look exactly the same to anyone who’s not examining it through an electron microscope.

Sure, it’ll make it a little harder to signal snooty cultural superiority. But if you’re living in Detroit and trying to signal snooty cultural superiority, man, I don’t know what to tell you.

Just to pull this out and give it its own post for emphasis.

So, apparently Larry Correia and Vox Day offered on their Web sites a slate of suggested nominees for several Hugo categories, and several of their suggested nominees hit the final ballot. This has made a number of people feel things ranging from annoyance to outrage, with the commensurate suggestion that, if such a thing is not illegal, then it’s at least just not done. So let me offer a couple of thoughts.

1. Does what these two fellows have done contravene the actual Hugo nomination rules? If they answer is “no” (and it does in fact appear to be “no”), then fair play. Game on.

2. As to the “it’s just not done” thing: Well, now it has. And as it’s been done, and it’s by all indications entirely legal, wasting time griping that it’s happened, with regards to this year’s voting, seems like frittering to me. Again: Game on.

3. But it’s also not entirely honest to say that it’s not been done before, either. Lots of people suggest or at least remind people of their own works for consideration (I do the latter); lots of people suggest or at least remind people of the works of others for consideration. Just this year I suggested Abagail Nussbaum for Fan Writer; there she is on the ballot. Was my recommendation causative? Maybe, maybe not (I suspect not — she’s built a reputation over a number of years), but the point is I made the recommendation.

The new wrinkle here would be Correia/Day allegedly exhorting a comprehensive slate of nominees for the purpose of annoying people they would like to annoy, rather than with regard to the quality of the works offered. I’m not sure that’s the whole story (From what I can see, I think the list was composed to highlight works these fellows found worthy, and also, as a bonus, they thought they’d annoy some folks in the bargain). But again, even if the least charitable interpretation holds, see point one and point two. You may see this as a cynical, contemptuous of the awards and the people who vote for them, and just a real dick move. But even if it were, eh. Yet again: this is the hand the Hugos are dealt this year. Let’s go ahead and play it.

4. More to the point for me, even if we were to grant that a slate of nominees was engineered to get on the ballot for the purposes of annoying some voters, and to make some obtuse point about politics and the Hugos, why should anyone be obliged to play along by those assertions? To paraphrase a point I made yesterday on Twitter, how terrible it would be if someone elbowed their way onto the Hugo list to make a political point, and all that happened was that their nominated work was judged solely by its artistic merits.

If work was shunted onto the list to make a political point and without regard to its quality, and it is crap, you’re going to know it when you read that work, and you should judge it accordingly. And if a work was shunted onto the list to make a political point and without regard to the quality, and it’s pretty good, you’re going to know that too — and you should judge it accordingly. If you believe that these fellows pushed their way onto the list to make a political point, nothing will annoy them more than for their work to be considered fairly. It undermines their entire point.

It doesn’t mean you give a work an award, if you find it lacking. But you treat it fairly. And yes, it’s entirely possible that in this formulation, anything less than a win will be seen by them as evidence of politics. But again: Why would you accede to such assertions? If their works win, good for them. If they lose, that’s life. Speaking as a six-time Hugo loser, who once lost a Hugo by a single vote, let me just say that when you’re a grown-up, you learn to accept you don’t get everything you want.

5. Please also keep in mind that even if you believe that the list is a cynical exercise, there are people and work on that list who may be well worth consideration, who may or may not have even known they were part of (or would have consented to) being part of a cynical exercise. Consider that you would be doing them (and the Hugos) a disservice to dismiss them out of hand. I’ve seen rumblings of people suggesting they’ll put everyone on the Correia/Day slate below “no award” no matter what, but if you’re doing that, you’re making these fellows’ alleged point for them. Again: Why do that? It’s nearly as easy to read a work (or at least, read as far as can) and decide it’s just not for you. And if it is for you, well. Surprise!

6. On a strictly personal note, at least one of these fellows apparently wishes to assert that the reason they’re introducing politics into the mix here is because I did it before them, i.e., that this is somehow really my fault. Well, no. One, just because this dude doesn’t like me, it doesn’t make me responsible for his actions. That’s the sort of “he made me do it” logic you give up when you’re twelve. Two, I’ve certainly made people aware of my work, and given space on my site to let others do the same; I’m not aware of ever having said “here’s a slate of people you should nominate for this award, including me.” Totally legal and no reason not to, if you think it’s something you want to do. Not something I would want to do, or have done.

But if the suggestion is that I’ve been strategic about getting onto the Hugo ballot at times, well. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest I haven’t. I have, and certainly I know that’s annoyed people before. But, oh well — and no matter what at the end of the day what I was on the ballot for had to face the other nominees in the category. Sometimes that work fared well, and I took home a Hugo. But I also have my share of fifth place finishes, too.

I think maybe this is why I’m less annoyed with the Correia/Day slate than others. If they’re on the ballot due to crafty strategy, well, good for them. A nice trick if you can manage it. But now they have to compete. I look who’s on the ballot with them, and this is what I have to say about that: Good luck, guys. You’re gonna need it.

7. Ultimately, here’s what I think about this year’s slate: It’s got some stuff on it I already know I like. It’s got some stuff on it that I already know I don’t like. And it’s got some stuff on it I haven’t read, so I’ll read it and decide what I think.

In other words; it’s a Hugo slate pretty much any Hugo slate in any year. I plan to treat it exactly like I treat any Hugo slate in any year. You might consider it, too.

 

fjm observed of the 1939 BDP nominations:

Apparently the Russell T Davies of 1939 was Orson Welles (4 of 5 Best Short Dramatic Presentation) #RetroHugos #Loncon3 #hugoawards

— Farah Mendlesohn (@effjayem) April 19, 2014

Now, the good thing about that is that they are all available online from several archive sites. I will link to them from here, but you can find them on the Internet Archive as well. (My links are single MP3 files, though you can probably find other formats if you poke around.)
Around The World In 80 Days (23 October 1938)
A Christmas Carol (23 December 1938)
Dracula (11 July 1938)
The War Of The Worlds (30 October 1938)

Unfortunately no recording is known to survive of the fifth nominee, the BBC's 11 February 1938 live 38-minute TV adaptation of R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, thought to be the first ever BBC science fiction play.

Because, I have them!

* Nope, I’m not on the ballot this year. It will happen. As I won the best novel Hugo last year, I am perfectly fine with that. It’s nice to spread around the joy.

* I think it’s an interesting slate this year: Lots of stuff to like, a few things to puzzle over, and as always lots of fodder for discussion. On the novel ballot it’s particularly interesting to see Wheel of Time (the complete series) there — it’s a quirk of the Hugo rules that if any individual book of a series hasn’t been nominated, the entire series can be. So here we are with the whole series. Quirky Hugo rules are fun.

* I just know you’re all dying to know what I think of Vox Day’s nomination in the Novelette category. I think this: One, I haven’t read the story in question, so I can’t possibly comment on it. Two, the Hugo nomination process is pretty straightforward — people nominate a work in a category. If it gets enough votes, it’s a nominee. If the work’s on the ballot, it’s because enough nominators wanted it there. Three, the Hugo rules don’t say that a racist, sexist, homophobic dipshit can’t be nominated for a Hugo — nor should they, because in that particular category at least, it’s about the work, not the person.

In sum: Vox Day has every right (so far as I know, and as far as you know, too) to be on the ballot. You may not like it, or may wish to intimate that the work in question doesn’t deserve to be on the ballot, but you should remember what “deserve” means in the context of Hugo (i.e., that the nominators follow the rules while nominating), and just deal with it like the grown up you are.

* Apropos of nothing in particular, however, I will note that in every category it is possible to rank a nominated work below “No Award” if, after reading the work in question and giving it fair and serious consideration, you decide that it doesn’t deserve to be on the ballot and, say, that its presence on the ballot is basically a stunt by a bunch of nominators who were more interested in trolling the awards than anything else. Just a thing for you to keep in mind when voting time rolls around.

* Also, remember when I said that one of the drawbacks of announcing the Hugo Awards on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter was that it means that the stories the media will pick up on during the week will be the outraged reactions? Yeah, this is very likely to be another year that it works that way, I think.

* On a related note, and to get out ahead of what I suspect will be a talking point, I think people may wish to suggest that aside from Vox Day there are other writers on the Hugo ballot who are there more for political and/or trolling purposes than for the quality of the nominated work, and in particular writers who are known to be more on the politically conservative side of things.

Here’s what I have to say about that: You know what? Don’t do that. Instead, take a look at the work, read the work, and if you like the work, place it appropriately on your ballot. Because why shouldn’t you? Regardless of how a work got on the ballot (or more accurately in this case, how you think it got onto the ballot), it’s there now. Read the books and stories. If you like them, great. If you don’t, there’s plenty of other excellent work on the ballot for your consideration.

Let me put it this way: In the last year, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen have teed up on me several times in blog posts and comments, for their own various reasons. They don’t have my politics or my world view in a lot of things. But I’m looking forward to reading their nominated works, and if one of them really catches my fancy, and I don’t see why I wouldn’t vote for it. Correia and Torgersen disagreeing with me or trying to score points off of me for their own purposes isn’t really enough to dissuade me from giving their work a fair shake. It’s a pretty simple thing as far as I’m concerned. Your mileage may vary, of course. But this is my mileage.

* I noted on Twitter that I was delighted that yet again the Fan Writer Hugo category will have a new winner this year — no one nominated this year has won it before. It really does make me happy this has been the path of this particular Hugo category.

Aaaaaand those are my immediate Hugo thoughts. Your thoughts on my thoughts?

Update: No, the Hugo nominations were not rigged.

Two political science articles I read recently have surprisingly dissonant conclusions.

Gilens and Page’s study “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” is very interesting. You may have spotted it in the news media under any of a host of diverse titles:

The New Yorker: Is America An Oligarchy?

BBC: Study: US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy.

RT: Oligarchy, Not Democracy.

Business Insider: Major Study Finds That The US Is An Oligarchy.

And my favorite, Daily Kos: Too Important For Clever Titles: Scientific Study Says We Are An Oligarchy

(the word “oligarchy” appears in the study only once, at the bottom of page six, as a reference to an alternative theory the authors do not endorse)

But RAMPANT MEDIA PLAGIARISM aside, it’s not a bad summary. The study tries to determine what factors predict whether or not a policy gets implemented in the United States. They compare popular support to elite support, where “elites” are the wealthiest ten percent, and find that elite support is a stronger predictor. I believe the way they put it is that once you know whether elites support a policy, learning whether or not the general public supports it improves your model’s ability to predict whether or not it gets passed only an tiny amount, even though elite opinion and popular opinion are often quite different.

Also recently, Rationalist Conspiracy had a good post on Money Doesn’t Matter In Politics. A lot of anecdotes, but also links to some convincing studies, like the one that shows how “in Congressional races where candidates spent about $250K (1990 dollars), every $100K spent got another 0.3% of the vote, a tiny amount.”

To Alyssa’s list I would add Ansolabehere, Figueiredo and Snyder’s: Why Is There So Little Money In Politics?, recently spotted on Marginal Revolution. The summary (which does not include the word “oligarchy”):

“We show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators’ votes. We illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money in politics, but rather why organized interests give at all.”

I call these “dissonant” because the simplest explanation for the Gilens and Page finding is that the economic elite are buying elections. But the Ansolabehere et al result says they couldn’t even if they tried. If we take both of these studies at face value, how can we reconcile them?

I can think of a few hypotheses:

1. Legislators vote based on their personal opinions. Most legislators are elite, therefore their opinions correlate with the opinions of other elites.

2. Elites control the media, the universities, et cetera. They affect legislators indirectly, by affecting the entire culture (but how would they do this without influencing commoners? Maybe this is a subset of [1], in that elites consume elite-produced media?)

3. Legislators would like to think they are elite, and so they vote with elite opinion in the hopes of looking cool and getting elites to like them.

4. Money does not buy elections, but legislators think it does, so they try to satisfy the people with the money in order to win elections.

5. Money does not buy elections, but money can fund think tanks and lobbyists who can persuade legislators through non-election-buying means. This doesn’t take the form of promising financial support or during elections, it just comes from talking and befriending and advising and convincing them. The studies showing money doesn’t affect campaigns miss this effect. Ansolabehere seems to like this one, pointing out that interest groups spend ten times as much as lobbying as on direct campaign contributions. But even here there are economic arguments against. They estimate that one hour of a legislator’s time costs $10,000. This is a high number, but if talking to legislators seriously affected legislation it would be an amazing steal.

6. Elites vote more and are more politically active in terms of volunteering, letter-writing, etc. Legislators try to cultivate their affection to win elections, but it has nothing to do with money. But this effect doesn’t seem strong enough to make up for the small number of elites.

7. The connection between elites and successful policies is a coincidence – not in the sense that the study found a nonsignificant finding, but in the sense that elite opinion and legislative success are both biased in the same direction for different reasons. For example, maybe elites tend to lean conservative, and the conservative party in government is much better organized and able to push more legislation through. Gallup finds there is not a big difference between elites and commoners in terms of basic party labeling. But this study (which does define “elite” somewhat differently) shows that elites are predictably less supportive of welfare and redistribution programs than commoners are (I am enraged that this study doesn’t give good comparative data on social issues). If those programs tend to fail for some reason, that could help produce some of these effects.

In 2010 something quite remarkable happened.

Two parties came together, they claimed in the national interest (although some would of course dispute that motive) to form a coalition in order to govern the country for the next 5 years.

It has been difficult for the Conservatives and Lib Dems. They haven't always agreed and there have been at time bitter arguments between them. However they have managed to remain in government together and nobody now seriously thinks that they will not last another year until polling day on May 7th 2015.

In the meantime, the Labour opposition have tried to find different ways to position themselves against the government. They have been quite inventive in this. They have referred to it as a "Tory led government" as they clearly think this is a good attack line. They have at times accused the Lib Dems of "betraying" their voters and also implied that this government has no mandate as nobody specifically elected the coalition. They have questioned the motives of ministers of both parties in the way they have implemented the cuts, claiming they are "ideological". They have berated the government for being heartless, out of touch, in the pocket of millionaires and many, many, many other such attacks.

This has been rather effective. Look:


Labour climbed ahead of the Tories in the polls a few months after the 2010 general election and apart from a slight blip a year or so later when the Tories briefly overtook them they have basically stayed ahead. The Lib Dems slid down to around 10% and have bumped around at that level ever since.

Surely based on this Labour is winning the argument and the public would prefer Labour then?

Well not quite actually. Look:


If we combine the totals of both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, (i.e. the two parties of government) then that combined total has largely been ahead of Labour. There's a bit of crossover around the time and for a while after the "Omnishambles" budget of 2012. But for the majority of the time and certainly quite recently the "government" total has been ahead.

Of course the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are two separate parties. They won't be merging or standing on joint tickets, or even going for some sort of "coupon" agreement next year. They will stand separately. But Labour consistently attacks and berated the entire government. The pejorative term "ConDem" government is used to great effect in their campaigning. So if they are going to attack the entire government it is only fair to look at the figures in that context. And that shows us that despite the fact that for 4 years the government has had to make swingeing cuts and has launched unpopular reforms in all sorts of areas, they are still more popular than the Labour opposition.

If I was a Labour politician or activist I'd be very worried about this.

America is an oligarchy not a democracy.