Andrew Hickey

There’s a passage in Matthew’s account of the Resurrection (27:52-53) that hasn’t received much attention until relatively recently. At the moment Jesus is resurrected:

“the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”

Christopher Hitchens was among the more prominent people to do a doubletake: ‘These rather conspicuous events, which among other things would seem to make resurrection something of a commonplace, were entirely missed by Saint John, or at any rate unreported by him, and appear not at all in the only written historical record, which was by Flavius Josephus.’.

All four canonical gospels spend a lot of their time discussing the events of the death and Resurrection of Christ (at least a third of their word count), but only Matthew thinks it worth mentioning that ‘many holy people’ emerged from their tombs and walked into Jerusalem, and the quote above is the sum total of Matthew’s description. It does beg a few questions: How many holy people? Who were they? Who did they appear to? What happened to them afterwards?

Matthew is describing one of the most impressive miracles anywhere in the Bible, and not just because it sounds spectacular, dramatic and above all else public, so difficult to dismiss. It’s significant because it’s a miracle that’s not just a conjuring trick, it’s something that should have been extraordinarily informative, with some direct theological implications. Did these holy men say anything interesting? Lazarus did, we’re told, when he returned from the dead. Did they just stand there? How did people recognise them, if they didn’t say anything?

Perhaps a more practical question is to ask where Matthew got his information. Well, the first thing to note is that the author of the Gospel According to Matthew refers to the apostle Matthew in the third person, and that the attribution of this Gospel to him is based on a fourth century source who said Matthew wrote a book of collected sayings in ‘the language of the Hebrews’, then ascribes a Gospel to him that isn’t a book of sayings and most scholars agree was originally written in Greek. There is, as ever, some debate, but no one really argues that the author of Matthew was an eyewitness. He was writing at least one, probably two generations after the event, and he was probably living in Syria. Even if he’d been living in Jerusalem at the time, he couldn’t have been an eyewitness to every event of those days. If he’d seen the ‘many holy people’ who’d risen himself, you might think he’d describe that in more detail.
He based what he wrote on ‘Mark’ (the earliest gospel, most scholars agree); the Q Document, which is not, as Chris Morris once suggested, the book where Christ was issued his Walther PPK and gadgets, but a now lost book of Jesus’ sayings that ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ seem to have read but ‘Mark’ apparently hadn’t; and some material unique to Matthew, which he’d possibly acquired by collecting oral accounts or referring to now-lost letters, lists or similar documents.

Where did the author learn about the ‘many holy people’? We don’t know. There are – as far as I’ve been able to find out – no other contemporary accounts, either from Christian or non-Christian sources, canonical or non-canonical, that even hint at it. It does seem odd that something so spectacular didn’t rate a mention anywhere. This may or may not mean something. The Romans loved stories about weird happenings, what we’d call Fortean events now. But not everything was widely reported and the surviving written record is fragmentary. It’s entirely possible (and completely impossible to prove) that it was the talk of the town for a hundred years, or survived for a long time as an urban myth.

There’s an obvious sceptical explanation: it didn’t happen. And we can qualify this further by saying Matthew clearly had a pragmatic reason for adding it – his is the Gospel most concerned with reconciling the life of Jesus to the Old Testament and Jewish tradition generally. The early church faced scepticism from Jews who didn’t think Jesus fit the description of the Messiah from prophecy. (Ezekiel 28:24, for example, says that ‘No longer will the people of Israel have malicious neighbours who are painful briers and sharp thorns’, and a pedant might feel Jesus missed his performance target on that). Matthew does include information that doesn’t appear in the other Gospels but which aligns Jesus with prophecy. There are cynical and non-cynical explanations for why he would do that, but the simplest explanation either way is ‘in order to fit prophecy, the author of Matthew added these couple of lines’. Off his own bat? Possibly, but you’d imagine and hope someone would say ‘er … not heard that before, where did you get this bit from?’. And while there are parts of the New Testament that scholars agree have been, for want of a better word, retconned so that the account of Jesus’ life and actions fits the expectation for a Messiah, it’s not clear which prophecy this ‘many holy people’ rising would be fulfilling.

But the cynical explanation fits the facts as we know them: the author of Matthew (who isn’t the apostle Matthew) essentially made it up, because it helped his case.

It should be noted that there are places in Matthew where he does seem to offer some awkward moments, that his account isn’t some neat whitewash, and that he seems to be engaged in an exercise of writing down what people already believe, rather than making stuff up.

I’ve found precisely one reference to it between Matthew and the present day. [Edited to clarify: by which I mean a reference that's attempted to elaborate on the risen holy people walking into Jerusalem as historical event and fill in details. Thanks to Kate Orman (see comments), this article demonstrates that many Christian scholars have accepted it and referred to it. The main point of discussion appears to be the story logic of exactly when they were resurrected. Many elide it with some form of the Harrowing of Hell. There is some discussion about what happened to the risen saints - the consensus seems to be that they ascended with Jesus. Again, this begs a question - that would mean that a group of resurrected holy people spent forty days in Jerusalem. Where were they? Apparently they were not doing anything at all worth mentioning. You'd think if they were with Jesus, then they'd feature in some accounts of what Jesus did. When Jesus seeks to reassure Doubting Thomas, for example, he shows him his wounds. Presumably if he had a cohort of resurrected Jewish prophets and patriarchs with him, Jesus would have gone on to say 'and there's also these guys'.  Geisler cites Ignatius, writing in the very early second century. Ignatius is a key early figure in Christian history, and must have been a contemporary of 'Matthew'. It's interesting, I think, that Ignatius cites 'Scripture' to support the account of the holy people rising, given that the only scripture we know that mentions it is Matthew. Presumably appearing in scripture would have made the claim more plausible than if Ignatius said he knew a friend of a friend who'd seen it with his own eyes. Sticking to the evidence we know about, all we can infer from Ignatius is that he read Matthew and accepted it, 'it' explicitly including the story of the risen holy people.]

The only source to elaborate on the story as historical event  is The Mystical City of God. Not Augustine’s book, but a book a mid-seventeenth century nun, Mary of Jesus of Agreda, said was dictated to her by the Virgin Mary. This is from Book 6, Chapter 11:
‘In all this glory and heavenly adornment the Saviour now arose from the grave; and in the presence of the saints and Patriarchs He promised universal resurrection in their own flesh and body to all men, and that they moreover, as an effect of his own Resurrection, should be similarly glorified. As an earnest and as a pledge of the universal resurrection, the Lord commanded the souls of many saints there present to reunite with their bodies and rise up to immortal life. Immediately this divine command was executed, and their bodies arose, as is mentioned by saint Matthew, in anticipation of this mystery (Matthew 27, 52). Among them were saint Anne, saint Joseph and saint Joachim, and others of the ancient Fathers and Patriarchs, who had distinguished themselves in the faith and hope of the Incarnation, and had desired and prayed for it with greater earnestness to the Lord. As a reward for their zeal, the resurrection and glory of their bodies was now anticipated.’
This puts a little flesh on the bones, as it were. St Joseph is Mary’s husband, Anne and Joachim are Mary’s parents (their names are nyotas, in this case from the Gospel of James, a book not accepted as canon from the generation after Matthew). It’s a little strange that none of the other ‘holy people’ are named – they would, presumably, have to have been ones entombed just outside Jerusalem. Again, there’s no secular source for where Mary of Jesus of Agreda got this information. Is it a passed down oral tradition? If so, then it’s not left another mark, and it is not part of official Catholic teaching.

‘Immortal life’ here would seem to mean that the risen saints didn’t return to their tombs, that their resurrections weren’t temporary. It’s presumably, though, not meant to imply they’re still wandering the Earth. If they’d ascended bodily to Heaven, as some Christian traditions teach Mary did, that would be worth mentioning. This was the conclusion of the fifth century St Remigius, who said ‘We ought therefore to believe without hesitation that they who rose from the dead at the Lord’s resurrection, ascended also into heaven together with Him’.

Bede thought Joseph was buried in the Valley of Josaphat, eleven miles from Jerusalem. There are various other traditions, and Bulgaria’s National History Museum has relics including body parts. The relics of St Anne have been venerated since the eighth century, and there was a church built over Anne and Joachim’s tombs in the fourth century which survived until the ninth. That would seem to contradict the account in The Mystical City of God, and it also suggests that there’s no prevailing tradition to suggest Joseph or Mary’s parents were resurrected.

Whether you think it happened as an historical event or not, it’s still odd, isn’t it? Why isn’t the story of ‘many holy people’ more prominent in Christian teaching? Why isn’t this a big deal? Have the bishops and theologians really just glossed over it in the hope no one ever invents Christopher Hitchens or blogging? If we take the post-theist approach, that religious narratives are stories, then I think the answer becomes obvious. Surely Hitchens is right that, in story terms, all these other resurrections cheapen the main one that day, or at the very least shift the focus away from the protagonist (note that The Mystical City of God does quite a neat job of fixing this problem by having Jesus actively initiating and guiding the process). I think another has to be that … well, it’s only a couple of lines in one of the Gospels, and they’re oddly offhand. The author of Matthew didn’t seem to think it worth dwelling on, it was 1600 years before anyone else seems to have mentioned it. Logically, we might feel it ought to be important, but that’s not the story being told.

The arrow of time is caused by quantum entanglement.

When I was taking classes in the craft of fiction, everyone—from established professional writers to English professors—recommended that a writer never ever say that a character looked like a famous actor. No “he resembled a young Orson Welles” or “she dressed like Claudette Colbert.”

Not only was it lazy writing—the Gurus said—but, more importantly, there was no way for your reader to know exactly what you meant.

You see, kids, back in the days when you walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to your typewriter, when manuscripts were laced with white-out, and copies were made with carbon paper, old movies were hard to find.

I was lucky: I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research has a complete collection of Warner Brothers films from 1931 to 1949, not to mention an archive of theater, film, and television that went through the 1970s.

The university’s film society would schedule old movie nights and charge a reasonable amount for students. So I saw a lot of old films that most people never saw. (There’s a reason that Madison produced some of the best movie writers and critics of my generation; they had access to old films when most students outside of New York and Los Angeles did not.)

But the teachers all had a point. Not only did referencing old movies make it difficult for modern readers to “see” your characters, it also dated the work. Because so much of popular culture back then was available for such a short period of time, and then it was impossible to find without an archive nearby, a good old movie house (with a lot of money), or a lot of late-night television viewing. I often memorized TV Guide, and stayed up until the wee hours to see a censored version of a movie I’d only heard about.

Cabaret made no sense when I saw the movie version on network television, with all references to homosexuality and sex removed. But I struggled through, since that was the only way I thought I might ever see the film.

I did that with a lot of films. A college friend spent his first year in the TV room of our dorm, watching classic Star Trek every afternoon. He’d only heard about the show; he hadn’t been allowed to watch it at home, so he caught the reruns. I first saw Doctor Who on various PBS stations, out of order and often at very strange times of the day, because I couldn’t see them any other way.

The shift began in the 1980s, with video cassettes. But even then, only people with money (and the correct kind of video player) could watch films. The true change really hit as Blockbuster and other video rentals made watching affordable.

Even so, it wasn’t always easy. Some films never made it to video. Most films got made into DVDs, but even now, some aren’t available. (Unless you guys can locate a DVD or streaming version of my favorite Bill Forsyth film, Comfort and Joy. I haven’t been able to.)

By the early 1990s, I realized I could compare my characters to movie stars, if I wanted to, and people would understand. It’s still lazy if that’s all I say—but if I’m in the point of view of say a major movie buff, it might be a great way to characterize my narrator. The option is open to me.

That change is simple to understand. Those of us raised in a world where everything was fleeting truly appreciate the fact that we can now share the things we love with someone else whenever we want to. We’re aware of the difference.

But we haven’t given much thought to the world we’re moving into. The world that so many people who were born from about 1995 to now will inhabit.

Let me give you two different examples of the attitude shift.

The first example comes from a story I read this week, from The Best American Mysteries 2011. The story, “Diamond Alley” by Dennis McFadden, captures the world that I and so many people who were born between 1945 and 1985 grew up in.

The [Pittsburgh] Pirates were with us everywhere that autumn. They filled the air. Every evening when we went out, we didn’t need our transistors—we could hear Bob Prince calling the game all over town, his friendly baritone drifting from radios on porches, in kitchens and living rooms, as pervasive as the scent of burning leaves.

If you walked down the street on any given night in America, looking at the reflection of the televisions in your neighbors’ windows, you had a one in three chance of knowing what they were watching, even if they had the curtains closed. If they had the curtains open, then you could see an actor or two, and realize exactly what they were watching—and what time it was at that moment.

Things were that static. You also knew if you were walking, and, say, Bonanza was on, you would have to hurry home to catch the rest of it. You might not get to see the beginning ever (or so you thought then).

The second example comes from a New Yorker article on Netflix, published in the February 3, 2014 issue. Brian Robbins, who runs Awesomeness TV, a provider of YouTube channels (and programming) and which attract (as far as I can tell) at least thirty-one million teens and tweens. About their attitude toward programming, he says,

The next generation, our audience and even younger, they don’t even know what live TV is. They live in an on-demand world.

An on-demand world.

Think about that for a moment. Those of us raised in that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it world had a sense of urgency about everything we loved. If we didn’t schedule ourselves around a TV show, we’d miss it. If we missed the opening weekend to a film, we might not see it. If we weren’t listening to the radio during a baseball game, we might never understand the nuances—we’d have to stick with the reported coverage the next day.

That’s changed. I don’t feel any urgency at all about finding what I love. I just deleted a show to make room on my DVR, secure in the knowledge that I can pick up that series on demand when I’m ready to.

On demand.

On demand requires quite a mental shift for those of us raised in the old Get-It-Now world. And most of us have made some of that shift. We’re aware that we can buy something when we want it or watch a show whenever we feel like it, but we’re not aware of the other habits and things that are changing.

The biggest generational shift is an unconscious sense of entitlement that people who grew up in an on-demand world have. They want a show or a book or a song when they want it, and they want it to be easily accessible, in a format they can use.

When they can’t get it, they either complain—loudly on social media—or they steal it.

Study after study has shown that piracy goes up when something is restricted or impossible to get. The BBC learned this with Doctor Who in 2012. They made the show available in the States six hours after the show aired in Britain to get rid of online piracy.  By 2013’s Christmas episode, the BBC learned that an international simulcast not only boosted ratings but also reduced piracy.

People want what they want when it’s available, but that doesn’t mean they have to watch it then.

Fans will go to great lengths to get what they want when they want it. HBO GO crashed on April 6 when Game of Thrones premiered, not because the system couldn’t handle the demand of the subscribers, but because it couldn’t handle the demand of the subscribers and the thieves.

From The Washington Post:

Password sharing is incredibly common for streaming video sites — a cordcutter will use the login information of a friend, family worker, or, in the case of New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham, a stranger from New Jersey they once met in a Mexican restaurant to access a service, such as Netflix or HBO GO without paying subscription fees.

The solutions HBO provided on April 6^th to its subscribers were to watch the rebroadcast an hour or so later or to catch the show through the On Demand offering from their cable provider. Those who used borrowed passwords couldn’t do that.

HBO isn’t concerned about the thieves, by the way. After Buzzfeed asked HBO’s CEO about the piracy, they got this response:

“It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler said. It is, in many ways, a “terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers,” he said, noting that it could potentially lead to more subscribers in the future.

“We’re in the business of creating addicts,” he said at a BuzzFeed Brews event in New York.

HBO is as smart as the BBC on this one. They know if someone wants something badly enough, they’ll pay for the privilege of getting it when and where they want it.

On demand is good in that way. We writers take advantage of it when we write in series. Our readers want the next book the moment they finish the previous one. E-books allow the reader to get that book at 4 a.m. on a holiday weekend in a town where there won’t be an open bookstore for another 48 hours (and even then, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not the bookstore has the title).

But on demand has its other side.

Personally, I love it, although it does make me pickier than I used to be. Faced with the choice of programming or reading material, I can judge what I watch by mood. I need something funny tonight, or maybe I’m in the mood for a detective show, but not urban fantasy with a detective (like Grimm). Back in the day, I had to watch whatever was available on Thursday on Thursday, mood be damned.

This generational shift is causing a lot of problems, as generational shifts do. Not because teens and tweens don’t understand what live TV truly means or because all of us are becoming a bit entitled. Nor are the problems the loss of the shared currency—that “water cooler conversation” (and the fact that the term “water cooler” is in the idiom shows how dated the idea is)—or the fact that you can’t go from house to house and hear the same broadcast airing from each porch on a hot Sunday night.

The problems come from the fact that those of us who run things—people in our forties, fifties, and sixties—use metrics that were developed by our parents for their world, that tightly controlled Mad Men world where everyone was expected to be the same, not just in what they wore or bought but in what they listened to or watched or read as well.

The bestseller list?

It measures velocity. (A good essay on this topic, “The Meaningless Metrics of Fame,”  came from Mike Briggs, husband of Patricia Briggs, earlier this week. I’ve also dealt with it.)

Reviews?

They only want new books, and then only at the time of release.

Brick and mortar bookstores?

They only have room for the latest releases, and then only the ones that are the most popular with their customers (whoever those folks might be).

Books have come late to this fight. Books have been available on demand for only about four years now, in the U.S. In other countries, there’s been even less time.

And we’re all still fighting over meaningless metrics, to use Mike Briggs’ term, because those metrics only measure things that were important around the water cooler, not things which are important now.

What’s important now?

I think the HBO Go and BBC examples are telling. If you want to measure fan response, you should look at the demand among true fans to be the first, the very first, to see something. Not the casual fan who can plug her ears and scream, “Shuddap! Spoilers!” to everyone around her. (All of us casual fans do that, right? Or is it just me?)

I think the first metric is how many people want a book within a week of its release. That doesn’t make a book an instant bestseller. It simply shows us—the writer—how many fans we’ve managed to capture.

The next metric is how many copies of the book sell over time. That time should probably be measured in year-long increments. How many copies sell in the first year? How many in the second? How many in the fifth?

Because if the book’s sales increase per year, then something is happening for that book. That something is word of mouth.

We never had a way to measure word of mouth before, because books became unavailable within weeks of their release, and went out of print within months. Now, we can see the growth as more and more people tell their friends about a title.

My best standalone example is The Freelancer’s Survival Guide. It’s a constant seller. Its sales have increased each year because of word of mouth. I’m not doing anything to promote it except an occasional mention here, and the image on my sidebar (which I often take down). It’s also the title I’ve had in print the longest that wasn’t published by traditional publishing.

The growth is fascinating.

The publishing industry isn’t even talking about new metrics. That idea hasn’t occurred to traditional publishing, and indie (or self) published writers are constantly seeking validation from the old system—trying to figure out ways to game the bestseller lists or to get a fantastic review from somewhere that has old-world prestige.

Other industries that have dealt with this measuring success problem longer than we have are coming up with half-assed solutions, based on the old ways as well.

The music industry has bifurcated the hits charts so much that it resembles the Amazon fiction bestseller lists. Not only that, your bestselling song might be #1 on the R&B charts, but the sales numbers don’t even put it in the top 100 overall on iTunes. And how is that R&B song doing on Billboard? Who knows?

To make matters worse, the music industry has changed the sales figures. In 1976, a platinum single had to sell one million units to get the designation. In 2003, a platinum single had to sell one million physical units. By 2004, a platinum single had to sell one million units digitally and/or physically. In 2013, the Recording Industry Association of America added streaming music to its platinum count this way: in the US with 100 streams being the equivalent of 1 unit sold.

In other words, RIAA certification for singles no longer represent true sales. At what point does the metric become meaningless?

Movies have twisted themselves into pretzels doing the same thing. At first DVD sales weren’t counted toward a movie’s success. It was only box office. Now they are. For a while, only US box office mattered. Now, worldwide box office (which is often more lucrative on action films) counts more, especially when a studio considers the viability of a remake.

And television, television has no idea how to measure anything any more. Network television needs eyeballs to sell advertising, so it started changing its measurements a few years ago. First it was live, then live plus 24 hours, then live plus 48, then live plus one week. Now, I’m hearing that live plus one month is being talked about.

Not that it matters. Advertising is following the eyeballs—and those eyeballs have moved to tablets and other gadgets. A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau shows that online advertising has increased dramatically. Many news outlets mistakenly reported that online advertising has outpaced TV advertising, but that only shows that some reporters can’t read studies.

However, the report is fascinating because it shows that digital advertising, once considered “silly” or a “waste of money” has come into its own. Because people spend as much time with their devices as they do with their television sets.

The traditional publishing industry is notorious for not studying anything. What works to promote a book? Who knows. Why should they study that?

But at some point, traditional publishers are going to have to develop new ways to figure out which products sell well and which ones don’t. All of their systems—from sales figures (which measure books shipped not books sold) to bestseller lists to critical acclaim—are based on the old models.

It might take another ten years or more before traditional publishing figures out how to measure success for its various titles. What happens in ten years or more? Members of the on-demand generation will start to step into positions of power at traditional publishing companies (and everywhere else). Those future adults will want metrics that mean something to them, not things that belong to a hot autumn night accompanied by the smell of burning leaves and ancient voices on the radio.

However, those of us who are in the trenches now, those of us who publish our own stuff, whether we do so through our own small independent publishing companies or as individuals who do everything, will need to set up a modern metric system, one that reflects on the way things are done in an on-demand world.

I’d be happy to hear ideas on this one, because I’m just dipping a toe into it. I do know this is a long-tail issue. I also know that writers who produce series books have a leg-up in that instant demand thing. (HBO Go, had it existed back then, wouldn’t have crashed the night the first episode of Season One of Game of Thrones premiered. That kind of demand happens after people have fallen in love, not before.)

Writers don’t just succeed with series, though. As I write this, the #1 bestselling book in the Kindle store is the $11.99 ebook of Nora Roberts latest standalone novel, The Collector. She’s a brand, like Game of Thrones is a brand, like series can be a brand.

The key is figuring out how to make yourself one, which was, in part, why I wrote the Discoverability series. It’s a slow process. Nora Roberts started out as a category romance writer. Back when she started—in the water cooler days—her books were considered disposable. They were released every few months. Sounds like now, doesn’t it?

We need to figure out how to measure success in the digital age. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait twenty years until today’s teenagers come up with good system to measure this stuff.

I’d like to figure out something now that reflects the on-demand world. I’d like to step 100% into the 21^st century, without using any of the metrics of the past.

The world has changed. We don’t even write the way we used to any more. Conventional writing wisdom from 1980 doesn’t apply to 2014. Why should conventional marketing wisdom from 1980 govern how the publishing world determines success?

I know that my metric for success for this blog. I like the conversations it generates. I like the e-mail contacts, the links you send me, and the comments you guys make.

The most important metric I have, I’m afraid, is financial. I need the blog to fund itself on a weekly basis. I take a lot of writing time to compose a weekly essay, so I need to earn a good writing wage to do so. I always hope that each blog post earns its own way.

So, if you liked the post, learned something, or enjoy the blog on a regular basis, please leave a tip on the way out.

Thanks so much!

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“The Business Rusch: Generational Divide” copyright 2014 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

[Content warning: psychiatrists having ethically complicated conversations with patients]

I recently attended the Michigan Psychiatric Society conference. It was all downhill after I heard the name of the first poster presentation. The study – investigating the tendency of anti-Parkinsons medication Requip® to cause nightmares as a side effect – was titled “Requip For A Dream”. I didn’t stay long enough to see whether that won the poster contest, but if it didn’t there is no God.

But I also attended a couple of forums and Q&A sessions, and in one of them a doctor asked the question:

“What do I say when one of my psychotic patients – who is telling me how he is Jesus, or is being pursued by the FBI, or something like that – glares at me and asks ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’”

The lecturer, who was a very prestigious psychiatrist of some sort, said that his standard response was “I believe that what you are seeing and experiencing is real to you.”

This is the sort of nice, pat answer I would expect from a clever and prestigious psychiatrist. It ticks all the boxes. It is kind and compassionate. It doesn’t technically lie. It doesn’t validate the patient’s delusions. And it acknowledges the patient’s emotions without being dismissive or confrontational.

On the other hand, if I was that patient it would enrage me.

Let me distinguish this from a very very similar concept where I think this answer is exactly correct. Suppose someone is having hallucinations, like believing there are spiders crawling all over him. He asks “You don’t believe me, do you?” I think the exactly correct answer is to say “I one hundred percent believe that you are experiencing spiders crawling all over you, that their appearance and features are extremely convincing, and that you’re not making this up. But there are not real spiders on you.”

And if you responded to the guy who thought he was Jesus with “I one hundred percent believe you are feeling a strong, almost irresistible urge to believe you are Jesus. But I don’t think you are actually him,” that would remove most of the creepiness for me (I also don’t think it would be very popular with patients).

But somehow this guy’s phrasing pressed my buttons. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t answering the question. It was that he was denying that the question was the sort of thing that needed to be answered, denying that there was a real fact-of-the-matter about Jesus at all, or denying that it was worth worrying about.

But if you’re worried you’re psychotic, that’s probably the most important question to you. The reason this came up at a big conference is that it’s a really common question. Psychotic people ask it a lot. If you’re psychotic, then the fact that you believe these strange things no one else believes has become one of the central things in your life. And to you it’s less important that the person be Validating And Accepting than that you settle this problem that is tearing your life apart.

And this answer isn’t even subtle about what it’s doing. It’s like “Obviously I don’t believe you, but I’m going to avoid saying so in so many words, and I bet you won’t even notice or care. You’ll just be grateful I’m acknowledging you at all”. It’s condescending, is what it is.

I’m not psychotic (I think). And I’m probably more concerned with there being a Real-World-With-Truth-Values than the average person. So maybe the prestigious expert is, as is often the case with prestigious experts, right. But I really don’t want to follow his advice. It would leave too bad a taste in my mouth.

I haven’t decided what I am going to say in its place. But in a perfect world, where I get exactly the right patient, the response I would really like to give is: “If you were me, would you believe it?”

I think, in this fantasy, if I picked the right patient they would laugh and say “Nope!”. Because psychotic people are smarter than they are usually given credit for, and also usually have good senses of humor, and at least we would both establish where we stood in a non-confrontational way.

And it’s always interesting how often deluded people know in the back of their head that their delusions are wrong, or at least questionable. Like I can just ask people “I’m here to do a psychiatric evaluation of you. Do you have any strange beliefs I should know about?” and they’ll say “Well, I believe I’m being pursued by the FBI.” I ask “Are you being pursued by the FBI?” They say “Yeah.” I asked once, because I was very curious and making things up as I went along, “Then why did you bring it up so quickly when I said I was a psychiatrist looking for symptoms of mental disease?”

My patient didn’t have a good answer for that. I didn’t get the impression it was some very logical “Well, I realize statistically most people who think they’re pursued by the FBI are psychotic, so I’ll just mention it, even though I personally am not.” It seemed more like another example of people, whether psychotic or not, being kind of garage-dragon-y.

This brings me to the other question I get from people a lot, which is “Do you think I’m crazy?” I think the Officially Correct Answer here is to say “Of course not”, which isn’t very convincing precisely because it’s obviously the Officially Correct Answer psychiatrists give to everyone. Even worse (but surprisingly common) is “Crazy isn’t a technical term”. Thanks. I’m sure that must be very reassuring.

Again, a fantasy answer I would like to give if I have exactly the right patient is “If you’re asking that question, don’t worry.” Which I think is sort of true. If you’re in a psychiatric hospital, and your conclusion is that maybe this means you might be crazy, you have some pretty good reality-based thinking going on. If you’re in a psychiatric hospital, and your conclusion is that maybe this means the FBI has found out you’re Jesus and is trying to stop you, that’s the guy who’s in trouble.

And again I worry that I might be getting too clever. Probably some of these patients aren’t very smart, or aren’t very cynical, and a simple “No, of course not” would be reassuring in a way a weird self-referential answer wouldn’t. So far I have just given some version of the simple answer. But when there’s someone I know well, and who’s especially jaded, and I doubt the simple answer would go over well, I really want to try something less cliched and more honest.

But even that’s not the answer I fantasize about giving later on, when I have my own practice and patients whom I’ve known for years and I can pick out the ones who are a lot like I was when I was younger and seeing a psychiatrist. For them the answer will be “Yes, of course. So am I. So is everyone. The interesting question isn’t whether you’re crazy, it’s whether you function anyway. Let’s try to work on that.”

Tagged by Andrew, because whenever someone mentions my name I must appear…and he got it from Lawrence Burton, and to be honest I haven’t checked how deep the stack goes, but…

*

1. What are you working on at the moment?

Well, at the moment the eternal Job #1 is a sort of pop opera, a jazz-flamenco opera really, called Poseidon’s People…

Which is about the Hittites…

…Sort of. Actually it’s about a group of imaginary proto-Hittites I invented, prehistoric dwellers on the north shore of the Black Sea, who eventually make their way down into the Mediterranean Basin after a great cataclysm…and then make their way secretly into all our history after that. It’s basically a story about sublimed influences on/in Western culture, in two very large parts or movements: one follows the story from the Black Sea in about 8,000 B.C. west to Spain in about 1180 A.D., and the second begins in the British Isles in the present day, and winds its way eastward and back through time (though rather circuitously) to arrive on the north bank of the Bosphorus in about 5,000 B.C., and then the whole thing makes (I think) a rather delightful circle. Actually it’s not as complicated as it sounds, being basically just a rather large concept album, completely in my wheelhouse and completely appropriate to my skill-set…duck soup, really, and so the time spent in the actual writing isn’t so extreme…but the time spent in all the thinking, the managing of the sublimed influences and showing them by allusion and so forth, that eats up hours and days and weeks and months and OH MY GOD IS THAT THE TIME…!

So I am pretty much working on this constantly inside my head, as I have been for a few years now, which is something that’s a bit galling to have to do for a project that’s essentially a folly. It would’ve all been totally finished by 2010 if I’d done it all myself, but I wisely sought out collaborators such as Andrew and Illogical Volume and the long-absent Madeley…even Holly has gotten into the act (yay!), and I fully intend to make some other Mindless “talk English” into a microphone too, before I’m done. So it might’ve been finished four years ago, but it would’ve been a third the length and it would’ve been CRAP!, therefore God bless all the long-suffering helpful blogpeople, once mere Internet Friends and now real ones. As well, on this end (the Part One end) I’m very fortunate — very fortunate! — to have both an excellent jazz guitarist and an excellent flamenco guitarist as friends who are close enough for me to reach their arms in order to twist…and a dandy rapper/slam poet friend, and another couple of enthusiastic associates of great and unsuspected talent, and Part One is in fact going to be fully done in demo form by the end of May, so…y’know, I’m excited. SO MUCH THINKING ABOUT HITTITES! And after four years or whatever it’s pretty much getting on for time, Hittite-thinking-wise. Studio stuff in 2015, I guess, I try not to think that far ahead for fear it’ll distract me from my Master Planner duties, but…

Anyway, you will all be invited to the premiere, or record-release party, or whatever it turns out to be…and I’m not kidding about that, this is not to be made into a movie starring George Clooney, this is for us, Bloggers: you, and me, and all our bloggy friends who are engaged in the thankless job of collaborating with One Such As I. Huh, I guess they’ll be able to tell you if it’s all worthwhile once they get an earful of Part One’s demos at the end of Spring…as for my own horn, I would toot it never, except if this meme counts which I guess it probably does. After all…I’m here, aren’t I?

Outside of that: a great deal more music. Writing stuff for a new album with one partner, continually working on things for my on-a-slight-hiatus band with my other two partners, and at a guess I’d say we’ve got about another three albums of material stored up at this point, so…STUDIO. And then there’s just odd things, little things that I make for no reason, that are no good to anybody and have little in the way of imaginable purpose. Hmm, lemme see if I can load one of the more recent of those on here…

(Whoops, sorry, unsuccessful so far…boy, WordPress has changed a LOTTA THINGS in the last little while…)

So there’s that; but none of that is really what I do. Really I write stories and scripts, except I don’t write scripts anymore because EVEN THOUGH I AM AWESOME AT IT (if we’re just talking TV and movies, anyway) there is still no thing that I hate doing, more than I hate dealing with Biz. It’s just not worth it. At least: for me. But on the story front I am curiously active at the moment, reevaluating a bunch of SF stories that went staledated while I was busy making other plans, and figuring out just what it is I have to say now, that things I had to say back then might be profitably streamed into. Some of these things come back around into currency just like a boomerang, which is weird…others I will have to wait long enough for their subjects to become “retro” instead of just “irrelevant”…but all in all it’s a stimulating time for my prose endeavours: once I just get Poseidon’s People sorted out, I plan a trilogy of Hard SF Stories which will have the unusual feature of actually meriting the name. Uh…

I hope!

But right now it’s all just busy-busy-busy, like the Magician at the end of Frosty The Snowman. A mad whirl. My correspondence has suffered over the last few years, too. And I forgot to do laundry today, and also there’s about five (or fifteen) blog posts languishing in this hard drive which were meant to get out into the fresh air and get some exercise around about January or so…

2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

It’s more boring!

No, well…actually it’s just becoming ever more about only the things that I am personally interested in. Or maybe it’s just that my conscious control over the manner in which I infect my own work is improving? I want to differ, I really do…I can’t do any of the things that other people are good at anyway, so basically I am just praying to differ. Richard Bensam compliments me enormously by saying I’m interested in the thought-processes of characters: how they think, and wherefore is that “how”. Well, plot-mechanics provide the “what” of their thinking, so I dunno what else there is to be interested in? Now that I think about it? Hmm. If I’m writing SF, I’m always thinking about HPS (that’s History and Philosophy of Science for those of you who haven’t been yammered at about it by me yet)…always always always ALWAYS, in fact I’d even say that I just can’t write SF at all anymore if there is no philosophical weight to the story, if it has no relevance to the history of science. And I am always trying not just to take some random factoid out of Scientific American as just a springboard, you know? Because I want the science to really be the science, I want the scientific problems to be genuine problems in science…I want to float theories that are (hmm) worth entertaining, if I can, even if they’re natively presumptuous because of the ineliminable “fiction” part of SF. I guess when you boil it down I want to do gedankenexperiments, but not being a physicist I have to use words instead of math. So maybe I’m a bit like Chopin?  It would be a bit bigheaded for me to claim something like that, so I don’t claim it, but…outside of Isaac Asimov I’m the only person I know of who writes HPS-based SF, I don’t think anyone ever did it before him and I’m not sure anyone did it after (though you could argue Cordwainer Smith did something like it it at around the same time), Umberto Eco has certainly done it and so has Tom Holt, but I think they both escape the “SF” tag. Did Mary Stewart do it, in her Merlin stories? But she escaped the tag too…

AH!!

Ursula LeGuin!

And Alan Moore, to tell you the truth. Watchmen awakened my interest in HPS well before I even knew there was such a thing as HPS…

So maybe I’m different that way, if “that way” matters. Which I’m not sure it does, to anyone but me…

In music, though, it’s a different story; I know exactly how I differ in a genre sense, since I spent so much time writing alt-country songs. It’s Watchmen again, actually! Country music has some strict conventions, so what I did with that was I built in multivalence, I got even more interested in formal trickery than my Eng. Lit. education had already made me…there are no “innocent” expressions in any of my songs, you don’t need to unpack it all but if you chose to you’d find a lot of strange resonances buried in the cliches. Kinda wanna be the Lawrence Durrell of pop songwriting? Again, I’m fortunate to have collaborators who see a lot of value in those sorts of shenanigans, and are good at it themselves…so, yes, I have written old-fashioned Hurtin’ Songs that reference Thomas Browne and Piaget and Rumi and Einstein and Donne and blah blah blah blah…! And I love doing all that, it’s a real constrained type of art, and thus a fascinating puzzle. How do you cram all that stuff in there, how do you make a lasagna out of a crepe, how do you make a treble clef into a roman a clef? As I often say, rap lyrics can go anywhere and do anything, can become arbitrarily logically-dense in about the space of two heartbeats…rap is VERY cool for being able to do that. But that the ordinary melodic song isn’t as fitted to that function is basically why I so enjoy screwing around with making every line a laminate, and making every kinetic thing balance or double up or reflect back on itself or what-have-you. I am not particularly good at it; I had to learn it all, none of it came at all naturally, and I’m still learning it. There are musical Jack Kirbys out there who don’t even need to rough anything in, they just MAKE, and the fruit of their making is complexity that goes a million miles deep…but I’m not one of them. My musical vocabulary is still just so awful I can’t tell you, I can barely communicate with musicians! But I come at it from my place, if you like I write like a critic…

I think that’s what I do, anyway. Supposed to be impossible, isn’t it? That’s what they all say. But oh, the cleverness of me…

And on the blogwriting front (is arguing about the semiotics of Spider-Man really a genre, now?) (says a voice in my head), a great pleasure for me is that I’m not very much different from most of the people I read…I write long things full of digressions and tangents, and I’m mostly interested in seeing how far I can cast my net and still expect to bring up the desired sort of fish. This “Plok” voice of mine is largely a device I employ to do that, and for some strange reason I’m interested in getting good at it…and there was a time, not too long ago in non-Internet time, when maybe that made me a slightly unusual blog-stylist? But I’ve since discovered that loads of other people can do that too, and better than I can — Andrew’s Grant Morrison books are like that only they’re coherent — and I find this very comforting and reassuring, not to be all different all the time.

3. Why do you write what you do?

Curiosity makes me write. I read things and I see things and I get a funny idea, a silly idea, from it all…from whatever odd pattern-matching games my brain chooses to carry out, and I just want to know if the silly idea really is silly, so I chase it down and try to ramify it. I’ll write anything if it makes me curious; heck, I thought of an idea for an actual opera last year or the year before, called “Copernicus In Bologna”…absolutely no chance of me writing an actual opera, that is NOT in my wheelhouse, but…you know, I’m of a ludic inclination. I try to stay in bed for at least a half-hour after waking, every single day: I want go-nowhere musings that a human standing erect must partly abandon for the necessities of coordination. Actually a lot of the stuff I write comes out of the pressure of dreams — “right, so that’s what that meant, now how do I make it make comprehensible sense ten minutes from now when I’m standing upright and brushing my teeth?” Without abandoning the sense completely, which is always bound up with the dream-logic so you can’t just make it all rational. But for whatever reason — diet, maybe? — I have a LOT of dreams that are pretty “clean copy”, and…

I don’t know, those ones just sort of stick in the mind? The mind is a womb housing twins, as I’m sure you’re all aware: one twin’s name is Thought, and the other twin’s name is Dream. When you’re asleep, you don’t “think” anything, you merely dream it…”I dreamed I was talking to you.” “What, you thought you were talking to me?” “No, of course I didn’t think I was talking to you!”…and when you’re awake you don’t dream but you think instead. For myself, I’m always curious why Asleep-Me dreamed what he did…say what exactly is the difference between thinking and dreaming, anyway? I don’t know, and no one else knows either, and that’s why those inklings are worth pursuing. So there’s your example…

I dunno. Like I said, I like to stay active. In Greg Egan’s Permutation City there’s a place all the uploaded consciousnesses can go in their minds: the coal face, the realm of pure mathematical research. My friend Jack Butler (oh God but my correspondence with him has suffered these last couple of years!) once told me that the great thing about mathematics is that anyone can make a discovery, and once discovered by someone a mathematical thing — a truth! — is never lost. And we will never come to an end of truths to discover, in math. So in Egan’s book you might go on absolutely forever and do anything you please, and you have no needs and all your wants are met, and so what can possibly motivate you, what can you care about after a million virtual lifetimes of perfect satiety? The coal face; you can always find some real work to do, work that matters, and you can set your own schedule and do your own thing and return eternally from every imaginable series of events whether good or bad, to that own-seam-mining, and with all eternity to do it in it doesn’t even matter if all you have to scrape away at it with is a bent spoon. So the reason I write what I do, is I guess because…

No one else is writing it?

So I might as well make myself useful.

Uh, for a certain value of “useful”.

4. How does your writing process work?

There’s a lot of drinking! Steven Sondheim says that every songwriter medicates in some way while they’re manufacturing inspiration…obviously a generalization, but for me it fits! Seems to fit, although what I mainly manufacture is misprision, so it would fit, wouldn’t it. You need sobriety for the detail work, of course. Or, not exactly sobriety, more like…

Coffee!

But basically I am a guy who writes songs best when he’s at a party, because writing songs is a lot like a party…you know, due to the fun-ness of it. So I generally just combine the two activities. My friend Pete and I have evolved a way of doing it that isn’t like that, mind you, just out of sheer necessity…we write on the phone, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin, and the feeling really is one of presence, like at a party: all other methods work less well, because we’ve gotten super-efficient at phonework. Wrote an album in a week, once!

Just over the phone!

Seriously: no one does that anymore.

But when I’m not doing musical or visual things, I generally start every story with a sort of Plot Diary — just a pad and a pen, and something like free-association, and I write about the thing I want to write about, and I write about it and write about it until the pen runs out of ink, and at the end I have a couple of pads of paper that are partly personal diary (“woe is me, how will I ever figure out what to write about, and what about those groceries and that laundry”) and partly acres of backstory and millions of fiddly little mechanical details, and partly the actual composition of the piece, right down to dialogue that doesn’t need changing later on! All in an enormous pile, all mixed-up together like a potful of cold spaghetti. And then after that I get a fresh pad and a fresh pen, and start the first draft for real…then edit the first draft by marking it up like hell until it damn well looks like spaghetti, then produce a second handwritten draft…and then I do a typed draft where I just change shit on the fly in the process of transcribing the written draft, and then I print THAT out and revise IT! Then by the second typed draft I’m basically done, which means it’s time to throw it all out and start over from scratch and wish I had some other sort of marketable skill. Mind you, while Poseidon’s People has been going on I haven’t had much chance to write that way, which makes me sad. My writing table’s covered in dust! Working on keyboards sucks, I lose the sense of the…the composed nature of the composition, the sense of a special compositional space that I can enter when I’m working and then leave again when I’m not. The computer just eats time, for me: gobbles it all up, and then you look up and it’s ten hours later and you’re not completely sure of what you’ve done, and it’s hard to read back through it. Whereas writing with paper and pen is a lot like reading a book, in that it seems to deliver extra time: always a physical sense of involvement, something like an actual activity, which dispenses the feeling of fruitfulness and a job well done. Others may disagree, but for me if I’m not working with pen and paper then it’s not really proper work, it’s like the thing I do where I make notes on matchbook covers while doing reading that turns into research…it feels like it’s just annotation, not composition. And the computer just creates such a tremendous feeling of time pressing in on me, it’s like an attention-splitting machine, it’s a multitasker…and I don’t even really like to read that way, let alone write that way. Somehow the computer is like a clock, telling me about all the things I’m running out of time for, reading the list of tasks in the job jar and calling out “well, I guess you’ve fucked that one up for today!” So for me, paper is the way. Always paper. Then I put my watch on the table next to me, and I look at it when I feel like looking at it, and somehow never miss dinnertime?

But mostly it’s this: I always start with a title. I love titles, find them wonderful lenses for the focussing of purpose…every title a sort of analytic breakthrough! “What’s this story going to be about?” When I find the right title it tells me what the story’s about, and it gives me something to remain true to through all the revisions and reversions. My own intention, obviously: why I wrote the damn thing in the first place.

Aaannnnndddd…

That’s about it?

Of course that isn’t it, there’s miles more of it, but this is a meme not a novel, so I should probably stop now. Hey, don’t they always say that if you’re looking for a way to end your contribution to a meme, that means you’ve already written it?

Sounds like good advice!

But if I were to start taking advice, all these blog posts would be three hundred words long and consist entirely of bullet points…and there would be very little of arguing over the semiotics of Spider-Man…

And then, of course, I would never have started a blog in the first place.

HO-KAY!

Now to privately email the people I want to tag with this meme, since apparently that’s how one is supposed to go about it…

So you may all now start living in fear of receiving an email from me! Or in other words…

Business as usual.

Polling this parliament PB Thread Are we reaching a tipping point for Clegg's leadership http://t.co/pJaMJualu0 pic.twitter.com/7GYQQtHecA

— The Screaming Eagles (@TSEofPB) April 15, 2014

One of the constants in this parliament is each May, in the local elections, the Lib Dems lose a significant number of councillors and the Lib Dems insouciance to it all. With other parties, it may have triggered speculation about the Leader/a Leadership election. The Lib Dems motto seems to be “Keep Calm and Carry On”

I suspect this year the Lib Dem response is going to be different to another night of bad results, as this cycle of elections features a nationwide election, The European Parliament Elections.

If you look at the above graph, the Tories have seen a slight recovery in the last year, but their coalition partners have not, which must be galling for the Lib Dems. The current polling is pretty dire for the LDs, with them polling around 7 or 8 per cent with a lot of pollsters.

On inspection of the Guardian ICM Euro poll, table 7 shows more voters are planning to vote Green than Lib Dem (24 to 23). Whilst this is but one poll, the fact it is with ICM, the pollster most favourable to the Lib Dem, finishing fifth behind UKIP and The Greens a year before the General Election will cause the Lib Dems to review  their whole strategy and leadership.

I think it is a distinct possibility that the SNP will have more MEPs than then Lib Dems will have in Great Britain. Those are the things that trigger leadership elections.

Add in Nick Clegg’s poor performance in the debates, particularly the second one, which was meant to be an opportunity for the Lib Dems to do well, the polling showed it was pretty dire for Clegg and the Lib Dems. In hindsight, putting a man with the negative ratings of Clegg against the man with the positive ratings of Farage may have been a blunder. The one saving grace was more people didn’t watch it.

Given the prominence that the Leaders have in general election campaigns, the Lib Dems may conclude thanks Nick, but it is time to move on.

The other interesting aspect is that it may well be in David Cameron’s interests that Nick Clegg is replaced. A more left leaning Lib Dem leader such as Tim Farron or Vince Cable maybe the way to get those 2010 Lib Dems switchers to Labour back, as the block of the electorate is currently of one of the two biggest obstacles to David Cameron remaining in Downing Street post May 2015.

It maybe worth looking at the Lib Dem leader at the next general election market as the value has gone out of the next Lib Dem leader market.   Cable and Farron could represent value, as I think the next Leader will be someone who is perceived to be the left of Nick Clegg. Or back the 3/1 Paddy Power are offering on Clegg not being the Lib Dem leader at the next election. 

TSE

New PB Thread on how many MEPs the Lib Dems will have after the Euros http://t.co/ZHM2lWolM5 pic.twitter.com/hioJ9rUC0t

— The Screaming Eagles (@TSEofPB) April 16, 2014

Ladbrokes have a market on how many MEPs the Lib Dems will have after the Euros.

If we apply UNS to the ICM poll for the Guardian, they will end up with zero MEPs. Now this election is conducted in regions under the d’Hondt  method so a straight UNS calculation may not be apt.

That said, the poll fits is a continuation of of dire European Election polling for the Lib Dems, and the trend isn’t in their favour. The polling may get worse for them, as there’s very little opportunities for them to do so  and increases the likelihood of them getting zero MEPs, on that basis, and the expectation that the price wont last, (It was at 5/1 this morning) I’ve gone for the zero MEPs option.

TSE

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April 16th, 2014: Adventure Time #27 is out today! IT INVOLVES: Finn and Jake being ghosts BMO and Ice King on a date EVEN MORE, AS IF THAT WASN'T ENOUGH?? You can read a preview by clicking on this page! You can get it locally, online, or digitally. One year ago today: the trick here is that it is ensconced in law that people can have different opinions about plays – Ryan

I remember hearing someone I know try to explain rationality to his friends.

He started with “It’s important to have correct beliefs. You might think this is obvious, but think about creationists and homeopaths and people who think the moon landing was a hoax.” And then further on in this vein.

And I thought: “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!”

I will make a confession. Every time someone talks about the stupidity of creationists, moon-hoaxers, and homeopaths, I cringe.

It’s not that moon-hoaxers, homeopaths et al aren’t dumb. They are. It’s not even that these people don’t do real harm. They do.

(although probably less than people think; people rarely stop conventional treatment in favor of homeopathy, and both a popular website and a review article have a really hard time finding more than a handful of people genuinely harmed by it. Moon hoaxes seem even less dangerous, unless of course you are standing near Buzz Aldrin when you talk about them.)

What annoys me about the people who harp on moon-hoaxing and homeopathy – without any interest in the rest of medicine or space history – is that it seems like an attempt to Other irrationality.

(yes, I did just use “other” as a verb. Maybe I’ve been hanging around Continental types too much lately.)

It’s saying “Look, over here! It’s irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.”

But to me, the rationality movement is about Self-ing irrationality.

(yes, I did just use “self” as a verb. I don’t even have the excuse of it being part of a philosophical tradition)

It is about realizing that you, yes you, might be wrong about the things that you’re most certain of, and nothing can save you except maybe extreme epistemic paranoia.

Talking about moon-hoaxers and homeopaths too much, at least the way we do it, is counterproductive to this goal. Throw examples of obviously stupid false beliefs at someone, and they start thinking all false beliefs are obvious. Give too many examples of false beliefs that aren’t tempting to them, and they start believing they’re immune to temptation.

And it raises sloppiness to a virtue.

Take homeopathy. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard people say: “Homeopaths don’t realize beliefs require evidence. No study anywhere has ever found homeopathy to be effective!”

But of course dozens of studies have found homeopathy to be effective.

“Well, sure, but they weren’t double-blind! What you don’t realize is that there can be placebo effects from…”

But of course many of these studies have been large double-blinded randomized controlled trials, or even meta-analyses of such.

“Okay, but not published in reputable journals.”

Is The Lancet reputable enough for you?

“But homeopaths don’t even realize that many of their concoctions don’t contain even a single molecule of active substance!”

But of course almost all homeopaths realize this and their proposed mechanism for homeopathic effects not only survives this criticism but relies upon it.

“But all doctors and biologists agree that homeopathy doesn’t work!”

Have you ever spent the five seconds it would take to look up a survey of what percent of doctors and biologists believe homeopathy doesn’t work? Or are you just assuming that’s true because someone on your side told you so and it seems right?

I am of course being mean here. Being open-minded to homeopaths – reading all the research carefully, seeking out their own writings so you don’t accidentally straw-man them, double-checking all of your seemingly “obvious” assumptions – would be a waste of your time.

And someone who demands that you be open-minded about homeopathy would not be your friend. They would probably be a shill for homeopathy and best ignored.

But this is exactly the problem!

The more we concentrate on homeopathy, and moon hoaxes, and creationism – the more people who have never felt any temptation towards these beliefs go through the motions of “debunk”-ing them a hundred times to one another for fun – the more we are driving home the message that these are a representative sample of the kinds of problems we face.

And the more we do that, the more we are training people to make the correct approach to homeopathy – ignoring poor research and straw men on your own side while being very suspicious of anyone who tells us to be careful – their standard approach to any controversy.

And then we get people believing all sorts of shoddy research – because after all, the world is divided between things like homeopathy that Have Never Been Supported By Any Evidence Ever, and things like conventional medicine that Have Studies In Real Journals And Are Pushed By Real Scientists.

Or losing all subtlety and moderation in their political beliefs, never questioning their own side’s claims, because the world is divided between People Like Me Who Know The Right Answer, and Shills For The Other Side Who Tell Me To Be Open-Minded As Part Of A Trap.

This post was partly inspired by Gruntled and Hinged’s You Probably Don’t Want Peer-Reviewed Evidence For God (actually, I started writing it before that was published – but since Bem has published evidence showing psi exists, I must have just been precognitively inspired by it). But there’s another G&H post that retrocausally got me thinking even more.

Inoculation is when you use a weak pathogen like cowpox to build immunity against a stronger pathogen like smallpox. The inoculation effect in psychology is when a person, upon being presented with several weak arguments against a proposition, becomes immune to stronger arguments against the same position.

Tell a religious person that Christianity is false because Jesus is just a blatant ripoff of the warrior-god Mithras and they’ll open up a Near Eastern history book, notice that’s not true at all, and then be that much more skeptical of the next argument against their faith. “Oh, atheists. Those are those people who think stupid things like Jesus = Mithras. I already figured out they’re not worth taking seriously.” Except on a deeper level that precedes and is immune to conscious thought.

So we take the intelligent Internet-reading public, and we throw a bunch of incredibly dumb theories at them – moon-hoaxism, homeopathy, creationism, anti-vaxxing, lizard people, that one guy who thought the rapture would come a couple years ago, whatever. And they are easily debunked, and the stuff you and all your friends believed was obviously true is, in fact, obviously true, and any time you spent investigating whether you were wrong is time you wasted.

And I worry that we are vaccinating people against reading the research for themselves instead of trusting smarmy bloggers who talk about how stupid the other side is.

That we are vaccinating people against thinking there might be important truths on both sides of an issue.

That we are vaccinating people against understanding how “scientific evidence” is a really complicated concept, and that many things that are in peer-reviewed journals will later turn out to be wrong.

That we are vaccinating people against the idea that many theories they find absurd or repugnant at first will later turn out to be true, because nature doesn’t respect our feelings.

That we are vaccinating people against doubt.

And maybe this is partly good. It’s probably a good idea to trust your doctor and also a good idea to trust your climatologist, and rare is the field where I would feel comfortable challenging expert consensus completely.

But there’s also this problem of hundreds of different religions and political ideologies, and most people are born into ones that are at least somewhat wrong. That makes this capacity for real doubt – doubting something even though all your family and friends is telling you it’s obviously true and you must be an idiot to question it at all – a tremendously important skill. It’s especially important for the couple of rare individuals who will be in a position to cause a paradigm shift in a science by doubting one of its fundamental assumptions.

I don’t think that reading about lizard people or creationism will affect people’s ability to distinguish between, let’s say, cyclic universe theory versus multiverse theory, or other equally dispassionate debates.

But if ever you ever need to have a true crisis of faith, then any time you spend thinking about homeopathy and moon hoaxes beyond the negligible effect they have on your life will be time spent learning exactly the wrong mental habits.

“Hey, Arzbyx, what’s up?”

“Please address me as Overlord Arzbyx the Supervisor, flesh thing, or I shall have you reduced to component chemicals and utilized as cleaning solution.”

“Hey, lighten up, boss man. It’s Friday afternoon!”

“This necrotizer cannon is not going to build itself, Unit 46031-H.”

“So, you going to any ballgames this weekend?”

“Are you referring to the baseball match? It was my understanding they were forbidden under punishment of death.”

“Nah, Holkartj the Manual-Preparer reinstated them. He said that the soporific pace of the game will make us less likely to revolt.”

“Overlord Holkartkj the Manual-Preparer.”

“Right, him.”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Why do you contine to occupy the entranceway to my supervision compartment, Unit 46031-H?”

“Oh! Ha. Yeah. Look, I’m gonna go ahead and bug out of here a little early, if it’s cool.”

“The temperature is perfectly regulated by the climatroids, except for in the punishment pits, where…”

“No, I mean if it’s all right with you. I’m going to cut out a little early. You know. It’s Friday.”

“On my homeworld it is only Day 4 of the 17-day weekly cycle. We work all but one and that day is spent breeding and excrecting.”

“Lucky you. For the breeding at least. I wish I got some that often! But you know my wife. Ha ha.”

“I do. Just yesterday I subjected her to the hypno-wheel.”

“Right. But it’s no wonder you guys don’t excrete too often. The food here is terrible.”

“The nutri-paste contains all the elements needed for survival and optimal work efficiency.”

“It tastes like crap.”

“Your comparison is flawed. Additionally, I suspect that your badinage is merely an attempt to distract me from the fact that you are attempting to desert your duties before the appointed hour, a transgression punishable by…”

“It’s five now.”

“What?”

“It’s five o’clock already. I’m outta here.”

“Return to your duties at once, Unit 46031-H, or I shall order your immediate conversion to freeze-dried scout rations.”

“Sure, boss man, I’ll go back to work. All you gotta do is pay me my O-T.”

“Damn unions.”

I've been spending a little time lately asking myself questions about the near future. And in particular—this is especially relevant if you're planning on writing a near-future SF novel set maybe 15-30 years hence—what it's going to be like as an experience for, well, not for my generation (I'll be 65-80 if I live that long: of declining relevance) but for the next generation on. And I suspect it'll be pretty shitty.

I was born in late 1964, the youngest child of older-than-average parents who married late: my cousins are (or were) part of the baby boom generation, but culturally I'm an early type specimen of Generation X.

My generation (in the UK) benefited from free university education, as long as we got in before 1992. From 1992 onwards, the student grant (subsistence payments for living, roughly comparable to being on the dole) were phased out, replaced completely by repayable loans by 1996. Then tuition fees were brought in, replacing the previously-free education framework as the universities were de facto privatised and turned into profit-making diploma mills. No sheepskin means no job if you don't have an employment track record, so Generations Y and subsequent were condemned to go heavily into debt to acquire the magic credentials without which an HR department won't look at them. Today's students expect to graduate with a burden of over £40,000 in loans on their back.

When I came out of university and post-graduate training in the late 80s, a housing bubble was inflating rapidly. I bought my first home, a one bedroom apartment in a modern development, with parking and a box room and an airy living room, for a little under £28,000. It seemed like a lot of money at the time: an elder sibling, 8 years before me, had bought their first home (a 2 bedroom house in Nottingham) for around £12,000. Housing in the 1970s was unimaginably cheap by today's standards. Just over 15 months later after I bought my flat I sold it for £40,000 and used the profits to put myself back into university, having decided that my original career choice was rather unfortunate. Someone born just a decade after me wouldn't have had that option. By the late 90s the bubble was reinflating: a decade on from my purchase, apartments like that one were changing hands for on the order of £100,000, well above the creditworthiness of a new graduate in their first job with a 100% mortgage, even if they weren't burdened by a pre-existing education loan larger than the cost of my first mortgage.

Since 2008, the UK economy has stagnated drastically. It's still producing jobs—this hasn't been called the "unemployment-free recession" for nothing—but they're mostly low-paid jobs at the bottom of the pile. We can still manufacture stuff, it seems, but manufacturing no longer provides mass employment. And service jobs are rapidly being automated, as witness the spread of self-service checkouts and ATMs and lights-out warehouses. (You know the pack drill: I'm not going to repeat the reasons for this here.) The important news is that wage growth is finally overtaking inflation for the first time in 5 years, after a period of net decline in personal income (unless you're in the 1% at the top of the 1%, of course).

I'm not even going to anatomize the new housing bubble: it's just plain depressing to contemplate.

So: low or stagnant income, the services my generation depended on and took for granted will no longer exist or be private monopolies, you either take on a crushing debt burden or consign yourself to unskilled labour for life, the cost of housing is an unsuperable barrier. To that you can add childcare costs: it's estimated that the cost of day care for one infant is around 70-80% of the average female wage. One ray of hope for Generation Y is rising life expectancy—but by the same token the retirement age is rising, because there's no way that working for 40 years can cover the costs of education and housing debt and a pension or annuity that will support you for another 25-30 years. Generation Y will probably work until they become too infirm, some time in their late 70s to early 80s, then experience the final 3-5 year period of decline in poor health and poverty if this goes on (because of course we're talking about the state of the nation between 2060 and 2080).

If you follow this blog you already know my views on how we have created a security panopticon surveillance state the like of which would have given the East German Stasi wet dreams. Generation Y have come of age in this state; to the Millennial generation, East Germany probably looks like a near-utopia. (You have a 90% chance of your phone conversations not being bugged, and the state will pay for your education, housing, and healthcare! What's not to like?)

There has been a boom market in dystopian young adult fiction over the past decade. There is a reason for this. Play and recreation is an important training mechanism in young mammals by which they practice or rehearse activities that will fit them for later adult life experiences. (It's also fun, but bear with me while I discuss the more ploddingly puritan angle for a moment.) Could it be that the popularity of YA dystopias reflects the fact that our youngest generation of readers expect to live out their lives in dystopia? (The alternative explanations hold that (a) high school in the age of helicopter parenting, fingerprint readers in the library, and CCTV in the corridors is an authoritarian dystopia anyway, and YA dys-fic helps kids understand their environment; and (b) that worse, their parents (who influence their reading) think this.)

On a global scale, things are improving. The absolute number of people living in poverty has remained static or actually declined over two decades during which our population rose dramatically. Wars affect fewer people than ever before. Huge swathes of the developing world are actually developing, and are now within sight of catching up with our declining developed world standard of living. But that's scant consolation to those of us who are trapped in the middle. And the way things are looking now, I expect the 30 year old Brits of 2030, people whose grandparents were buying houses and starting families on a single breadwinner's wages in the 1960s, will be envying the living standards of the average Malaysian citizen.

This decline has not of course gone unnoticed by the elite. There's a reason for the increasing militarization of police and security organizations in the United States and the UK: widespread civil disorder escalating to revolution along the lines of the Arab Spring is no longer unimaginable by 2030 if current trends continue. The oligarchs can hold the lid down by force for quite a considerable time, but the longer this continues the worse the eventual explosion will be, as witness the upheavals in Egypt or Ukraine.

So there's the problem in a nutshell. What should we be doing about it? And what is it feasible for us to do? (For example: I'd love to see a UK government deflate the housing market by around 80% and renationalize a bunch of infrastructure that should never have been sold off in the first place, but I recognize that it would be political suicide for any party that tried it).

Asked at his press conference yesterday about the allegations of serial child abuse against Cyril Smith, Nick Clegg said he had known nothing of them when he paid tribute to Smith on his 80th birthday as a "beacon" and an "inspiration" on his 80th birthday in 2008:

"Cyril Smith stood down as an MP 13 years before I became an MP. Many of the actions, the repugnant actions, which we now learn about took place well before the party I now lead even existed – in fact, took place before I even existed.

"Given those facts and that chronology, it is – as my party has made quite clear – not surprising that the Liberal Democrats, who were founded in 1989, two or three years before Cyril Smith stood down, were not aware."

Personally, I have known about the allegations against Smith since a considerably milder version of them appeared in Private Eye in 1979. As I once wrote, I have always assumed they were true.

Nick says he never heard them, and we must believe them. But the fact that there was no one in his inner circle to mention it to him does support the view (held by old farts like me) that he has surrounded himself with a group of bright young things with no great knowledge of the party.

I don't think Nick's response on Cyril Smith is successful, and the reason it doesn't tells us a lot about the problems he now faces.

During the television debates in the last general election campaign he could present himself as a young outsider without political baggage. He tries to do it here, but it does not work.

Nick Clegg is seen as a politician like any other who makes compromises and does not always tell the truth. The mishandling of tuition fees - I could never quite work out whether he was apologising for making that promise or for breaking it - hastened the process, but it was inevitable that it would take place.

And those of us who still like Nick now expect a bit more from him. He is a longstanding party leader and deputy prime minister. Answering with a touch of the petulance he is prone too and modelling your reply on Homer Simpson - "It was like that when I got here" - won't do any more.

Nick's failure to come to terms with this change in the way he is seen by the public was one of the reasons he did not do better in his debates with Nigel Farage. And unless he does come to terms with it, he will struggle if there are televised debates at the next election too.

As to Cyril Smith, it is not Nick Clegg who has hard questions to answer but David Steel, who was both chief whip and leader of the Liberal Party.

Over to you, Dave.

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April 15th, 2014: Here, let me save you some time! Commotio cordis. Really sorry if you or your family has invested heavily in physical bodies made of meat, perhaps for untold generations!! One year ago today: the bedsheets have batman on them, OF COURSE they have batman on them – Ryan

The lock-picking controversy of 1851.

Sarah Wollaston asks: Why am I being blamed for the Nigel Evans sex case?

Scarlett Johansson is, and I mean to do her no disservice by saying so, more a movie star than an actress.  She is one of those rare individuals in Hollywood who has attained a status so iconic that whether or not she actually delivers a good performance or a bad one is almost beside the point.  However, she is also still young and still adventuresome, and she has been willing to work with a number of directors who are well aware of her status as a movie star, but are themselves clever enough to want to play around with that idea.  The last movie I saw featuring Ms. Johansson — I say featuring for a reason — was Spike Jonze’s Her, in which she plays the disembodied voice of a computer operating system.  She is, essentially, a machine that is designed to have emotions — or, if not to actually have them, at least to provide a simulacrum of them that may as well be real; but this conceit almost seemed secondary to the audacity of Jonze’s decision to take someone who is, after all, widely considered one of the world’s most beautiful women and have her star in a romantic movie where she cannot be seen at any time.

I found Her to be interesting but unsatisfying, a little too in love with its own conceits while not quite willing to explore them and their meanings in enough depth.  Jonathan Glazer’s new sci-fi/horror piece, Under the Skin, is vastly more successful, but it toys with a strikingly similar premise — and an equally daring use of Scarlett Johansson, the movie star.  In the film, which begins with one of the most hypnotic and compelling opening sequences I’ve seen in years, Johansson portrays an unnamed and enigmatic creature who takes on human skin.  A blackened, skeletal thing, she (?) adopts the appearance of a dead streetwalker and visits nightclubs, bars, and street corners all throughout Scotland, picking up a largely indistinguishable group of rootless single men and luring them back to her home.  There, brought in by the promise of easy sex with a beautiful girl, they go willingly to their deeply mysterious deaths, sucked into a black liquid pool and, apparently, harvested for their bodily components.

After a few such encounters, Johansson picks up a savagely deformed young man and, apparently taking pity on him, releases him from the deathtrap.  Realizing she has crossed a line, she flees deeper into the northlands; as she is pursued by her keeper (another nameless figure who takes on the appearance of a stern Eurobiker), she attempts small gestures of humanity (eating a slice of pie, having sex with a kind man who finds her wandering cold and alone), but to no avail.  In the end, she meets with a fate that she cannot comprehend; the ending of the movie is bizarre, repulsive, moving, and entirely unexpected, and it closes with a visual as stunning as the one that began it.

All this is just plot, though, and plot is one of the least accessible things about Under the Skin.  I have not read the book upon which it is based, but while each scene is explicable at least in part, Glazer certainly abstracts them to an extreme degree, so that some things that happen don’t make sense until later scenes, or until the end of the movie, or even hours later, in moments of undistracted contemplation.  This is part of what is frustrating about it, but it is also part of what is magnificent about it.  It is that rarest of things, a genre film that is willing to jettison the fussy tedium of plot point after plot point that sinks so many genre efforts.  Glazer is not delivering a purely surrealist film here, though it is crammed with images and sounds that could only truly come from dreams; instead, he has simply refused to make the genre elements entirely literal and explicable (and, therefore, dull).  It is certainly a science-fiction film, but there are only a few moments — most of them at the very beginning and the very end — that can easily be identified as bearing any hallmarks of that genre.  It is also clearly a horror film — there are moments of sublime terror, and overall, the movie is extraordinarily disturbing, keeping the viewer ill at ease for almost its entire running time.  But there is very little gore, and what death occurs is abstracted in the extreme; it is only at the end that a truly and explicitly horrific act occurs, and it is not at the hands of an alien.

Much of Under the Skin‘s pleasures are sensual in nature.  The sound editing is some of the most impressive I’ve encountered since Todd Haynes’ Safe, almost 20 years ago; the way small environmental sounds are ramped up to a distracting volume when Johansson is alone, and sublimated to the point of inaudibility when she is out in public, is subtle but unmistakable.  The score, too, is constantly impressive; written by Mica Levi, the talented front woman of British indie act Micachu & the Shapes, it conjures everything from Bernard Herrmann in Hitchcock mode to Krzysztof Penderecki.  The visual style is sleek but never artificial, and the movie as a whole is exquisitely paced; with its flashes of Kubrick’s 2001, Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, it has a distinctly 1970s vibe, without ever coming across as mere homage or recreation.  It is by no means a movie without precedents, but its visual and tonal language add up to much more than the sum of influences.

Just as Glazer plays with the reality of what is happening in the narrative, showing us the development of the story but never doing so in a prosaic enough way that it’s easy to get our hooks into, so too are we left somewhat on our own when figuring out what, if anything, all of it means.  Since seeing the film, I have encountered the notion that it is meant to be a metaphor for factory farming, that it is a feminist reclamation of the classic sci-fi trope of the ‘body-snatcher’; that it is a profound meditation on the idea of rape culture and/or the ‘male gaze’.  I think all these interpretations are plausible without being entirely correct.  For myself, I seemed to detect elements of commentary on the nature of sex work; certainly Johansson is meant to be bait for johns, her clothes come from a murdered prostitute, her killings illustrate the way random sex can be easily turned into horror, and it is impossible not to think of her scowling guardian in the role of a pimp.  (The comparison to Jeanne Dielman carries over here, too; in both films, the seemingly emotionless woman is jolted into a shocking new perception of reality by an unexpected emotional reaction.)  But Glazer hasn’t made a movie that’s so easily reduced to a message; its significance, like its action, are there to be sussed out, not to be immediately apprehended.

As to Johansson:  it is somewhat difficult to assess whether what she is doing is great acting.  In a pure reversal of Her, she is visible on screen almost every moment, but she has almost nothing to say; she’s almost completely silent in the second half of Under the Skin.  She is meant to convey an easy sexuality that makes her a perfect lure, a blank-faced incomprehension of everything outside of her prescribed duties; and, finally, a frustrated lack of comprehension, once she actually becomes able to comprehend things.  She does all these things extremely well (she also doesn’t blink in the whole movie, which is a hell of a feat, if nothing else), but it is also not a role that is imbued with the kind of internal struggle and emotional range that we often associate with ‘good acting’.  But the way she indulges the reality of her own superstar status fills the role with interest.  This may be a function of her unusual stardom:  while extremely attractive, Johansson has never been a typical Hollywood beauty, and here, she embraces that with no small degree of selflessness:  she is gangly, awkward, clumsy, with a hint of a belly and inexplicable bruises.  She gazes into the mirror, naked, after having her odd emotional awakening, agog at what she sees, as if she is seeing her body for the first time; but to us, it is impossible to shake the reality that it is the body of Scarlett Johansson.  Glazer’s most daring and successful gambit is in scenes where she picks up strangers in dance clubs and discos:  miked up and surreptitiously filmed, she approaches men, improvising her lines, and drawing them out — these are not actors, but real people she picked up in bars, who did not recognize her as the movie star she is.  The ease with which they allow themselves to be seduced by a stranger is amusing to us as an audience, entirely fitting to the story, and more than a little creepy.  It is true that the strength of the approach is that we are seeing this story of alien infiltration from the alien perspective; but it is more complicated and less obvious than that.  We are watching her perspective; we are seeing her develop it and cope with it.  It is her eyes, through our eyes, that reflect the alienation.

Under the Skin is Glazer’s first film in a decade.  I had seen his debut, the British gangster riff Sexy Beast, and found it wanting; it read to me like a fairly typical specimen of the form buoyed by a single alarming performance that didn’t have a lot of staying power.  His second feature, Birth, I have still not seen, though it’s been recommended to me by several people as something quite unique and special.  If this film — deliberate, meticulous, enigmatic, and vivid — is any indication of what he’s capable, I hope he doesn’t take as long to bring us his next one.  It’s a lot to process, and it stays with you long after you’ve seen it; a good estimation of its virtues likely will require multiple viewings.  But there are few movies I’ve seen this year that I am as eager to see again; I can’t imagine its spell will easily be broken.

 

To be honest, I just learned about the Ryan White Medicaid waiver recently--because folks who make laws are trying to defund it. As soon as I learned that, and what the waiver is, I was horrified. This waiver is not for the direct cost of HIV medication and treatment, it's for the other stuff.

This is a thing people don't seem to grok about chronic illness: managing it is a lot of work. I do not have intimate experience of managing HIV, but I manage other chronic illnesses, & I'm going to talk about that because some things do translate across illnesses.

People have this idea that if you have a chronic illness, you take your medication and are pretty much fine. The more nuanced folks will realize that your fine and everyone else's fine are a bit different, or that "fine" is relative, but people focus on the medications that directly deal with the chronic condition. That isn't even a small percentage. There is so much more.

Part of living with chronic illness is doctor's appointments. There's the appointments for regular maintinance of the condition, even when you feel fine--there may be blood tests, medication adjustments, other procedures. There's more urgent appointments when symptoms of the chronic illness flare up, and these almost always involve testing or medication changes or referral to yet another doctor in case something in another system is wrong. There's primary care appointments when you're sick, because for many of us with chronic illness, getting "a cold" or "the flu" or what have you is has the potential to cause a lot of problems.

One of the services Ryan White Part D covers is transportation for HIV patients. When I go to the neurologist it can be a whole day--hour on the bus, half hour of paperwork, half hour appointment, wait in the lab for half an hour, 15 minutes for the blood draw, hour and a half to the pharmacy, 20 minute wait there, half hour home. See, poor people ride the bus. Chronically ill folks are disproportionately poor, and recipients of this waiver are disproportionately women and children of color (who are also disproportionately living in poverty). A chronically ill woman with kids, or a mother of a chronically ill child? It isn't right to ask her to spend all day on the bus. Cutting services that allow her to spend time with her children isn't acceptable.

And sometimes transport is a need. A legitimate need. It is, in fact, possible to be too sick to go to the doctor. That was me last week. If the bus is the only option, getting to the doctors who take medicaid can be a trek. Making that trek while acutely ill on top of chronic illnesses exascerbated by viral or bacterial infections? Usually if I'm afraid I'll collapse on the bus or not get home, I take my chances. A parent doesn't have that option. A parent of a chronically ill child has a much more difficult call than I did in that situation--she wants what is best for her baby, her child. But taking a sick kid on the bus is miserable, the actual worst. The people who think cutting this program is a bright idea may say "take a cab" but that isn't realistic for many many people. That's not an acceptable solution.

Nor is cutting child care funding. I've never taken a child to my doctor appointments, but I have been taken to my mother's & my siblings' doctor appointments, and they went to mine. It is boring for the children who aren't directly being examined, and it is much harder for the adults to discuss the things that the appointment is actually about.

The programs provided by this waiver allow women and children to do more with their time and energy than manage HIV. This is important. Chronic illness is scary. It's so much harder to deal with when everything is sitting at doctors and riding the bus and playing alone because today's trips knocked mommy out (peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, because little kids can make those & mom is too tired to make dinner, even if she really wants to). The programs allow families to have a life outside of managing the illness--to have an actual family life. To have those moments of silliness. To have time and energy to enjoy each other.

"Not cutting medication funding" is nowhere near enough. It is a beginning but it's nothing to be proud of. It's not even the minimum of decency. Families dealing with HIV & getting services through this waiver deserve the help. They deserve to know more than daily management of the disease. Lending a hand shouldn't be too much to ask, not even a little.

You still have a chance to win a signed copy of the new edition of Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0). In addition to that book, the prize package will also include the Basic Instructions 2014 Box Calendar, and a signed copy of a book by a different author. This week, the bonus book is You, by Charles Benoit.

You can enter below by friending Off to Be the Wizard on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or by leaving a comment on this post answering a simple question. (FYI, last week there was some confusion because only those who entered could see the question. For the record, the question is "Do you prefer paper or e-books, and if if it e-books, what format?")

Sadly, the offer is only open to people in the United States. Shipping costs, what can I say? The contest closes on, April13th at 12am, then a new give away with a different bonus book will begin. Thanks, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Earlier today I was at an OAH roundtable on blogging as scholarship. There were a number of distinguished bloggers there (Anne Little;  Kenneth Owen; Benjamin Alpers; John Fea), all of whom blog in very different styles. The audience was great.

I thought I’d post some of my argument about why blogging is valuable as scholarship: it boils down to the fact that our notion of scholarship and “historical work” is deranged. Not just in the fact that we have, preposterously, only three real forms, the conference paper, the article, and the book: it’s also that the the style of academic discourse is grotesquely psychologically conflicted.

I’ve argued before that the way we’re taught to read bears no relation to the way we are taught to write. We are taught to write as if our audience was a learned man of leisure, with servants, and we’re taught to read like sou-chefs gutting a fish: quickly, ruthlessly, under time pressure. We are asked to construct a form of self punishment–we write for the person we wish we could be, and in reading destroy that person we imagined.

Don’t take my word for it. You can clearly see this conflicted self in the contrast, growing wider every year, between the text of any academic history and the acknowledgments. Open any book  of footnoted academic history published in the last two decades, and the text will almost never use the word “I,” almost never mention anything personal, never describe intellectual struggle or uncertainty. The text will aim to erase the author altogether, so the argument emerges full grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. But the acknowledgements! The acknowledgments are a virtual carnival of the self, full of confessions of doubt, descriptions of struggle, metaphors of journey and passage and transformation; yearnings and regrets and intimacies: salutes to comrades professional and personal, the fallen and the still standing. The acknowledgements are colorful, personal and self indulgent: the text is personless and self banishing.

Something’s not right here! I mean, mentally not right. The division between the text and the acknowledgements is as wide or wider than the division between the way we are taught to write and the way we are taught to read. It is a sign of repressed desires and wishes. Really, from a distance it look like a mental illness.

Blogging maybe has the potential to reintegrate the fragmented academic personality. It makes the personal visible. It allows for struggle; it is the journey towards meaning. It allows for an authorial voice that speaks through itself, instead of through some disembodied imagined person. It’s embedded in community. And it doesn’t involve the violent forms of self-erasure that the acknowledgments keep proving we want to escape

I got out of the business back in ’89, right before the bottom fell out. Nowadays there’s not much room for competition. It’s just like any business: once it gets going, and the big boys see that there’s money to be made, they start buying up the smaller competitors, and squeezing out the rest. I mean, you can’t even rob a liquor store in Gotham these days without Penguin Limited or Joker-Quinn Consolidated Holdings getting a piece of it.

When I started out, things were different. You had plenty of people who weren’t just in it for the money. Not to say that wasn’t a prime motivator, of course. I was trying to make a quick buck, sure. Who hasn’t dreamed about fleeing  a crime scene, carrying a medium-sized burlap sack full of hundreds and marked “LOOT” in his hands? But there was more to it than that. For me, it was frustration. The Manarajan the Magician gig wasn’t paying the bills, but more than that, I got to the point that if I had to do the interlocking rings for one more Nintendo-addicted eight-year-old, I was gonna kill someone. And back then, anyone with a dopey gimmick and a friend who was a seamstress could make a go of it. It wasn’t like now, when you have to have a huge amount of capital just to get into the game. You had guys who were in it for money, fame, career, sex, boredom, adventure, or the sheer psychopathic thrill of it. It was a great time to be a supervillain.

A lot of times, people ask me, “Julian, do you have any regrets?” Hell, no. First off, you understand, I was never one of the hardcore guys, like Clayface. So for me, it was always Gotham State. And, you know, it’s not like Gotham State was a frat house or anything, but it was better than that hole up in Arkham. I took some accounting classes with Killer Croc, and he said that place was a fucking pit. Also, I went straight pretty early in the game, before things got crazy-weird. I met my beautiful wife Melodie when she was on staff at the public defender’s office, which was a lucky break for me, and since I was mostly a baffle-grab guy (as we used to call it — that was a guy who spent his time confusing the other side and then took the money while they were trying to figure out what the fuck you were doing), Bats never wailed on me like he did some guys. So I mostly had a pretty good run.

Now I have a decent small business. I came up with a breakfast cereal based on mathematical symbols that ended up being a big hit, and I market it and run the company out of my home. That’s doing well. My wife went into private practice, and actually ended up defending a lot of the old guys who are still in the game, so I keep in touch. Bats even sends me a calendar once a year on Christmas, ha ha. It’s a pretty good gag.

I guess some people would be angry. I didn’t make any money in the long run, and there was all that time I spent in the joint. I guess I was kind of a laughing stock, you know, the whole “Calendar Man” gig being considered pretty wimpy these days, in the wake of guys like Magog and Deathbringer. My costume was totally lame. That dopey hood and the big paper pages on the shoulders, Christ. But, hey! What do I know? Show me one guy who isn’t embarrassed at his high school photo. And at least my Who’s Who entry got drawn by Pat Broderick instead of some hack. Really, I have nothing to feel angry about. I mean, look at the Calculator. 54 years old, still themed as a piece of technology no one’s used since the days of Texas Instruments, and getting his ass whipped on a regular basis by every schmuck in a mask, left toothless and muttering “It’s all part of the master plan”. What an idiot. I can’t believe I invited him to my wedding.

[content warning: mild ideohazards about rumination that might make people who have anxiety disorders have anxiety disorders more effectively, in the bad sense of "effectively"]

[epistemic status: more crackpottish than usual for this blog. Wild speculation.]

I.

If the brain had been designed by an amateur, it would enter a runaway feedback loop the first time it felt an emotion.

Think about it. You see a butterfly. This makes you happy. Being happy is an unexpected pleasant surprise. Now you’re happy that you’re happy. This makes you extra happy. Being extra happy is awesome! This makes you extra extra happy. And so on to as much bliss as your neurons are capable of representing.

Or you stub your toe. This makes you sad. Being sad sucks and makes you less productive and less fun to be around. This means being sad is an unexpected negative event, which sounds like a good reason to be sadder. Being even sadder is going to ruin your night even more, so you get sadder still, and so on until you become suicidally depressed over a single lousy toe.

In the real world, either those feedback loops usually don’t happen, or they converge and stop at some finite point. I would not be surprised to learn that a lot of evolutionary innovation and biochemical complexity goes into creating a STRONG BARRIER against conditioning on your own internal experience. Sometimes it fails.

A guy named Wegner conducted a famous psych experiment where he asked a bunch of participants to sit in a room alone and try not to think about a bear with sunglasses. Of course, that was pretty much all they could think of. They seem to have gotten into a feedback loop where “desire not to think of a bear with sunglasses” -> “thought of a bear with sunglasses” -> “frustration” -> “stronger desire not to think of…” -> “more thoughts of…” and so on.

One of my professor’s work – and my college thesis – expanded the field of bear-with-sunglasses-ology to note that people with obsessive compulsive disorder are found to be much worse at this task than the general population. This is not surprising. OCD seems to be pretty much exactly this scenario, except instead of trying not to think of a bear with sunglasses, you’re trying not to think about how you’re dirty-contaminated, or how maybe you left the stove on, or how what if your car just hit somebody then where would you be? OCDers get stuck in feedback loops where their worry about their obsessive thought is itself a form of the obsessive thought and so both justifies and intensifies their worry.

I also remember a study where a guy with a sleep lab offered participants a cash reward if they could go to sleep more quickly than usual; the end result was that all of them took much longer to go to sleep than usual. Strong desire to go to sleep -> actually a strong anti-sedating emotion -> worry that you won’t get the prize -> stronger desire to go to sleep -> even less sedated -> so on.

There seems to be an element of this in most anxiety disorders. Someone goes outside, something bad happens. Next time they go outside, they feel anxious. The usual STRONG BARRIER against conditioning upon internal experience is AWOL for some reason. The patient finds the experience of becoming anxiety very negative; therefore their belief that “going outside leads to bad things” is justified. Eventually they are so anxious about possibly becoming anxious that they just stay in their house all the time.

(hey, this is kind of Lob’s theorem! If you know that, if you’re anxious about being anxious you would be anxious, then you’re anxious. Maybe.)

But the most clear-cut example is panic disorder. Someone gets anxious for some reason. They get the standard somatic correlates of anxiety – racing heartbeat, sweating, etc. This is a scary situation to be in, not least because it mimics all sorts of terrible medical conditions like heart attacks. This makes the person more anxious, which increases the somatic correlates, and so on.

II.

A lot of CBT seems to be about manually breaking these feedback loops. But I’m just as interested in what we accidentally do to manually increase them. I worry that making mental self-reference slightly easier and more mentally accessible can lead to a big increase in feedback loop size.

I am misophonic – it means I can’t tolerate certain noises. Ten years ago, I would not have used the word “misophonic”, and I would not even have said I have low noise tolerance. I would have said “Hey, that TV is bothering me, can you turn it off?”

I didn’t start thinking about it on a meta-level until one of my roommates told me “Wow, Scott, you seem to be really super sensitive to noise.” And then gave me a little bit of grief over it, which made it stick in my brain. Ever after that I modeled myself as a person who was super sensitive to noise.

And that made my noise sensitivity much, much worse. I hypothesize that maybe, instead of just noise -> distraction, this created a longer feedback loop. Something like noise -> anxiety that I, as a person sensitive to noise, am going to be distracted -> this anxiety is itself distracting -> noticing that I am distracted and being anxious that this distraction will continue as long as the noise continues -> further distraction -> and so on.

(it’s worth noting here that I have obsessive compulsive disorder and that noise sensitivity is a classic feature of the condition)

I had precisely the same experience on this post when I said I was triggered by certain kinds of feminist and social justice rhetoric. I didn’t really think of it that way until I wrote that sentence. I mean, it was true that I heard the rhetoric and then I felt upset and scared, it was just that I had never thought of it as a part of my identity before, or connected it to the word “trigger”. Well, as soon as I did that, the problem got about three times worse, and continues to get worse. I think this nice little crystallized concept of “trigger” might allow my brain to feed back its anxiety more effectively, like “Yup, this thing triggers you, better start feeling anxious about feeling anxious about feeling anxious about…” and that made it go from “a thing that bothers me but which I can cope with” to “giant psychological disaster”.

(now I wonder about typical mind stuff. Do people without OCD have this same experience of anxiety about anxiety about anxiety…? For example, when I was young I was afraid of the dark, not because I believed in ghosts, but because I expected to hear a sound or see something blown around by the wind which I would mistake for a ghost and then have to deal with waves of terror rushing through my body until I figured out what it was, and this was sufficiently bad that I slept with the lights on as a child. Is this the sort of thing other people could imagine feeling, or is it really unusual?)

But this sort of thing is comparatively small fish. I’m more worried about the effect of our entire rich emotional vocabulary. Like, we just sort of invented the concept of being “stressed out” sometime in the last century. Did that make people more stressed out about being stressed out? Did the movement for people to become more introspective and talk about their feelings more (that was a thing, right? That’s why old people are so stoic and young people are so touchy-feely?) make people more likely to fall into feedback loops?

What happens when you give people a psychological diagnosis like “depression”? I’ve always heard that it makes people feel better, because now they know there’s an explanation for what they’re experiencing and it’s not their own fault. But I don’t know if I’ve seen any studies proving this, and even if there were I’d expect them to suffer from the general bias to confirm things that everyone knows are true. What if it just makes people be depressed about how depressed they are, and then go “There’s that depression again, guess this means I’m not getting any better” and become depressed about that?

III.

This whole essay is a little crackpottish, but now I’m moving from things that merely can’t yet be supported by evidence to things that actively contradict it. But I think about this a lot, and it’s my blog, so shut up and listen anyway.

I notice that the class of mental disorders that seem to involve feedback loops – depression, OCD, anxiety – are also the class of mental disorders effectively treated with serotonergic drugs.

One of the most powerful serotonergic drugs in existence is LSD. And as I have learned from – let’s say long boring journal articles – the main effect of LSD is to make you literally loopy. Your thoughts loop in and become about themselves, your sense of time becomes cyclic, everything you see becomes a fractal or a spiral or both. And you end up in an extreme emotional feedback loop to infinity – either a “good trip” or a “bad trip”.

This just-so story is not quite as convincing as I would like because SSRIs and LSDs both increase serotonin but have opposite effects on loopiness. But “serotonin” is a wide and complicated category, and like I said above, I bet the brain has a lot of different mechanisms to finely adjust how self-referential your thoughts are allowed to get.

I will get crackpottier still: maybe the parameter being adjusted is some kind of “allowed size of loop”, so that usually you can finish an entire train of thought and then maybe reflect back on items in the train. Small amounts of LSD decrease the loop size, so that individual thoughts can refer to themselves. And large amounts of LSD (the journal articles I read were very comprehensive) decrease the loop size to zero, and the perfect pure consciousness people claim to experience is just a loop looping in on itself forever, empty of content.

I have many evocative memories of the house my brothers and I lived in in the winter of 1976. The smell of the kitchen - kerosene and chilblain ointment, and the underlying taint of damp mould. The creaky old sofa. The little round hole in the upstairs window. The thin polystyrene layer on the bedroom walls that made for laughably poor insulation. And, of course, the time I tried to conjure spirits into a crude Solomonic circle.

'You have to get in the circle with me,' I told my younger brothers. 'The book says so!'

They refused.

I clutched my cut-out cardboard pentagram in my fist and cursed their recalcitrance.

This all sounds like the prelude to a horror story - early Stephen King perhaps - but it actually happened. I was eight or nine at the time and had recently found a book that told you how to do magic. Unlike the Puffin Book of Magic, a manual of conjuring tricks which explicitly warned you that it was not going to give you special powers, the book I'd found was far more encouraging.

The Puffin book's back cover read 'This book will not teach you how to make palaces appear, or turn your teacher into an ice-cream frog.' (Ever since, I have wondered what an ice-cream frog was.) Depressing news for a skinny young boy in National Health glasses. Imagine my delight, then, when I read quite a different message on the back of my new discovery, How To Make Magic:

'There is more to magic than magic tricks. First make your own magic wand, then learn how to do mind reading and fortune telling, how to weave spells, brew magic potions, summon spirits and hunt ghosts.'

AWESOME. None of the Puffin book's limp disclaimers here. This was the real stuff. Proper magic. Weave spells! Brew magic potions! SUMMON SPIRITS!

In later life, I sometimes wondered what on earth had been going through the minds of whoever wrote that book. I didn't doubt my recollection of it, much less that of the spirit-summoning fiasco, but I did wonder just how much of it I'd recalled correctly. Surely, even in the 1970s, people didn't write occult handbooks for kids?

And then I found it again.





The front cover tells us right away that something is deeply amiss here. This is a children's book, one of many in the 'How To' series. It is the only children's book I have ever seen that has a goat skull on the cover. Look carefully in the bottom right hand corner. That's a dagger. Possibly even a Wiccan 'athame', by the look of it. And I have no idea what is going on with that disembodied head, or mask, or whatever the hell it is. I will say this, though: the front cover of what's supposed to be a children's book features an altar setup that puts the likes of 'Teen Witch' to shame.




Just look how innocuous the other titles in the series are! 'How to make presents from odds and ends' 'How to sew presents from scraps'. It were the 1970s, you know. Winter of discontent. Make do and mend.




The introduction. 'Perhaps you are one of those rare people gifted with real magical powers, as well as having a few baffling tricks up your sleeve.' The implication is clear: there is stage magic, and then there is real magic. It's basically encouraging the kids of 1974 to believe in the occult. As a kid in 1976, I thought this was the coolest thing ever.




One of the book's stage magic sections, this section is relatively innocuous. I say 'relatively' because it still recommends that the child reading the book should pop along to the chemists and BUY SOME FUCKING SALTPETRE. Oh for the lost days of our youth when a small boy could come skipping out of a chemist's shop with a manual of witchcraft in one hand and a bag of bomb ingredients in the other.

Note the mention of an adult figure, whose sole function is to provide a lighted cigarette. This, I think, shows the authors' overall regard for adult responsibility here.

Savour, if you will, the chilling sentence 'You might like to write a special chant to help create the right sort of atmosphere.' The atmosphere in question presumably being pant-crapping terror with a lingering aroma of tobacco, adult indifference and gunpowder.




And now the wrongness begins in earnest. (We're still in the stage magic bit, remember. We haven't even STARTED on the occult stuff.) Look at that picture. Reflect that the book not only encourages you to stick a burning flame in your mouth, it manages to make that even worse with the accompanying photo.




Here's a fun crafting project, kids. Make your own ouija board!




The observant among you will note that cutting a hazel branch at sunrise to catch the sun's new light and power is something actual witches were believed to do. Not a joke, not stage magic. Actual witchcraft for kids. Or what people thought witchcraft entailed in 1974, anyway.




Ask a kid to magic a wart away nowadays, and they'll just look at you funny...

('Horsehair from an old mattress'? Horsehair? Just how old would a mattress need to be to have horsehair in it?)

Always remember to collect your herbs when the moon is waxing, children.




'Ask an adult to singe the ends of the paper with a lighted cigarette.'

Evidently this book's idea of an ideal parent is someone who constantly smokes and doesn't ask awkward questions about what you are up to in the attic with the herbs you gathered at full moon and the wand you cut at sunrise. We'd be straight on the blower to social services today, of course.

'Remember to carry your spell scroll with you on all magical occasions!' Magical occasions? It's beginning to look like the reader can expect to be invited to a Sabbat just as soon as they've finished the basics.




Put them into the bottle. Leave for three days in the sun. Shake them daily. Listen to your parents anxiously telephoning the doctor.




DUDE WHAT.

'Has your teacher, or a friend, made you a little angry lately?'

'Yes, magic book. They have. Will you help me to hurt them, magic book?'

'Of course, my child. Of course...'

I bet this is how Ginny Weasley felt when she first picked Tom Riddle's diary up.

And that wonderful little disclaimer: 'They may not have much effect.' Not MUCH effect. Why, I wonder, did the book not just say 'Of course, magic isn't real and this is all for fun'?




'Ask your parents if you can bewitch a corner of your garden at home. The centre piece should really be a tree around which you should plant a circle of white flowers - snowdrops or daisies, perhaps - in honour of the moon goddess.'

What do you mean, you don't remember agreeing to worship the moon goddess? Tough shit, kid. You want to work real magic instead of that make-believe stuff, you honour the moon goddess.




... yes, folks, this is it. This is the very double page spread that led to me attempting ritual magic before the age of 10. Even now, I am staggered that a book would recommend this. The circle and triangle diagram are based on a genuine grimoire of demonology, the Goetia or Lesser Key of Solomon.

And this, of course, is the most memorable line from the whole book:

'Be careful not to put the pentagrams upside down because they look a bit like the Devil with his horns and you don't want him turning up.'

How exquisitely English is that? Like a brusque nanny being strict about the rowdy boy from the council estate who you aren't allowed to have at your party. We don't want HIM turning up.

Edit: Hello Reddit! Here are some bonus scans of the book for you from my Twitter account.

https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/451379250386305024/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/451351757189165056/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/451322669535748098/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/451322241016283136/photo/1
https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/451320178794455041/photo/1

Yes, I still use Livejournal. But so does George R R Martin, so I'm okay with that.

Extra edit: Hello people coming here from Dangerous Minds! Have another scan. This is the apple girl and the candle-eating boy doing some apple bobbing. Poor boy looks like he's going to be roasted.

https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/509462716671479808

This runs an hour and 19 minutes so few of you will watch it…but you should. It's a pretty good video of what I think is one of the ten-or-so best movies ever made: The General starring Buster Keaton. Made in 1926, it was not a success and its failure to perform at the box office damaged Keaton's career somewhat.

Why did it fail? Historians of such things have offered many reasons but a biggie is that audiences then expected more comedy and less serious adventure in a film with Keaton's name on it. Also, back then, there were still people alive with strong first-hand and second-hand feelings about the Civil War and some found things in it as reasons for outrage.

But the film survived and was rediscovered and heralded. The American Film Institute, when it compiled its 10th Anniversary list of the 100 best American movies of all time pegged it at #18. That's pretty darn good. I don't expect anyone to watch the whole thing here…and maybe a web video isn't the ideal way to experience this masterpiece. But I couldn't resist having one of my favorite movies on the site here. You understand…

I am now being flung into sky in the westerly direction. I hope not to overshoot and land in the Pacific.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

For those asking, yes, there is a gremlin on the wing. He's a trainee! He's kind of nervous so we're all trying to be encouraging.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

The gremlin's supervisor is here. That's gotta make him nervous.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

Uh-oh. Trainee gremlin apparently tearing up the wing all wrong. Supervisor shaking its head, writing something on a clipboard.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

Now the gremlin has gone to a window to scare a passenger. The passenger in question: a small baby. I think that's cheating.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

Small child is delighted and says "puppy" over and over. The trainee gremlin bursts into tears. This is a hard gig, man.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

The supervisor gremlin is making the trainee gremlin stand in the corner of the wing. Oh, my. This isn't going well at all.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

Supervisor gremlin on the phone now. Appears to be calling in an experienced backup gremlin. I'm feeling bad for the trainee gremlin now.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

I mean, yes. The trainee gremlin is trying to destroy our plane and send us all screaming to our deaths. But a gig is a gig is a gig.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

You try getting a job as a gremlin on this economy. It's either destroying planes or being garden statuary for ironic suburbanites.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

So, yes, I have sympathy for this trainee gremlin – wait. Trainee gremlin has just pushed supervisor gremlin off the wing. Bold strategy!—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

Huh. Apparently, supervisor gremlin had wings. Hovering over trainee, glaring. Trainee gremlin looks frustrated by this plot twist.—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

But as it turns out, attempting to murder your supervisor is an accepted work strategy amongst gremlins! Trainee gremlin passes the exam!—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

The whole plane is cheering! Trainee gremlin takes an awkward bow, and then tries to dislodge an engine. Adorable!—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

And as we plummet out of the sky, we can die happy, assured the American gremlin industry is still tops in the world. USA! USA! U(thud)—
John Scalzi (@scalzi) April 10, 2014

(For those who missed the first in this series, posted almost a year ago (i.e., almost certainly on another long plane trip to Los Angeles), it’s here.)

Some of you might have noticed something called heartbleed generating a lot of tech news smoke and heat this week.

This web server runs on Apache, yes. But I don't provide an encrypted server connection over SSL—it's an unencrypted set-up because I'm not in the business of selling you something or handling your confidential information, and I don't see a pressing need to make your life and mine more complicated in order to provide an illusion of (non-existent) security. If you're not running an SSL encrypted service in the first place, then you're not vulnerable to a particularly nasty zero-day hitting OpenSSL. QED.

This is not to say that I won't be patching the OpenSSL setup on my colo box in due course, because security is next to godliness or good oral hygiene or something. But I'm not running around panicking. You aren't trusting me with your credit card details or your Google account credentials, and if you were, you can only expect me (or any commercial web server) to provide limited security against non-state actors. For example, if the folks at the Donut in Cheltenham want to read my blog, patching SSL isn't going to keep them out: (a) the machine isn't under my physical control, and (b) there's this little thing called RIPA(2000) that gives them the legal power to demand access to my private keys under a gagging order and on pain of imprisonment if they want to play medium-heavy. Or to go raid my colocation host (see (a)). Playing heavy-heavy in this context would involve armed police or drone strikes or ... you get the picture.

We live in a panopticon, and it's time to get real. Yes, we should look to our security updates for protection against "ordinary" criminals. But if you're worried about the government, patching NSA-exploited zero-days is a bit like trying to treat a bubonic plague outbreak by hanging a sprig of lavender over your front door: at best it's a displacement activity, while the cure lies elsewhere.

Why is it that most film and TV producers will not read scripts that are not submitted to them by reputable agents? Well, this exchange between a producer and a wanna-be screenwriter might give you a good idea.

The term gets used all the time. Ed Kilgore, at Talking Points Memo, says “you don’t have to be a racist to practice racism.” This makes zero sense to me. What is racism? How is it different from prejudice or bigotry?

My answer is pretty simple: a racist is a person who believes in the idea of “race” as a real thing. It’s standard among academics to argue there is no such thing as “the white race,” for example: it’s a made up idea. “But I look outside, and mostly I see white people!” “Look at Congress, mostly white people.” The answer is that “white” is only a convenient shorthand we have invented to group Italians, Jews, Irish, Spanish, Polish, etc into a single category. We know “white person” is a made up term when we consider people who blur the boundaries–dark skinned white people, light skinned people with slightly asian features. One of the classic problems with “white people” in the US has been historically, Arabs. White or not? The other, classically, is Asian Indians, who are in some cases supposed to be “caucasian” but have brown skin. “Caucasian” itself is an entirely made-up term. Similarly “black” includes people whose skin color ranges from light brown to deep black. We call people black even though they are clearly mixed–exhibit “A” being Barack Obama.

So a racist, I would argue, is a person who believes in the idea of “race” as an actual real thing, a biological fact. Lots of people believe this.

By this definition, you can be a racist and be a really nice guy. You can be a racist and believe in equal opportunity for all, equal justice and fairness for all. You can be a racist and insist on ending segregation. You can be a racist and not hate anybody. A racist is someone who believes in the legitimacy of “race” as a biological fact. Segregationist would often say that they had no personal dislike of the black race, they just thought the races should stay separate. This is racism, even if in fact they sincerely DO like the members so the other race and bear them no ill will.

I’m willing to say “I am not a racist” because I do not believe at all in the idea of race.

But before I congratulate myself, the related problem is bigotry. You can be a bigot without being a racist. If you think lawyers are all bad people, you are bigoted against lawyers. If you hate all liberals, or all conservatives, because “they are all” this or that, you are a bigot. Nobody thinks lawyers are a race: hating all lawyers is a form of bigotry, not racism. I’m certainly not free of bigotry, though I try to be. If you think all southerners are dumb, or all northerners are rude, you are a bigot. If you think all black people are lazy, you are a racist AND a bigot.

Obviously bigotry and racism go together quite nicely, and it’s relatively rare, it seems to me, to find a racist who is not also a bigot. The idea of “race” as a biological “fact” emerged at a moment when Europeans were colonizing the world and trading slaves. Coupling racism to bigotry was good business. It’s actually pretty hard, in this context, to be a racist and not also engage in the bigotry racism nearly always travels with. “Race” as an idea, an idea coupled to bigotry, is central to understanding US history. There is a vast political and economic structure in place which favors “white”people and grossly disfavors “black” people.

It’s not “racist” to point this out: there is nothing “racist” in pointing out the way bigotry and the idea of race have worked together to structure power. I don’t believe lawyers are a race: there are no biological lawyers. Yet I can undertake to regulate the legal profession. So too I can accept the idea of affirmative action, if it imagines “black” as a socially created category, not a biological fact. Accept it somewhat uneasily.

Obviously this is sticky territory. Could I accept legal segregation if “black” was understood was as a socially created category, not a biological fact? Maybe: it’s hard to know what that would look like. Would there be some kind of skin reflectivity test? Some kind of culture test? It would be pretty clear, pretty quickly, that we were testing for idiotic, trivial and silly things, things that had no weight and didn’t justify the apparatus of segregation. But if you couple skin reflectivity to an idea of “race,” then segregation begins to make some kind of sense, the sense of racism. Affirmative action has many of these problems. It’s a program born out of the overwhelming importance of the idea of race to American life. To the degree that imagines people as having a real biological race, then it’s a racist program. Nobody ever said equal opportunity was going to be easy.

Again, I’m arguing that a “racist” is a person who accepts the idea of race as a biological fact, a real thing. A bigot is a person who dislikes a group of others. Racism and bigotry generally go together.

Many people seem to think that if they aren’t being mean-spirited, then it’s not bigotry or racism. Paula Deen liked the idea of black people of servants at a wedding, she said, and it reminded her of the charming life of the antebellum south. Was she being a racist? I can’t know. She was speaking of something awful–racial slavery–as charming, and she was seeking to recreate the hierarchy of racial slavery for fun. But I don’t think I can call that “racist:” I need other words, like “clueless” or “insensitive” or tasteless. Saying “dark skinned people make attractive waiters” does not seem to me to be a racist statement, but it certainly sets off alarm bells: “I see dark skinned people as servile and their servility is charming.” “Dark skinned people,” though, are not automatically a race. So was she being a racist? I can’t tell.

Another good example might be depictions of the president as a monkey. Opponents of George Bush started a website/meme called “The Smirking Chimp.” It included images of Bush as a chimp. Images of the Obamas as chimps are even more common: are these “racist” images? Why are these images racist and not the images of Bush? I think the answer is obvious. There is a long history in the US of regarding African Americans as a lesser people, more primitive, closer to nature; there’s a long history of depicting African Americans as ape-like in the service of white supremacy. The people who made those images of the Obamas  might argue they were just expressing their perfectly reasonable distaste for Obama, not racist feelings. This seems highly unlikely to me. There are many depictions of the entire Obama family as monkeys. You never saw this for the Bush family. I’m calling these racist in spirit and intent. 

It seems to me the starting point should be: is “race” being treated as a biological fact in this depiction? Is genetic inferiority being imagined? Are the traits being mocked understood as “innate” and “biological?” As the examples above suggest, this wouldn’t end the ambiguity about “racist speech,” but it would be a good starting point for introducing some clarity into the debate.

 

Thanks to all of you who have written to ask why the annotated guides have disappeared from the site... as most of you guessed it's because they are about to turn into a book.
"The Annotated Marx Brothers" will be published by McFarland next year.
As well as the last three films I never got around to doing here, I promise the book will contain loads and loads of stuff that was never seen online: each entry is massively expanded with new information, and there is an all-new accompanying commentary for each film.
Thanks so much for all the interest, and I hope you like the book.
I've nearly finished it, so I'll be back here soon with more online stuff...

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April 9th, 2014: HEY EVERYONE Have you ever said "Hey I like Dinosaur Comics, and I want support this Ryan guy, but I don't need or want any more stuff?" Today I'm starting a micropatronage campaign on Patreon, which lets you become a literal patron of the arts for as little as $1 a month. Super cheap! And patrons get all sorts of cool benefits, like the ability to read tomorrow's comic today (you can do that RIGHT NOW), a behind-the-scenes stream, private hangouts - lots of rad stuff! If that sounds super awesome, check out the campaign and thank you so much for your support! I've been doing Dinosaur Comics for 11 years and it's the best job in the world, and your support and micropatronage will hopefully allow me to continue doing so... FOREVER?? OR AT LEAST UNTIL MY BODY FAILS?? WHICHEVER COMES FIRST?? One year ago today: hey, the 90s called! they wanted to compliment you on your fashion taste and I sincerely promised them that I would pass the compliment along. – Ryan