Black Lace watched their #TOTP appearance at the house of their guitarist’s Uncle George - nightclub owner George Deakin… — Top Of The Pops Fax (@TOTP1979) March 20, 2014
In a 1978 trial, George Deakin was 1 of 4 men accused of conspiracy to murder, alongside former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. #TOTP — Top Of The Pops Fax (@TOTP1979) March 20, 2014
My favourite television programme at the moment is the reruns of Top of the Pops from 1979. You can see them on BBC4 at 7.30 on Thursday evenings - providing the DJ presenting has not been arrested under Operation Yewtree in the past few days.
The pleasure of watching the show is greatly enhanced if you follow Top of the Pops Fax on Twitter.
This evening, while Mary Ann by Black Lace was on, it tweeted possibly the great trivial fact ever.
March 20th, 2014: There has been a tiny tyrannosaur discovered in Alaska! So far it has been named Nanuqsaurus hoglundi but I think we all know the REAL name of this dinosaur:
There were lots of stories of slavery and escape from slavery written by the slaves themselves; a whole genre of North American literature. You can find all the published North American slave narratives collected here, free and in digital form. It’s fantastic resource. Some of the narratives were world renowned in their day, some were obscure.
All of them are problematic. To get them published, you had to cater to a white middle class audience. There’s nothing inherently wrong with middle class white people–theaporetic is one himself. But middle class white people have a set of expectations about morality and decency and right conduct.
Slaves had no legal rights. They had no right to control their bodies or their sexuality. They had no right to compensation. Conventional middle class notions of propriety and conduct did them no good at all and possibly injured them.
But if you wanted to publish your narrative you had to appeal to readers. They wanted to know that you were pious, hard working and humble and chaste; that you thanked the lord and kindly white people for your deliverance and were living a respectable life. They were not at all interested in your critique of northern society, and the fact that, for example, segregation by law was common in the North or that you could not vote, though free.
Virtually every slave narrative starts or ends with the testimonial of one or more white persons, usually ministers, who assure the reader that not only is the story true, the author is well mannered, knows how to eat with a fork and won’t scare the livestock. Here’s a typical example, from the narrative of Henry Bibb:
DETROIT, March 16, 1845.
The undersigned have pleasure in recommending Henry Bibb to the kindness and confidence of Anti-slavery friends in every State. He has resided among us for some years. His deportment, his conduct, and his christian course have won our esteem and affection. The narrative of his sufferings and more early life has been thoroughly investigated by a Committee appointed for the purpose. They sought evidence respecting it in every proper quarter, and their report attested its undoubted truth. In this conclusion we all cordially unite….
H. HALLOCK,
President of the Detroit Lib. Association.
CULLEN BROWN, Vice-President.
S. M. HOLMES, Secretary.
J.D. BALDWIN,
CHARLES H. STEWART,
MARTIN WILSON,
WILLIAM BARNUM.
Solomon Northup’s narrative includes an “Editor’s Preface” and then an appendix with a dozen pages of testimony from people who knew him in New York. Pretty much every time a black person appeared in print, they had to have some white person saying they were ok.
So the slave narratives are highly filtered. The most famous examples is the narrative of Harriet Jacobs, who lived a materially privileged and in many ways easy life as a favored slave, but who suffered from a sexually predatory owner. To thwart her owner, she gets pregnant by a neighboring slaveowner. Then she hides in an attic for seven years and finally escapes to the north. In her narrative, she has to spend a great deal of time justifying her conduct to her readers. We can’t read slave narratives as the direct voice of the author, we have to understand them as the voice of the author, filtered through the demands of a very specific audience.
Solomon Northup’s story is doubly problematic then. First in the way ALL slave narratives are problematic–it’s telling northern white people what they wanted to hear. And second in the fact that it’s the only example, among slave narratives, of a free person kidnapped in to slavery. For anyone interested, I’ve made a separate pages reproducing the images from Northup’s book, to show visually how it was framed for a middle class white audience. [1. Another famous example is the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, who claimed to have been kidnapped from Africa and sold into slavery. This has been proven pretty conclusively to not have been true. That Equiano felt he had to write it this way proves my point, I think]
One of our neighbors, a high school senior, put this succinctly and well in a Facebook comment:
what i learned [is] that slavery is bad, but what’s REALLY bad is when someone who’s not supposed to be a slave has to experience it. it really clarified for me that there’s a second, extra-terrible version of slavery that’s more worth making a movie about.
Here’s some of what the director of the film, Steve McQueen, said about the Solomon Northup’s book:
So here’s the director telling us that the virtue of the book was that it was already a script, and it was already the idea he had dreamed up in his head, and it was already a story about today. And in fact that was exactly the point I was trying to make. The book, written to persuade middle class northern white people that slavery was bad, is now a movie that aims to tell middle class white people that slavery was bad, especially if it happened to people who were supposed to be free. Indeed. I think we all agree.
There’s no evidence that McQueen bothered to read any other slave narratives, or histories of slavery; all the evidence, from his own mouth, suggests that he saw it as a familiar modern story. To whit:
“I compare Solomon Northup’s book [Twelve Years a Slave] with Anne Frank’s diary. And because I live in the Netherlands, and I went to school with that book. Solomon’s book is amazing. It’s the same book, but written 97 years before; a firsthand account of discrimination. Those histories are so combined.”
Yikes! In both Anne Franks’ story and Solomon Northup’s story, bad things happen. And in both bad things happen more or less because of “discrimination.” But somehow Northup’s story is the story of Anne Frank, but also at the same a white american story but not just a white american story but the story of America while also being the story of Anne Frank. At the same time, the film is presented, by McQueen and by promoters and critics, as an unflinching portrait of slavery: indeed, says McQueen, I want the film to tell the story of slavery. This is the worst kind of intellectual gibberish: slipshod, making lazy generalized comparisons across genres. We would all like bad things not to happen.
So we get to what I was originally trying to argue–that the film is a uncritical restatement of present ideas in period dress.
Which is fine, I suppose, but this is a blog partly about history, and what history does and can or should do. Is it unreasonable Steve to ask McQueen to do research on the thing he is making a movie about? Maybe, but the makers of Twelve Years a Slave entered the film in the history sweepstakes, not me. It’s entirely reasonable to critique it as history, since that’s how it’s presented.
Maybe you don’t make historical films–I mean, why bother, if the story of Anne Frank is the same as the story of white America is the story of all America? I think the reason they bother with history for one thing script ideas are lying around, but for another you get the comforting sense of universality–they were just like us–at the same time that all those things are over, and we’re all where we should be.
Some 45 million fake £1 coins are now in circulation, according to the Royal Mint. That’s about 3 percent of the total. Yet if there is anyone out there today following in Glindon’s footsteps, their work could soon become much more difficult. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne revealed the proposed design for a shiny new £1 coin Wednesday. And it is very shiny. Click here to continue reading on Know More.
A 244-page tour through the rules of punctuation, there was no diverting illustrations and not even a whiff of celebrity. And yet when it was released in 2003, it became one of that year’s biggest hits with many bookshops unable to feed the demand. For it’s author Lynne Truss, it also meant being dragged kicking and screaming into the limelight.
I thought at first that this article was a spoof, a count-the-errors exercise. But no. How many errors do you see?
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by the way, is a highly unreliable guide to punctuation. From Bryan Garner’s withering review of the book:
Why do the experts uniformly disparage a punctuation book that appeals so much to the popular mind? The thing is that many people think they’re sticklers when they’re not. And Lynne Truss happens to be one of them. She’s taken a leaf from Karl Marx in proclaiming that her rallying cry is “Sticklers of the world, unite!” That’s exactly what they’re doing, but not quite in the way she intended. The true sticklers of the world are uniting against Lynne Truss.
You would, I trust, accept that such places as universities are supposed to be safe spaces that have a duty of care to their students. Hate speech is, almost by definition, something which cannot be allowed in a safe space. Many other places wish to define themselves as safe spaces for various groups - the Royal Vauxhall Tavern has generally aimed at being a safe space for all LGBT people. Denying people particular platforms is not censoring them, because they are free to find other places from which they can speak, unless their speech has been declared illegal.
There is thus no contradiction whatever between support for no-platforming people and opposition to censorship, especially when the person no-platformed has endless other platforms from which to express their views. Most hate speech aims to silence either directly or by denying access - hate speech censors.
I have no reason to hold you personally responsible for anything that has happened in the past, but protest against no-plaforming by groups that have regularly done their best actually to silence other groups when they have had the power to do so are hypocritical at best.
The first-time visitor will, first of all, want to blend in, and second of all, amass a large personal fortune under the local economic system. This allows the advance scout to make preparations for the invasion in privacy and solitude. Don’t be taken in by counterproductive rhetoric: money does matter. It buys you a place of your own, away from the prying eyes of soldiers, scientists, government agents, documentary filmmakers and vivisectionists.
Fortunately for you and the rampaging horde of extra-terrestrial space monsters you represent, modern-day America is ripe with moneymaking opportunities for the intrepidadvance guard. (We do not advise visitors to set up shop anywhere but the United States, due to its unprecedented access to communications equipment, “advanced” technology and mutual funds. Great Britain may seem like an attractive and less crowded alternative, but please see the entry under Icke, David.) A number of high-profile professions are easily learned, highly profitable, and, as an added bonus, able to nurture the level of treachery and deception required of a expeditionary scout. As a service to our readers, we offer a review of some of the more worthwhile pursuits.
1. INSURANCE. This is a favorite of the Alphanes of Proxima Centauri, so if your people have any longstanding rivalries with them, please consider another profession. Insurance began as an attempt to service the public, by offering low-cost protection against the eventuality of disaster, sickness or unexpected catastrophe. However, like most social functions on the Earth, it was quickly entrusted to businessmen, who immediately turned it into a form of legalized gambling. Essentially, you offer to bet your client that something bad will not happen to them. They, in turn, bet that something bad will happen, and pay you a regularly occurring fee on the odds that they’re right. It’s already a good deal for you, strictly from a statistical standpoint, but as an added incentive, you can actually use actuarial data in your favor! That’s right: under the law (see below), if someone is actually a risk to have a bad thing happen to them, you get to charge them even more money. Amazingly, the more likely they are to need your insurance, the more you can make them pay to get it! Eventually, you can refuse to give them insurance at all, but you still get to keep all the money they’ve already given you. Best of all, many types of insurance are legally required, so your customers have no choice but to use your services!
2. LAW. All societies are founded upon the rule of law, and those of the Earth are no exception. Interestingly, however, the U.S. sees no particular reason to explain the law to its people, despite the fact that legal matters dominate almost every aspect of their daily life. It is difficult for a visitor, even one who hopes to enslave or eradicate the local population, to understand why a society so dominated by law and finance does not deem it necessary to educate students about either, or why legal and economic matters are governed by a tiny elite with specialized educations. However, there’s no real reason to understand it — just take advantage of it! Their heads will all be on spikes before too long anyhow. The interesting thing about the legal profession is that the overwhelming majority of political leaders are lawyers and millionaires, even though a minuscule number of their constituencies are either; but this works to your benefit, since that means the people who write the law, the people who change the law and the people who interpret and make a profit off the law are all the same. That is to say, you. Another fun fact about the law: while a folk belief has it that everyone is entitled to a lawyer, this only applies to criminal law, not far more frequent civil cases; and even in criminal cases, public defenders are notoriously incompetent. How does this work for you? It means that if you’re a good lawyer, you will only get wealthy clients!
3. REAL ESTATE. Before too long, the land will belong to you. From mountain to valley and coast to plain, you will possess all that you survey, and as you stride triumphantly across the ruined Earth, you will track behind you a trail of blood and reptilian ichor. In the meantime, however, why not take advantage of some of the Neanderthal local statutes concerning property ownership in order to make a financial killing? Under U.S. law, the land does not belong to the state, but to any individual or invented entity with the money to “buy” it. This means a tremendous amount of money can be made in maneuvering around the arcane laws concernding property rights in order to “sell” land from one person to another. Believe it or not, simply transferring ownership of a domestic domicile from one Earthling to another Earthling requires the intervention of highly paid specialists who collect huge fees for “closing” a transaction no more sophisticated than giving your offspring its allowance. Other moneymaking endeavors including staking out ruined property for people to throw money at for a “tax loss” (see the special section on Governmental Fraud), staking out the homes of recently deceased locals in order to cajole some cash out of their heirs or opportunistic passers-by, or “rent”. While our underlings live or die merely at the whim of their cruel alien overlords, on Earth, one actually has to pay strangers simply in order to live indoors! There is untold money to be made in buying a building, dividing it up into tiny partitions, and then having people pay you to sleep in them.
4. BANKING. Now that we’ve established the importance of making money, brace yourself for the best news of all. Astoundingly enough, when Earthlings get money, they don’t merely acquire goods and services with it: they pay large amounts of it to total strangers for the “privilege” of keeping the money for them! Those buildings on downtown corners that look like overgrown temples are actually banks — large repositories for money that does not belong to the people who own the bank. In one of the most profitable scams since the casino (see index under Free Money), bankers have established a process whereby people work all week for money, and then simply hand all the money over to the bankers. Of course, they claim to offer “services” for the money, but as you might expect, it’s all pretty much a scam. Here’s how it works: you take their money and keep it in a metal box. Then you invest it all and make piles more money, which you get to keep; if you lose the money, the government pays you back. You can offer them a “checking” account, whereby they pay you for a paper representation of their money, or you can offer them a “savings” account, whereby they get more money than they put in, but far, far below the amount you make investing their money in the stock market. Or you can offer them a “credit card”, which is a piece of plastic that allows them to spend money they don’t actually have. You get to charge them ridiculous amounts of extra money for this (the same goes for “loans”), and if they don’t pay at all, you can take everything they own! You can even report them to a completely unanswerable ‘credit bureau’ and ensure they become, basically, an indentured servant. There are also hundreds of other so-called financial services, all of which are highly profitable, require almost no work on your part, and not only make tons of money in and of themselves but allow you to charge “fees” that can get you thousands of dollars and that no one ever questions, no matter how obviously fraudulent they are. Best of all, like insurance, the law as much as requires people to do business with banks; many things cannot be bought without credit cards, checks or the intervention of “financial services” companies. Honestly, the cash just flows in like water. We’re a little ashamed we didn’t think of this ourselves before spending all that money on our galactic plasma cannon suppression fleet.
5. ADVERTISING. Despite the bogus rhetoric of management consultants (about whom we could write an entire book), much of the Earth economy, having inexplicably rejected slavery and compulsory labor, is still upheld on a production basis. But trust us, you will want to avoid factory production like the Valkurrian Worm Plague. The last thing you need is government intervention, labor difficulties, and having to worry about your shipping costs, when what you really want is to spend most of your day figuring out where the first photon artillery hardpoints should be placed on Invasion Day. This doesn’t mean, however, that you shouldn’t be able to make lots of easy cash off of the brick-and-mortar crowd! Here’s how it works: production facilities on Earth do not exist to service needs, as they do in a rational military-imperialist-fascist economy. They exist to make money. And the best way to make money is to get people to buy your products even when they don’t need them. How this is done is to begin producing goods that no one has asked for, and then hire someone to convince people that they really, really need them. Sounds like for-profit propaganda, doesn’t it? Well, it is. But they choose to call it “advertising” or “marketing”, and as hard as this may be to believe, it’s considered quite a respectable career option. Yes, in America, the process of systematized lying, of duping the public into paying money for transparent colas, pre-damaged clothing and electronics that are designed to fail, is one of the most honorable and profitable ventures that a visitor can undertake. The ambitious space invader would be a fool to pass up the chance to become an advertiser, or, at the very least, employ an advertiser just prior to the invasion. A few well-spent dollars with Leo Burnett (an excellent Chicago-based firm run by some Orion pirates) may save you millions in military spending later on.
As a further service, here are a few things for any potential invasionary vanguard to keep in mind:
- Any good scout knows to act like the natives. Take a look at the Earthlings. Note how many of the brown, tan and black ones are incarcerated and how few of them are to be found in places of high finance. There’s a reason for this: it’s because they are an oppressed slave culture, although no one will admit this for reasons none of us here at Desolate Planet have been able to figure out. Be smart: think pink.
- A $9,000 suit may seem like a foolish waste of money, but it’s actually one of the best investments an alien invader can make. If you’re wearing an overpriced suit, people will pretty much listen to anything you have to say no matter how crazy it is, especially if the person in the suit is white. Sometimes they’ll even give you money for no reason.
- Stick with your own kind! Most of the people who run the banking, insurance, advertising, law and real estate industries are aliens anyway. And don’t worry about attracting unwanted attention by getting together with other people in your profession to plot against the public. Not only is this accepted, it’s actually expected!
Please feel free to contact us with further tips and tricks, especially if you’re already on Earth and are working in the medical, consultancy or political fields. Good luck, and happy hunting!
There are two avenues from modern physics to the belief that the universe we see around us is not all there is, but is instead one of infinitely many like it. The first is inflationary cosmology; the second is quantum mechanics. Though very different, these two multiverse models share two features: first, they both posit objective physical probabilities that tell us how likely we are to be in some portion of the multiverse rather than telling us how likely the multiverse is to be some way or another; and second, they both have a problem with prediction and confirmation. I’ll discuss the relationship between self-locating probability and confirmation in these theories.
Our first avenue to the multiverse is cosmological: many inflationary models predict that the early inflation of our universe is eternal, continuously spinning off bubble universes in a sea of expansion. This leads to infinitely many distinct universes, each with its own fundamental constants and ratio of dark energy to dark matter and ordinary matter (for more on this see [6]).
The second comes from one interpretation of quantum mechanics. The Everett, or many worlds, interpretation holds that the world is completely characterized by a universal quantum wavefunction which never collapses. After any experiment, the wavefunction—and the world—splits, with a branch corresponding to every possible measurement outcome. So, for example, if I am measuring the spin of an electron, after my measurement there are two descendants of me: one who measured spin up, and one who measured spin down, each living in his own local universe. We should note that this is just one—very controversial—way of understanding quantum mechanics.
To keep things simple we’ll call the totality of all that there is ‘the multiverse’ and smaller, isolated, universe-like regions ‘local universes’. We typically take these two theories as providing us with very different multiverses: the cosmological multiverse is a collection of matter-filled regions (local universes) separated by infinitely expanding space, whereas the many worlds model of quantum mechanics gives us one wavefunction in a superposition of states, each of which corresponds to a local universe. But some cosmologists think these might be linked: we won’t discuss this here, but see [1] and [2] if you’re interested.
These two theories share a problem: they are apparently unfalsifiable. Since they predict that all measurement outcomes occur in some local universe, there are no results which are incompatible with either theory. Even if falsifiability is not the arbiter of scientific worthiness, the problem remains. We gain evidence for a theory by testing a its predictions; but since these theories claim that every experimental outcome occurs somewhere they don’t seem to predict anything about any particular experiment. So it is difficult to see how any experimental result or observation could possibly count as evidence for either.
In the case of multiverse expansion models, the model predicts that every possible ratio of matter to dark energy exists in some universe; it predicts that there is some universe for every way of setting of the (at least some of) the fundamental constants, and for every distribution of matter (this isn’t universally agreed upon, although consensus is growing; for an overview see [3], and for dissent from the inflationary paradigm see [5]). But we take features of our local universe—such as its vacuum energy or the uniformity of the microwave background radiation—to be evidence for the theory. How is this possible if the theory predicts that there are infinitely universes without these features?
In the case of Many Worlds Quantum Mechanics, the theory predicts that every experimental outcome occurs on some branch. But we take the results we observe—such as the frequency of spin-up results in a Stern-Gerlach experiment–to be evidencefor the theory. How is this possible if we know that the theory predicts infinitely many branches with different frequencies?
Call this the evidence challenge. The answer given by both theories is roughly the same: although we know that, for each experiment, every possible result shows up somewhere, we can still have a probability that we are in some region of the multiverse. We get a probability that our area is like this rather than like that.
What’s weird about this is that this is not a probability for the multiverse to develop in some way. We know exactly how the multiverse will develop. Instead, this probability that we are in some part of it rather than another. It’s essentially self-locating or indexical. (Philosophers call this sort of probability de se). We know what the multiverse is like with certainty; our predictions, and so our evidence, are predictions about where we are instead of predictions about what happens.
Confirmation, on this model, involves two steps: First, we gather information E about our local universe. We then assume that we are in a typical part of the multiverse—a region that’s like most. Our evidence E confirms the theory if and only if the theory says that E holds in most places. To show that a theory can be confirmed, then, we must show that the theory gives us a natural measure which can tell us what most universes are like.
But this talk about most is a distraction. We know that there are infinitely many of each type of local universe? Coming up with the right measure of most is the cosmological measure problem. There is not yet a consensus about what the correct measure is. Without an agreed-upon measure on the table, it’s hard to tell whether the measure in question could give evidence for the theory. Most measures involve finding a preferred ordering of observations, and cutting off these observations before this sequence diverge, and then taking the limiting relative frequency. (For a recent overview of the options, see [4].) We then assume that we are equally likely—according to the measure—to be any observer. This assumption is called the typicality or Copernican assumption.
Proponents of many worlds quantum mechanics agree that the natural measure over branches is the Born rule—which tells us that the likelyhood we’re in some local universe is proportional to that local universe’s amplitude in the universal wave function. More branches are like ours if our branch has a high amplitude. The trick, for many worlds, is not figuring out what the correct measure is. It’s in justifyingusing this measure to gain evidence for the theory. Most justifications go via decision theory; they argue that an agent in a many world universe will use the born rule to weight their decisions. To their opponents, these justifications seem too pragmatic. (For a thorough exploration of this strategy, see [7] or [8].)
There’s a knee-jerk reaction to all of this, which is to reject the idea that objective physical probabilities can be self-locating. Physics should tell us how likely the universe is to have some property, or how likely things are to develop in a certain way, or how likely an experimental outcome is. It’s supposed to give us probabilities which are about the world.
This seems to be a requirement if these objective probabilities are going to feature in explanations of our surroundings, which physical probabilities surely do. Self-locating probabilities don’t seem like the sort of thing that can do this. How can the likelihood that I’m over here, rather than over there, explain why this electron is spin up? How can we explain the structure of our universe by citing the likelihood that we end up here rather than somewhere else?
And one reaction to this knee-jerk is to reject an underlying intuition about explanations and physical probability—that the probabilities must guide the world, and that explaining A requires showing how A was produced.. Doing so requires us to think of physical probabilities as deeply related to us: on this view, physical probabilities are just the best way of encoding information about what we should expect. Explanation is also closely connected to telling us what we ought to have expected, or showing how what we observe is part of a unified system. This is a revisionary take on physical probability, but one that many of us might already accept.
But even if we accept this us-directed notion of physical probability, both theories still have to justify the inference procedure described above. For one might be doubtful thatany inferences of the sort described are justified. Doing so requires us to rely on atypicality principle: that our local universe is like most; to make a prediction we must assume that our locality is like most consistent with our evidence. But what could justify this principle? Perhaps, like Hume’s Principle of the Uniformity of Nature (PUN), this is something we must accept to do science, but cannot justify. Still, a proponent of this sort of reasoning now has two basic epistemic assumptions: PUN and Typicality.
Comments welcome!
References:
[1] Aguirre, Anthony, and Max Tegmark (2012). “Born in an Infinite Universe: a Cosmological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” arXiv:1008.1066v2
[2] Bousso, Raphael, and Leonard Susskind (2011) “The Multiverse Interpretaton of Quantum Mechanics.” arXiv:1105.3796v3
[4] Freivogel, Ben (2011). “Making Predictions in the Multiverse.” arXiv:1105.0244v2
[5] Ijjas, Anna, Paul Steinhardt, and Abraham Loeb (2013). “Inflationary Paradigm in Trouble After Planck 2013.” arXiv:1304.2785v2
[6] Susskind, Leonard (2003). “The Anthropic Landscape of String Theory.” arXiv:hep-th/0302219
[7] Wallace, David (2005). “Quantum Probability from Subjective Likelihood: Improving on Deutsch’s Proof of the Probability Rule.” arXiv:quant-ph/0312157v2
[8] Wallace, David (2012). The Emergent Multiverse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
It’s pretty long, because it’s scrupulously documented, so if you don’t want to read the whole thing right now that’s OK. You don’t need to read it right now. But you do need to read it 10 years from now.
It’s very, very important that you read it 10 years from now.
So here is what I want you to do. I want you to print out a hard copy of Thomson-DeVeaux’s article. Here is a .pdf version you can use. The Prospect’s print feature is a bit awkward, so there’s a big chunk of white space there between the title of the piece and the picture of Cardinal Dolan. That’s good, in this case, because I want you to use that white space to write a message to yourself to be read 10 years from now. Write: “It is March, 2014, and most American evangelicals do not believe that using contraception is a sin.” Then write today’s date and sign it.
Now fold this neatly, put it in an envelope and seal the envelope. Write your own address on the front and then, on the back, write “To Be Opened and Read on March 18, 2024.”
Take this envelope to the post office, put a first-class stamp on it, and mail it to yourself. It will arrive at your home in a few business days with an official postmark bearing today’s date. Don’t open it. Set it aside somewhere safe. File it away with your passport and insurance papers and all the rest of that important stuff so that, 10 years from now, you will be able to find it again, and you will be able to open it and read it as per the instructions you’ve just written for yourself today in 2014.
This time capsule will make for strange reading in 2024. Thomson-DeVeaux’s words will seem alien and insane, and so will those astonishing words written next to Dolan’s picture in your own handwriting. “It is March, 2014, and most American evangelicals do not believe that using contraception is a sin.”
That claim will seem unbelievable. Your future self will have a hard time accepting those words. Everyone knows that evangelical Christians are anti-contraception, your future self will think. Everyone knows that evangelical Christians have always been anti-contraception.
This time-capsule letter will be jarring, almost frightening, not just because of the sweeping, radical change in evangelical opinion over the previous decade, but because of the near-unanimous agreement that everyone pretend that change never occurred. It will be almost as though everyone had forgotten making that change. Your future self will not remember that change taking place. Your future self will, like everyone else, be convinced that nothing has ever changed — that evangelicals have always, always, always been adamantly opposed to the use of contraception.
Perhaps this seems like a strange prediction. Perhaps you think I’m exaggerating.
But this has happened before.
And because it has happened before, it can happen again. And I believe that it is happening again — that we’re seeing it happen again, now, yet just like before we will soon forget that we saw it happen. We will soon forget that it happened at all. A radical transformation of evangelical identity will occur such that who we are 10 years from now will be utterly different from who we are today and yet, once again, we will collectively forget that any such transformation ever occurred.
This time-capsule letter to yourself may be the only way of preserving or restoring the memory of what really happened.
Imagine that you had written yourself such a time-capsule letter back in 1973. Imagine you had taken a copy of the Southern Baptist Press news bulletin and enclosed it in an envelope mailed to yourself with the instruction, “To Be Opened and Read on January 31, 1983.”
Ten years later, watching President Reagan and Jerry Falwell on the nightly news, you would have unsealed the envelope and read these inconceivably strange words:
WASHINGTON (BP) — The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision that overturned a Texas law which denied a woman the right of abortion except to save her life, has advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.
What? That’s impossible. That’s madness. Everyone knows that evangelicals are adamantly opposed to legal abortion. Everyone knows that evangelicals have always been adamantly opposed to legal abortion.
You would have been bewildered to see your own handwriting there on the page, a message to yourself written 10 years earlier: “It is January, 1973, and most American evangelicals believe that abortion should be legal.” You would have had a very hard time accepting that you could ever have written such a thing — that anyone could ever have written such a thing. How could it be that the central defining characteristic of American evangelicalism was less than a decade old? And even stranger: How could it be that such a radical, sweeping transformation in evangelical identity had occurred without anyone remembering it happening?
Wycliffe and the majority of English translators who followed him all read this verse the way that it had been read for centuries before there ever existed such a thing as the English language into which it could be translated. … They translated it to mean what it had long been understood to mean, and in the only way that it makes sense to translate it in the context of the rest of this chapter.
The New American Standard Bible translated this passage that same way up until 1977. But something changed between 1977 and 1995 — something that had nothing to do with scholarship, language, accuracy, fidelity or readability.
American politics had changed between 1977 and 1995. It had polarized and radicalized millions of American Protestants, rallying them around a single issue and thus, as intended, rallying them behind a single political party.
In 1977, the sort of American Protestants who purchased most Bibles couldn’t be summed up in a single word. But by 1995, they could be: “abortion.”
And for anti-abortion American evangelicals, Exodus 21:12-27 was unacceptable. It suggested that striking and killing an unborn fetus was in a separate category from striking and killing a “person.” Strike and kill a free person, you get the death penalty. Strike and kill an unborn fetus, you get a fine.
And so in 1995, like those earlier translators who invented and inserted “Junias,” the translators of the NASB reshaped this passage. “She has a miscarriage, yet there is not further injury” would, in consideration of the changes in American politics since 1977, henceforth be transformed into “she gives birth prematurely, yet there is no injury.”
Politics — specifically, the political desire to control women — shaped the translation of that text. The translators changed the words of the Bible to make it seem like it supported their political agenda. They changed the words of the Bible so that others reading it would not be able to see that its actual words challenged and contradicted their political agenda.
It has happened before and, as Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux shows, it is happening again. History will, again, be rewritten. The Bible will, again, be rewritten.
So write yourself a note and seal it in a time capsule. Remember.
Twelve Years a Slave is based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, who was born in comfortable freedom and kidnapped into slavery. Right there is the problem. The movie is presented as an indictment of the institution of slavery, and beyond that as a particularly vivid and realistic account of the awfulness of slavery. But it’s based on an extremely atypical experience, and so while it may be an excellent film, as history it’s just bad in really important ways.
To begin with, yes, slavery was awful, and deplorable, and an outrage, and I would say the Civil War was not a tragedy, it was necessary and good because it ultimately ended slavery. I just want to get that out of the way now–slavery = very very indefensibly bad.
But why is slavery bad? It’s not bad because men born in freedom were kidnapped into it. That did happen–here and in Africa–and clearly, that was bad. But the vast vast vast majority of slaves were born in slavery. There were about four million slaves in the US in 1860, and the number who had been born free and kidnapped into the deep south was statistically insignificant. What’s bad about it was its normality.
It’s a pleasure to condemn slavery, especially since the condemnation of American racial slavery involves no cost whatsoever for most of us today. It requires no courage, extracts no price. No one will even disapprove of our condemnation–quite the opposite. It’s almost impossible for modern people to imagine the world view that made slavery possible. That’s the hardest thing to teach–what was it that made slavery not just possible, but completely acceptable? It’s common to imagine that slaveowners were depraved and evil, and Twelve Years a Slave, the film, has been widely noted for its depiction of a depraved, sadistic and evil slaveowner.
Certainly there were depraved and evil slaveowners, but you can’t just dismiss all slaveowners as “evil and depraved.” It’s way too simplistic, and it doesn’t explain what made this evil thing–slavery–so acceptable.
What made it acceptable was its normality. All of us are complicit in morally doubtful acts–every time a drone, funded by my tax dollars, kills civilians in Afghanistan, I’m complicit in an evil act. Does that make me an evil person? You might say yes, but it’s not because I’m a depraved sadist, it’s because I live in world where killing distant civilians from the air has become normalized.
And slavery was normal, legitimated by church and state and custom. It was ubiquitous in the southern low country. If you were born into slavery and your grandparents were slaves, slavery was the way of the world. And that’s hard to get our heads around. Slavery, “unfreedom,” is more or less unthinkable for most people. I regularly ask students “why is slavery wrong” and they have a hard time coming up with answers at first: it just is. It’s just evil. What was it like to be born into a world where slavery was normalized? How did that world work?
Making a person born into freedom the model for explaining slavery is never going to get you to an answer to that question. It’s going to get you a vehement, passionate and visceral rejection of the institution of slavery. In other words, it’s going to confirm what we already believe, which is what Hollywood is really good at. Does anyone out there want to argue in favor of racial slavery? But it’s not going to explain how the system of racial slavery operated as normal for so long. That’s the really hard question, and the really interesting historical question. It’s hard because asking it involves thinking about what we really mean by freedom, and what it means to live in a world where evil acts are normalized.
I need to add that there are a large number of slave narratives that involve people, born into slavery, who think their way out of slavery and then act their way out. Two classic examples would be Frederick Douglass’ narratives and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Jacobs story is really fantastic, because she escapes slavery, but not patriarchy, and not the need to work for a living in a really rough “free” marketplace, and her narrative is really keen on the complexities of what it means to be free. Which is why it won’t make a good movie, unless you ignore the complex parts. It’s hard to think your way out of normality and the critique you come up with might be unsettling to everyone, not just a comfortable condemnation of a recognized evil.
Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.
And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.
I thought about this recently during a conversation with Ozy:
Ozy: I am currently eating chickpeas and rice and I am _delighted_ by the fact that I can eat this _whenever I want_ The nice thing about DISCOVERING YOUR FOOD PREFERENCES is that suddenly all the food in my cupboards is food I like and am looking forward to eating. and usually I get food I like by, like, luck? So this is excitement.
Scott: I don’t understand, why didn’t you buy things like that before?
Ozy: It took me a while to have enough of a sense of the food I like for “make a list of the food I like” to be a viable grocery-list-making strategy.
Scott: I’ve got to admit I’m confused and intrigued by your “don’t know my own preferences” thing.
Ozy: Hrm. Well, it’s sort of like… you know how sometimes you pretend to like something because it’s high-status, and if you do it well enough you _actually believe_ you like the thing? Unless I pay a lot of attention _all_ my preferences end up being not “what I actually enjoy” but like “what is high status” or “what will keep people from getting angry at me”
Scott: How does that apply to food?
Ozy: Well, sometimes people will tell you a certain food is high-status or healthy or a thing that everyone enjoys, and then I would like it. And a lot of times I just ate whatever was in front of me or ordered whatever the cheapest vegetarian thing on the menu was. And I… sort of vaguely had a sense that some things were more pleasurable to eat than other things but I didn’t like _keep track_ of what they were or anything. Because if I knew I might like the _wrong things_. And also because I didn’t intuitively grasp that the “liking” thing everyone was talking about was related to pleasure and not to like popularity/status.
So the fact that people talk about what foods they like about a zillion times a day isn’t enough to make everyone realize liking foods is a thing.
But it gets worse. A high school friend posted on Facebook a link to a really interesting answer on Quora. It makes you log on, so I’ll copy the relevant part below:
I have anosmia, which means I lack smell the way a blind person lacks sight. What’s surprising about this is that I didn’t even know it for the first half of my life.
Each night I would tell my mom, “Dinner smells great!” I teased my sister about her stinky feet. I held my nose when I ate Brussels sprouts. In gardens, I bent down and took a whiff of the roses. I yelled “gross” when someone farted. I never thought twice about any of it for fourteen years.
Then, in freshman English class, I had an assignment to write about the Garden of Eden using details from all five senses. Working on this one night, I sat in my room imagining a peach. I watched the juice ooze out as I squeezed at the soft fuzz. I felt the wet, sappy liquid drip from my fingers down onto my palm. As the mushy heart of the fruit compressed, I could hear it squishing, and when I took that first bite I could taste the little bit of tartness that followed the incredible sweet sensation flooding my mouth.
But I had to write about smell, too, and I was stopped dead by the question of what a peach smelled like. Good. That was all I could come up with. I tried to think of other things. Garbage smelled bad. Perfume smelled good. Popcorn good. Poop bad. But how so? What was the difference? What were the nuances? In just a few minutes’ reflection I realized that, despite years of believing the contrary, I never had and never would smell a peach.
All my behavior to that point indicated that I had smell. No one suspected I didn’t. For years I simply hadn’t known what it was that was supposed to be there. I just thought the way it was for me was how it was for everyone. It took the right stimulus before I finally discovered the gap.
So I guess you can just not be able to smell and not know it.
This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.
I know one friend’s answer. He discovered he was color-blind sometime in his teens. This still surprises me. People are always taking Ishihara tests (those colorful dotted circles with numbers inside of them) and discovering they’re color blind. Going through life with everyone else saying “The light was red, but now it’s green” and thinking it was weird that they were making such a big deal about subtle variations in shades of brownish-gray, but it was probably one of those metaphors.
As for me? I took a surprisingly long time to realize I was asexual. When I was a virgin, I figured sex was one of those things that seemed gross before you did it, and then you realized how great it was. Afterwards, I figured it was something that didn’t get good until you were skilled at it and had been in a relationship long enough to truly appreciate the other person. In retrospect, pretty much every aspect of male sexual culture is a counterargument to that theory, but I guess it’s just really hard for my brain to generate “you are a mental mutant” as a hypothesis.
But even bigger than that, I think I might not have had emotions, at least not fully, for about five years as a teenager when I was on SSRIs. I even sort of noticed myself not having emotions, but dismissed that as an odd thing to happen and probably other people were just being really overexuberant about things. Later I learned emotional blunting is a commonly reported side effect of SSRIs and I was probably just really not experiencing emotions. When I came off them it took me several years to get used to having normal-intensity feelings again, but it wasn’t a sudden revelation, like “Wow, I was missing a fundamental human experience for the past several years!” Just a sense of things being different which was hard to cash out.
As always, I wonder if a lot of what other people interpret through vague social things might be biological, or at least more complicatedly social. I can’t enjoy jazz music even a little – the best I can do is pick up something sort of like a beat and half-heartedly feel like maybe I could snap my fingers to it if I could build up the energy. My brother fell in love with jazz as soon as he heard it and is now a professional jazz musician who has dedicated his life to it. Are we listening to the same thing when we hear a jazz tune? Or am I like a guy who can’t smell trying to appreciate perfume?
Elton John and Bernie Taupin's “Rocket Man” is usually read as a very poor imitation of David Bowie's “Space Oddity”. Both songs explore the mundane reality of space travel and both came out just as the wave of public interest in outer space and spaceflight had crested and was beginning to roll back (though “Space Oddity”, at least the original version, was far more timely in 1969, with “Rocket Man”'s 1972 release date already making it feel curiously dated, though do recall “Space Oddity” was re-released that year too) and, to top it off, both songs were even produced by the same guy: Gus Dudgeon. And of course, the critical consensus goes, no-one is going to call Bernie Taupin an especially poetic, captivating or moving songwriter, and David Bowie is, well, David Bowie.
But this misses, I feel, a big part of the nuance “Rocket Man” actually displays. Yes, I'll come right out and say it: This is pretty clunky song, and there are a fair few embarrassing verses and questionable lines. But I'll also freely admit this is one of my favourite pop songs, and while I'm well aware my taste in music can be described as “eclectic” at best and “suspect” at worst, just hear me out for a bit. First of all, that chorus has got to be one of the most achingly beautiful things ever recorded, and that's really all “Rocket Man” needs to become an instant classic, because in pop the hooks and chorus are unabashedly the most important parts of the song. Secondly though, “Rocket Man”'s origins are a bit more interesting than most people tend to give them credit for, as it was inspired both by a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name and Taupin witnessing a meteor or faraway airplane when looking up at the sky at night. Far from echoing David Bowie's indictment of (or at least very mixed feelings about) the Space Age on “Space Oddity”, what “Rocket Man” is actually about is a world where rocketry, at one time the most exciting and fashionable technology around, is so commonplace and mundane that astronauts become like truck drivers.
This is what takes “Rocket Man” from being curiously out of time to being very much of its time: In the mid-to-late 1970s pop culture in the United States had a particular fascination with truck drivers and trucker culture, brought upon by a number of movies from this period glamourizing the lifestyle and the widespread popularity of CB radio. With the 1970s fuel crisis in full swing, many people, but especially truckers, used CB radio to coordinate fuel runs to stations that had the best gas prices and to organise protests against new regulations. Truckers were seen as, in a sense, bringing back lost “American” values of rugged cowboy individualism (never mind the fact this assumption had zero historical precedent and is due more to the popularity of John Wayne movies: The fact is it existed) and, as a result, truck drivers, CB radio, and the distinctive language of slang they used, became very fashionable.
This peaked in 1975 with the release of the movie White Line Fever, about a Vietnam veteran who takes over his father's truck driving business and is forced to contend with corrupt executives who want him to haul illegal cargo, and the novelty song “Convoy”, which uses a bunch of CB radio slang to tell a story about a massive convoy that drives 24/7 across the United States in defiance of new federal truck driving regulations. So, in 1972, “Rocket Man” would have been an actually very savvy release, coming as it did right between Space Fever and the trucker fad and incorporating elements of both (Elton John even appears on the sleeve cover of the single in a spangly cowboy outfit).
But, of course, we're not looking at “Rocket Man” in 1972. We're looking at it in 1978-9, which is an altogether different cultural landscape. Actually, by the way I measure zeitgeists and timescapes, we're for all intents and purposes in the 1980s now, the changeover between the Long 1960s and Long 1980s happening about a year ago. And, while the trucker fad continued into the late 1970s, with other movies like Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and F.I.S.T. (1978), it never again quite matched the popularity it saw in the earlier part of the decade. But even so, “Rocket Man” remains relevant because there's a secondary thread to its invocation and likening of space travellers with truck drivers, and that's most clearly revealed in what remains, in my view, the song's definitive performance in January 1978.
When we talk about “Rocket Man” in the context of Star Trek, really only one thing comes to mind: William Shatner's legendarily insane interpretation of it at the 1977 Saturn Awards. Apart from Captain Kirk, this may actually be the one thing Shatner will forever be most remembered for: It has been mercilessly parodied any number of ways ever since, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for Shatner's reputation as a self-absorbed, self-indulgent, out-of-touch egotistical blowhard. You don't need me to tell you by now that I consider this to be a terribly unfair and undeserved reading, but let's take a moment to unpack this reaction as I concede “Rocket Man” is likely Shatner's most difficult and easily misread work. More so than even The Transformed Man, this is the thing that's going to cause people who are only familiar with Star Trek to think Shatner has absolutely lost his goddamned mind: Captain Kirk sits under a spotlight on stool in a velvet smoking jacket in the middle of a darkened stage, then begins monloguing a pop song from six years ago while other, smaller, CSO Shatners suddenly and inexplicably pop out of hammerspace and start having a conversation with each other.
At this point, if you only know Shatner from Star Trek, the immediate, and understandable, reaction is to stare at the screen blinking for a few moments before exclaiming “what the actual fuck” and then wondering which of the two of you has snapped and become unhinged from reality. But we of course know the kind of performer William Shatner really is, and we can see “Rocket Man” for what it truly is: The next step in Shatner's evolution as a performance artist and his first stab at a mixed media work that incorporates television and televisual logic. The first clue ought to be that Bernie Taupin himself is actually on hand to introduce Shatner's performance personally, claiming he's very proud to do so “due to the interest in the meaning of the song”, as if somehow Shatner was the only person who could actually explicitly spell out everything the song was about.
Which, actually, he does. There are two major things about this performance that make it really unique and effective. The first of these is the fact this was done for the televised broadcast of a live event: Already, this piece is playing with the interaction between different mediums. Given that this is William Shatner, we have spoken word poetry, theatre and pop music by default, but now we throw television into the mix as well. But this performance is meant as much for the actual audience at the Saturn Awards as it is for us: You can hear the live attendees reacting to the piece in progress which, given the fact it relies upon CSO to work, means there had to have been a viewscreen in the actual auditorium for people to watch. So we have Shatner performing the song for the cameras, which is performing his performance for the live audience, and we at home can watch the audience watching the live feed of Shatner's show on the monitor on site. This is incredibly medium aware, actually recursively so, which puts it firmly in the Long 1980s tradition of postmodern cinematography, which we'll talk about a great deal more as the era progresses. It not only ties into Shatner's own predilection for recursive artifice, it builds upon it and takes it to the next level.
(Another thing worth noting about the switch to television is this also provides Shatner with a kind of memorable “music video” to go with his performance: MTV isn't too far away, and the genre had been around for several years already. Combine this with the choice of covering an iconic single, and making sure to maintain the chorus and all its melancholy beauty, means “Rocket Man” is, paradoxically, William Shatner's most accessible and radio-friendly song yet. This awareness will help him relaunch his music career decades later.)
Tying into this is the use of CSO itself. CSO, or chroma key, or colour separation overlay, is what we commonly refer to day as bluescreening or greenscreening: That is, composting two images together by superimposing one over a flat, unnatural colour in the background. Here, Shatner and his editors use to it create the multiple Shatner effect that this video is so famous (and derided) for. But if we watch those scenes keeping in mind that we're watching a performance artist, they start to make a whole lot more sense. The purpose is to indicate different facets of the titular Rocket Man's personality: Watch how the performance opens with a solitary Shatner sitting alone in darkness smoking and reciting the song's opening verse, as if he's contemplating the meaning of it (the smoking actually shows off Shatner's incredibly formidable dedication to performing a role: In real life he's firmly straight edge and doesn't even drink alcohol, but he's playing a Space Trucker, and Space Truckers would probably smoke). We get the first chorus, and it's only *then* that the CSO performers come out.
And when they do, they deliver their lines an entirely different way to the seated Shatner's pensiveness: The performer on the right puts on a show of being a bold gruff, manly renegade hero (AllMusic describes this as Shatner's “Private Dick” performance), but this is clearly a facade, as he grows increasingly lonesome and neurotic as the song progresses. The performer on the left, meanwhile, acts like a fun loving, uninhibited stud who clearly wants to be the life of every party, but who also seems to be using this as a mask to disguise his inner loneliness. This is a perfect showcase for Shatner's recursive artifice, and he takes full advantage of the repetitiveness of Taupin's lyrics: Note the wildly different ways each performer delivers the lines to the chorus (such as in the wordplay joke of delivering “rocket” one time as “rock it”), and yet how each one seems to be using it to convey the Rocket Man's conflicted emotions. Take, for example, the line
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no, no, no
Shatner runs the gamut here, delivering it every way it could possibly be delivered: The Rocket Man thus becomes someone who's both claiming to be a more suave and courageous person than people think he is, but who also worries about living up to other people's expectations of him. Much as he did in The Transformed Man, Shatner is showing us that this contradictory melange of emotions is something common to everyone and part of the human experience.
And this also brings us to the other important factor about this performance: That William Shatner did it for a science fiction awards show in 1978. Because “I'm not the man they think I am at home” is a sentence that describes William Shatner himself as much as it does the Rocket Man. The Transformed Man came out in 1968: At a time when Shatner was trying to carve out a new career for himself in the wake of Star Trek, and before he realised what a big deal that show was going to become and how much he was going to be burned because of it in the 1970s. That record, despite its reputation and packaging that misled people into thinking it was a celebrity cash-in, wasn't about Star Trek or science fiction overtly: It was about how central performance is to our lives. Furthermore though, The Transformed Man wasn't autobiographical, at least any more then we would expect given it was a project that was important to Shatner and was about something he felt united all humans. “Rocket Man”, meanwhile, came out a decade later and at the cusp of Star Trek being relaunched, when it was probably safe to say science fiction fans were the only people paying any sort of attention to William Shatner, and it *does* carry a whiff of self-reflection about it.
Thus, one of the many interpretive layers to “Rocket Man” becomes William Shatner working through the phenomenon that is Captain Kirk and Star Trek and what both have meant to him over the past ten years. William Shatner is not “the man they think [he is] at home”, because William Shatner is not Captain Kirk, and Star Trek fans have an irritating and unhealthy tendency to forget this. The real kicker comes when the Shatner on the right says
And all this science, I don't understand
It's just a job, five days a week
and the way its delivered, you can totally read Shatner's confusion and bewilderment at the way Trekkers obsess over a TV show from the 1960s in it (recall the Star Fleet Technical Manual was out by now too) and his awkward attempts to remind people that Captain Kirk was only someone he played on television for an acting gig years ago. Not that Shatner doesn't respect Trekkers' passion, of course (Star Trek: The New Voyages came out the previous year, and you can see Shatner working through many of these same themes in his introduction to “Mind Sifter”, yet he remains positive, gracious and encouraging throughout), it's just that...well, he doesn't quite understand yet.
But the coup de grace comes when all of this is taken together. The real power of “Rocket Man” comes from its expressly working class heart. It is, after all, a song about a world where astronauts became truck drivers, and it's even possible to use this to excuse some of Taupin's sketchy songwriting: One would not necessarily expect a truck driver to speak like a refined and educated Oxford Dean, for example. And the thing about truck drivers that the mid-70s fad didn't pick up on was their tendency towards introspection and crushing loneliness. But “Rocket Man”, both the original and William Shatner's re-conceptualization, do get this: You can't take a job like that and not be OK with having a considerable amount of time to yourself, and when you're driving down a highway in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, you tend to get lost in your own thoughts. It's why late night radio is so popular with truckers: It's the only thing on, and when you're in a state of mind like that your imagination drifts towards more esoteric and cosmic things anyway.
(While Coast to Coast AM, the archetypical example of this genre, wouldn't premier until 1984, truckers in previous decades would have been entertained by Long John Nebel's show out of New York, considered the pioneer of paranormal radio. Coincidentally, Nebel died in 1978.)
This is what “Rocket Man” is really about to me. And while this theme is present in the original song to some extent, it's William Shatner who seizes and doubles down on it. “Rocket Man” sounds like nothing here so much as it does the ruminations of a trucker driving down a cosmic highway contemplating his place in the universe. Shatner wears these mixed feelings as a mask in a grand performance that makes a theatre out of the mundane and of himself. And, in doing so, he not only highlights the original motif of rocket men as truck drivers, he also, given the positionality and perspective he injects into this performance, equates Captain Kirk with these sorts of people as well. Once and for all then, the soul of Kirk and Star Trek forever becomes that of the working class spaceman, just like D.C. Fontana always knew it was and that we long suspected it to be.
And furthermore, it's really funny: Not because of the reasons most people give (that Shatner is comically bombing due to his complete lack of self-awareness, which he's not) but because it's supposed to be funny: You can hear the live audience laughing at a number of points: They clearly get the joke, and so does Shatner, who gives us one of his trademark twinkling smiles at the end of the show, which is met with a thunderous applause. Perhaps people from the Long 1960s and Long 1980s weren't more naive then we are today. Maybe they just saw and understood some things we don't know to look for anymore.
Of the almost innumerable things William Shatner has done over the years, I think this may well be his truest masterpiece. All of the themes that are the most important to him as a performer and an observer of human nature are on display here, and they're all wrapped up in a package that's as provocative as it is memorable and charmingly funny. It's an art house piece about, and done as, a pop single, which puts William Shatner squarely in good company with the blossoming counterculture of the Long 1980s. In a different universe where this Star Trek thing never worked out, maybe he'd be seen as a contemporary of William S. Burroughs or Laurie Anderson. As it stands though, for a few glorious moments in January, 1978 that continue to this day, William Shatner captured something of the human experience.
'Totalitarian Salads,' published in 1976, sold more copies than any other book that year and was voted Scarfolk's best book by no less than 100% of the public in a mandatory survey.
The success of this publication may be partly due to the fact that all bar one of Scarfolk's bookshops and publishing companies were razed to the ground in semi-mysterious circumstances. In short,'Totalitarian Salads' was the only book commercially available that year.
Additionally, the authors and editors of competing cookery books were found sauteed in a mass shallow grave just outside Scarfolk. Police food forensics experts put the recovered bodies in a refrigerator overnight before transferring them to an oven for 20-25 minutes and then pouring into individual pots to be garnished with wreathes of flowers.
Despite attempts to monopolise the cookery book market, illegal food pamphlets were distributed by an underground recipe resistance movement. This is the origin of recipes such as 'soufflé uprising,' 'coup soup,' 'putsch punch,' and 'insurgence sausages.'
Well, now. I am updating LJ drunk. This is like the good old bad old days.
I just walked home from the_meanest_cat's house after much wine and conversation. On my small hours perambulation home I mainly noticed the birdsong. Time was, when a late night walk of shame would have been proper shameful, and my ears would have been the least focused part of me.
I don't mind being 45. I mind being 45 and somewhat crippled and somewhat skint. Being old, for special values of old, is not how I thought it would be. I could, I suppose, last another 45 years. I'd rather not, unless they were a lot less exhausting than the last 45. That isn't melancholy; mostly it's laziness.
Being 45/old is not how I thought it would be. I expected, when I was young, that, right about now, I would basking on the sunlit uplands of my life. There are no sunlit uplands. I still have to watch my step down here in the valley.
I taught a boy this morning who is smarter than me. He doesn't read books, can't really write words beyond their first syllable, and yet his vocabulary, when you push him, is extensive. His verbal reasoning is superb. He's got an Oxbridge kind of brain, ticking away under his shaved eyebrows and stupid beanie hat. Give him my start in life (books, aspiration)and he'd do something good. Give him Chinless Dave Cameron's start in life (books, aspiration, money, entitlement) and he'd do something wonderful. As it is, he'll probably end up in jail.
When I was twenty I crossed the road to avoid boys like him. At thirty I taught boys like him but I didn't feel, so sharply, the waste they represented. Even at thirty, the phrase 'you only have one life' was a cliche. It meant no more to me, really, than any advertising slogan. Now, at 45, I look at a boy like him and know he only has one life and the chances are it won't be a good one, that it will have fewer opportunities and liberties and joys than mine. And the only positive I can think of when I look at him is ' At least this isn't my doing; at least he isn't my son'. I am many bad things, you see, but at least I am not my mother.
The other thing I did not - could not - anticipate about being oldish, is how I would come to feel about the past. I knew that past was another country; I read 'The Past is Myself'. I didn't expect to be a little in love with it. I remember the shape of the seventies. Not just the broad strokes of music and dress, but the weight of old money in my hand; the disappointing taste of the remnants of a Walls vanilla brick licked from its flimsy cardboard container; the school photographer telling me I should smile because I was so pretty, and telling my teacher, 'She IS pretty. Not dark enough to be offensive'; the feel of the crisp, stringy summer-of-'76 grass beneath my burning, dirty, happy, little feet.
Oh, to have happy feet again. That's what bad old is. Wishing your feet/hands/hips etc didn't hurt quite so much. Good old is realising that booze and conversation work just as well as prescription painkillers.
Oof. Too sleepy and sozzled to empty the rest of my fitful, fluttering, vanishing thoughts on to this kindly page.
Luke Muehlhauser: In Rossi et al. (2011), you and your co-authors quickly survey a variety of methods in computational social choice, including methods for preference aggregation, e.g. voting rules. In Narodytska et al. (2012), you and your co-authors examine the issue of combining voting rules to perform a run-off between the different winners of each voting rule. What do you think are some plausible practical applications of this work — either soon or after further theoretical development?
Toby Walsh: As humans, we’re all used to voting: voting for our politicians, or voting for where to go out. In the near future, we’ll hand over some of that responsibility to computational agents that will help organize our lives. Think Siri on steroids. In such situations, we often have many choices as there can be a combinatorial number of options. This means we need to consider computational questions: How do we get computer(s) to work with such rich decision spaces? How do we efficiently collect and represent users’ preferences?
I should note that computer systems are already voting. The SCATS system for controlling traffic lights has the controllers of different intersections vote for what should be the common cycle time for the lights. Similarly, the Space Shuttle had 5 control computers which voted on whose actions to follow.
Computational social choice is, however, more than just voting. It covers many other uses of preferences. Preferences are used to allocate scarce resources. I prefer, for example, a viewing slot on this expensive telescope when the moon is high from the horizon. Preferences are also used to allocate people to positions. I prefer, for example, to be matched to a hospital with a good pediatrics depts. Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel Prize in Economics recently for looking at such allocation problems. There are many appealing applications in areas like kidney transplant, and school choice.
One interesting thing we’ve learnt from machine learning is that you often make better decisions when you combine the opinions of several methods. It’s therefore likely that we’ll get better results by combining together voting methods. For this reason, we’ve been looking at how voting rules combine together.
Luke: Which methods from social computational choice might be relevant to a situation like the following, adapted from Bostrom (2009)?
Suppose you want to learn agent A’s preferences, and suppose that you begin with a set of mutually exclusive preference orderings, and that you assign each of these some probability of representing A’s preferences. Now imagine that each of these preference orderings gets to send some number of delegates to Parliament. The number of delegates each preference ordering gets to send is proportional to the probability of that preference ordering. Then the delegates bargain with one another for support on various issues; and the Parliament reaches a decision by the delegates voting.
Toby: In computational social choice, we’d be interested in computational aspects of such voting situations. The first problem in this setting is that the number of preference orderings is exponential. So, is the number of delegates also exponential which will make it computationally difficult to deal with such a large number of delegates? Or is it polynomial in which case, we need to consider which polynomial subset and how “representative” this is of the whole? Having solved such problems, we’ll then consider computational questions like how do the delegates compute their (possibly strategic) votes. We know from fundamental axiomatic results in social choice that any reasonable voting system is likely to be manipulable and subject to strategic voting.
Luke: In some of your work (e.g. 2011a, 2011b), you explore the computational complexity of manipulation. Are there cases where an agent can efficiently engage in truthful voting, but can’t efficiently engage in various forms of manipulation, including strategic voting?
Toby: Well, hopefully an agent can always efficiently engage in truthful voting as we want participation. But surprisingly, even this can be sometime challenging. A nice example goes back to the Victorian mathematician and writer Charles Dodgson, or to go by his more familiar pen name, Lewis Carroll. He proposed an interesting voting rule, known as Dodgson’s method which elects any candidate that is preferred by a majority of voters to any other candidate when such a candidate exists. When such a candidate does not exist (for instance, when votes are split three ways), it elects the closest candidate in the sense that we have to make the fewest number of pairwise swaps in the votes to get to a candidate that is preferred by a majority. It’s worth noting that many popular rules, even plurality voting, do not necessarily elect a candidate that is pairwise preferred to all others by a majority when such a candidate exists. Anyway, back to Dodgson’s rule. Somewhat to the surprise of many, even working out who wins an election run under Dodgson’s rule is computationally intractable in the worst case (formally, it is NP-hard).
Fortunately, most voting rules are easy to compute, typically even linear time. On the other hand, there are many deep impossibility results showing that voters may profit from strategic voting and mis-reporting their preferences. An interesting escape from this problem was put forwards by Bartholdi, Tovey and Trick. Perhaps strategic voting is possible but too computationally difficult to actually work out?
Since they, I and others have explored which voting rules have this property. For example, we recently settled a long standing open question that Borda voting (which many people will have seen as a variant of Borda voting is used in the Eurovision song contest) is computationally difficult to manipulate. These are worst case results so we’ve also looked at how difficult strategic voting is to compute in practice (not just in the worst case).
Luke: What are some of the most interesting questions in computational social choice that you think have a decent chance of being essentially resolved in the next 20 years?
Toby: We’ll definitely have a good idea of the computational properties of the many different voting rules proposed throughout history, from ancient ones like Borda to recent ones like Schulz’e rule. And we’ll understand the computational resistance of these rules to manipulation not just in the worst case but in average and in practice on real world elections. More practically, we’ll also have a good understanding of computational aspects of other problems in social choice like fair division. For instance, we’ll have developed a rich range of mechanisms for fair division that cover the spectrum of cases (divisible/indivisible goods, centralized/decentralized, etc) and for which we understand their properties (fairness, efficiency, etc) and agents behaviour (e.g. how agents can compute a best response, Nash dynamics, etc).
We're very fond of thinking - indeed, there seems almost a presumption - that come the 2015 General Election, there will be another hung Parliament, and we'll be back in government. Of course, this isn't necessarily the case, and for over 3 years now, the polling figures translated into a a GE result indicate a Labour majority.
But, as the economy improves and we can nearer the crucial date, polls are shifting and the Dan Hodges rule comes in to play. The Dan Hodges 'rule' - which I tend to broadly agree with - says...
1. Half of current UKIP support will go back to Tories 2. Lib Dems will rise to 15% 3. This support will come from Labour.
...under the Hodges rule we would end up with Labour having most seats, Tories having most votes, and us having the balance of power. In which case, Nick has to make a call.
But does he? Probably not.
Partly this is because it seems generally accepted - although i've never seen Nick confirm this - that when we say we will talk first to the 'biggest' party after 2015, we mean seats, not votes. Although this is an odd position for the party of PR to take.
But as George Eaton points out, there is a ready made programme for government already laid out in shared police positions between the Lib Dems and Labour - 13 fine White Papers, all in the offing.
They include
- A referendum on EU membership the next time any powers are transferred (and support for an "in" vote)
- The introduction of a mansion tax on property values above £2m
- The reduction of the voting age to 16
- The removal of Winter Fuel Payments from wealthy pensioners
- A 2030 decarbonisation target
- An elected House of Lords
- Greater oversight of the intelligence services
- Radical devolution from Westminster to local authorities and city regions
- Party funding reform
- An end to unqualified teachers in state schools
- A ban on for-profit free schools
- Tougher banking regulation and the potential separation of banks' retail and investment arms
- A mass housebuilding programme, including new social housing
- The Human Rights Act
Contrast this with the Tories, where we (quite rightly ) boast of all the Tory initiatives we have stopped, David Cameron says he has a little Black Book of legislation he wants to get done but can't with us in the way, the unhappiness on the Tory backbenchers, and the fact that - whisper it - there will be little legislation of consequence over the next 12 months of government, as things have really run out of steam (the Scottish referendum notwithstanding).
Given all that - if we are in government in May 2015 - I am increasingly convinced it will be with Labour.
Back in 2003 I attended a talk by David Brin, at Worldcon here in Toronto. Brin had blurbed Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance: the “Transparent Society”, he called it, and It Was Good. The camera would point both ways, cops and politicians just as subject to our scrutiny as we were to theirs. People are primates, Brin reminded us; our leaders are Alphas. Trying to ban government surveillance would be like poking a silverback gorilla with a stick. “But just maybe,” he allowed, “they’ll let us look back.”
Dude, thought I, do you have the first fucking clue how silverbacks react to eye contact?
It wasn’t just a bad analogy. It wasn’t analogy at all; it was literal, and it was wrong. Alpha primates regard looking back as a challenge. Anyone who’s been beaten up for recording video of police beating people up knows this; anyone whose cellphone has been smashed, or returned with the SIM card mysteriously erased. Document animal abuse in any of the US states with so-called “Ag-gag” laws on their books and you’re not only breaking the law, you’re a “domestic terrorist”.
Chelsea Manning looked back; she’ll be in jail for decades. Edward Snowden looked back and has been running ever since. All he did to put that target on his back was confirm something most of us have suspected for years: those silverbacks are recording every move we make online. But try to look back and they’ll scream terrorism and national security, and leave an innocent person on the no-fly list for no better reason than to cover up a typo.
Look back? Don’t make me laugh.
I don’t know if Brin has since changed his stance (Larry Niven just coauthored a novel which accepts the reality of climate change, so I guess there’s hope for anybody). Either way, other SF writers seem willing to take up the chorus. About a decade back Robert Sawyer wrote an editorial for a right-wing Canadian magazine in which he lamented the bad rap that “Big Brothers” had got ever since Orwell. He waxed nostalgic— and, apparently, without irony— about how safe he’d felt as a child knowing that his big brother was watching over him from the next room (thus becoming an unwitting case-in-point for Orwell’s arguments about the use of language as a tool of cognitive manipulation). Just a few years ago, up-and-comer Madeline Ashby built her Master’s thesis around a misty-eyed love letter to surveillance at border crossings.
But it’s not a transparent society unless light passes through the glass both ways. The light doesn’t do that.
Can we stop them from watching us, at least? Stay away from LinkedIn or facebook, keep your private information local and offline?
Sure. For a while, at least. Of course, you may have to kiss ebooks goodbye. Amazon reserves the right to reach down into your Kindle and wipe it clean any time it feels the urge (they did it a few years back— to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, ironically). You’ll have to do without graphics and multimedia and spreadsheets and word processing, too: both Adobe and Microsoft are phasing out local software in favor of Cloud-based “subscription” models. Even the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for chrissakes— an organization that really should know better— has recently switched to a “browser-based” journal feed that can’t be accessed offline. (And what happens if, for example, you’re out in the field doing, you know, science, and don’t have internet access? “Unfortunately, you won’t be able to download the issue on your computer,” Member Services told me, before passing on her Best Regards. “You’ll have to have internet access to view it.” Which is why I quit the AAAS, after over twenty years of membership.)
We used to own our books, our magazines, the games we played. Now we can only rent them. Business models and government paranoia both rely on stripping us naked online; but if we stay offline, we’re deaf dumb and blind. It doesn’t matter that nobody’s pretending the Cloud is anywhere close to secure. The spooks and the used-car salesmen are hell-bent on forcing us onto it anyway. I’ve lost track of the number of articles I’ve read— by such presumably progressive outlets as Wired, even— lamenting the lack of effective online security, only to throw up their hands and admit But of course we’re not going to retreat from the Cloud— we live there now. It’s as though those most cognizant of the dangers we face have also been charged with assuring us that there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it, so we might as well just give up and invite the NSA into our bathrooms. (Or even worse, embrace the cameras. Have you seen that Coke ad cobbled together from bits of faux-security-camera footage? A dozen “private” moments between people with no idea they’re on camera, served up to sell fizzy suger-water as though our hearts should be warmed by displays of universal surveillance. Orwell— brought to you by Hallmark.)
You all know this as well as I do, of course. I’m only about the millionth blogger to whinge about these things. So why do I feel like a voice in the wilderness when I wonder: why aren’t we retreating from the cloud, exactly? What’s so absurd about storing your life on a USB key or a hard drive, rather than handing it over to some amorphous webcorp that whispers sweet nothings about safe secrets and unbreakable encryption into your ear, only to roll over and surrender your most private details the first time some dead-eyed spook in a trench coat comes calling?
Remember the premise of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica: that the only way to win against high-tech opponents is to go retro, revert to a time when no computer was networked, when you ran starships by pulling levers and cranking valves. It was an exquisite narrative rationale for the anachronistic vibe endemic to everything from Alien to Firefly to Star Wars, that peeling-paint aesthetic that resonates in the gut even though it made no real sense until Moore gave it context.
Maybe now it’s more than rationale. Maybe now it’s a strategy. Because now we know that the NSA has back doors installed into every edition of Windows from Xp on up— but not into dusty old Win-95. And while giving up online access entirely isa bridge too far for most of us, there’s no reason we can’t keep our most private stuff on a standalone machine without network access. Even if we don’t ditch facebook entirely (and we should, you know— really, we should), there’s no reason we can’t tell it to fuck off when it keeps nagging us to tell it where we went to school, or if we want to be friends with this K. Homolka character. (And you certainly don’t want to use a real picture of yourself for your facebook header; they’re gearing up to use those as biometric baselines to ID as many other pictures of you as they can find. If they haven’t started already.)
Bruce Schneier points out that if the spooks want you badly enough, they’ll get you. Even if you stay off the net entirely, they can always sit in a van down the street and bounce a laser off your bedrooom window to hear your pillow talk— but of course, that would be too much bother for all but the most high-value targets. Along the same lines, Edward Snowden recently advocated making surveillance “too expensive” to perform with a driftnet; force them to use a longline, to focus their resources on specific targets rather than treating everyone on the planet as a potential suspect on general principles. The only reason they target all of us is because we’re all so damn easy to target, you see. They don’t seriously suspect you or I of anything but impotent rage, but they’ll scoop up everything on everybody as long as it’s cheap and easy to do so. That’s why the Internet is every spook’s best friend. It takes time and effort to install a keystroke logger on someone’s home machine; even more to infect the thumb drive that might get plugged into a non-networked device somewhere down the line. Most of us are welcome to keep whatever privacy can’t be stripped away with a whisper and a search algorithm.
That’s hardly an ethical stance, though. It’s pure cost/benefit. Wouldn’t it be nice for them if it wasn’t so hard to scoop up everything, if there were no TOR or PGP encryption or— hey, while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if all data storage was Cloud-based? Wouldn’t it be nice if nobody could write a manifesto without using Google Docs or Microsoft’s subscription service, wouldn’t it be nice if somehow, local storage devices could get smaller and smaller over time— who needs a big clunky desktop with a big clunky hard drive when you can have a tablet instead, an appliance that outsources its memory to the ether? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could weed out the luddites and malcontents who refuse to face reality and get with the program?
When I explain to someone why I’m not on twitter, they generally look at me like I’m some old fart yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. At the moment, refusal to join social networks is merely regarded as quaint and old-fashioned— but social norms change over time. My attitude is already a deal-breaker in some contexts; some literary agents refuse to represent you unless you’re an active Twit. Before too long, my attitude might graduate from merely curmudgeonly to gauche; later still, from gauche to downright suspicious. What’s that guy afraid of, anyway? Why would he be so worried if he didn’t have something to hide?
It’s no secret that it’s mainly us old folks who are raising the ruckus about privacy. All the twentysomething thumbwirers out there grew up with the notion of trading personal data for entertainment. These kids don’t just lack an expectation of privacy, they may even lack a functional definition of the stuff…
We all know the only people who go on about privacy issues are the ones who are up to no good…
Science fiction writers are suppose to go beyond predicting the automobile; we’re supposed to take the next step and predict smog alerts. So here’s a smog alert for you:
How long before local offline storage becomes either widely unavailable, or simply illegal?
After the last post on Bitcoin, I’ve been having some interesting discussion with a reader, Jonathon Duerig, about Bitcoin and money. This is the first of a two parter on money and digital technology
Bitcoin resembles the traditional gold standard, in that it’s a form of money imagined as outside government interference that can’t be inflated. It’s finite. The traditional attraction of this is obvious—for people who already have money, and especially investment capital, a scarce, finite money supply means the value of the money you hold increases. You can charge more to lend it A loose money supply tends to do the opposite. Loose money, paper money, tends to benefit the debtor and classically stimulates economic growth. Bitcoin confers most of the alleged advantages of the gold standard.1
The traditional justification for gold was that it had “intrinsic value.” It was made valuable by nature, by God, by the fact that it seemed to be universally desired: gold stands in the claims of gold bugs as “outside” of the social world. It will still have value if the much-longed-for government collapse finally occurs. The “intrinsic value” of gold is the central claim of gold bugs. It’s what they answered when people (like Ben Franklin) said “how come you just arbitrily declared only gold could be money?” Gold has “value,” was the answer, in the same way it has weight and color and mass.
Intrinsic value has always seemed to me to be a ludicrous idea, because “value” isn’t like weight; it’s not a physical property, it’s a cultural idea, a set of agreed-upon propositions. Saying gold has intrinsic value is like saying gold has intrinsic freedom or intrinsic cheerfulness or intrinsic creativity. Freedom, novelty and creativity are social things, not material properties. Absent people, gold has mass and atomic weight but no value at all.
Unlike gold, Bitcoin was never imagined as having “intrinsic value.” Quite the opposite: Bitcoin is a heavily heavily ideological thing, invented out of thin air by persons unknown. It’s as real as any complex number arrived at by massive calculation. It has utility–it’s useful–and it’s kept scarce. But it’s only useful to people with a digital infrastructure. And its value derives from the beliefs of those who use it, and they tend to be libertarians or people skeptical of government. In that sense, Bitcoin is just like paper money. It requires a “faith community.”
We now use a pure paper money, “Federal Reserve Notes,” backed by the authority of the United States of American and our faith in its stability and prosperity. This is not a trivial thing–people regularly fight and die for the United States of America, after all, and swear they love it and insist that it has been specially blessed by God. The United States of America is a big powerful nation with lots of material assets and a vast military. It looms large in the imagination; there’s a lot there to believe in. It’s true that the law compels us to take Federal Reserve Notes–you can’t legally refuse to accept them in payment. But this ultimately depends on faith as well. If people lost faith in the nation, they would simply start negotiating private contracts which required payment in other forms of money–like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin resembles the traditional gold standard, in that it’s a limited supply that can’t be inflated. But it very much resembles paper money in that it depends on a community of belief. In Bitcoin’s case it’s faith in technology; in the benign motives of someone who may or may not be Satoshi Nakamoto, and faith in libertarian anti government dogma. Some people believe in it as an instrument of freeing us all from state tyranny; others believe in it as a ting they can speculate in. But it only works if people believe in it, like paper money.2
History demonstrates very clearly, I’d argue, that you can’t have a money that’s based on a fixed supply, and you can’t have a money that’s limited to only one faith community. A limited supply fosters monopoly and stifles growth; it makes it impossible to fight wars or undertake large scale infrastructure and investment. You want a certain amount of flexibility in your money. For example, the US engaged in massive deficit spending to fight WWII. It would not have been able to do so under the gold standard. Does anyone think that would have been a good thing? And it’s too hard to do business outside of your faith community–Bitcoins remain difficult to buy, and limited in what you can spend them on. They mostly circulate among co-religionists. But a money based on something in unlimited supply is no good either. So we have tried basing money on metal, and basing the money supply on the alleged wisdom of elites, like, in the 1820s, Nicholas Biddle of the Second Bank of the US, or Ben Bernanke of the Fed in the early 21st century, or the community of libertarian techies.
Bitcoin is yet another attempt to manage the fact that we want money to do multiple, contradictory things. We want it to be scarce and abundant at the same time. We want to have a lot of money ourselves, but if everyone has a lot of money then its value goes down, because it’s not scarce anymore. It might be more accurate to say that what we want is a situation where I (you) have a lot of money and most people have only a little. But that’s not an attractive society, for most of us. Balancing the relative scarcity and abundance of money is the heart of the whole problem that Bitcoin addresses–addresses very badly, in my opinion. I have an alternative coming in the next blog post.
one interesting difference is that we know exactly how finite the Bitcoin supply is going to be. We know the supply of gold is limited, but we don’t really know how limited. There may be huge amounts of gold under the sea floor, or bubbling in molten rock: we don’t know. One of the advantages of gold, you could argue, is that it’s finite in supply but we have no idea how finite. But the maximum number of Bitcoins is set at 21 million. There will never be more than that, and in fact, because some are lost, there will never be even that many. ↩
This is true of all money, in fact; gold only has value because people agree to believe it has value ↩
“Call me naive but I felt something – I’m not quite sure what it was, but I felt it all the same.” – Noel Gallagher on New Labour.
When Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher shook hands in Downing Street that Autumn, they were men facing similar problems: what do you do after you’ve won? Accounts of the first Blair term stress that New Labour never realised, deep down, they were as powerful as they were – Blair stuck to plans which assumed his party would be working with only a modest majority.
Gallagher, on the other hand, believed absolutely that Oasis would be the biggest band in the country. He’d said it would happen by right, and it had. But that didn’t make him any more prepared. If Blair didn’t believe he could tear up his plan, Noel hadn’t seen much need to make one. What do you do after Morning Glory? You do it again – bigger, better, louder, longer, even if the band hate each other and the songs aren’t there. Be Here Now is known as a cocaine album, but just as pertinently it’s a success album. It’s an avalanche of half-worked, muddy, adequate ideas that exist because nobody said they couldn’t and momentum said they had to. Landslide indie: as 1997 as it gets.
The question is whether “D’You Know What I Mean?” is the victory, the hangover, or both at once. As a comeback single, it’s doing two things – reintroducing Oasis’ attitude, lensed as ever through Liam’s vocals, and trying to haul in that massive, nation-spanning Knebworth audience with a big-tent chorus. “All my people, right here right now, d’you know what I mean?” translates simply as “Vote Oasis”. They’re pitching for re-election as the People’s Band.
The Morning Glory follow-up was always going to be a news event, and “D’You Know What I Mean” leans right into that: it’s nothing but event, and away from its context it feels bloated and beached. It’s the 1990s equivalent of Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” – a guaranteed, massive, empty smash built out of a band doing everything they did before but louder and stupider. Oasis (unhappily for them) do not have Nile Rodgers on hand to pull things into glossy shape. But they have the same total, barefaced confidence – tell them it’s nonsense, and aren’t you the idiot for caring? This is an alpha record, built to emasculate criticism – with this big a dick, the Emperor hardly needs clothes.
And critics, notoriously, fell into line. Q’s 5-star review of Be Here Now has been scrubbed from the Internet, but Select’s effort did the rounds a few months ago. “All of rock history has been leading up to this point”, it proclaimed, in one of several moments where ignoring the mark (also five starts) makes the praise slightly less straightforward. Even so, this sort of review has gone down in critical history as a hideous misstep – as fans and even the band backed off from Be Here Now, the adulation tanked reviewers’ credibility. This may be what artist Jeremy Deller meant in his savage summary of Oasis: “they ruined British music, and they ruined British music journalism”.
(Is that fair? Paul Gorman’s In Their Own Write, an oral history of the music press, is silent on the Be Here Now incident, which is odd because it gives a detailed account of its prelude, the set of mostly average write-ups for (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. The press’ change of mind wasn’t just a result of nervous triangulation to placate readers, it was partly down to strongarm tactics from Oasis’ marketing team, backed by the band themselves, who suggested they might refuse access on the basis of the Morning Glory pans. Oasis’ presence meant tens of thousands in sales: the threat worked.)
So had all of rock history been leading here? Not history, maybe, but “D’You Know What I Mean?” is at least a prowl through rock’s wax museum. It subs out meaning for rapid cuts through a haul of reference points – “Blood on the tracks and they must be mine / Fool on the Hill and I Feel Fine” and plenty more. The record benefits enormously from having an engaged-sounding Liam – which means a Liam radiating contempt for his brother’s idolatory: all those old fragments of rock are just bits of gum for him to chew and spit out.
If all there was to it was that confidence, its behemoth production, a snarling verse or two, and a couple of rounds of the chorus, “D’You Know What I Mean” would do its comeback job. It swaps their energy for bludgeoning aggro, and it doesn’t have the bite or tenderness or angry hope of better Oasis songs, but it might have reminded you that the band could do those things. Instead, the song makes that point then simply refuses to stop. From one listen to Be Here Now it was obvious that Noel Gallagher had made an album of long songs with no good idea how to make a song long beyond hammering the bits he liked best into inertia. “D’You Know What I Mean” has no reason to get anywhere near seven minutes.
Any coherence this has as a song comes down to two things: Liam’s sullen vocal, and the drums, where a slowed-down NWA sample creates a mid-paced stomper of a rhythm, simple and arrogant, and evokes Liam’s slouched swagger anyway. Everything else is a confused, colossal swirl – helicopters, morse code, and every guitar effect Noel Gallagher could overdub on. It sounds nothing like The Beatles. It reaches back deeper, not into the collective past, but into Oasis’ own background. This is a song where those years Noel spent as an Inspiral Carpets roadie suddenly come into focus, the years when British guitar music was all mess and throb. In the soup between the drums and the singer, there are snatches of noise that call to mind Madchester, shoegaze, grunge, warmed-over punk and psychedelia; each effects-pedal soar or swell is another ghost of early 90s indie, crowded around Oasis’ shoulders for their victory lap.
And maybe that’s the best way to enjoy this confused, bullying, almost-exciting sprawl – as a party loyalist, someone just happy to see British rock on top of the charts. But Oasis had mined that particular goodwill for a long time, and Knebworth – two and a half million chasing 250,000 tickets – had been the peak of it. Factions as big as theirs take a while to fade away, but the disappointment of Be Here Now was the end of their country-wide enormity. At their meeting, Gallagher and Blair had success in common, but nothing else: the politician was already planning for re-election; the pop star had just blown it.
I’ve never particularly cared for those ubiquitous lists of “Rules for Writers”. (If I did, I’d probably present this one as more or less definitive.) Luckily for me, I am not much of a writer, and no one is sniffing around this site in hopes of getting a hot tip for dethroning Big Steve King. I do, however, live on the Internet, and on the Internet, everyone’s a critic. Since we are currently at Peak Media, there will soon be as many people writing about movies, television shows, music, books, and other art forms as there are people actually making them; but while the quantity of criticism has gone nuclear, quality is becoming as rare as the Javan rhinoceros. Hence these well-meant and humbly offered tapas of advice. (Note: I am certainly as guilty of breaking these rules as anyone; indeed, their appearance here is meant as much as a reminder to me as a proscription for anyone else. And if you think my own past disqualifies me from daring to offer such advice, well, I certainly can’t argue with that.)
1. Criticism is not biography. There’s nothing wrong with a little personal anecdotage to pepper a critical analysis, especially if it’s germane to the substance of the critique. But with so many contemporary critics, the cart is placed so far ahead of the horse that it’s no longer even visible. If you’re so unengaged with a work of art that you find yourself writing a memoir rather than be forced to talk about it, then it’s probably not worth writing about to begin with. Similarly, if you find yourself continually reviewing only art that has a personal connection to you and your own history, you’re writing for an audience of one person, and that person already knows everything you’re going to say about it. If you get more than three paragraphs into a piece of critical writing and you still haven’t said anything about the object of your critique that could be experienced by someone who isn’t you, then you’re likely producing something too narcissistic to be of interest. We should know enough about you to know why you care, but your challenge is to tell the readers why they should care.
2. You are not Lester Bangs. His particular approach, which it would be pointless to discuss, is appealing to each generation that encounters it afresh, and that’s proof of why it was so important. That’s the good part. The bad part is that style was perfected already, by Lester Bangs, who stopped doing it in 1982 due to extenuating circumstances. It was invented by Lester Bangs, suited only to Lester Bangs, and perfected at the hands of Lester Bangs. We needed one, we got him, and he’s gone. There is no need for another, particularly one who is demonstrably inferior to the original, and they’re all inferior.
3. Discuss the art you saw, not the art you wanted to see. This is one of the oldest truisms of the critical art, and the reason it needs to be continually reinforced is that it’s so powerfully tempting to ignore. Critics are artists, after all; often, they are skilled practitioners of the very art they critique, and it is often painfully obvious where a particular work of art went wrong. That’s fine, and it’s even desirable to point out that moment of failure to your audience. But it is inherently unfair to do anything other than review the movie you saw, and not the movie you wanted to see. Criticism is only valuable insofar as it directly addressed the object at which it is directed; if you, instead, want to discuss a generalized ideal of what you think a piece of art should be, then by all means, follow Harold Bloom in thinking that the only proper critique of a poem is another poem. But you can’t have it both ways.
4. Avoid empty language, but embrace new language. The use of jargon in criticism is a very contentious subject, especially in those areas where criticism veers away from the popular into the academic. If you are writing for a popular audience, it is true that they will learn nothing if you inundate them with a bunch of impenetrable argot they don’t understand. That said, academics don’t often use arcane language just to show off; they come up with highly specific names for things because they are attempting to describe highly specific subjects with as much accuracy as possible. Just as an artist embraces originality by creating something that was not in the world before, a critic can advance the cause of criticism by inventing language that was never before used. Your job is not to use the same words to discuss everything, but to ensure that when you use new ones, your reader understands what they mean and why you chose them.
5. Everything is political. This is almost entirely an American affliction. That art is, and should be, political by its very nature is something that most people in other countries have realized for centuries, and have embraced both in their creation of art and their criticism of same. But here, we either consider it rude to analyze the politics of an artwork and do little more than flail our hands around at it like we’re swatting at a bee, or we go overboard, taking the Zhdanovite position that no art is acceptable unless it conforms to our particular moral standard. It is time to accept politicized art at its value, find the hidden politics in art (and forsake the dated notion that the creator’s position is the word of God), and blend those into a critique of art as both a product of its culture and a critique of that culture. ”Controversial” is the ultimate dodge; there is no better word for abdicating an intelligent discussion of art.
6. Accounting is not criticism. Relatedly, however, we must abandon the ‘social justice warrior’ approach to criticism that merely tallies up the number of members of some arbitrarily chosen affinity group portrayed in a work of art or involved in its making. While there are useful, even vital conversations to be had about the way women, minorities, sexual identities, and so on are portrayed in art, those conversations cannot be had by simply totting up a list of numbers. ”There are no women in this band”, “there are not enough gay people involved in the production of this movie”, “there are no black authors on your Top Ten list”. “there are not enough white people in the writer’s room of this television show” — these are not criticisms, they are mere observations, and they tell us exactly nothing, either about the value of the art being produced or about what the solution to the real problems of equality of opportunity and representation in the arts might be. Critically, it is the equivalent of saying “I stubbed my toe”.
7. Description is not a sin; it is a necessity. Look: there is nothing wrong with florid prose, if it is skillfully carried out. Metaphor is not just desirable but absolutely necessary in criticism, and abstraction of subject can be made to accomplish great things. And yes, the Pitchfork house style — or, at least, the popular stereotype of the Pitchfork house style — unfairly takes it on the chin from its detractors. But it is also true that you can look through the last decade of their year-end staff picks, and in a distressingly large number of entries, have no idea what kind of music is under discussion. Yes, music is an emotional art form, and it is important to convey the importance of mood, tone, and feel; but if I read your review of something and I don’t even know what instruments are being played in what genre, you have made a fundamental error as a critic. I almost never watch movies or read books because of the plot, but I’d at least like to know what it is before plunking down my cultural currency; providing that is literally the least you can do. Unleash your impressive assortment of synonyms and similes after you’ve given me the most basic information.
8. I can read Wikipedia myself. I know, research is hard. You’re getting paid ten bucks to review this thing on a two-day deadline and all you have to go on is some self-congratulatory bullshit written by a paid publicist. And what else are you going to do to pad out your word count, actually talk about the music? Well…yeah. Not to put too fine a point on it, but beyond the essentials of dates and names, the background information about at artist and the circumstance under which she came to create her art are completely inessential. You may think you’ve dug up some interesting tidbit by playing connect-the-links, but nothing is more obvious than someone who’s relied on Wikipedia or IMDb to flesh out what is otherwise a weak review. The art should always be the thing that eats up the bulk of your writing; if it’s less interesting to you than the person who created it, then you should judge it a failure and write about that.
9. Purity, schmurity. If I could remove entirely from existence one critical tendency in all film writing, music reviewing and literary criticism, it would be the dead-end search for purity and its affiliated isms. Populism is a dodge; no art has ever been great just because a lot of people like it, and no art has ever been bad just because a lot of people like it. Authenticity is a dodge; the first caveman to bash a couple of rocks together was the only true original, and even he was just aping nature. Everyone else has built on a vast and constantly expanding corpus of widely pollinated culture. Purity is a dodge; diversity, appropriation, and cultural co-option have all existed since the dawn of human civilization, and no art form ‘belongs’ to a specific group of people except insofar as they are capable of executing it in a more or less interesting way. To claim otherwise is to take the side of every prescriptive reactionary in the history of art. These arguments exist only to give critics something to yack about; they serve no other purpose whatsoever.
10. Don’t go chasing influence. This is a tough one, and probably the one I’m most tolerant of seeing violated. After all, every expression of culture is a product of what has come before, and enumerating the influences that led to it has value, from both a critical and a historical perspective. Also, since I’m a big booster of describing art as part of the process of critiquing it, it can be very useful to a reader not familiar with some new style or sound to say “It looks like this movie” or “It sounds like this album”. In these circumstances, and to these ends, the Influence Game can be valuable. But far too often, especially in criticism of the Internet age where human writers seem to accept the idea that they are in direct competition with programmed algorithms, the Influence Game turns very quickly into a round of Observe My Exquisite Taste, a high-low variant of the venerable Look What I Know Aren’t I Marvelous, which is itself not actually a game, but a less satisfying form of masturbation.
11. Avoid the hype cycle. This is hard to blame on a lot of working critics, because they are paid to be part of a vast content-pushing scheme were clicks translate into ad dollars, and they are, tragically, professionally obliged to be part of the hype cycle. But for those who write for the love of writing, there is no excuse; they should know that the hype cycle is nothing but advertising, and by taking part in it, they are doing nothing more than performing as unpaid shills for moneymen. It is stupid, short-sighted, and actively destructive to the art form they claim to love. I would never advocate for willful obscurity, but the world is a vast place full of more movies, books, TV shows, and music than one person could ever possibly take in over a human lifetime. You may feel out of the loop by ignoring something big and shiny and new in favor of something older, less pervasive, and less ubiquitous; but you will never do the world a disservice by writing a single piece about a lesser-known book or movie or album instead of writing the 10,000th ‘thinkpiece’ about the same goddamn thing everyone else in the world is talking about.
12. Whether or not you liked something is the least interesting thing you can say about it. Another truism that’s beyond trite, and dreadfully difficult to avoid. But it’s so common because it’s so true: telling your audience whether you liked a piece of art or not isn’t very interesting, and at most, it should be the very first and least thing you say about the art, not the lion’s share of your critique. All it tells your reader is what your tastes are, and that’s a completely useless bit of information. What they want to know is if they will like it, and to tell them that, you must talk about the art and not about your experience of it. Why did you like it? What did you like about it? Why do you have particular tastes and preferences. What did the art do right, and what did it do wrong? Did it do right and fail? Did it do wrong and still work? What did it mean? Why did it get made? What did it look like or sound like? What did it teach us about ourselves or our world? What moral lesson did it impart or upend? What expectations did it fulfill or frustrate? Tell us the answers to these or a thousand other questions, but don’t, for the love of God, just tell us if you thought it was good or bad.
Sooner or later Labour governments run into a paradox. The more ambitious their spending plans get, the more they have to tax the very people those plans are intended to help.
So I was happy to support the Liberal Democrat policy of significantly raising the tax threshold to take a lot of poorer people out of the system altogether. And pleased to see the Coalition put the policy into effect so that people do not pay tax on the first £10,000.
Now the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are engaged into a contest to raise the personal allowance even further.
Clegg has said he would like to see the income tax threshold raised to £10,500, worth £100 a year to basic-rate taxpayers.
The deputy prime minister has said his ambition is to eventually raise the rate even further so no one pays any tax on the equivalent of the minimum wage, which would work out at a threshold of around £12,500.
And Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said it would be a "top priority" of the party to "raise the personal allowance dramatically" in the next parliament - suggesting it would be a red line for the Lib Dems in any coalition negotiation.
But hold on. The setting up of the Coalition was predicated on the need for unprecedented austerity. If we can't afford to maintain public spending at levels that Liberal Democrats would like, how come we can afford further substantial tax cuts?
That Huffington Post article quotes Jeremy Browne on the subject:
Browne said he was "slightly unnerved" by the "Dutch auction" at the last Lib Dem and Conservative conferences where the two parties traded off policies.
"The Conservatives promised extra money for a marriage tax break and the Lib Dems promised to spend extra money on giving free school meals to all infant school aged children," he said.
"The message I find that sends is there is money to splash around and I think it's a difficult message to send at the same time when you told the electorate that educational maintenance allowance or child benefit for taxpayers above a certain threshold is unaffordable." He added: "We still have a big deficit by any standard, just because it's less colossal than before doesn't mean its not still big." Browne said there was a "tendency of all parties to start getting ready to do the giveaways before there is anything to actually give away."
My feeling is that Nick Clegg's support for further tax cuts is driven by politics rather than economics. He hopes that the Lib Dems will be identified in the public mind with these cuts and reasons that the more of them there are, the more popular we shall be.
But, like Jeremy Browne, I wonder whether there is any economic justification for these cuts at a time when public debt it still growing.
Perhaps unlike Jeremy, if there is scope for reigning back on austerity then I would rather see the funding of local services - the sort we have always taken for granted, like buses and museums and libraries - given priority.
That is, after all, what people thought they were voting for when they voted for our councillors and for our candidates at the last election.
Thanks to Lib Dem Voice for putting me on to this article. Incidentally, their picture of Jeremy Browne' is much better than Huffington Post's because he has a beard.
Joy: ’Exist’? That’s what we do outside of show business? It’s not so bad, existing.
– from Inside Llewyn Davis
Lately I’ve been thinking about Zen Pencils.
Normally, I don’t give this site — featuring the competent but often spectacularly point-missing cartoons of Gavin Aung Than, who specializes in lifting ‘inspirational’ quotes from famous figures and threading them into some fatuous narrative of his own invention — a second look. But a recent series (I won’t link to it, for reasons that should be clear enough), in which he joins the ranks of those dreary souls who posit an eternal war between ‘artists’ and ‘haters’, got me examining my own problem with our culture’s elevation of ‘creativity’ — at least as it is perceived by the people who stand to make money off of it — and why I have such a negative reaction to ‘inspirational’ literature (scare quotes to be justified in time; bear with me).
Ever since the rise, starting in the late 1990s of the ‘creative’ class, not coincidentally alongside the ascendance of the Internet as a cultural and economic force, there has been an epidemic of aspirational thought amongst the self-perceived elite. It’s not entirely new to America, which has long been in love with the notion of the self-made man, of transcendence through capitalism, of the meritocratic elite; we rid ourselves of the European belief in a hereditary aristocracy, but could never quite escape the belief in some kind of natural-born haut monde that is entitled to success. It echoes through the ages, from the rags-to-riches stories of Horatio Alger to the explosion of motivational camp in the 1980s, as embodied by “Successories”. But the message — that success is your birthright, and all you have to do is want it bad enough — didn’t become truly ingrained in the mythos of the creative class until the Web economy, with its instant billionaires, TED Talks, and curious combination of making vast corporate profits while maintaining the air of a subversive anti-corporate rebel, really took hold.
Now, everywhere we turn, from the lower echelons of Web entrepreneurs like Aung Than, who use it to cash in on their cartoons and pretend they are doing some vital service to mankind, to the upper atmosphere of privileged tech millionaires who urge us to “do what you love and the money will follow”, we are drowning in a flood of aspirational libertarianism. This is not the cruel, hard-edged objectivism of Ayn Rand that scorns charity and embraces social Darwinism; it is a feel-good philosophy of wealth as a byproduct of passion, always equipped with a quote from Einstein or Vonnegut or Deepak Chopra to ease our conscience about using capitalism as a method of spiritual enlightenment. It is a gospel of achievement, not of domination. It paints the lower orders not as moochers and leeches, forever begging their betters for a handout, but as non-creatives and under-achievers, whose greatest crime is not wanting it bad enough. But while it couches its message of attainment uber alles in (literal) terms of art, the message is essentially the same: you deserve success, and it is your talent that entitles you to it. And if you fail, it’s because you’re just not trying.
If there is a unique development in the most recent manifestation of the gospel of entitlement, it is who has become the villain. If Alger’s short stories were characterized by sneering and obvious villains of the old school who gained an advantage by taking shortcuts and behaving like heels, and Rand’s monsters were embodied as cynical collectivists wanting to tear down greatness to satisfy the envy of the lunk-headed masses, the new ways teach us that villains are people we used to think of as heroes: average, hard-working Joes and Janes. In a spectacular co-option of the socialist contempt for the bourgeois, but with the rich taking the place of the working class as the triumphalist heroes, these narratives truly fit the zeitgeist. Even as the middle class disappears as an actual economic category, the inspirational tales of the new creative class and its artistic dupes portray the honest and loyal white-collar worker as the new kulak, an enemy fit only to be destroyed. Ordinariness is the greatest heresy; existence is the gravest crime; providing for one’s family and future is the ultimate betrayal. The villain of the story is never a successful capitalist (who is, as always, sacrosanct) or a jealous laborer (who is, as always, invisible), but a man or a woman who fails to pursue his or her most special and wonderful dream, thus depriving the world of not only the salvation of art, but also the inevitable financial gain that always comes from following that star.
For me, the strangest thing about this mutation of the fairy tales of the upper classes is how close it comes to the gospel of Marxism — and even closer to something yet more close to my heart, the critique of everyday life by the likes of Debord, Vaneigem, and the rest of the Situationist International. Like the technocratic libertarians of the new creative class, they railed against boredom as a cardinal sin, despised the life-wasting rot of the office job and the daily grind, and encouraged an embrace of creativity, art, and wonder as a means of navigating the world of the ordinary. But while the Situationst critique was always and inextricably socialist in nature, the new creatives have flipped the script into a story about the inevitability and desirability of the preservation and accumulation of capital. The Situationists wanted to destroy the existing order so that every man and woman, no matter how ‘ordinary’, could live a life of creativity and discovery; they wanted to tear up the sidewalks and discover the beach underneath it. The new creatives want the beach all to themselves, as a reward for converting creativity and discovery into cash; the sidewalk, one assumes, is to be patrolled by non-creative goons whose job is to keep the equally non-creative masses at arms’ length.
The end result of all this is not the uplift and glorification of the common man; it is his eradication. So pervasive has this cult of creativity become that you hear it even from artists and writers, who, struggling on their own against a hostile world of indifference, disrespect, and theft, ought to know better. Instead, they embrace the myth wholeheartedly; if they are failures themselves, it is not because of a mass media that renders them a grain of sand on a vast digital beach, or a cynical ‘disruption’ of the creative market that turns people from artists and writers to ‘content providers’, reducing their passion to a commodity, their protection to a fantasy, and their compensation to a joke. Instead, they focus their anger on other artists, on critics and ‘haters’, and, especially, on non-creators, who are thought to be unworthy of their own thoughts and opinions because of their inability to write or draw or create. That this description also includes a good 99% of their audience, and thus their entire reason for existence, is something far too crass to mention.
This sort of message creep, this twisting of the ideal of artistic achievement as a blessing meant to shed light on the darkness of mere being into an entitlement for which one deserves personal reward, this idea that failure is not the child of a thousand fathers but a manifestation of weakness or lack of will on the part of those who foolishly don’t think they deserve success, has even spilled over into other areas of life. Despite ample evidence that it is the product of innumerable genetic conditions, environmental factors, and lifestyle conditions that can barely be fathomed, obesity is almost always framed as the consequence of a lack of discipline. Mental illness, too, is often chalked up to a lack of will, an unwillingness to ‘get over it’. Even physical health is coming under the rubric of the overachievers brigade: cancer, one of the most heinous and random afflictions that can lay a human being low, is often the target of slogan-yelling and aspirational bugaboo. ”Stand up to cancer”, the bus ad reads, as if it’s a balrog, and we simply have to draw a line in the sand; “cancer stops with me,” screams the commercial, as if it were in our power to end it all along and we didn’t realize it until someone told us; “I stared down cancer, and it blinked”, says the man on the billboard, not so subtly implying that anyone who has had the bad taste to actually die of cancer just wasn’t trying hard enough. (This naturally makes an appearance in Zen Pencils, where a quote from Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture is illustrated in the usual dismayingly literal-minded way: ”The brick walls are there to stop people who don’t want it badly enough.” One supposes it would be crass to suggest that Pausch failed to scale his own personal brick wall, in the form of a malignant neoplasm of the pancreas, in 2008 because he didn’t want to live badly enough.)
And here, of course, is where we find the tell. The problem isn’t the idea of aspiration itself, or of dedication and perseverance, or of inspirational quotes. The problem isn’t the belief that relentlessly pursuing one’s dreams can lead to success, though it should be approached with the recognition that it takes a lot of good fortune and the right opportunities, and the empathy to understand that those who never have those breaks should not be figures of contempt or object lessons in failure. The problem isn’t even the idea that people of unshakable will can change the world, though this should be tempered with the recognition of a moral context: the unshakable will of Gandhi to change the world had a very different endgame than the equally unshakable will of Hitler to change the world. The problem is that none of these are being presented honestly. They are, instead, being presented in the form of marketing, in the form of advertising. They are not personal messages of achievement and inspiration; they are commercials. They are meant only to sell you something, whether it’s trinkets for a particular charity, or treatment at a particular hospital, or the idea that you should give up on such quaint notions as job security and benefits in our bold new digital economy. Whatever they’re specifically selling, they are commercials, and commercials are never to be trusted, especially when the message delivered is one of contempt for the ordinary man, the average citizen, the person who could be you if you weren’t so unique and special.
“We are even oppressed at being men, men with a real, individual body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and strive instead to be some sort of impossible generalized man,” Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from Underground. ”Soon we shall contrive to be born, somehow, from an idea.” Even being a great man in our culture is a near impossibility; rising above mere ordinariness is so difficult it sometimes seems unattainable. Truly great human beings, those whose works or ideas somehow, madly, raise the level of their fellow man to something more elevated, those who leave humanity in a less degraded and animal condition than which they found it, can be counted one in a billion, and when was the last time someone praised Martin Luther King’s singing voice? Our artists, too, pour every thread of their soul into creating art that reminds us that we are capable of being something more than jealous apes; this leaves them drained of almost every other human characteristic, and when we insist that they must also be people of high moral character, it is we who look foolish, not they. It is hard enough just being alive, just living and trying to be a decent person without being overwhelmed by shame and guilt and the demands of the world; the last thing we need is someone who got a few extra pulls of the handle at the cosmic slot machine telling us we’re doing it all wrong. If there is something we should aspire to, it certainly cannot be a position from which we look upon ordinary people, people no less miraculous but perhaps just a little less lucky than ourselves, as a lesser form of life.
GENESIS
Dumb mud
“Madam, I’m Adam”
Eve damned Eden, mad Eve
Cain: a maniac
EXODUS
Egad, no bondage!
“Live not on evil!”
LEVITICUS
Repel a leper
NUMBERS & DEUTERONOMY
Are we not drawn onwards, we Jews, drawn onward to new era?
JUDGES, PROPHETS, KINGS, & WRITINGS
Now, sir, a war is won
Egad! A base life defiles a bad age.
[Deed]
[Deed]
[Tenet]
[Tenet]
THE GOSPELS
So – let’s use Jesus’ telos.
Dogma: I am God!
Deliverer re-reviled
“Abba, abba…”
Did I do, O God, did I as I said I’d do? Good, I did.
Deified
REVELATIONS
Won’t I panic in a pit now?
(most of these palindromes are not original to me, but I cannot find good attributions)
(I apologize for skipping the Pauline epistles, but I couldn’t find or invent good palindromes to describe them. But if we follow most scholars in rejecting 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, and Ephesians, then modern commentary on the Pauline epistles could be “some men interpret nine memos”)
(I realize the title “Semite Times” might lead one to expect a more general history of the Jews beyond the Biblical period. I cannot do this concept justice, but a good chunk of modern Israeli history could be “bar an Arab”)
(Sounds Biblical as heck but unfortunately doesn’t seem to correspond to any actual Bible story: “So may Obadiah, even in Nineveh, aid a boy, Amos”.)
I don’t normally pay too much attention to the length of a song’s stay at Number One, but the scale of “I’ll Be Missing You”’s popularity is significant. It ran three weeks at the top, was knocked off by the comeback single of the country’s biggest band, then came back the week after for another three – and all this before Princess Diana died, giving it another surge. It outsold “Wannabe”. It was colossal.
The point of this sudden attention to stats is to show that, in the UK at least, “I’ll Be Missing You” cleanly transcended its obvious context – the bloody climax of the Death Row/Bad Boy hip-hop feud that left Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur dead – to be bought on its own merits as a pop requiem. Tupac and Biggie were well-known figures, huge with the British hip-hop audience, but not six-weeks-at-number-one huge. Criticisms of “I’ll Be Missing You” have been plentiful – it’s cynical, it’s lazy, it makes a saint of a criminal, it’s a fairly terrible piece of rap music. Some of the attacks are on point, others miss the point. But most of them come from some knowledge of rap and of this song’s place within it. It’s worth first trying to hear it from the point of view of someone who bought “I’ll Be Missing You” with no conception of or interest in that context – since my bet is those people kept it at Number One for so long. What would they have got out of it?
A familiar song, for starters: Sting got 100% of the publishing here. On the “Every Breath You Take” thread there’s a pushback from an angry googler arguing that to spawn two major hits makes a song ‘critic-proof’, and he’s right – that bassline holds a fell attraction for music listeners no critic has ever dented. Puff Daddy, whose voice I marginally prefer to Sting’s, and Faith Evans, who is considerably better, find a new use for Andy Summers’ guitar line – taking its claustrophobic monotony and turning it into stately, clasped-hands monotony.
Our straw-person buyer also gets a very straightforward song about death, with a friend and a widow talking through their regret, bafflement and pain. Here’s where I think Puffy – as performer, not mogul – has more to do with this record’s success than he generally gets credit for. He has the kind of flat, legible, very straightforward non-flow the British public seem to rather like, and his style makes “I’ll Be Missing You” a highly gendered expression of grief – a man stoically, stiffly showing his regret; a woman keening and mourning. That contrast, corny though it is, sells the record as much as The Police do.
Dropping back from that wider context, Puff Daddy’s rapping is actually right for the role he’s playing here – the ad libber suddenly forced to find his own voice, a sideman pushed into an unwanted spotlight. Mourning an MC whose power lay partly in how easy, slick and dangerously charming he sounded, Puffy’s stumbles and rigidity demonstrate the hole left by his friend’s passing. Notorious B.I.G. would have sold a rhyme as contorted as “making hits, stages they received you on / still can’t believe you’re gone”, which dies as it comes out of Puff Daddy’s mouth. That’s the point.
So you can spin an argument to make “I’ll Be Missing You” sound good on paper. Even at the time it was a record I was tempted to defend, because a lot of the criticisms played into wider, murkier, prejudices about hip-hop in general. Yes, Notorious B.I.G. was no angel, but a friend’s eulogy shouldn’t be treated as a balanced obituary. No, rapping about violent acts doesn’t mean you deserve to be gunned down at 24, any more than singing about drugs means you deserve to overdose or lose your mind. Yes, it’s completely dependent on a massive sample – you’ll be taking that “Bitter Sweet Symphony” back to the shop, then? And so the conversations turned across most of a summer.
Except, ultimately, all the hypocrisies in the world couldn’t make “I’ll Be Missing You” into a very good record, or even a slightly good one. It’s mawkish, pious, and horribly overlong by at least two minutes. Puff Daddy ends every verse with heavy-handed product placement for his friend’s last album. The man’s limitations as a rapper may illustrate what a loss Biggie’s talent is, but that doesn’t make them any more entertaining. The big-sample approach to hip-hop can work, but “Every Breath You Take” is too sullen and draggy for such reanimation. For years, saloon bar critics and minor league stand-ups had made lazy jokes about hip-hop: it’s just guys talking, they said. Over other people’s music, they said. And now here we have probably the biggest hip-hop single in Britain up to this point, and it has to be the one which sounds exactly like they always said rap did.
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) operate an appeals system for over or under blocking of web content, following the implementation of Perry & Cameron’s Porn Filters. The appeals system is designed for cases where there is some dispute between operators and site owners about the blocking of sites.
A number of abortion related websites. Although “controversial for some“, the BBFC “found no content which we would classify at 18 or R18“.
A website that sells office supplies. The BBFC “found no content on the site which we would classify at 18 or R18.”
A web site about studying or working abroad. The BBFC “found no content on the site which we would classify at 18 or R18“.
A tool for generating passwords. The BBFC “found no content on the site which we would classify 18 or R18“.
A tool to help carers. The BBFC “found no content on the site which we would classify 18 or R18“.
Information related to motor insurance. The BBFC “found no content on the site which we would classify 18 or R18“.
The Girl Guides (!) web site. The BBFC found no content on the site which… well, you get the idea.
And there was one case of underblocking, of a site containing elements “encouraging members to post pictures of people they would rape, described as a ‘Rape Gallery’, alongside written comments about raping these individual.
Unsurprisingly, the BBFC “concluded that it would be classified at least 18 or R18, and might potentially be refused classification.”
The remaining three cases were queries by operators, two in what appear to be a genuinely marginal case of “is this 18-rated porn” and one asking if they should be blocking a site on assisted suicide or not. So in at least some instances the operators acted responsibly, in the others…
…well, I’d love to see the support ticket where some poor helpdesk staff member had to justify blocking an office supplies website. I can only assume at least one mobile operator has an internal appeals policy that can be summarised by “LALALA, I’M NOT LISTENING”.
(This is my last posting on the disappearance of flight MH370—at least until we find the wreckage.)
Having eliminated the stolen passport holders (illegal immigrants joining their families) and heard new admissions from the Malaysian military about the track of the airliner, I have a hypothesis about the disappearance of MH370 that doesn't require human malice—just a single terrible coincidence (of the kind that causes most major air disasters).
Last year Boeing issued an Airworthiness Directive for other models of B777, to look for cracking in the fuselage skin under the SATCOM transceiver antenna. Such cracking could lead, in extremis, to rapid decompression. "The FAA said it had also determined that this unsafe condition "is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design"."
* On February 22nd, aircraft 9M-MRO underwent maintenance. During this, or during a previous maintenance cycle, an empty oxygen bottle was installed by mistake for a full one, or a valve was jammed, or some other undetected fault rendered the flight deck crew's emergency oxygen supply inoperable.
* At 17:22Z on March 7th, while in flight at 35,000 feet, the fuselage ruptured under or around the SATCOM antenna housing, damaging the SATCOM antenna connections and causing rapid decompression.
* At the same time, the previously undetected fault in the gas supply to the pilots' oxygen masks starved them of oxygen.
The pilots would not succumb to hypoxia immediately. They probably had enough conscious-but-confused time to don their (non-functional) oxygen masks, dial a course change into the autopilot, reduce altitude by 5000 feet, and broadcast a Mayday that nobody heard because it never got out of the airframe (because of the damaged SATCOM antenna).
Then they lost consciousness.
The plane drilled on into the big blue for six more hours with the pilots dead at the controls, like Paine Stewart's LearJet. The cabin crew were unable to get through the reinforced door before their portable oxygen bottles ran out: the aircraft finally ran out of fuel and came down somewhere over the middle of the Indian or Pacific Oceans.
We might not find the wreckage for years.
I'd like to stress that this is my current preferred hypothesis. It doesn't rely on conspiracy theories or human malice, and it explains the observed course and altitude changes. All it requires is the ghastly coincidence of two individually survivable maintenance errors affecting the same aircraft on the same flight. (Which is, of course, the pattern of most major aviation disasters.) There is, however, one take-away from this picture.
If this turns out to be what happened to flight MH370, expect the airline industry to start pushing back hard against the requirement for reinforced cockpit doors to be locked at all times while airliners are in flight.
Losing Helios 552 might be a freak accident, but if decompression and a locked door led to the loss of MA370 as well, then this would be a new threat that will now have killed 360 air travellers—many times more than have died as a result of hijackings since 9/11.
Is it appropriate to employ anti-hijacking measures to prevent violent hijackings a couple of times per decade, if they run the risk, as a side-effect, of crashing in-service airliners a couple of times per decade?
If you’re an aficionado of passive-aggressive fannish xenophobia, in which the frothing distrust of people who aren’t just like you is couched in language designed to give the appearance of being reasonable until you squint at it closely, then you’re not going to want to miss this piece by Baen publisher Toni Weisskopf. It’s a really fine example of the form. I recommend you check it out for the full effect, but for those of you who won’t, here’s an encapsulation of the piece:
“Once upon a time all the fractious lands of science fiction fandom were joined together, and worshiped at the altar of Heinlein. But in these fallen times, lo do many refuse to worship Heinlein, preferring instead their false idols and evil ways. What shall we, who continue to attend the Orthodox Church of Heinlein, do with these dirty, dirty people? Perhaps we shall wall ourselves away in His sepulcher, for we are the One True Church, and should not have to sully ourselves with the likes of them. P.S.: Also, their awards don’t mean anything because we don’t get nominated for them very much and maybe we don’t want to be nominated anyway.”
So, notes.
1. In one sense, Ms. Weisskopf is to be commended for her facility at marketing messaging, in which she, as publisher of Baen Books, quite adeptly makes the argument, implicitly and explicitly, that those who read Baen Books are in fact the One True Fandom, and that the One True Fandom reads Baen (it should be noted that the piece originally ran in the Baen Bar online forum, located at the Baen Books site). At the same time she also suggests that despite being the One True Fandom, Baen folk are also outside the mainstream of science fiction, thus playing the hand of rhetorical cards that includes both Heirs to the Throne and Belittled Outsiders. It’s a nice trick.
You might think I’m being sarcastic about that comment, but, in fact, I’m not. Anecdotally speaking, Baen’s folk really do appear to have a high level of identification with the house, and much (but to be clear, not all) of Baen’s stock-in-trade is a specific type of science fiction, which structurally resembles “golden age” science fiction and whose readership/authorship correlates with social/political conservatism. Conservative folks, pretty much by definition, tend to see themselves as caretakers and standard bearers of a lineage — in this case, of a brand of science fiction that hearkens back to an earlier age, and particularly to the work of Robert Heinlein.
So when Ms. Weisskopf addresses the Baen true faithful like this (as she does both in the Baen’s Bar and on the site of Ms. Hoyt, a Baen author), aside from anything else she’s doing, she’s engaging in the laudable tactic of binding — or rebinding — her company’s host to her company’s product: Baen fans are the real science fiction fans, and real science fiction fans want real science fiction, which comes from Baen. It’s a nice bit of commercial epistemic closure. So good job, Ms. Weisskopf.
2. That said, as a bit of messaging it does have its own risks: Namely, when a publisher of a science fiction house explicitly brands everyone else as heretics and interlopers in the House of the Future, she also implicitly argues that no one other than those she’s identified as True Believers should be touching her company’s books — they’re for the small and select in crowd. Sure, maybe once you’ve gone through a complex baptismal process, in which you memorize the Notebooks of Lazarus Long and are able to recite them at a gun range whilst the members of the faithful blaze away with their semi-automatics, then you can be allowed in. But you’ll still always be a novitiate — now go get papa a cigar, junior.
And, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what Ms. Weisskopf wants; maybe she’s decided that the self-identified True Faithful is a sufficient market, and will remain so, despite the fact that it’s aging as it goes along, and the numbers of people entering the genre through the Heinlein door has, shall we say, shrunk dramatically over the years. However, if I were one of her investors, or her distributor, I’d probably shoot her a note saying seriously, what the Hell are you doing? Because loudly and publicly dismissing a majority of a market segment in a publicly-accessible forum is not generally considered a smart business move. Fortunately I am not an investor or a distributor.
3. However, I have been — and am — a reader of Baen books and authors. The company has excellent stores of both. I’ve featured Baen authors here for the Big Idea segment; I note here and on Twitter the new books that Baen puts out every month, because I think that Baen authors and books are worth letting people know about, including people who aren’t already self-identified as members of the Baen faithful. Have I been wrong to do this? Have I been wrong to personally enjoy the books of Baen authors? Because certainly there are enough Baen authors out there who have been happy to consider me a poster boy for Everything That Is Wrong in Science Fiction. I would hate to sully their books with my gaze, or my willingness to let the wrong people know about their work.
So, a personal note to Ms. Weisskopf: If you’d like me to stop reading and appreciating the work of your publishing house, and to stop publicizing it to the people outside of the True Faithful, all you have to do is let me know. I will be sad to do it, because your authors do good work, well worth celebrating. But if, as you say, you are “not sure there is a good enough argument for engaging them,” where “them” includes a very large segment of the audience who reads this site — and almost certainly me — then I will regretfully stop accepting Baen authors for the Big Idea and stop noting when Baen Books come over my transom.
You know where I am; let me know what you think. In the meantime, I’ll just assume you actually do want me to keep promoting your authors and books.
4. Speaking as someone who does, in fact, love the work of Robert Heinlein, has acknowledged his obvious influence in his own work, defended him from detractors and who has been labeled “The New Heinlein” more times than he can count, I feel I can say this: The fetishization of Robert Heinlein creeps me the fuck out. Heinlein was a great writer, a central figure in the development of science fiction as a literature and as a community and, by all I know of him from people who knew him, a fine and decent human being — flawed, to be sure, but here’s a stone for you to cast if you are not also flawed.
With that said, using him as the yardstick for who is a True Fan and who is not, and picturing him with the sort of uncritically slobbering reverence one offers gods or Ayn Rand is risible. First and most obviously, a man who made a point of aiming for “the slicks” — the general interest magazines that would grow his audience exponentially beyond the pulps and helped him to position himself as a writer of wide cultural significance — probably should not be used as the fetish object for a group of people actively trying to exclude other people as real fans of science fiction.
Second, if memory serves, Heinlein took a exasperated view of people who read his stuff and then climbed his walls looking for him to be their guru. From what I know of the man I would suspect he would feel the same exasperation with the people who want to do to him in science fiction what conservatives do to Ronald Reagan in just about every other sphere. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer my Heinlein as a human being, not a hand-sized plaster idol, perfectly sized to bludgeon those I’m uncomfortable with.
Third, if you want to make the argument that people who are serious about science fiction as a genre should read Heinlein, then you get no argument from me — indeed, I would agree! Just as they should read Wollenstonecraft, Verne, Wells, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Russ and Tiptree. If you want to make the argument that writers should pay attention to how Heinlein crafts his work, I’m right there with you, too. But if you say that none but those who go through Bob shall enter the Kingdom of Fandom, you’re going to lose me. Because it’s wrong. People can, people do, people have. They’re quite happy in fandom, too! And there’s nothing a member of the Orthodox Church of Heinlein can do to evict them. Which is the thing which really busts some of their chops, I suspect.
5.There is no one way to be a fan of the genre. Ms. Weisskopf’s unilateral attempt to establish fans of her publishing house as the One True Church, with Heinlein as its graven image, is flat out wrong. Not only are they not the One True Church, they don’t even get Robert Heinlein to themselves. They have to timeshare him with me and with many other fans who love his work, see him as an influence, and at the same time are happy to welcome anyone who wants to be part of the science fiction and fantasy community into the fold, no matter how they got there. Try to take Robert Heinlein from me, guys. See where that gets you. He’s not yours alone. You can’t gatekeep him from me.
Likewise, Ms. Weisskopf’s handwringing about what should be done about the interlopers and heretics incorrectly arrogates to her little group the ability to make any sort of decision on the matter. They can’t. Baen is not, in fact, the core of science fiction and fantasy; people who identify as Baen fans are not the only “real” science fiction and fantasy fans. They’re not even “one side” of science fiction and fantasy; that’s like saying Virginia is “one side” of the United States of America. They are a constituency at best — one with no more or less significance than many others.
If the Baen folks do, in fact, decide to contract into a little defensive ball in which only the pure of heart shall be admitted into Bob’s sight, the impact on the rest of the science fiction and fantasy field will be pretty much exactly nothing. The rest of the field will chug along in its myriad ways, happy not to be bothered by a small and shrinking group yelling at them you aren’t the true fans, no not atall, why aren’t you listening to us.
Baen and its fans and writers are what any of us in the genre are: a constituent part, something the makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. It’s a shame so many of the people who identify with it — the publisher included — appear to be yelling at the rising tide of the current field to keep it from coming in. I imagine that Robert Heinlein might have something pungent to say to them about it. Maybe he already did. I’ll have to check the notebooks.
