I was recently reading yet another botched explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and it ticked me off. It wasn't a particularly interesting one, so I'm not going disassemble it in detail. What it did was the usual crackpot quantum dance: Heisenberg said that quantum means observers affect the universe, therefore our thoughts can control the universe. Blah blah blah.

It's not worth getting into the cranky details. But it inspired me to actually take some time and try to explain what uncertainty really means. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is fascinating. It's an extremely simple concept, and yet when you realize what it means, it's the most mind-blowingly strange thing that you've ever heard.

One of the beautiful things about it is that you can take the math of uncertainty and reduce it to one simple equation. It says that given any object or particle, the following equation is always true:

Where:

• is a measurement of the amount of uncertainty
  about the position of the particle;
• is the uncertainty about the momentum of the particle; and
• is a fundamental constant, called the reduced Plank's constant, which is roughly .

That last constant deserves a bit of extra explanation. Plank's constant describes the fundamental granularity of the universe. We perceive the world as being smooth. When we look at the distance between two objects, we can divide it in half, and in half again, and in half again. It seems like we should be able to do that forever. Mathematically we can, but physically we can't! Eventually, we get to a point where where is no way to subdivide distance anymore. We hit the grain-size of the universe. The same goes for time: we can look at what happens in a second, or a millisecond, or a nanosecond. But eventually, it gets down to a point where you can't divide time anymore! Planck's constant essentially defines that smallest unit of time or space.

Back to that beautiful equation: what uncertainty says is that the product of the uncertainty about the position of a particle and the uncertainty about the momentum of a particle must be at least a certain minimum.

Here's where people go wrong. They take that to mean that our ability to measure the position and momentum of a particle is uncertain - that the problem is in the process of measurement. But no: it's talking about a fundamental uncertainty. This is what makes it an incredibly crazy idea. It's not just talking about our inability to measure something: it's talking about the fundamental true uncertainty of the particle in the universe because of the quantum structure of the universe.

Let's talk about an example. Look out the window. See the sunlight? It's produced by fusion in the sun. But fusion should be impossible. Without uncertainty, the sun could not exist. We could not exist.

Why should it be impossible for fusion to happen in the sun? Because it's nowhere near dense or hot enough.

There are two forces that you need to consider in the process of nuclear fusion. There's the electromagnetic force, and there's the strong nuclear force.

The electromagnetic force, we're all familiar with. Like charges repel, different charges attract. The nucleus of an atom has a positive charge - so nuclei repel each other.

The nuclear force we're less familiar with. The protons in a nucleus repel each other - they've still got like charges! But there's another force - the strong nuclear force - that holds the nucleus together. The strong nuclear force is incredibly strong at extremely short distances, but it diminishes much, much faster than electromagnetism. So if you can get a proton close enough to the nucleus of an atom for the strong force to outweigh the electromagnetic, then that proton will stick to the nucleus, and you've got fusion!

The problem with fusion is that it takes a lot of energy to get two hydrogen nuclei close enough to each other for that strong force to kick in. In fact, it turns out that hydrogen nuclei in the sun are nowhere close to energetic enough to overcome the electromagnetic repulsion - not by multiple orders of magnitude!

But this is where uncertainty comes in to play. The core of the sun is a dense soup of other hydrogen atoms. They can't move around very much without the other atoms around them moving. That means that their momentum is very constrained - is very small, because there's just not much possible variation in how fast it's moving. But the product of and have to be greater than , which means that needs to be pretty large to compensate for the certainty about the momentum.

If is large, that means that the particle's position is not very constrained at all. It's not just that we can't tell exactly where it is, but it's position is fundamentally fuzzy. It doesn't have a precise position!

That uncertainty about the position allows a strange thing to happen. The fuzziness of position of a hydrogen nucleus is large enough that it overlaps with the the nucleus of another atom - and bang, they fuse.

This is an insane idea. A hydrogen nucleus doesn't get pushed into a collision with another hydrogen nucleus. It randomly appears in a collided state, because it's position wasn't really fixed. The two nuclei that fused didn't move: they simply didn't have a precise position!

So where does this uncertainty come from? It's part of the hard-to-comprehend world of quantum physics. Particles aren't really particles. They're waves. But they're not really waves. They're particles. They're both, and they're neither. They're something in between, or they're both at the same time. But they're not the precise things that we think of. They're inherently fuzzy probabilistic things. That's the source uncertainty: at macroscopic scales, they behave as if they're particles. But they aren't really. So the properties that associate with particles just don't work. An electron doesn't have an exact position and velocity. It has a haze of probability space where it could be. The uncertainty equation describes that haze - the inherent uncertainty that's caused by the real particle/wave duality of the things we call particles.

I really hate the term “writer.” It’s not accurate. Yeah, I’m a writer. But honestly, what I really am is a storyteller.  I tell stories, and I use fiction on the page (digital or paper) as my medium.

I mention this, because for the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading and I’ve also been doing a lot of teaching. I’ve helped Dean with some homework for the online classes, and I recently taught a science fiction workshop in October. The science fiction workshop is my second craft workshop of the year. The first, mystery, took place in June.

Craft workshops always teach me something. Usually, they get me to think about what I do, why I do it, and how I can improve. They also teach me about my own reading biases. There are just some things I don’t want to read—ever. Workshops force me to read those things, and while I may not like what I’ve read, I often appreciate it.

Confession time: I adore beautifully crafted sentences. The ideal novel for me is written in a clear, somewhat unique voice, one that startles me with its originality—while (and the while is important)—telling me a fantastic story. Given the choice—beautifully crafted sentences or a good story—I’ll pick the good story every time.

A year ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on the problems that writing workshops taught by people who do not make a living at their writing have caused the writing profession. Those people, very few of whom know how to capture and hold an audience, focus on the words, the sentences, the metaphors, and the “craft,” of writing, ignoring—or failing to understand—the importance of storytelling.

These teachers, some of whom have sold one or two things (or a handful) and some of whom have not, teach incorrectly as well. They teach by critique, how to deconstruct, how to disassemble.

No one ever learned how to build a house by taking one apart. Sure, you can learn a lot by taking a house apart—what the builder did, but not how the builder did it. And by the time the house is in ruins, you can’t exactly remember what it looked like or the elegance of its lines—how it flowed from one room to the next. All of that got destroyed.

Try to rebuild a house after tearing one down. Just try. You won’t even know how to use a hammer, let alone when you need one instead of a Phillips screwdriver.

I dealt with all of that in the earlier blog posts, which became my book, The Pursuit of Perfection. (You can still get the blog posts for free on this site. Start with this post, and be sure to read the comments.)

Storytelling is a craft. It’s something that can be learned. Some people have more of a gift for storytelling than others, but you’ll find that those people who display an early gift usually had exposure to stories and good storytellers earlier than others.

The teachers I mention above don’t teach storytelling because they don’t know it’s important. They don’t understand how the words and structure that William Faulkner uses in one of my favorite stories, “Barn Burning,” reinforce the story, and that Faulkner did not choose the words consciously nor did he figure out the structure consciously. It came from his subconscious in service of the story.

The preponderance of these writing schools, in universities, colleges, and even some high schools, has created an airless room filled with lovely things. This has led to a literary culture that praises those lovely things, and appreciates those airless rooms.

For example, last spring, I read a highly acclaimed novel that I won’t name. The sentence-by-sentence writing was so astonishingly good that there are still things I know my subconscious will learn from it. The prose was vivid, the details crisp, the scene setting tremendous.

But I slowed down in the middle of the novel, and forced myself to the end, which was even  more dissatisfying than I had thought it might be. The novel’s story was simple: set half in the present, half in the past, a character hides a secret from one of the other characters. That secret, known to a third character, was going to get revealed as this third character made his way to the other two.

We readers knew that the reveal would happen. We waited for the moment of revelation, and then we wanted to see the fallout. How would these characters survive something that vast, that awesome, something kept secret for nearly fifty years that changed all of their lives?

Well, honestly, we’re still wondering. The reveal happened in final chapter and then—get this—everyone went to bed (and not to have sex). To sleep and live another day. The end.

I damn near threw the book across the room. The entire novel was just a beginning. All the writer had was a conceit, and he wrote to the end of that conceit, and no farther. What happened next? How would everything resolve?

Apparently we were supposed to guess. Or write our own damn novel. Because this author—this highly praised author—had two-thirds of a novel left to write.

However, in the rarefied world of literary fiction, this author’s book was called one of the best of the year. Not because his story was any good. Because his prose was so stellar, no one called him on the lack of story.

Hollywood has come calling because one of the characters in the book is Hollywood itself (the film industry likes fiction about the film industry), and you can bet if this thing actually gets made into a movie, the movie will go waaaaaaaay past that little opening section. Or will pad the front. Or will add a storyline.

Otherwise, there can be no movie. Screenwriters—especially screenwriters who focus on big budget movies—have to include a story or the audience will disappear.

This novel is not unique. I’ve read dozens just like it, with a good idea buried under lovely prose, with good characters (albeit characters who suffer from the author’s contempt of their actions) and some marvelous setting.

Such stories abound in the literary mainstream.

They also exist in science fiction and women’s fiction. The demands of both the mystery genre and of the romance genre prevent such things from happening there. In both, a plot is essential. Something has to happen, whether the author’s prose is lovely or not.

The writers who write such things will never be remembered. Their work won’t be considered art one hundred years from now. If anything, they’re the Bulwer-Lyttons of the future, the writers whose style is so dated that future generations make fun of it.

We read Jane Austen and Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne even though, their work is also stylistically dated, because all three of them told great stories. We’re reading for the story, not for the sentences or the beautifully constructed metaphor. Hell, most of those metaphors are lost on us because they refer to things that are no longer part of our every day lives.

Technically, these writers aren’t remembered because they wrote “art,” but because they wrote “story.” Compelling stories, even now, which hold our attention despite the antiquated style.

Just like so many bestsellers hold our attention despite the thinness of the prose. I’m not saying all bestsellers will be remembered 100 years from now, but some will. The storytellers whose books get handed from adult to child—like J.K. Rowling—will survive much longer than the writer with a mountain of accolades and not a memorable story in her oeuvre.

For years, Dean and I have taught professionals whose careers have plateaued. Mostly, we teach business, because most careers stall when business intrudes. But every now and then, a writer’s career stalls because something is wrong in the craft.

I have devised a series of exercises that have to be done fresh as stand-alones, things that look at each aspect of the writing from character to dialogue to detail. These exercises pull a person’s writing into its individual parts. I do this so that I can tell a professional writer what he does well and what he needs to work on.

The reason I had to devise the exercises was this: professional writers are great at hiding what they don’t do well. They’re like the Wizard of Oz. A good professional writer can get the crowd in the room to look Oz the Great And Terrible, and ignore the curtain in the corner.

That’s great when stories about Great and Terrible Ozes sell, but if the market for G&T Oz stories disappears, the writer might not have the chops to write something else. Chops can be learned, but sometimes it takes someone to pull the curtain back and look at the levers before the learning can begin.

Just think of me as Toto.

I’ve done this for years, and the exercises are edifying. Mostly, though, professionals have all the skills. They’re just better at some things than they are at others.

I use the exercises with professionals to take them to the next level, to an aspect of craft they might not even know exists.

But recently, Dean and I have used these exercises to help newer writers, folks who haven’t been at it long, or folks who have tried repeatedly to sell their work and keep failing for some indefinable reason.

And I learned something that is, to me, a bit horrifying.

To a person, these writers have learned how to imitate the features of a story without learning how to tell a story. For the first time in the 14 years I’ve been using these exercises, I’m seeing beautifully written prose pieces devoid of character or real setting or any hint of voice.

A couple of writers wrote lovely, lovely, lovely sensory detail without ever sinking into a character’s head. Great word usage, wonderful thesaurus work, but no living breathing character and without a character, no story at all.

Dean and I are seeing things like this from writers all over the country, and it’s worse in writers with a pedigree. If they have an MFA or if they had been to the weeks-long summer writers workshops taught around the country, the writers can dash off beautiful prose with the best of them.

What they can’t do is tell a story.

And worse, they don’t understand that they need to. They have no idea what story components are.

No one is teaching storytelling in these writing workshops. No one seems to believe it’s important. In fact, a lot of workshops ridicule the writers who tell great stories. Most of those writers are long-time New York Times bestsellers. Their prose might be plain, but their stories are phenomenal, which is why so many people read the books.

Right now, there are more stories being told in the culture than ever before—not just in books, but in movies, games, television, comics and more. When Dean first started live-blogging his daily routine, I bitched a little because I said it sounded like all I did was watch TV. He and I watch at least an hour of television per night. With the exception of The Voice, which is filled with business advice for anyone who wants (or has) a career in the arts, we watch stories. We don’t deconstruction them—that’s not the point. (See the house metaphor above.) We watch for enjoyment, and with luck, we watch to learn some storytelling techniques along the way.

I have several friends who are great verbal storytellers, and again, I often listen with a thought to picking up technique. I listen to radio pieces all the time, from news to puff pieces, again, searching for story.

Story is everywhere—except in so much of what passes for “quality” fiction.

So many people write to me to ask what they need to do to have a career in writing. I generally tell them they need to learn business.

But after this experience in the last nine months, I’m going to add one more thing: they need to learn storytelling. Storytelling is an art. It has patterns that have survived for hundreds of years, expectations that readers/listeners have that must be met. The old forms aren’t something to be sneered at; they’re something we should understand, because they go deep into the human psyche.

The more I try to help writers who feel trapped, stuck, or lost in their work, the more I want to break the red pencils of writing teachers everywhere. These teachers aren’t mean-spirited. They’re just misguided. They don’t know how to tell stories either, so they teach what they do know: sentences.

That’s like saying your house is only composed of boards. Houses built that way would have no foundation or wiring or plumbing or even shingles on the roof. They’d only have boards, sometimes nailed together in beautiful ways. They’d look like houses, but no one would want to live in them.

Some carpenters would create lovely shells, but no one would remember those shells years later. And most carpenters would slap up the imitation of a house that would leak and wouldn’t hold together in a windstorm.

I feel for these writers. So many of them have spent tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, to learn how to nail boards together. They’ve learned how to be “writers,” but they’re no better at storytelling than they were the day they handed over the first dollar for the first class.

Stories seem deceptively simple, and they’re not. The simplicity comes in the repetition.

Boy meets girl is still compelling, even thousands of years after the first couple met. We’re still interested in murder, betrayal, political intrigue, war craft—even though Shakespeare did it all and did it all better than any of us ever could. And what about those lovely Deal With The Devil stories? They still fascinate, hundreds of years after Goethe’s Faust stamped its mighty fist on the genre.

A lot of times people want to know why their indie-published ebooks aren’t selling, and often the answers are based in business: the cover is awful or it doesn’t brand the book by genre; the about-the-book blurb is passive or it isn’t written like ad copy.

Once a writer has repaired those things, however, then it’s time to buck up and face this possibility: the books aren’t very good.

Oh, the writing is probably lovely. The sentences are beautiful. The metaphors gleam and glisten. But the characters are thin or clichéd, and the setting non-existent. Mostly, though, the story isn’t compelling. Or, more likely, there really isn’t a story.

In the early days of e-publishing (all of four years ago), the bestselling indie book titles were novels riddled with spelling and punctuation errors. Sometimes the formatting sucked. But the storytelling by writers who generally had never gone to a single workshop was absolutely fantastic. Why would readers buy books two and three in a series? Not for the riveting prose, but to see what happened next.

If you finish a story or a novel, and everyone tells you how lovely the writing is, then you’ve probably screwed up. If they demand the next book, you’re doing a very good job indeed.

Stop calling yourself a writer. The label writer is a misnomer.

Call yourself a storyteller.

And then prove it—over and over again.

I’m in the process of telling a huge story, and taking time away from that project is actually painful. I haven’t missed a business blog post since the beginning of April, 2009, however, mostly because I know you folks will show up from week to week.

Many of you have commented or given me other incentives. The donations help as well, reminding me (and you) that this is part of my business, however much it pulls me away from the fiction writing part of my career.

So, thank you all for returning. And thanks for the support.

And please, if you learn something or value the blog, leave a tip on the way out.

Thanks!

Click Here to Go To PayPal.

“The Business Rusch: Storytelling” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

SPECIAL NOTICE: I’d like to put out a call to those of you who are traditionally published. I need to update my Deal Breakers book for 2014. I have quite a bit of material, but I would like to see what I’ve missed.

So if you received a traditional publishing contract from a major publishing house and/or an agency agreement from an agent, please black out all the personal information and send it to me. I’m particularly interested in the contract clauses you negotiated away and/or that you walked away from.

I also would like to see the clauses you’re proud of getting. The ones where you feel you triumphed in your negotiation.

I need the entire contract, because a contract is a living document, and what it says on page 13 has an impact on what it says on page 2. Please black out your name, the name of your agent, the advances, etc., and send me the file.

I promise, I will not use your name or any personal information, except that I might say something like “a first-time author” or “an author who has published novels for fifteen years” or “a bestselling author.” I won’t even use a personal pronoun to give your secret away. And I’ll be the only one who looks at this.

If you want to see how I do this, look at the Addendums post from earlier this year. (And yes, that will be in Deal Breakers 2014.)

Thank you! I appreciate all of the help.

 

As promotion for my forthcoming book on They Might Be Giants' Flood (out this Thursday!), my co-author and I are guest-editing the 33 1/3 blog at 333sound.com this week. That's right, you get double the blogging from me this week. Our first post is here, featuring bits of our interview with the band that didn't fit into the book.


So, you've bought A Golden Thread, my critical history of Wonder Woman. And you're one of the readers who hasn't read any Wonder Woman comics - which is fine, as I wrote the book assuming a reader who hadn't. But now you want to go read some because you're interested.

Or perhaps you haven't bought it yet because you don't know enough about Wonder Woman, but you're curious why I think the topic is so interesting.

Either way, here are my picks for the five Wonder Woman collections/eras somebody interested in knowing more about the fascinating history of the character should read. Or just the five Wonder Woman collections anyone looking for a good comic should read. Really, just read them. Then go buy A Golden Thread. Even if you've bought it already; just buy another copy. They make great Christmas presents.
The Wonder Woman Chronicles (Volume 2)

Volume 1 of this series is currently out of print, but the original William Moulton Marston/Harry G. Peter stories don't really require chronological ordering anyway. What's important is that this is nearly two hundred pages of World War II era Wonder Woman by her creators themselves. This is the era of Wonder Woman in which she was a propaganda figure for her creator's imagined female supremacist bondage utopia.

What jumps out about stories in this era is twofold. First is their weird inventiveness. Marston was completely barmy, and his stories are packed with strange and wonderful ideas. Second is the fact that Marston has a radical vision of the world that is as idiosyncratic and sweeping as that of William Blake or Philip K. Dick. Wonder Woman is a part of a larger philosophical and intellectual system for him, and though the full nature of that system isn't clear from the strips alone, they sparkle with a sort of mad passion lacking in any other superhero comic I've read. These are some of the weirdest comics ever to have a major cultural impact.

Diana Prince: Wonder Woman (Volume 4)

One of my favorite parts of A Golden Thread is the two chapters devoted to the so-called I Ching era, a period in the late 60s/early 70s in which Wonder Woman lost her superpowers and adventured as an ordinary human being. This era was pilloried by Gloria Steinem, whose objections were used as a pretext for sacking the creative team and replacing it. In practice, though, the creative team was a bunch of fabulous writers and artists, headed by Denny O'Neil, whose angry leftist take on Green Arrow remains one of the iconic comics of the 1970s. For the last two issues of the era they had Samuel Delaney writing, who was doing one of the most serious-minded feminist takes on the comic ever, before or since. And upon firing them DC replaced them with Robert Kanigher, who promptly created an evil black duplicate of Wonder Woman called "Nubia." It's one of the most spectacular own-goals for feminism ever.

This is the final set of stories from that era, including Samuel Delaney's two-issue run and the appallingly bad Robert Kanigher issue where all of these plot threads are quickly abandoned. (Though not the one introducing Nubia) The entire era is worth looking at, but seeing just how good Samuel Delaney's take on Wonder Woman was and just how stupid what comes immediately after it is fascinating. This is an era of Wonder Woman that shows just how broad the concept is. It pushes the idea of Wonder Woman further than any other era really ever has.Plus it has Wonder Woman and Catwoman teaming up with Fafhrd the Barbarian in a Sword and Sorcery epic. It sells itself.

The George Pérez Era (Comixology link)

That the trade paperback collection of this is out of print speaks volumes about just how poorly DC handle both Wonder Woman and their archival material. Following the universe-wide reboot of Crisis on Infinite Earths, Wonder Woman was revamped by writer-artist George Pérez when, basically, nobody else was interested and he felt like she deserved a high caliber creator. This was Pérez's first book as a writer, and he absolutely killed on it. The comic is dense, with a mythic sweep to it that redefined the character brilliantly. Pérez's take goes back to fundamentals and Greek mythology, but does so in a way that is grounded in the real world and in human experience.

This is not a surprise - the comic was edited by Karen Berger, who had overseen Alan Moore's work on Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and matched the sophisticated, mature styles that mark all the work she edits with Wonder Woman's more colorful world. There's an alternate universe wher Wonder Woman was one of the books to make the jump to Vertigo in 1993, and got an extended run as a mature readers comic worked on by the best lights of the industry. Reading this, you see how close it came. This is a comic that is far, far better than it needs to be, and is a classic as a result.

And even if the trades are out of print, you can get it issue by issue from Comixology, with the first issue costing only 99 cents. (Don't be fooled by the zero issue - it does not meaningfully come before #1, and belongs to a later era of the comic)

Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia

Out of print, but at least affordably priced. Rucka is a phenomenal writer who's become known in comics for his well-done female characters, who are not "strong female characters" in the ordinary and frustrating sense, but who are instead rounded and developed characters who are women. His Wonder Woman run is a thing of beauty, even if it was interrupted and then brought to a premature halt by another big DC Universe event and relaunch.

This graphic novel predates his run, and is a stand-alone story of Wonder Woman and Batman (another character he had an iconic run on) coming into conflict over the life of a young woman. Batman is hunting her because she murdered three people. Wonder Woman, meanwhile, is protecting her for her own complex reasons. It is in many ways the themes and vision of the Marston era brought into the present era, and written in a more grounded, mature manner. The contrasts between Wonder Woman and Batman are amazingly well done, with Wonder Woman having a moral code that is at once utterly strange and utterly sensible. Pay attention to how the themes of dominance and submission from the Marston era come back and are updated for the present day. If you buy only one thing on this list, buy this. There should not be a used copy left on Amazon at the end of the day.

Wonder Woman Volume 1: Blood

Ironically, in amongst the frequently misogynistic and almost universally awful dreck of DC's "New 52" relaunch is Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang's take on Wonder Woman, which by several miles the best comic coming out of DC right now. But that's not saying much, so let's try again - there's no era in DC's history where this wouldn't be one of the best books they had coming out.

Azzarello calmly sidesteps the endless navel-gazing that Wonder Woman comics sink into, instead penning an unnerving book of mythological horror. Instead of tediously analyzing what the role of Wonder Woman should be, as virtually ever other Wonder Woman comic does these days, Azzarello just tells a rolicking story that features Wonder Woman as its main character. He has a clear ear for her, capturing much of the essence of the character without ever having to indulge in patting himself on the back for how well he writes her. Instead the book displays a steely confidence that has made every issue a solid read. And the art is phenomenal, particularly in its unnervingly haunting depictions of the Greek gods. Buy it. Catch up. And then start grabbing the new issues.

Advice to ambitious young Liberal Democrats

Here is a letter typical of those I receive from ambitious young Liberal Democrats; it asks me which book the writer should read to maximise her chances of becoming a Member of Parliament. My answer is always the same. In order to be selected for a half-promising seat you need a roadworthy bicycle and a copy of Wainwright’s West Country Marginals. Once you have been adopted, however, there is only one volume that will do: A Fortunate Life: The Autobiography of Paddy Ashdown (which is by Paddy Ashdown, incidentally).

I know of no book that sets out half so clearly what is needed to win an election campaign. I don’t mean the chapter on "The Winning of Yeovil" that was made available free on the electric internet recently, excellent though it is In Its Way: no, I am thinking about the section on jungle warfare in Sarawak where Ashplant explains how to mount patrols, the best way to lay an ambush and how to treat an open wound using red ants. It was no surprise to me when, armed with this knowledge, we took control of South Somerset District Council.

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

Earlier this week...

• Sharing my postbag

An embarrassment at the Home Office

I recognise this letterhead: it belongs to the Deputy Prime Minister. I have to confess that I wrote to him the other day in somewhat intemperate terms. You see, it had recently been drawn to my attention that someone who holds the most ridiculous views had been appointed to the Home Office and I let Clegg have both barrels for allowing it to happen. How can we possibly be taken seriously as a party when we allow such things to happen? I demanded.

Clegg, I see, has replied in emollient terms, saying that he agrees with my view of the matter but Cameron is adamant that Theresa May must be Home Secretary and there is nothing he can do about it. I suppose that is coalition government for you.

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

Earlier this week...

• Sharing my postbag
• Advice to ambitious young Liberal Democrats

From Stuart Douglas and obersebooks.co.uk:

THE ANNUAL YEARS - BY PAUL MAGRS

"“These extraordinary books are like weird, grotesque shadow-versions of the Show we recognise. They are mutations haunting the wilderness between the domed, protected cities of Canonicity. The world of the Annuals is odder, darker, madder, more psychedelic and surreal. These are adventures in a wilder, destabilized universe. The cosiness of what we recognise as Doctor Who has gone.” - Paul Magrs, from the Introduction

Continuing our recent tradition of doing Doctor Who titles, so long as they're the sort of thing we at in the Obverse Bungalow would like to read, next year will see the publication in hardback of The Annual Years, a serious and detailed look at that most maligned of Doctor Who storytelling, the World Distributors annuals.

From 1965 to 1986, from William Hartnell to Colin Baker, the annuals were weird and witty and wonderful, a big brother to TV Comic and second cousin to Doctor Who Discovers… - and all the more beloved by us because of that.

With cover art and internal illustrations by Adam Bullock, and commentary on every single story from Paul Magrs, author of Doctor Who fiction for Big Finish, the BBC and AudioGo, this is the celebration that the annuals have long been overdue!"

Another great article on Aeon magazine this week is about why no one should believe in miracles, by Lawrence Shapiro.  Shapiro takes a tasty stock of Hume’s argument against miracles, adds a dash of Bayesian epistemology, and rounds things off with a nice discussion of the base-rate fallacy—surely worth a read.  But after reading it, I wondered why we don’t use this much simpler argument against supernatural intervention:

THE A PRIORI ARGUMENT:

1. Miracles violate the laws of nature.
2. The laws of nature are exceptionless—that is, they are (expressed by) true universal generalizations
3. Conclusion: There are no miracles.

The argument is valid, and both of its premises have a claim not merely to truth, but to conceptual truth. The first premise is a characterization of what makes God’s miraculous action supernatural: miracles contravene or override the natural laws which govern the world.  The second premise is guaranteed by most views about the laws of nature, but anyway here’s a quick argument for it: the laws of nature are nomically necessary, and necessity implies truth.  So the laws are true.  Unless something has gone wrong, we don’t merely have inductive reasons to doubt that miracles have happened (as Hume and Shapiro claim) but a priori reason: the very idea is conceptually incoherent. But of course this argument is too quick: though we may have good reason to doubt that miracles have happened, that reason is not conceptual incoherence.  What went wrong?

We could deny premise 1: perhaps there’s a way of characterizing supernatural intervention that doesn’t rely on it’s being above the petty rules which govern mortal mechanics.   We’ll return to this idea in a bit.  First, though, I’d like to look into relaxing the second premise.  Could a law of nature be false?

Some people think so—Nancy Cartwright chief amongst them.  But she’s an outlier, and most theories of natural law back premise two.  Foremost amongst these is dispositional essentialism: According to this view, advocated by Brian Ellis and Alexander Bird, the laws express the essential natures of the properties they involve.  So if Coulomb’s law is a law of nature, it’s an essential property of charge that charged objects obey Coulomb’s law.  Since things have their essential properties at every world in which they exist, charged objects must—and do—conform strictly to Coulomb’s law.

Humeans, on the other hand, take laws to be mere regularities, not backed by essences or necessity.  Now these regularity theorists have some explaining to do: why are some generalizations laws, and others mere accidents?  What is the difference between “Like charged particles repel one another” and “all of my coffee mugs are dirty”?

The regularity theorist’s answer is pragmatic: laws are tools used to organize our knowledge into a deductive system. “like charged particles repel one another” is inferentially very useful; “all of my coffee mugs are dirty” is not.  This insight leads us to the Best Systems Account of laws (BSA), associated with John Stuart Mill, Frank Ramsey, and David Lewis:  the laws of nature are those true generalizations which, taken together, form the simplest, strongest axiomatic system of all of the truths of the world—where a system is simpler if it has fewer axioms, and stronger if it implies more truths.

We can imagine assigning a score to each potential lawbook: points are gained by having true consequences, deducted for having more axioms.  The group of true generalizations which scores highest is the lawbook of our world.

This characterization of laws gives regularity theorists more room to maneuver than dispositional essentialists.  The dispositional essentialist held that laws are true because they are metaphysically necessary; the Humean holds that laws are true because true generalizations better organize knowledge than false ones.

So it’s not against the spirit of Humeanism to relax the truth condition if adding some false generalization to our deductive system would yield a simpler system from which very many truths and very few falsehoods could be inferred.  We’d just need to tweak our scoring rules a bit: a potential system of laws gets points added for each true consequence, points deducted for each axiom, and points deducted for each false consequence.  Presumably, these will be weighted—one false consequence should remove many more points than each true consequence.  Call this the Good Enough System Account of laws (GESA).  The laws of the Good Enough System can have exceptions, provided the exceptions are few, and the laws are otherwise quite useful.

Now, if the GESA of laws is right, we shouldn’t be so sure of Premise 2 of the a priori argument.  We might have good reason to think that miracles don’t happen, but they aren’t ruled out by fiat.

Of course, we might also want to deny premise 1.  Remember, Premise 1 sought to express what was miraculous about miracles: God’s direct interventions violate the laws that govern mortal mechanics.  But God’s interventions must be interventions, that is, they must really cause things.  And causation requires subsumption under laws.  So while in order for divine intervention to be divine, it must break the natural laws, in order for it to be intervention, it must obey some law.  What gives?

Here, I think, we should distinguish between fundamental and nonfundamental lawhood.  Even in mortal contexts, we are willing to countenance not-strictly-speaking-true nonfundamental laws (read: the special sciences) but not false fundamental laws (read: physics).  This makes the GESA more closely aligned with how we think of special sciences, and the BSA—with its stipulation that the laws must be true—closer to how we think of fundamental science.  (The view we’ve arrived at is similar to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen’s Better Best System account, but allows us to distinguish the fundamental laws from the nonfundamental: the fundamental laws are true, whereas the nonfundamental laws may not be).

The believer in miracles, then, takes the fundamental law to be divine: “what God intends comes to pass”.  But this doesn’t leave her bereft of mortal mechanics: instead of being strictly true, the natural laws of physics are nonfundamental laws: most of their consequences are true, but their usefulness to us isn’t impugned by those miraculous occasions when they lead us astray.

Don’t get me wrong, though—while I think the a priori argument is unsound, denying it shouldn’t make us more willing to countenance miraculous intervention.  Hume’s argument, and Shapiro’s, should remind us that believing miracles actually happen is, nearly always, irrational.

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November 19th, 2013: OH SNAP IS KISSING AWESOME WHILE FEELINGS ARE BORING? COULD A GARMENT CLARIFY THIS SOMEHOW?? OH WOW, THANK YOU REALITY One year ago today: the back to the future font is called "back ttf" and i JUST got the joke – Ryan

So Suzanne Wright from Autism$peaks sent out more of the same hatemongering that was tired before her grandson was even born, about how autism is terrible because the faaaaaaaaaaaamilies and we might eat food from the fridge or something and that's the worst thing ever.

That is not what autism is.

This is autism:


Autism is friendship, the kind you can only have when you meet someone who is like you. Allistic people don't so much understand what that is, because they expect that most people are on their wavelength. But Autistic people know how special that is, because it is rare and it is precious. Someone who understands intuitively, who speaks your language, is worth their weight in something way more valuable than gold.

And autism is community that comes together. There's this idea that we can't do that, but that idea is wrong. Never have I ever seen another community that takes care of its own so much. We have our issues, as all communities do, but we also have fierce loyalty and ferociously fight for and care for our own. We know what it is to not have that. Again, we know how beautiful that is once we find it.


Autism is adventure. Or craving it at least. Jumping into that freezing cold water because it was there. And then jumping in again and again because it was freezing but it was a delight every single time. It may not be the normal thing to do, but it was better than normal. It was exhilarating.

Jumping into that water? I felt more alive than I think most people ever do. It was just me, the air, then the water. The sensation of my stomach rising? Stopped time until the water woke me up. It was actual perfection in an experience.


Autism is focus. This leap is called a double stag. My focus was right on the sole of my foot, visually speaking. Internally speaking it was only on what I was doing. There was no thought as traditionally described. There was me, music, the mat, and movement. That's it. I can do that. I cannot meditate in the usual sense, but I can become one with movement. Everything else goes away.

So it is when I am focusing on something that I love. The way I love? It is deep. Autism is deep love. People write it off as special interest or obsession, but even if it's not something I can excel at, I can excel at loving what I love, loving what I do, loving who I love. Autism is being able to be consumed by love and interest, it is giving 100% because it is an insult to the thing one loves to give any less. Autism is going big or going home.

Autism is finding myself and losing everything else while jumping, flipping, spinning. And this is the best thing ever.


And now we are back to autism is love and community. Autism is also sharing. Autism is knowing people because of autism. My young friend, Leo of Squidalicious fame, shared with me. He shared his iPad and his stims and his love. And he and his family are just a few of the many people I care about deeply who I would not have met if there was no such thing as autism.

No one ever said that being Autistic is easy. But we do say that it's worth it. We're okay. We love and deserve to be loved.

David Cameron comes in for a lot of criticism from libertarian and sex-positive types for his morally conservative attitude to internet porn, as shown in his determination to force IP companies to introduce opt-in smut filters. But perhaps he just doesn't have either the time or the inclination to do his own research, and is reliant on what campaigners tell him, or what he reads in the Daily Mail. If so, then he can scarcely be blamed for assuming that the entirety of "mainstream porn" is violent and misogynistic, encourages adolescent boys to hate women and abuse their girlfriends and irreperably corrupts the minds of young children who innocently go looking for pictures of kittens.

After all, it's common knowledge that in the age of the internet porn is pretty grim stuff. Even self-declared feminist pornographers proclaim as much, even while selling their own dream of a sex-positive, eco-friendly, non-exploitative alternative. Indeed, the essential violence and misogyny of the "mainstream" is as much an item of faith among "alternative" pornographers as it is for anti-porn campaigners such as Gail Dines, who has described online erotica as "a never-ending universe of ravaged anuses, distended vaginas and semen-smeared faces".

Not only does the alternative producers' business model depend upon the existence of an unspeakable mainstream (rather as the censors' does also) so does their self-identity - now buttressed by a global network of arty porn festivals and feminist award ceremonies. The existence of easy-access, free and often pirated porn is the common enemy of both professional porn producers and moralists, it must be said, so the confluence of interest in damning "mainstream porn" isn't surprising.

It's also common knowledge that only boys and men want to watch porn anyway. Even in households without children, Our Dave promises, "husbands will have to have a difficult conversation with their wives about accessing porn at home". Because all women everywhere are horrified by the very idea of sexually explicit material - and men, meanwhile, are so ashamed by it they will acquiesce in default filters that in the way of things will end up blocking a great many sites that aren't remotely pornographic anyway. So that's OK then.

Is there any actual research, as opposed to anecdote, about what "mainstream porn" really looks like? It's not difficult to do, after all - at least, not until the Cameron Cordon arrives some time next year. Here's some, conducted by three women at New Brunswick University in Canada, led by graduate student Sarah Vannier and her supervisor Professor Lucia O’Sullivan. Recently unveiled by Vannier at a science and sexuality conference in San Diego, it has a catchy title - Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms: A Content Analysis of Free "Teen" and "MILF" Online Pornography. Ironically, the content of this content analysis is not free, but if the abstract is accurate it does what it says on the tin.

Vannier's research interests include oral sex among teenagers and sexual compliance in committed relationships ("I’m pretty sure I picked one of the most interesting careers out there", she says.) She has also written a sex advice column for her student newspaper - in which she notes that "although watching porn for research sounds like a ton of fun, it does get boring after a while". Concentrating on free sites not only makes for low research costs (though was the research possible on the university's own computers, I wonder?) it's also the most useful place to start, given that they account for the vast majority of porn consumption.

And as the abstract says in somewhat self-contradictory terms, "viewing free online pornographic videos has increasingly become a common behavior among young people, although little is known about the content of these videos." Presumably the content of the videos is not little known to the many who view them. But you get the point - little is known officially and publicly (or in academic journals) about the content of the videos.

And perhaps (though perhaps not) little is known to the politicians making decisions about internet filtering about the content of these videos. It's an area where admitting ignorance is a positive asset to a politician or a pundit, where claiming to know what you're talking about might be held against you. "I've never seen the stuff myself, but I've heard it's revolting" is the safest line to take publicly. I suspect that several politicians who may find themselves having "difficult conversations" at home next year know more than they will ever say. But since coming out in opposition to the porn filter is as much as admission of guilt, that will have to remain in the realm of conjecture.

So short of informing yourself by actually visiting these sites, which no-one in their right mind would ever do, you'll have to rely on Sarah Vannier's research. And so, without further ado:

The current study analyzed the content of two popular female-age-based types of free, online pornography (teen and MILF) and examined nuances in the portrayal of gender and access to power in relation to the age of the female actor. A total of 100 videos were selected from 10 popular Web sites, and their content was coded using independent raters.

The focus of the research, then, was not only on the content of the videos but on the underlying socio-political message. Were these "popular" genres characterised principally by violence and perversion? Were the women involved portrayed as the degraded playthings of insatiable male lust? Not entirely:

Vaginal intercourse and fellatio were the most frequently depicted sexual acts. The use of sex toys, paraphilias, cuddling, and condom use were rare, as were depictions of coercion.

Control of the pace and direction of sexual activity was typically shared by the male and female actors. Moreover, there were no gender differences in initiation of sexual activity, use of persuasion, portrayals of sexual experience, or in professional status. However, female actors in MILF videos were portrayed as more agentic and were more likely to initiate sexual activity, control the pace of sexual activity, and have a higher professional status.

(My italics)

So there you have it. Older female performers were "more likely to initiate sexual activity" but even in "teen" videos the women aren't entirely or even predominantly passive. There were "no gender differences". This is of course strikingly at variance with the almost universal assumptions about the content of mainstream porn, even those articulated by alternative and feminist pornographers. So contrary are these findings to the accepted wisdom I'd be amazed if they were taken seriously or used to inform the public debate. Nevertheless, I suspect the research will come as little surprise to the majority of people who actually watch the stuff.

Truly, online porn exists in a parallel universe

(Or, ‘Nick’s writing complicated posts about Doctor Who again, so look away now if you’re only here for the politics)

First up, if you haven’t already, go read Teatime Brutality’s post ‘Canon and sheep shit: Why we fight‘ which explains why there’s no such thing as a Doctor Who ‘canon’. Second, if you haven’t seen The Night Of The Doctor yet, you probably should before you read further, as there will likely be spoilers.

So, The Night Of The Doctor features Paul McGann’s Doctor. In it, the Doctor mentions a list of companions from the Big Finish audio dramas. Thus, according to some people, this means those dramas are now ‘canon’.

In the same vein, during The Name Of The Doctor, the Doctor has a conversation with Madame Vastra. Because of this, The Talons Of Weng-Chiang is now a purple catfish called Brian.

Both these statements are equally nonsensical. To quote Teatime Brutality:

“you’re assuming a British mass-audience show from 1963 would work like American cult-audience show from the Nineties.”

The important thing to remember about Doctor Who is that it was created as a way to tell stories, not as a story in its own right. Go look back at the way the series was created and for you’ll see that it was, as Douglas Adams reputedly said, the only good thing ever created by a committee. The Doctor, the companions, the TARDIS – none of them were created with any complicated back stories in mind or with detailed stories of their own to tell. Instead, they were purely functional creations designed to facilitate a series that could tell stories of the past, future or sideways in time. It wasn’t intended to be about telling any bigger story, and no one envisaged the way it would develop. (The central joke of The Pitch Of Fear is that no one actually envisaged the series continuing in the way it did)

The people who were making and consuming Doctor Who in that period certainly had no concept of it having a ‘canon’ that they had to slavishly adhere to. Like most non-soap TV series of its time, each story was a separate event, with references back to previous stories only ever made to reintroduce old villains. They’d try and aim for some sort of consistency, but David Whitaker (Doctor Who’s first script editor) saw nothing wrong with completely rewriting how Ian and Barbara met the Doctor for the first novelisation of the series, and the whole thing was changed again for the film. The problem for us in comprehending this is that shows that are a collection of stories with no continuing elements are vanishingly rare on TV nowadays. Everything has serialised elements, plot arcs and character arcs and aspires to be one long story. (Hustle is probably the most recent series with the least arc-based storytelling – there are very few episodes of that making reference to others)

However, I would argue that the reason Doctor Who has survived so long – and will continue to survive long after we’re all dead – is because it resolutely resists any attempt to turn it into one story with a beginning, a middle and an end. To imagine that it should be like Star Wars, with its varying degrees of canonicity for different stories is to assume that they’re the same thing when they’re obviously not. Star Wars began as a single story by a single person, while Who began as a framework for telling lots of stories by lots of different people. Sure, you can imagine what you think is the beginning of the story, and it might be a great story, but it’s still just one story amongst many others, in the same way that Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood is just one version of the story, and not a ‘canonical’ telling of it.

There are millions of Doctor Who stories out there – some have been made for television, some are in books or on audio, some are comics, some on stage, some are words in internet archives, some are enacted by children in the playground and others only exist in their creators’ heads. Some are brilliant, some are awful, some redefine the character of the Doctor and the nature of the universe he inhabits, some take great pains to leave everything exactly as they found it and some feature characters you’ve never even heard of having adventures you (and possibly even they) don’t really understand or comprehend. But they all exist, and every one of them is just as real as all the others. Now, you may argue that some mystic process of canonicity makes some of them more real than the others, and doing that might make you happy, but I prefer to see them all as stories, all entertaining someone somewhere and for me, that’s far more important than whether it has some official stamp of approval. Just let the stories be told and the only category you’ll need is whether you like them or not.

“Grandpa!”

“Eh? Who’s this?”

“Happy birthday!”

“Shriver?”

“No, grandpa. It’s me, Kenny. I wanted to wish you a happy birthday!”

“Leave me alone.”

“Ninety-six years young! How are they treating you at the retirement community?”

“It’s a nursing home, you cockeyed son of a bitch. Your rotten bastard father put me in a home.”

“Man. Watch the language, huh, grandpa?”

“He was a bastard. I’m serious. I had dozens of them. Your grandmother was a Copa girl.”

“Have you been hitting that bourbon again, grandpa? Because it’s a commemorative bottle. I know how much you like history. You’re not supposed to drink out of it.”

“I was drinking before you were swimming around in your bastard father’s guts, Kenny, you four-eyed stoolie. Don’t tell me what to do.”

“So you have been drinking. You know what Dr. Zwickoff says about your liver.”

“Dr. Zwickoff can blow me. Those back pills didn’t kill me. That sack of crap Oswald’s bullet didn’t kill me. A little Kentucky bourbon isn’t going to kill me.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re damn right I’m drunk. That’s the only reason I’m telling you this. God help you if you ever let it slip. Men have died to protect this secret. Do you know who you’re talking to?”

“Oh, man. Is this going to be the story about how you’re really John F. Kennedy?”

“Have I told you this before? I forget. You’ll forget things too, when you get to be my age. I don’t know how I told you this much and you’re still alive.”

“Because I don’t believe you, grandpa. No one believes you. Not even Aunt Mildred believes you and she believes in those cross-shaped magnets she got from the back of Parade Magazine.”

“Kids today don’t believe anything. We were the best and the brightest. You’re all just a bunch of nitwits. I’ve got proof.”

“Your ‘proof’ is that you sign your name ‘Jack’ instead of ‘Mike’ and you own a robe you claim is from Air Force One. That doesn’t convince anybody. Even the people at the home don’t believe you.”

“They’re a bunch of goddamn Republican dupes. When I think I faked my own death to secure a safe future for them and their asshole grandchildren.”

“Kennedy’s death wasn’t fake. It was on national TV.”

“So was the moon landing. You believe we really landed a guy on the moon? When we couldn’t even make pocket calculators? Grow up, you sorry fuck.”

“Grandpa. Your blood pressure.”

“I wouldn’t even have done it if that cocksucker Hoover wasn’t always breathing down my neck. What was I supposed to do, piss away my legacy?”

“What legacy? The Cuban Missile Crisis? The Vietnam War? Huge budget deficits and tax hikes?”

“How about civil rights and the goddamn Peace Corps, you miserable little turd?”

“That was mostly LBJ. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because you’re not John F. Kennedy.”

“What makes you so goddamn sure? I have the same birthday.”

“I remember you from when I was a kid, in the early ’70s. I have pictures. You don’t look anything like Kennedy.”

“You think those doctors who switched the coffins were just screwing around, boy? They were trained professionals. You think it’s been easy, living in another man’s face while I get played in the movies by a bunch of hacks and Jackie marries some fat Greek asshole? You think it’s easy having an airport named after you and not being able to get free drinks in it? And I can’t even remember the last time I saw a half-dollar in circulation.”

“You’re not even Irish. Our family name is Wolfram. We’re Protestants.”

“Sure. Assumed. I’m not going to stick my neck out and risk the mob or Castro coming after me.”

“After fifty years?”

“They have long memories.”

“I wish you did. You’ve told me that story about how the guy in the motorcade was a furloughed sex criminal like a hundred times.”

“It’s a good story.”

“It was a good story the first eight times I heard it. Look, I gotta go, grandpa. Happy birthday. I’ll, uh, I’ll call you again soon.”

“Hey, don’t do me any favors, you stuck-up little prick. I’ve got plenty of things to do.”

“What can you possibly have to do?”

“I have to put my presidential papers in order. I have some executive orders I’m going to have covertly enacted. And my memoirs aren’t just gonna write themselves.”

“Sure, grandpa.”

“And there’s a nurse who comes in on night shift who’s been asking for it ever since I went on the heart pills.”

“Well, now I don’t know what to think.”

I do believe that nobody, especially perhaps people who barely afford their own "compact and bijou" residence, should subsidise "spare" rooms for others through the tax system.  I believe this whether it's property rented from private landlords, where it is already outlawed, or social landlords (who arguably ought to be better at planning their estates to take account of demographic change).

I also believe there are places, as Oxford at least was a dozen years ago when I was a councillor, in which such a policy ought to help relieve overcrowding as the main problem rather than under occupancy which appears to be a bigger issue elsewhere.

And further, all Housing Benefit ultimately benefits landlords at the expense of *everyone* else, not just those renting.  The effect of Housing Benefit is to place a floor on housing costs and everyone's costs are increased by that, whether in the size of mortgage they have to take on to buy or the rent they hand over to their landlord.

So I have been half-heartedly in favour, generally speaking, of anything, including this so called "bedroom tax", that might reduce the dependence on and upward redistribution effects of Housing Benefit.  But I've changed my mind.  It's not that I am suddenly converted to the idea of paying surplus housing costs for other people.  But that, as in the back of my mind I knew all along, that this policy was attacking the wrong people and the wrong problem.  In an era of "little boxes…all made of ticky tacky" in a nation that has seen much economic growth over the past few generations, we all deserve some extra space.  No other developed nation has seen its average house sizes fall as we have in Britain as their countries became richer.

But when I have seen some of the victims of this policy, I see people who are already shunted around by the state and its partners in social housing provision, being penalised for relatively small amounts of money that pale into insignificance compared with the overall effect of land use policy and tax policy that maintains land values for those who have got some land of value and penalises everyone else, not just those caught in the bedroom tax.  It has exposed a lack of planning and investment on the part of social housing providers.  This may or may not be primarily related to government spending policies but is also affected by the land cost conundrum - it's difficult to justify "tear downs" with the land proportion of any property so high.

Instead of the paltry few hundred million the "bedroom tax" might save, whilst penalising people with no other options, a sensible government would have done something to alleviate the multi-billion land cost burden faced by every last one of us, except those with homes to spare.  That they haven't shows that they care more about the Daily Express house-price hawks than the costs of living facing real people every day.  They are no better than the last lot, which isn't saying much.

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Christmas Day of 1963, a new TV show debuted on CBS. It was produced by Allen Funt, whose Candid Camera was then riding high in the ratings for that network. It’s not so much the practice any more but it used to be kind of understood that if you had a hit on a network, that network would buy another show from you. Mr. Funt came up with Tell It To The Camera, which reversed the principle of his other series. Instead of catching ordinary people on a hidden camera, the new show put ordinary people in front of a non-hidden camera and invited them to say anything they wanted. They could recite a poem, sing a song, tell a joke, express an opinion…anything. Crews were dispatched across America to film people on the street in different cities.

Does that sound like a great idea for a show to you? It doesn’t sound like a great idea for a show to me. And after I saw one episode, I couldn’t fathom how it sounded like a great idea for a show to anyone. It was one of the most boring things I ever saw on television and America agreed with me. CBS yanked it after thirteen weeks, by which time there were probably more people on an episode than were watching it.  I wonder if before it went on, anyone at CBS said, "You know, this is the perfect time for a series like this, so soon after the President was assassinated.  The people of America feel a crying need to express themselves and to speak out."  And like we need more proof that TV doesn’t learn from its mistakes: In 1980, producer George Schlatter used his clout from Real People to sell NBC on Speak Up, America…same premise as Tell It To The Camera, same short run.

Mr. Funt’s show was pretty obscure. As far as I can tell, there’s no mention of it over in the Internet Movie Database. If you do a Google search for "Tell It To The Camera Funt," all you’ll find are a lot of articles in newspaper libraries like the one above. Mostly, you’ll find terrible reviews.

I remember the series for an interesting reason.  When I was in high school, I had this friend named Mike. He called me one day and had me help him on a secret mission. A friend of his had tipped him off that CBS was cleaning out its library. If one went at a certain time to a certain set of dumpsters in a public alley alongside CBS Television City, one could fish lots of 16mm prints of old TV shows out of said dumpster. This we did, taking home about, I’d guess, 100-150 cans of Amos & Andy, General Electric Theater, The Jack Benny Program and many others. There were several episodes of Tell It To Groucho, the short-lived series Groucho Marx did as a follow-up to You Bet Your Life. There was also an amazing film — an hour of You Bet Your Life from when it was on radio. They hauled cameras into the studio and filmed a broadcast, apparently as a test to gauge how the show would look or should look when it was transferred to television.

Mike and I showed some of these films around our school and at local groups and then at some point, Mike sold them all to a collector. A lot of these shows are available in the home video market and I wonder how many, if any, are transfers from the prints we rescued from the garbage.

One thing we picked up — and I’m not sure why — was all thirteen episodes of Tell It To The Camera. We had to act fast to get the films because there were studio guards to shoo us away. I think we quickly sorted film cans into "take" and "leave" piles, put the Funt shows into a "leave" pile, then accidentally took one of those stacks. Later, we watched about half of one episode. It was a great print but a terrible show…but still, we couldn’t bring ourselves to throw them away.

I cannot explain why but a thought came to me: Maybe Allen Funt would want these. I don’t know why but I found the number of his production company in New York and made a phone call to his office. This was back when "long distance" phone calls were not inexpensive. I explained to the receptionist that I had some of their films they might want and she put me through to an officious gent who didn’t give me his name but I’m pretty sure was not Allen Funt. I got as far as explaining to him what I had when he interrupted, half-yelling, "How did you get those? Those are our copyrighted property!"

I explained that a friend of mine and I had fished them out of a trash dumpster. He half-yelled, "What were they doing in a trash dumpster?"

I said I didn’t know but we’d saved them from being burned or dumped in the ocean or whatever would have happened to them. I then told him, "I’d be glad to ship them back to you if you’ll pay for postage." I thought that was damned nice of me but instead, he began full-out yelling, "WHAT? YOU WANT US TO PAY RANSOM FOR OUR OWN PROPERTY?"

I said it wasn’t ransom. I was going to go to a lot of trouble to get them to him and I wouldn’t make a dime on the deal. He shouted back in all caps, "YOU WILL HAVE THOSE FILMS IN MY OFFICE IN 24 HOURS OR I WILL CALL MY FRIENDS AT THE F.B.I. AND HAVE YOU ARRESTED!!!"

Since I hadn’t given anyone there my name and since I didn’t figure he had the capacity to trace the call, I hung up on him. Later, I gave the films back to Mike and I think he finally threw them away or gave them away or something. A few years ago, I met Allen Funt’s son Bill and I told him the story. He sighed and told me their company didn’t have any copies of those shows. Well, that’s why.

The US government sets up secure tents for the president and other officials to deal with classified material while traveling abroad.

Even when Obama travels to allied nations, aides quickly set up the security tent -- which has opaque sides and noise-making devices inside -- in a room near his hotel suite. When the president needs to read a classified document or have a sensitive conversation, he ducks into the tent to shield himself from secret video cameras and listening devices.

[...]

Following a several-hundred-page classified manual, the rooms are lined with foil and soundproofed. An interior location, preferably with no windows, is recommended.

Every so often a news item grabs my eyeballs and reminds me that I'm supposed to be an amateur futurologist, because of course SF is all about predicting the future (just like astronomy is all about building really big telescopes, and computer science is all about building really fast computers, and, and [insert ironic metaphor here]).

Via MetaFilter, I stumble across the latest development in 3D printing (now that 3D printed handguns have gone mainstream). Mad props go to another printing startup, although that's not what they're marketing themselves as: Fabrican ...

Fabrican is a unlikely-sounding spin-off of the Department of Chemical Engineering, at Imperial College (which in case you're not familiar with it is one of the top engineering/science colleges in the UK; formerly part of the University of London)—at least, it's unlikely until you begin thinking in terms of emulsions, colloids, and the physical chemistry of nanoscale objects. It's basically fabric in a spray can. Tiny fibres suspended in liquid are ejected through a fine nozzle and, as the supernatant evaporates, they adhere to one another. If at this point you're thinking The Jetsons and spray-on clothing, have a cigar: you've fallen for the obvious marketing angle, because if you're trying to market a new product and raise brand awareness among the public, what works better than photographs of serious-faced scientists with paint guns spray-painting hot-looking models with skin-tight instant leotards? (Note: the technical term for this sort of marketing gambit is, or really ought to be, bukake couture.)

The real marketing value pitch is less ambitious, and buried further down the page. Fabrican currently amounts to spray-on felt; a loose mat of unwoven fibres that adhere to one another and naturally entangle. This is brilliant if you're an auto manufacturer, who wants to do away with the laborious hand-fitting of carpets in your cars (just have the paint shop spray the carpet on the floor panels), or a furniture manufacturer who wants to soften the image of those cheap plastic chairs you sell for lecture theatres or buses and commuter rail.

But the implications go much further, because this is just step one. What we're looking at is the first sign of the shift to 3D printing of clothing (and no, Victoria's Secret doesn't count, other than for novelty value, any more than the Honeywell 316/Nieman Marcus Kitchen Computer of 1969 was a sign of the personal computer revolution to come).

Here's the thing: we live in an age of plenty when it comes to clothing—but it relies on a dirty little secret. Clothing has gotten much, much cheaper over the past century; if you ignore the brand premium on Levi's jeans (which have risen in price in real terms, due to going from cheap workware for manual labourers to premium brand name fashion item), a pair of workman's trousers today cost less than a quarter of the equivalent price in 1900. But this fall in prices is local to us, in the developed world. Fabric is woven on mechanical looms, as it has been for a couple of centuries, and garments are still largely cut and entirely sewn by human hands—the greatest enabler of increased productivity was the sewing machine in the 1850s (and, later, the overlocker/serger and other specialised industrial sewing devices). Our cheap clothes are made in sweatshops by underpaid developing world workers, and as Bangladeshi wages rise, the factories migrate to cheaper nations.

A side-effect of separating garment manufacture from consumers (us) is that they don't fit well, either. There are legends of Chinese clothing factories whose first batch of sized-for-western-girth produce has to be rejected by the buyers because nobody on the shop floor believed that the people they were making clothes for could be so fat. Nor do we, in general, have our cheap clothes adjusted to fit. While it's worthwhile to have an expensive suit or formal gown tailored, who would bother fitting a $10 tee-shirt or a $20 pair of jeans? Yes, we have easy access to cheap clothes at prices that make them all but disposable. But we also have cheap clothes that don't fit particularly well and fall apart rapidly.

So, where does spray-on fabric come into this?

We are used to wearing clothes made out of woven (or knitted, or crocheted) fabric—lengths of spun yarn that are interlaced in two dimensions to form a flexible mesh. The individual fibres in cotton or wool or linen or silk may be quite short, but when spun they adhere to each other and this allows us to create thread or yarn many orders of magnitude longer than a fibre.

Right now Fabrican's spray-on felt relies on very short fibres in a liquid carrier that form a matted felt when the solvent dries. (I infer that the strands are probably quite weak, individually, requiring the matting to provide some additional tensile strength.) But I'd like you to imagine the same technology refined so that instead of coming out of a spray-can it comes out of an ink jet printer nozzle. And I'd like you to imagine the same print head also having a different "ink" to print with—a waxy masking substance that can dissolve in an oily dry cleaning fluid and be washed out of the finished garment. Print alternate layers of fabric and mask and the layers of fabric won't adhere to one another. Dry clean after printing and you have separate layers. Give it ink jet printer resolution and you should be able to "print" woven fabric, complete with the warp and weft in situ (separated by the mask layer). The rest of this picture is about ten billion dollars and ten years' worth of fine tuning, and then luxury fibres (synthetic spider silk, anyone?): but the basic premise is that we are between 5 and 20 years away from being able to 3D print woven fabric.

What are the implications?

If you don't think printing woven fabric is a big deal, DARPA beg to differ; DARPA is pumping serious money into robot sewing machines. But automating garment assembly from traditional fabric components turns out to be a really hard problem (as this possibly-paywalled New Scientist article on a €23M project to build a sewbot explains). Cloth is slippery, changes shape if you drop it, wrinkles, and has to be stretched and twisted and folded as it is sewn. Note that final word: sewn. If you can print fabric in situ out of fibres in a liquid form, you don't need to sew components to shape—especially if you can print more than one type and colour of fibre at a time: you can fabricate your "stitches" (inter-layer connections) as part of the process, with minimal hand-finishing to possibly add fasteners (zips or buttons).

Add in a left-field extra: the rapid spread of millimeter wave scanners for airport security. These devices caused a bit of a to-do, earning them the nick-name "perv scanner" in some circles, because of their ability to see through clothing to the skin beneath, in order to check passengers for hidden contraband. But if you put the same machine in a clothes shop, it allows the establishment to obtain extremely accurate measurements of its customers without requiring a strip-tease and manual measurement of all the relevant saggy, lumpy bits and pieces. By use of surface-penetrating wavelengths (possibly high-intensity laser light, or infrared) it may also be possible to automatically distinguish between fatty tissue, musculature, and underlying bone structure. All of which are relevant to the construction of clothing.

So here's my picture of the chain store of the future. You go in, go to the scanning booth, and do the airport-equivalent thing in a variety of positions—stretch and bend as well as hands-up. You then look at the styles on display on the shop floor, pick out what you like, and see it as it will appear on your own body on an avatar on a computer screen. You buy it, and a machine in the back of the store (or an out-of-town lights out 24x7 robotic garment factory) begins to print it. Some time later—maybe minutes, maybe hours or a day or two—the outfit you ordered comes to you. And it fits perfectly, every time. Some items are probably still off-the-shelf (socks, hosiery, maybe even those cheap tee shirts), but anything major is printed, unless you can afford to go to the really high end and pay a human being to make it for you out of natural fibres. Oh, and the printed stuff doesn't have seams in places that chafe or bind.

Now, here's the down-side.

The fabrics on offer to start with will be fugly. Maybe not as bad as the bri-nylon shirts and terylene and other crappy synthetics of yesteryear, but it's still going to be fairly obvious (at first) what you're wearing. Figuring out how to make a sprayable matrix that uses cotton or silk or wool fibres has a multi-billion dollar pay-off at the end, so I expect it to happen eventually, but at first the stuff is going to look and feel like felted nylon. The styles on offer at first will also be fugly. I've spent a few years watching my spouse make her own clothing, and it's worth noting that dress patterns are complex and don't scale linearly: going from a size 12 to a size 18 isn't just a matter of blowing every dimension up by 50%. Clothes that are some variation of a simple tube or tubes will be easier than, say, a pair of jeans (with pockets and decorative seams) let alone an underwired bra or a sports jacket. Nor are there going to be many chain stores left to buy this stuff from. The job of a high street store in this scenario is to take measurements with a scanner and handle order fulfilment. Maybe also to act as a showroom. Today they have changing rooms and act as edge-of-network distribution centres. Tomorrow? Expect tumbleweed where the likes of Macy's or Primark have their bigger stores. Let alone T[J|K] Maxx—that business model is on the way out.

But back to the product itself. The first printed garmets aren't going to eat into the high end fashion market. Rather, they're going to displace sweatshop low-end produce. No, scratch that: initially this stuff is going to be something you spray on conference seats and car body panels (and maybe horrible 70s style flock wallpaper). But sooner or later it'll get good enough for really cheap, semi-disposable clothing. And then the pressure to improve the processes and recapture some of that $100Bn imported-from-China garment market will be irresistible.

So I expect 3D printed clothing will take time to catch on. But as it catches on, a lot of developing world factory workers are going to find their jobs are as obsolete as the half million men who used to work down British coal mines, or the million who worked in iron and steel foundries, or the other countless millions who used to pick crops and plough fields by hand and by horse. People who use sewing machines for a living will find their jobs have gone the same place as people who used to work in office typing pools with carbon paper and manual typewriters. Low status jobs, mostly women, with negligible social safety nets to catch them when they fall. On the other hand, this will hopefully be as much a thing of the past as this.

When garment manufacturing returns to the countries where they're consumed, the pace at which fashion trends turn over may actually accelerate: currently, there's a limit on how fast high street fashion can change imposed by the time it takes to send pattern blocks to a factory overseas, verify that the product is of satisfactory quality, then ship the loaded TEUs to market. It'll be like going from batch processing of punched cards on a mainframe in a computer bureau to using a time-sharing terminal: expect flash fashion trends to take off like a rocket once the tech gets cheap enough and good enough to fit the budget and taste of the vital high street 14-24 year old female demographic (and once the design software gets accessible enough).

It'll take a while longer (if ever—there are strength/durability/flexibility issues here) for 3D printing to revolutionize footwear (but, oh my aching feet, I can't wait).

The hand-sewn couture market (which still exists) will be joined by the not-as-high-end machine-sewn-by-real-people somewhat-more-durable market in the middle end. But it won't be a mass employer.

Now. What am I missing?

“Janet, I’m not trying to tell you how to raise your child.”

“Oh, really? Because that’s what it sounds like to me.”

“I’m only telling you this because I love you. Because I want to help you.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You know I’m right. If you would just look at it objectively, you know I’m right.”

“I knew this would happen. You told me when we started dating that you didn’t have a problem with my having a daughter.”

“I don’t have a problem with it. Grace is a wonderful kid. You know I care about her. But I care about you more. And she’s a drain on you.”

“A drain? How would…how can you say such a thing?”

“She’s taking advantage of you, Janet.”

“She’s a child.”

“She’s a child as long as you treat her like one. She’s getting older every day. And she never even talks about working or getting her own apartment or even going back to school.”

“It’s summer!”

“Sure, it is now. And how many more semesters are you going to let her lounge around here, buy her all of her food, let her do whatever she wants? The other day I asked her what she wanted to do with her life, and do you know what she told me? She said she wanted to be a princess.”

“That’s…”

“A princess, Janet. Talking like that, she’s going to be borrowing money from you when she’s 35.”

“So what are you suggesting? Since you know everything about child-rearing?”

“Well, getting a job would be a good start.”

“She’s too young.”

“I had a job when I was her age.”

“You did not!”

“Yes I did!”

“Oh, doing what?”

“Landscaping.”

“What does that mean? You mowed your dad’s lawn?”

“I don’t know who you think you’re going to score points off of, denigrating a whole profession.”

“She doesn’t need a job. I make plenty of money.”

“It’s not about the money. It’s about responsibility. Lots of people are working at her age.”

“Where?”

“Southeast Asia. Africa. In some countries she could join the Army.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Look, I’m not saying she should join the Army. It’s just an example.”

“Martin, she’s six.”

“It’s not like I’m suggesting she should work in a factory or anything.”

“Yes you are! You did just yesterday!”

“First of all, Helm isn’t a factory. It’s an assembly plant. They don’t make things there, they just put them together. Second, it’s a union shop. She’d get great benefits, vacation, the whole deal.”

“Just let this go, Martin. I’m serious. I don’t want to hear any more about building character, or taking responsibility, or how little girls grow up fast these days. Just let it go.”

“All right, Janet. She’s your daughter.”

“Well, I’m glad we agree on something.”

“I just wonder who’s going to pay for that pony she’s always talking about.”

Wow. An interesting sign of a rapidly changing utilities market:

“On Nov. 1, AEP, one of the other five biggest coal-fired electric utilities, filed a plan to Indiana and Michigan regulators saying that the only new generating capacity it would need over the next decade would be wind and, starting in 2020, solar. The company said it ‘expects that utility-scale solar resources will become economically justifiable by 2020.’”

(Via Tennessee Valley Authority to close 8 coal-fired power plants – The Washington Post.)

AEP is still a dirty energy producer (they supply my energy, I used to buy their carbon offsets for their green program, until they shut that down, I’ve been trying to figure out how to hop over to a new provider that uses the wind power from the nearby wind farm but customer service on this front has been rather atrocious and I’ve been so busy I’ve been lax in follow through) but it’s an interesting marker to watch.

How a journalist faced his fears and learned to be good at maths.

Content note: This post discusses transphobia, transmisogyny with particular focus on a known perpetrator.

I suppose in the past I’ve avoided, for the most part, discussing specific perpetrators of transphobia and transmisogyny. My reasoning for this has been that this shit is structural: one perpetrator does not a system make, and bringing the fucker down won’t heal anything without deep change. I prefer to discuss things more broadly, as a nod to the systemic nature of these problems.

So let’s talk about the problem named Cathy Brennan. I doubt I need to introduce her to you. The first Google hit for her name gives a precis on what she’s like. For more, it’s really worth looking at the work the trans community has done on collating the abuse she has perpetrated and the heartbreaking personal accounts of what she’s done.

Brennan is one of the most virulent of the TERfs. This is perhaps due to her class privilege: Brennan works as a lawyer for payday lenders and is fucking raking it in. Despite this, she has a hell of a lot of time on her hands. This time, she uses to harass and abuse trans women. She researches their dead names, finds pictures, and then puts them on her websites next to pictures of rapists. If she can, she contacts employers. These are trans women, simply existing as trans women, smeared and outed because Brennan doesn’t think they should exist.

Brennan uses her lesbian feminism as a veil for this behaviour. It is nothing more than that: a veil. Brennan will gladly side with homophobic organisations if they will get her what she wants–that is, making life more dangerous for trans women.

And this is not a petty intellectual difference. What Cathy Brennan does endangers the lives of women. Outing trans women can starve them out of a job, it can socially isolate them, it can put them at risk of acts of violence–the very male violence that Brennan pretends to oppose. Furthermore, her rhetoric trivialises rape and abuse: morally equating the existence of trans women with these horrors does nobody any favours except the bigots.

As feminists, we must stand against this. We must reject Brennan entirely. We need to stand against these repeated incitements to violence, and back up our trans sisters who are victims of her work.

Yet cis feminism does too little. We stay quiet in the face of this, because the perpetrator is a cis woman and the excuse of sisterhood keeps us quiet. Brennan has a small but loyal army of enablers who police any criticism, who cry division and silencing whenever anyone dares to point out that putting women in danger is hardly a feminist act. The whole thing creates a climate wherein it is hard to speak out.

My own reasoning for refraining from writing about Cathy Brennan specifically rings hollow in my ears. On reflection, that’s been rather a double standard on my part: I’ll gladly write reams about perpetrators like Julian Assange. Even I, Attacker Of Women, have perhaps gone somewhat easy on a perpetrator, because even I, Attacker Of Women, have internalised some of the cisterhood bollocks which shuts down and silences these discussions.

It has taken me this long to fully nail my colours to the mast. Fuck Cathy Brennan. I hope that every time she cooks pasta, it comes out slightly overdone or slightly underdone. I hope she steps on upturned plugs every morning. I wish stale biscuits and unripe bananas on her.

Calling out this one person will not fix a broken system, but it is vital that we do so. It is vital that we draw attention to the abuse she perpetrates, and reject her brand of feminism entirely. It is vital that we support her victims. It is vital that we question her enablers. We need to unite against hate and violence within feminism, and Cathy Brennan is one of the best places to start. As cis feminists, she is our mess, and we need to help clean it up.

It is not enough to say that Cathy Brennan isn’t a feminist, because she wears that label. We need to actively challenge her, to make it known that we see what she does and we reject it entirely.

Further reading:
#dearcisfeminism- A very enlightening hashtag, unfortunately marred by a few TERf attempts at detrailing
You Can’t Ignore the Bug (GenderTerror)
Abuse is still abuse (Sam Ambreen)
Transphobia has no place in feminism (me)
Time to pick a side (also me; both of these pieces kind of talked around the issue without naming the problem explicitly)

In a desperate attempt to get past the tedious arguments that keep hampering our progress in actually Getting Shit Done, I’m going to say this, and then every time it crops up again I can whap this out and be all like “ta-da! Here’s my opinion, now I’m going to go back to bed.”

Today it’s Lily Allen putting out a music video that women of colour feel reflects another manifestation of white supremacy. Yesterday it was some other music video, the day before it was a newspaper column, and before that it was a thing on telly, and basically what I’m saying is these arguments happen again and again. It goes like this:

1. Pop culture thing happens.
2. Privileged people like it.
3. People without privilege criticise it from their perspective and call it problematic.
4. Privileged people who like it get upset.
5. Privileged people who like it think the criticism is some sort of personal attack.
6. Privileged people who like it declare the thing to be Not Problematic.
7. Ranks close. Nothing changes.

I was once one of the people who lathered, rinsed and repeated steps 4-7, so I can see exactly how it happens. It’s nice to enjoy something. It makes you feel good. And you’re a nice, good person. Also, racism and transmisogyny and sexism and ableism and bourgeois dickholery are generally pretty awful. So, it logically follows that because you and the way you feel are good, and oppression and supremacy are bad, the thing you like can’t be any of those things.

Except that’s not how it works. That thing you liked? It’s not a part of you. You almost certainly, in fact, had no creative control over it. Instead, it was created by rich and privileged people, far far away. Chances are, they’re not big evil hood-wearing KKK members either. They fucked up, because privilege kind of does that.

The people who are criticising it are those who have to experience oppression. This means they’re a hell of a lot better at spotting it than privileged people. They are probably right here, far more likely to be right about this than you, the fan.

So do you need to stop liking that thing you like? Hell no. I recommend you read this excellent guide: “How To Be A Fan Of Problematic Things”, which guides you through the process of actively critiquing pop culture, starting from this position:

Liking problematic things doesn’t make you an asshole. In fact, you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist (TM)! After all, most texts have some problematic elements in them, because they’re produced by humans, who are well-known to be imperfect. But it can be surprisingly difficult to own up to the problematic things in the media you like, particularly when you feel strongly about it, as many fans do. We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised groups.

So please, please, please let’s stop having this wearing argument. While liking something problematic doesn’t make you a shit, having this argument pisses people off. It pisses off the marginalised voices we need to hear more of in feminism. It pisses off people who are subject to oppressions. It pisses off everyone who’s had to sit through this nonsense more than once–on both sides.

Let’s just listen to what’s being said, understand it and engage with it, and then enjoy our favourite things with a more critical eye.

Let me tell you a little something about myself.

Today, I am a fat, out-of-shape, and devoutly unathletic middle-aged man. But once, in my youth, I was a fat, out-of-shape, but modestly athletic teenager; and during that time, I played football (as a nose tackle for my high school team) and baseball (as a relief pitcher in both high school and college).

My experiences of the two sports were wildly different. As a baseball player, I was moderately successful; I was a lefty with a funky delivery and a handful of ‘trick’ pitches, which made me valuable for getting key late-inning outs provided the coach had the good sense to pull me before hitters could catch on to my syrup-slow arsenal of junk. My teams were also pretty good; in high school we were contenders if never winners, and in college, I played (albeit deep from the bench) for one of the best programs in the region. I was also largely accepted by my teammates, despite being overweight and bookish; relievers in general, and lefties in particular, have always been considered freaks, and most of the other players accepted my nerdy personality in a tolerantly indulgent way, provided I didn’t fuck up too often. (Since I could throw accurately, though with little velocity, I was also called on to be the team’s designated plunker, a role I relished and which endeared me to the coach and my teammates alike.) I played for three years, and though my inability to break 70 on the radar gun along with general ineptitude as a fielder ensured I’d go no further than the varsity bench, I enjoyed most of my time as a baseball player and remember those days fondly. They’re part of the reason I grew up to be a baseball fan and a devotee of sports despite my status as a doughy geek.

As a football player, though, I was utterly miserable. The finer points of the game, which I had never enjoyed, escaped me, and my dad more or less forced me to try out for the team in a doomed effort to drill some machismo into me. The position I played was given to me not because I had any true aptitude for it, but because I was the biggest and tallest player on the team; I simply happened to fit a standard physical requirement. Our team was terrible; we had a lousy offense, no overall game plan, and a coach who was frustrated and incompetent. We won but a single game the whole time I played, and I sure as shit didn’t help; I was slow, confused, and not very aggressive, and while I never lost us a game, I was little more than dead weight on the field. The rest of the team – which comprised the alpha jocks of the school, as football attracted the best athletes even though the baseball and basketball teams had more winning ways – despised me. They hated my mental weakness, my intellectual tendencies, my awkwardness, my lack of masculinity and aggression and intensity, and I hated them right back. I was mercilessly bullied, both mentally and physically: I was stripped naked and thrown out of the locker room. I was tossed under the collapsing bleachers of the gym and trapped there for hours; I had to choke myself from crying when I called out to the dean to rescue me. I was beaten with soap bars stuffed into socks. I was called a pussy and a faggot on a daily basis. On our last game of the year, I was plowed into by the hulking Mexican kid who played center for the opposing team and injured my back quite badly; I never played again and looked on my injury as a blessing that allowed me to escape football forever. I still can’t stand football, and I look upon my experiences playing it as a big factor in my loathing for the institutionalized abuse, bogus manliness, and relentless bullying that’s endemic to sports culture.

While I grew up into a man who is almost entirely pacific, I was never a pacifist. I came from a military family, and I was expected to do my time in the service, as every male member of the family had done up until that time. I respected the military (and I still do, despite my deep hatred of war, warrior culture, and the way militarism has strangled our society), and I planned on doing a stint in the Navy. I joined the Naval Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corps in high school – again, pressured to do so by my ex-Army dad, but I went along willingly, hoping to get my college tuition paid for, as we were a working-class family. My experiences, again, were twofold.

I took easily to some aspects of the ROTC program. I was adept at military history, strategy and tactics; I was mechanically clever; I learned drill and other aspects of military protocol easily; and I earned ribbons for rifle marksmanship. But I was a wash-out at most of the swimming exercises, a fatal blow for anyone hoping to do time in the Navy, and worse that, I bristled under the strict discipline required. I was a natural at drill, but my uniform was never quite squared away; I always lacked one or another vital skill that would let me make rank. Our instructor was an intelligent man who treated us with respect, but he was also a strict disciplinarian who looked the other way when his selected leaders behaved like martinets, ignoring what the cadets were good at and punishing them for minor infractions of rules I found arbitrary. Even so, I might have done well enough, but my senior year – a time when, not coincidentally, I was developing some serious ethical concerns about military service in general – we were shipped off to a mini-boot camp in San Diego. I relished the training and the chance to familiarize myself with actual naval transports and equipment, but our drill instructor was a bloviating maniac who screamed non-stop abuse at us and handed over the everyday running of the platoon to the usual bullying goons. I flunked out, faked an injury to escape one particularly egregious group punishment – for which I received a beating later that night – and came back embittered at the whole program. I became the first man in my family (though, thankfully, not the last) to eschew military service. I don’t think my dad ever quite forgave me.

Despite his wishes, neither football nor the military instilled in me much of a sense of discipline. In fact, it was quite the opposite; they taught me to distrust and fear authority, to despise officially sanctioned brutality, to hate the standard presentation of maleness in our culture, and I let those qualities make me cynical and lazy. I became quick to look for corruption inside any organization, and keenly sensitive to the fact that people in power would often excuse the bad behavior of their trusted underlings. I didn’t grow up entirely weak or unfocused; I was (to my shame) quite a brawler for much of my late 20s and early 30s, and have often struggled with certain violent tendencies despite my dislike of institutional violence. I found discipline internally, through my art and a somewhat muddled self-image. I even picked up on some elements of American macho culture that I’m not especially proud of and have struggled to overcome: an over-focus on self-reliance, a hostility to people outside of my peer group, a reluctance to ask for help, and a tendency to swallow my emotions. But I never embraced the values my old man hoped I would get out of the organizations that had made him into who he was, for better and for worse.

All this is, of course, prelude to a discussion I’ve been having with myself about the situation with Richie Incognito and the Miami Dolphins – not only his brutal hazing of a teammate, which went so far that the teammate simply walked away from the team, but the way the Dolphins organization handled it, and how that handling has been reacted to in the press and in the court of public opinion. Much of what has been said about the case has come from people who have found it appropriate to heap scorn on Jonathan Martin, the victim of Incognito’s bullying and abuse, and much of what they have said has come from a very familiar position: that Martin should have toughened up. That he should have been a man. That he should have dealt with Incognito, at best, by attacking him in kind, and at worst, by going “in-house” rather than making his case to the press. That he should have nutted up and stood up for himself. That the behavior to which he was subjected – including racist insults and threats to his family – were meant only to build team unity and bring him closer to the group. That football is like the military, and it’s only through the heat of the forge that you make strong steel. That Martin was a pussy. That Martin was a faggot.

The personal anecdotes were offered by way of entrée, because it seems like, particularly in discussions of these pervasively macho areas of American life, individual experience – usually pretty worthless as a means of analyzing a complex situation – is the only way in. How can you judge, if you’ve never played the game? – that’s the question always asked. How can you understand, if you’ve never been in the trenches? And it’s not entirely unfair, that question, though we are all too willing to accept it from others who likewise never strapped on a helmet, either in football or in war. But it highlights some deeply problematic aspects of the issues at hand, which I think inform why the conversation about Incognito and Martin in miniature, as stand-ins for the greater issues of hazing and bullying and the purpose to which they are applied, has gone so disastrously astray.

For one thing, the preference for personal anecdote, and the hostility to statistical analysis and the overall study of trends, points to a disturbing anti-intellectualism in sports. Numbers are just fine so long as they confine themselves to on-field performance, but should they tell us something about the games beyond the games – about economic inequality or racism or sexism or about the NFL’s serious problems with criminal behavior or head injuries – all of a sudden they take a back seat to individual opinion and the nebulous grand traditions of manly striving. No one is more fond of analysis than a sports booster defending his favorite player, and no one is more hostile to it than that same booster being told his sport of choice is institutionally dysfunctional. Eggheads are just fine for predicting VORP and WHIP but keep them away from our fun.

For another, even personal experience is tainted by circumstance. In reading all the defenses of the Dolphins management by men who suffered humiliation, derision and abuse at the hands of their own teammates and coaches, the stink of rationalization wafts off the screen; it is impossible not to wonder if they have simply chosen to believe their debasement had some improving quality because the alternative is to realize that it was all for nothing, just an empty exercise in sadism. How many of these men played for losing teams? How many of them were, as I was, shamed and bullied to no good end, as the numbers increased in the L column and the realization that they were being forged, not into a victorious brotherhood, but into a collection of warped failures? Even if they’d been winners, that teaches us nothing; Jim Bouton famously mocked the idea of team unity in his classic memoir Ball Four, noting that it was always the winning that came first, with team chemistry the effect rather than the cause.

And in some circumstances, personal experience is entirely beside the point. Richie Incognito, widely recognized as one of the dirtiest players in the sport before the Martin revelations, is such a universal type he needs no explication. Everyone has known a Richie Incognito, on their team, at their school, with their unit, in their workplace: he is the kind of casually sociopathic egomaniac for whom the phrase “clubhouse cancer” was invented. Far from instilling team unity, he sows divisiveness everywhere; his relentless abuse draws no one together, but leaves them hoping he’ll suffer a career-ending injury just so the torment will cease. The party line amongst the boosters is that he’s the kind of guy you’d want to share a foxhole with, when in fact he’s the kind of guy who’d get scragged by his own men. He lacks even the demented leadership qualities of a Captain Queeg, or the savage defiance of a Ty Cobb. No one will ever remember fondly having spent time with a shitbag like Richie Incognito; he will be as warmly recalled when his career is over as a prison guard or a hangman.

It is this fact that strikes at the very heart of the issue of hazing, of bullying, and of bonding. The difference between these words may be precariously thin, but it is also dangerously sharp, and crossing it always draws blood. The point of this kind of bonding has always been to draw a group with little in common together, to eradicate their individuality just to the point where they are able to function seamlessly as a whole to achieve a mutual goal. Soldiers are meant to fight and win in wars; athletes are meant to point themselves inerrantly at a championship. The ultimate goal in both cases is to make a man willing to sacrifice himself for his comrades’ sake, not to make him willing to go out of his way to humiliate them. It is a mistake to think you must break men down and dehumanize them and build them back up to men again; what is sought is taking human men and making them greater than they were before. Treating your teammates like shit doesn’t make them want to bond with you and carry you along to glory; it fills them with resentment and makes them want to see you fail. It is a recipe not for victory, but for spite.

This is the reason that every branch of the military has instituted anti-hazing policies. This is the reason that the greatest leaders have depended on respect and not fear. And it is the unwillingness to recognize this, not any inherent flaw in the structure itself but a stubborn refusal to admit that parts of it can rot over time, that has poisoned the atmosphere in both sports and the military. Chicago Bears receiver Brandon Marshall, a bright and outspoken player who’s refused to bow to the prevailing attitudes when discussing his mental health issues, talked about the culture of the NFL and how it reflects one of the most damaging facets of machismo: “A little boy falls down and the first thing we say as parents is ‘Get up, shake it off…don’t cry.’ When a little girl falls down, what do we say? ‘It’s going to be OK’. We validate their feelings. So right there from that moment, we’re teaching our men to mask their feelings, don’t show their emotions…you can’t show that you’re hurt, you can’t show any pain. That’s a problem. And that’s what we have to change.”

The effects of this widespread cultural taboo against men behaving like humans instead of like “men” – effects I have too often invited myself because I am no more immune than anyone to the air I was raised breathing – is obvious to see in football and in military culture. When we discourage athletes from seeking help, when we stack the front office and the ‘leadership’ positions with people hostile to the very idea that there might be something wrong with the institution, you not only get a dozen, a hundred Jonathan Martins; you get a century of players whose brains were scrambled inside their skulls and sought no aid because no aid was offered. When you train a soldier to not let his experiences of war take an emotional hold, when you teach him that silence equals strength, you get the agonizing situation we are in now: an overburdened armed forces in which the pleasures of unity, service and achievement are eclipsed by the horrors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and a terrifyingly high prevalence of suicide. It is not too much speculation, I think, to reckon that many of the servicemen who took their own lives had been told that seeking help for changes in their minds and hearts they could not fathom, let alone articulate, was a sign of weakness. Of a pussy. Of a faggot.

But it is not just that the perpetrators of this toxic culture, the Richie Incognitos and their toadies and their bosses, are wrong only in a climate of modern mores and changing standards of sensitivity. They are wrong in theory and they are wrong in practice, for it is unity and not divisiveness, cooperation and not resentment, strategy and not tactics, inclusion and not cliqueishness, that wins both ballgames and wars. They would have you believe that they are men of the old school, and that the Jonathan Martins of this world are modern-day sob sisters who pass their malingering off to a sympathetic press as sensitivity of a sort that stands to destroy the grand old game by robbing it of its very masculine essence. They’re wrong, though, and they know it. They know it when they look at the teams in the winning locker rooms, and at the names in the almanacs of past champions. They are kicking downwards on their own because when they kick outwards, they get kicked back and it hurts. If a sea change comes to sports culture, they will be viewed in the same way as were coaches who believed that drinking water on a hot day caused a player to become weak and soft.

I am no Jonathan Martin. He has the goods; he started every game for years in one of the most dangerous positions in the sport. And I am not my father. I intentionally avoided military service, while he lied about his age so he could go fight in Korea before he was 16 years old. But I think I know a little about how Martin feels, and I think it’s enough to know that his is not the weak link in his team’s chain. And I know what happened to my dad, and how the values he was taught by men in the Army who were unfit to lead nearly ruined him later in life, when the physical and psychic wounds he suffered in the war built up and overwhelmed him, but he was too taken with a false notion of manly self-sufficiency to seek help until it was almost too late. Neither sports nor the military lost anything of value by losing me; but if they continue to avoid the problems that drove me away, they will lose more and more men that they desperately do need, until no one is left but the Richie Incognitos.

I think it remarkable that so many so-called digital natives have fallen for the fake news that BIg Bird is transgendered. A few seconds with the Google is sufficient to establish that the story is a spoof. Here is the story’s source, if you’d like to see it. Among the headlines at the site: “Analysts Forecast Drop In Holiday Spending As More Families Rely On Presents From Santa Claus.”

As I wrote in a post in which I made up the term “digital naïf,” “Many so-called digital natives are in truth digital naïfs. The natives’ naïveté is considerable.” Take a look at the Twitter if you doubt me.

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The Disney folks have announced they’re going to turn William Goldman’s fine book and screenplay, The Princess Bride, into a stage production. They don’t have a creative team to announce yet and they aren’t sure if it’ll be a musical. Seems to me this is a good idea and it oughta be a musical…

My name is Inigo Montoya
It’s time for the attack
And I don’t mean to annoy ya
But I want my father back!

And there should be a song called "Inconceivable!" and one called "As You Wish" and if they can do it without sounding like a tune in Spamalot, a number called "Only Almost Dead." They can buy all the leftover Shrek costumes from Dreamworks, spray them and use them for the Andre the Giant part. Oh — and they can round up all the ticket scalpers on Broadway, deslime them a bit and have them play the Giant Eels.

Seriously, it’s a great notion and I’ll bet they cast some great old "name" actor to play the Grandfather who, while one scene is being struck and the next is being set up, narrates a hunk of the story to his Grandkid. I wanna be there when this thing opens. Heck, I wanna be there when they have the open casting call for a "Mandy Patinkin type." Bet Mandy shows up and is told he’s all wrong for it.

(Yes, I am still on a road trip. Should be home Friday; meanwhile, I find it hard to blog (and write fiction) while on the move and living out of a suitcase.)

In other news: I'm shocked but unsurprised by the idiocy of Prime Minister David Cameron in saying that, for the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war, he wanted to see a "commemoration that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people". I never had a particularly high opinion of Call me Dave, but in this instance he's clearly intent on digging himself a new pit in my esteem.

David Cameron is an Old Etonian, a child of privilege who was schooled at Eton College: he therefore has no excuse for not knowing better. Eton College made a grim contribution to the British Army officer corps during that war—a contribution paid in blood, many times over. Call Me Dave spent his teen years surrounded by the charnel memorabilia of that war, but it seems to have skidded past his cranium as effortlessly as he himself swarmed up the greasy pole to the top of politics. So some remedial schooling in the history of his own school is in order ...

Dave, if you're reading this, I'd like you to imagine the class you were a member of at age 16. This class probably had 20-25 boys in it. To put the first world war in perspective, I'd like you to line your classmates up against a notional wall. Now imagine it's 1914, and you and your classmates are 16, and we're going to emulate the first world war. I want you to take a revolver, load one chamber with a bullet, and play Russian Roulette with each boy in turn. One random trigger pull each, up close against their head. If the gun doesn't go off, fine: if it blows their skull apart, reload with one round and proceed to the next boy.

Once you've finished playing Russian roulette, you can have your PR people drag the corpses away. Then you start all over again, this time holding the gun against an arm, leg, stomach, or crotch—it doesn't really matter—as you pull the trigger. This second game of roulette is not about killing: it is about savage, crippling, maiming injuries. Shattered kneecaps and hands, castration and colostomization. Oh, by the way, this time you load the pistol with two rounds to double the probability of each boy catching a Blighty.

The screaming, weeping, leaking survivors are the ones who made it back to England's green and pleasant land alive. I wonder if they'll have anything positive to say about your iterated game of Russian roulette?

If you'd been 16 in 1914, then of your class at Eton probably 4-6 would have died (Eton boys ended up as officers: the death rate among junior officers was double that among the non-commissioned ranks). Another 6-8 would have been wounded—faces burned off, arms and legs and spines shattered, lungs scarred by gas until they coughed themselves to death in middle years—these are not pretty injuries, duelling scars or badges of honour: these are vile blows that turn strong young men into lifelong cripples (the sort of people who these days fail their ATOS work assessments and are denied disability payments two weeks before they die of their condition: but I digress).

Only a small fraction of Eton's 1914 class survived the war without physical injury. Lest you assume the death toll was confined to gung-ho officer chappies leading their men over the top, even for the non-commissioned ranks it was a brutal war: around 5% of the total male population of the UK died on the front line, and another 10% were damaged, wounded in body or mind. (As a reference point for foreign readers, the death toll among the British was considerably worse than that of the American Civil War—and among the French it was bloodier by far.)

This is the event that Call Me Dave, our inexplicably ignorant excuse for a Prime Minister, thinks is a suitable subject for a commemoration that says something positive about the British people: a teachable patriotic moment for the masses. Only a second-rate reject from the marketing industry could come up with such an abjectly peurile pile of shrapnel-severed bollocks: that, or a fool who has swallowed Michael Gove's conveniently patriotic educational myths without so much as a pinch of skepticism or introspection. The first world war started as a family scrap driven by the bloated egos of the richest, most powerful family in Europe—lest we forget, Kaiser Wilhelm II was closely related by blood to both Tsar Nicholas II and King George V of Great Britain—and ended up as a nightmarish industrialized slaughterhouse. It was a mincing machine into which the menfolk of entire towns vanished, a Pals Battalion at a time: a death factory that manufactured an average of a thousand British corpses a day for years on end.

They said at the time that the British soldiers were lions led by donkeys. And it seems that as a nation we are still led by donkeys ...

Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility: p should be 0.005 or less.

The outcome could appear an abomination

In the May 2013 local elections UKIP chalked up nearly twice as many votes as the Lib Dems yet won barely half the number of seats – a fact that attracted very little comment at the time.

Given current polling and what is happening in local by-elections Farage’s party is not going away. It is continuing to poll in double figures even though only one pollster prompts for the party and several have weighting structures that underplay their current support.

In survey after survey we are seeing the raw number of UKIP supporters being down-graded once the weightings are applied.

In local by-elections UKIP are continuing to put on good vote shares in Labour and Conservative strongholds getting a number of very good second places.

The party has done well in parliamentary by-elections over the past year securing a number of spectacular second places but has never achieved a vote share in excess of 28%.

My reading is that the party could pile on votes in those constituencies where the outcome is not in doubt and where campaigning by the big two parties is minimal.

In the battlegrounds where the blues and the reds are slugging it out it will be a different picture – UKIP will get squeezed

Their overall national vote total could be helped by the Lib Dem approach to the election of putting everything into retaining what they have with barely a dozen other targets. As I’ve suggested before the yellows could chalk up a lot of lost deposits. This will be a small price to pay if their highly focused targeting strategy enables them to hold on to 30+ seats.

This could leave UKIP in the remarkable position of moving from the fourth place of GE2010 to third in terms of national vote share but still without a single MP.

First past the post works against them horribly.

Mike Smithson