I first put together this resource list in 2010. I intend to keep updating and reposting it every year until it’s no longer necessary.
If you’ve been sexually harassed, it’s your choice whether or not to report that harassment. It’s not an easy choice, and I obviously can’t guarantee the outcome. But I can tell you that if someone has harassed you, it’s 99% certain that they’ve done it to others. You’re not alone.
Please also see this post by Elise Matthesen about reporting sexual harassment. Of particular note is her explanation of the “formal” reporting process vs. informal or anonymous reports.
Reporting to Publishers:
As a general rule, if you’ve been sexually harassed by an editor or another employee of a publisher, complaints can be directed to the publisher’s H.R. department. Please note that reporting to H.R. will usually trigger a formal, legal response.
I’ve spoken to people at several publishers to get names and contact information for complaints, both formal and informal. I’ve put asterisks by the publishers where I spoke with someone directly.
Publishers – I would love to expand this list with better information. Please contact me.
Reporting to Conventions:
Often harassment doesn’t come from editors, but from authors, convention guests, or other fans. If this happens at a convention, you can contact convention security, ops, and/or the convention committee. Many (but not all) conventions include harassment policies in the program books and the websites.
A convention committee doesn’t have the same power as an employer. However, if harassment is reported at a convention, the individual may be confronted or asked to leave. In addition, reporting harassment by guests (authors, editors, etc.) is very helpful to the convention in deciding who not to invite back.
To any convention staff, I would encourage you to make sure you have a harassment policy in place, and equally importantly, that your volunteers are aware of that policy and willing to enforce it. Please see the “Other Resources” section below for starting points on developing such a policy, if you haven’t already done so.
Please see also John Scalzi’s Convention Harassment Policy Pledge, which has been c0-signed by more than 700 people who will not attend conventions that lack a posted and adequately publicized harassment policy.
Other:
Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA):
Per SFWA’s president Steven Gould, if you feel you are being harassed at a SFWA event or in SFWA online environs, please contact any SFWA board member, employee, or our ombudsman, Cynthia Felice, at ombudsman -at- sfwa.org. You don’t have to wait until after the fact to report it. (Though that is also your choice. There is no expiration date on harassment.)
What to Expect:
Ideally, someone who was sexually harassed could report it and expect to be treated with respect. Their concerns would be taken seriously, and all possible steps would be taken to make sure the behavior did not happen again, and that the offender understood such behavior was unacceptable. Disciplinary action would be taken when appropriate.
This is not a perfect world. Employers are required to follow the laws and their own policies, which take time. Even a formal report may result in nothing more than a warning (particularly if this is the first report of harassment).
That said, when I originally posted about sexual harassment in fandom, everyone who responded expressed that such behavior was unacceptable. And there were a lot of responses, from fans, authors, editors, con staff, and agents. The growing conversation suggests that more and more of us are taking sexual harassment seriously and working to put an end to this behavior.
As a rape counselor, I saw how powerful and important it can be to break the silence around assault and harassment. However, it’s always your choice whether or not to report. Making that report will be stressful. It may also be empowering, but there are no guarantees. It may or may not have visible results.
First and foremost, please do whatever is necessary to take care of yourself.
Other Resources:
Essays:
Please contact me if you know of additional resources that should be included here.
I've begun to notice a pattern with experiments in behavioral economics. An experiment produces a result that's counter-intuitive and surprising, and demonstrates that people don't behave as rationally as expected. Then, as time passes, other researchers contrive different versions of the experiment that show the experiment may not have been about what we thought it was about in the first place. For example, in the dictator game, Jeffrey Winking and Nicholas Mizer changed the experiment so that the participants didn't know each other and the subjects didn't know they were in an experiment. With this simple adjustment that made the conditions of the game more realistic, the "dictators" switched from giving away a large portion of their unearned gains to giving away nothing. Now it's happened to the marshmallow test.
In the original Stanford marshmallow experiment, children were given one marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow right away; or, if they waited fifteen minutes for the experimenter to return without eating the marshmallow, they'd get a second marshmallow. Even more interestingly, in follow-up studies two decades later, the children who waited longer for the second marshmallow, i.e. showed delayed gratification, had higher SAT scores, school performance, and even improved Body Mass Index. This is normally interpreted as indicating the importance of self-control and delayed gratification for life success.
Not so fast.
In a new variant of the experiment entitled (I kid you not) "Rational snacking", Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin from the University of Rochester gave the children a similar test with an interesting twist.
They assigned 28 children to two groups asked to perform art projects. Children in the first group each received half a container of used crayons, and were told that if they could wait, the researcher would bring them more and better art supplies. However, after two and a half minutes, the adult returned and told the child they had made a mistake, and there were no more art supplies so they'd have to use the original crayons.
In part 2, the adult gave the child a single sticker and told the child that if they waited, the adult would bring them more stickers to use. Again the adult reneged.
Children in the second group went through the same routine except this time the adult fulfilled their promises, bringing the children more and better art supplies and several large stickers.
After these two events, the experimenters repeated the classic marshmallow test with both groups. The results demonstrated children were a lot more rational than we might have thought. Of the 14 children in group 1, who had been shown that the experimenters were unreliable adults, 13 of them ate the first marshmallow. 8 of the 14 children in the reliable adult group, waited out the fifteen minutes. On average children in unreliable group 1 waited only 3 minutes, and those in reliable group 2 waited 12 minutes.
So maybe what the longitudinal studies show is that children who come from an environment where they have learned to be more trusting have better life outcomes. I make absolutely no claims as to which direction the arrow of causality may run, or whether it's pure correlation with other factors. For instance, maybe breastfeeding increases both trust and academic performance. But any way you interpret these results, the case for the importance and even the existence of innate self-control is looking a lot weaker.
 |
| Oh, I give up. |
Either way, the sad conclusion I have come to is that I have more faith in Labour and the Greens, than I do in the Liberal Democrats to put forward a package of policies which former Liberal Democrat voters can support.
It is very much that – sad – to have reached the conclusions that I have about the Liberal Democrats. I do feel that if people like me who have been involved in the Liberal Democrats at many different levels for 25 years, have come to such views, as many have already done, then there are some serious problems for the party.
I no longer know where the party’s real heart is and have serious doubts as to how far it could be effective in another coalition, with Labour even, let alone how far it could survive another with the Conservatives.
However, I also feel a personal sense of liberation, at no longer having to feel that I need to have any sense of allegiance to the party, when I feel so utterly appalled by the way it has behaved since 2010.Richard was at one time a central figure in the party, being Charles Kennedy's right-hand man. His more traditional social democratic politics are not mine, but we cannot afford to lose people like him.
Wow. [via Theresa DeLucci]
“Dustin Hoffman on playing a woman in Tootsie (1982)
‘If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, ‘Uh, that’s as beautiful as we can get you.’ And I went home and started crying to my wife, and I said, ‘I have to make this picture.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because I think I’m an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill, physically, the demands that we’re brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out.’”
(Via Batman Is Still Better Than Spider-Man.)
You can see more about Dustin and the movie here as well.
Is the United Kingdom a one party state?
(You might be forgiven for thinking this is a joke question, but please bear with me.)
Three main political parties have substantial representation in the House of Commons in Westminster; there are a handful of independent MPs and members of regional or minority parties, but in general governance is in the hands of the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and (to a lesser extent) the Liberal Democrat Party ...
It's fairly clear that, in addition to having rich tribal identities going back centuries, the individual members of these parties hold very different beliefs about how the UK should be governed. It would be hard, for example, to find much in common between the beliefs of my local MP (an old school Labour Fabian Society member) and those of the conservative back-benchers who lately thumbed their nose at the Prime Minister by sneaking an Alternative Queen's Speech motion into Hansard, calling for various policies that surprise no-one ("bring back hanging" being about the most progressive of them). Scratch a Liberal Democrat and, along with a lot of hand-wringing, you'll get broadly socially liberal policies (and, unless they're an Orange Book type, broadly socialist ones as well).
So why, when we have three clearly divergent political cultures, do I have the feeling that there's nobody to vote for — that whichever government is formed after the next election will continue to iterate and evolve the policies that have dominated British politics since May 1979?
I'm nursing a pet theory. Which is that there are actually four main political parties in Westminster: the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Ruling Party.
The Ruling Party is a meta-party; it has members in all of the three major parties, and probably the minority parties as well. It always wins every election, because whichever party wins (or participates in a coalition) is led in Parliament by members of the Ruling Party, who have more in common with each other than with the back bench dinosaurs who form the rump of their notional party. One does not rise to Front Bench rank in any of the major parties unless one is a paid-up Ruling Party member, who meets with the approval of the Ruling Party members one will have to work with. Outsiders are excluded or marginalized, as are followers of the ideology to which the nominal party adheres.
Your typical Ruling Party representative attended a private school, studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford (or perhaps Economics or Political Science at the LSE). If they took the Eton/PPE route they almost certainly joined the Oxford debating society. Alternatively they might be a barrister (a type of lawyer specializing in advocacy before a judge, rather than in back-office work).
The Ruling Party doesn't represent the general electorate, but a special electorate: the Alien Invaders and their symbiotes, the consultants and contractors and think-tank intellectuals who smooth the path to acquisition of government contracts or outsourcing arrangements — the government being the consumer of last resort in late phase consumer capitalism — arrangements which are supported and made profitable by government subsidies extracted from taxpayer revenue and long-term bonds. The Ruling Party is under no pressure to conform to the expectations of the general electorate because whoever the electors vote for, representatives of the Ruling Party will win; the only question is which representatives, which is why they are at such pains to triangulate on a common core of policies that don't risk differentiating them in a manner which might render them repugnant to some of the electorate.
Now, here's the problem with the Ruling Party system:
Democracy is a rather crap form of government, with several failure modes (of which the tendency to converge on an oligarchy is but one), but it has one huge advantage over other forms of government: it provides a mechanism for peacefully transferring power when a governing clique has outlived its popularity. We hold elections, not civil wars: we kick the bums out, their replacements clean house, and some time later the bums — chastened and perhaps minus some old, familiar, unpopular faces — get another chance.
But with the Ruling Party consolidating its grip on the front benches of the Nominal Parties — and this is not merely a problem in the UK, but in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere — the mechanism for ensuring a peaceful succession has broken down.
Moreover, we are now discovering that we live in a panopticon, in houses of glass that are open to inspection and surveillance by the powers of the Deep State. Our only remaining form of privacy is privacy by obscurity, by keeping such a low profile that we are of no individual interest to anyone: and even that is only a tenuous comfort. Any attempt at organizing a transfer of power that does not ring the changes and usher in a new group of Ruling Party faces to replace the old risks being denounced as Terrorism.
Regimes that brook no peaceful succession have to clamp down on dissent as their policies become increasingly unpopular. (Unpopularity can be avoided for some time — often for decades, in periods of economic prosperity — but eventually even the most enlightened regime loses the Mandate of Heaven, if only due to natural forces beyond their control.) And the new tools of surveillance guarantee that the scope for repression will be vast, for once you begin looking for subversion you will find a populace with no options for legitimate dissent provides unlimited targets.
My conclusion is that we are now entering a pre-revolutionary state, much as the nations of Europe did in 1849 with the suppression of the wave of revolutions that spurred, among other things, the writing of "The Communist Manifesto". It took more than a half-century for that pre-revolutionary situation to mature to the point of explosion, but explode it did, giving rise to the messy fallout of the 20th century. I don't know how long this pre-revolutionary situation will last — although I would be surprised if it persisted for less than two decades — but the whirlwind we reap will be ugly indeed: if you want to see how ugly, look to the Arab Spring and imagine it fought by finger-sized killer drones that know what you wrote on Facebook eighteen years ago when you were younger, foolish, and uncowed. And which is armed with dossiers the completeness of which the East German Stasi could only fantasize about.
ADMIN NOTE:
Some folks — typically the American libertarian peanut gallery — seem to feel the need to piss on the comment-thread fire hydrant to mark their opinion that all politicians, as a class, are corrupt. I will be deleting these comments. Because that mind set is not helpful; it breeds cynicism and apathy rather than addressing a very real problem. Moreover, they're wrong — at least based on my highly subjective appraisal of all politicians I've ever met. (I may disagree with them, but I don't think they're imbeciles or corrupt just because they don't share my outlook.)
I also reserve the right to delete comments that derail the discussion into a dead-end siding on the topic of American Exceptionalism. (Discussions of how the USA does/does not fit within this theory: fine. "But America is special!" Not so fine.)
This will be review for some people, but the blog’s picked up a fair number of new readers since hitting the new series, and some recap is thus in order. But let’s talk about orthodox Doctor Who fandom, shall we?I’ve been thinking about this post from Richard Beck since he posted it on Friday.
Beck is a professor of psychology, and he starts off with an unremarkable psychological observation: “We all want to matter. To be the focus of respect, esteem and interest.”
True enough, but not exactly revelatory. But Beck, as he often does, explores what this means and teases out pastoral and prophetic implications.
He doesn’t use those words — “pastoral” and “prophetic.” That’s seminary-speak for the same idea conveyed in the unofficial motto of journalists, preachers and stand-up comedians: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The former is what we mean by pastoral. The latter is prophetic. Richard Beck’s discussion of “Mattering” pulls off the tricky feat of doing both at the same time. I think this is a significant post about significance, an important post about importance, etc.
Let’s consider the pastoral side first, because Beck starts there:
What if it is hard to matter? What if you have nothing in your life that commends you to others? What if you aren’t successful, don’t have a job, don’t have kids, or a spouse, or money for the Instragram-worthy vacation?
How do you matter when you have to take a bus, have your electricity turned off, or need to ask others for food?
Well, you find other ways to matter.
Beck describes a couple of men like that who attend his church. They’re lonely and powerless and seeking a sense of significance in a world that regards people like them as insignificant. One has become a “confabulator,” using tall tales to find a sense of importance. The other seems to be perpetually injured. Beck says of these Eleanor Rigbies:
Though his stories don’t jibe with reality, you listen attentively and express interest and concern. Because he wants to matter.
And:
When you see him you inquire about his most recent injury. And he tells you the story of the accident. And you listen because this is how he matters.
Note the use of the second person in those sentences. I’m sure students of rhetoric and grammar have a name for that, but I don’t know what it is — something like “second-person normative” maybe. That’s another little trick used by both preachers and comics. And mothers. It’s sort of aspirationally presumptuous — a way of sneaking in an “ought” without triggering our defenses against moralistic language. Whether or not it is an accurate description of what “you” actually do when encountering such people, it challenges us to make it accurate, to be or to become the kind of “you” for whom it is accurate.
To be honest, in my case, it’s not always accurate. I often look for any chance I can find to escape from people like those Beck describes, to avoid having to listen to their stories, which tend to be frustratingly long and time-consuming, and I haven’t got a lot of time to spare. I have other things I have to do — important things, things that matter, and …
Uh-oh.
Beck’s next example hit even closer to home for me:
Occasionally I drive a van for our church Freedom Fellowship on Wednesday. Driving that route has taught me that sometimes we matter because of what we know. And even the smallest, thinnest epistemological edge can give you this sense of mattering. At the start, being new to the route the regular passengers knew the locations and best routes to get everyone that needed to be picked up. The first few times I drove I needed help about where to go next. People helped me and it made them feel like they mattered. They knew something that I didn’t. Their knowledge allowed them to help me, placed them in a superior position.
But as I’ve driven more and more, I need directions less and less. But still the directions come. I know I need to turn left, they know I know that I need to turn left, but I’m still told to turn left. Why? Because telling me how to go helps them matter. And they are going to hold on to that mattering for as long as possible. And I’m not going to rush them. Sometimes I ask for directions when I don’t need them.
I know this situation. I’ve been there — precisely. The very same thing happened to me this morning, driving my co-worker home from the night-shift at the big-box warehouse-store. And it will happen again tomorrow morning. I know where he lives and how to get there from the store, but every time he gives me directions.
The person in this picture is very important.
That was really starting to bug me, until I noticed that it was really starting to bug me.
I noticed, specifically, that I found it disproportionately irritating in the same way that it’s so easy to be irked or rankled or infuriated by the perpetual advice given us by the various managers and assistant managers and department managers at the store. Annoyance with this advice is a perennial topic of conversation among the crew at lunch breaks and coffee breaks. It took about a month on the job before I figured out why.
See, what we do there is we re-stock shelves. We take pallets of merchandise off of trucks and break them down and sort them and then, with cages, carts and pallet-jacks, we haul them to the various parts of the sprawling store where we slice open boxes and ensure that the shelves are filled with their bounty of offerings the following morning. It’s not complicated — all of the merchandise and all of the shelves are coded, and matching those codes isn’t particularly tricky. It may be a kind of menial drudge work, but like all such work it can be done with care, and the guys in the crew are good at it. They do it fast and they do it well. They’ve been at this a long time and they know what they’re doing.
And I think that is why all that unbidden, unnecessary advice from the various managers gets under their skin. It’s an implicit suggestion that they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a kind of refusal to give them the respect they’ve earned as people who know what they’re doing.
That bugs the guys on the crew. It bugged me, too, enough to make me start trying to figure out exactly how and why. And once I started exploring that, I came to see that all those manager-types were wrestling with the same thing. They, too, were just struggling to find some source of respect or of self-respect in a job that doesn’t offer as many sources of that as we all might like or want or need.
In Richard Beck’s terms, “We all want to matter.” We all require some sense of “respect, esteem and interest.” Once I realized that cheerfully accepting the superfluous instructions or inaccurate advice of one of those various bosses was an opportunity to allow them that, I was able to take the focus off myself — and thus off of my reflexive resentment over being denied even that slight source of mattering. I began, instead, repeating the mantra: This is water. This is water.
That’s from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. Please read the whole thing, but here’s the core of it:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
When you meet someone who maybe feels like they don’t matter — or who has been told they don’t matter, or who has been assigned a lot in life that the world says doesn’t matter — you have the chance to choose consciousness over unconsciousness. You have the chance to regain a piece of some infinite thing.
You have a chance, in other words, to show that person that they do matter — to reassure them that they are deserving of respect, esteem and interest. Even if you don’t need directions, sometimes you should ask for them because the other person needs to give them.
That’s a way of comforting the afflicted. That’s a kind of pastoral ministry.
But this matter of mattering also has prophetic implications. Richard Beck discusses those as well, and so will we here, but let me save that for a part 2 and a follow-up because right now I’ve gotta go. Those shelves won’t re-stock themselves you know.
We have been reduced roughly to the size of an inch.
Atoms are mostly empty space. We’ve known this since 1909, when Ernest Rutherford’s researchers Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden fired alpha particles at gold foil in an attempt to probe the structure of the atom. To their surprise, most of them went straight through. To their even greater surprise, a few of them bounced straight back. This led in short order to the basic model of the atom that we still use today: a tiny, positively charged nucleus containing almost all the atom’s mass, orbited by negatively charged electrons.
It’s this structure of the atom that makes things the size they are. The direction of the electric force between two charged particles depends on whether the charges are of the same sign, or opposite signs. If they are opposite, the force attracts the particles together: if they are the same, the force pushes them apart. Whether the force is attractive or repulsive, it increases the closer the particles get to one another. So the harder you try to push two electrons together, the more strongly they will try to push each other apart again.
Since the outside of the atom is made of electrons, the same thing happens as you try to push atoms together. And that’s what determines the size of objects in the world around us: the balance between the forces that keep atoms together, and the forces that push them apart.
If you’re going to shrink something, then, you have to change that balance. The obvious way is to simply squeeze the atoms closer together, applying enough pressure to overcome the repulsive electric force between the electrons. That’ll work, provided you don’t mind squishing whatever you’re trying to shrink.
If you want to shrink a person, and not turn them into a compressed pellet of dense goo, you’re going to have to be a bit more sophisticated. Instead of increasing the force pushing the atoms together, you could try to reduce the repulsive electric force, making the atoms naturally huddle up closer to each other.
The strength of the electric force depends on a physical constant called the permittivity of free space, usually labelled ε0 (epsilon-nought). The permittivity of a material is a number that tells you how it is affected by an electric field, and ε0 tells you the same thing about space itself. The higher ε0, the lower the force between charges. So, make ε0 bigger, electric fields get weaker, and atoms sit closer together. Shrinking accomplished!
Except… how exactly do you increase ε0? OK, use some mysterious property of the Tardis, fair enough, but what actually would have to be happening?
Well, the reason why ε0 is the size it is, the reason why space even has this property of permittivity at all, is still not entirely understood, but it probably goes something like this. In a normal material, made up of protons and electrons, an electric field makes these particles line up to a greater or lesser extent. Every material has its own molecular structure, its own configuration of protons and electrons, and this determines its permittivity. Empty space doesn’t have protons and electrons in it – that’s why it’s called empty space – but it does have something altogether stranger.
According to the theory of quantum fields, particles can pop in and out of existence for microscopic fractions of time. How long these virtual particles can exist for is governed by Planck’s constant, which is a very small number indeed – and that’s why we’re generally unaware of it happening. But it does mean that what we think of as empty space is in fact a boiling sea of virtual particles, appearing and disappearing in the blink of a quantum eye.
When an electric field passes through some part of empty space, these virtual particles line up with it just like the protons and electrons in a real material. If you want to increase the permittivity of free space, you need to have fewer virtual particles about – and that means reducing Planck’s constant.
So there you have it. Something goes wrong with the Tardis, it somehow reduces Planck’s constant in the bodies and clothes of our time travellers, and everybody shrinks. Job done.
Except… there are some complications. Mucking about with these constants doesn’t just bring atoms closer together. It also changes a lot of other things, including the energy levels of the electrons within the atoms. All of chemistry, and therefore all of biology, is determined by these energy levels. Change these, and you screw up every single process within our bodies. The consequences would at least be mercifully brief.
But let’s say you somehow manage to do this in such a way that everything still works, albeit in a miniaturised form. You still have problems. Breathing, for a start. The oxygen atoms in the air will be much too big for the now-miniaturised alveoli in the lungs, which allow the oxygen to pass into the blood. Seeing will be interesting, too. The light receptors in the eyes will now respond to much shorter wavelengths. For a shrinkage factor of 100, which would roughly shrink an adult down to about an inch, the eyes would see, not visible light, but X-rays. This would be pretty cool, except that there are not many X-rays around at the surface of the Earth – the X-rays from the Sun being absorbed by the atmosphere, which is just as well otherwise we’d all die – and so it would be like wandering about in the dark all the time.
And, even more fundamental and even more inescapable that all of these, there is the matter of weight. Pushing all these atoms together doesn’t change their mass. A person who weighs 70 kg normally will still weigh 70 kg after shrinking. Four such people standing on a table would make it collapse, and crossing soft ground would be impossible as every step would just sink deep into the earth.
All in all, this notion of shrinking people by bringing their atoms closer together doesn’t seem all that clever after all. What happens if we take some of the atoms away instead?
Certainly, removing 99 atoms out of every hundred would shrink a person. But you’d have to be a bit careful about it. Removing atoms blindly would end up destroying the delicate internal machinery of the body’s cells, with fatal consequences. The only way this approach might work is if you take away 99% of each type of cell, like shrinking a wall by removing some of the bricks. The bricks will still work and the wall will still stand, just a little shorter.
Bodies, however, are more complicated than walls. I dare say a length of bone or gut might more or less continue to function with 99% fewer cells. Even the retina might be OK, although the shrunken eyeball will not be able to focus, so one way or another the person ends up blind. But what about the brain? The complex connections between neurons are the basis of all our thoughts and memories, not to mention the unconscious processes that keep our bodies working. Remove 99% of these cells, and you destroy virtually all of the brain, right down to the basic functions that regulate breathing and circulation.
And even if all these problems could be overcome, these is still this fundamental issue of mass. It can’t just vanish – the conservation laws won’t allow it. And evidently it doesn’t just hang around, or our miniature heroes would find themselves drowning in great puddles of organic goo. No, the only way to get rid of mass entirely is to convert it to energy.
How much energy? That’s easy to calculate. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 tells us that mass and energy can be turned into one another, with the conversion factor given by the speed of light squared. This factor of c2 works out at just over 20 megatons per kilogram. Shrinking a 70 kg person, therefore, releases just over 1400 megatons of energy. The whole Tardis crew probably amounts to roughly 250 kg, so that’s an energy release of 5000 megatons. (Let’s not even try to figure out the numbers for the Tardis.) This is nearly ten times the size of the entire US nuclear arsenal, and a hundred times greater than Tsar Bomba, the largest bomb ever detonated.
To get an idea of what would happen if all this energy were released in, say, London, we can use one of my favourite web apps: Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP.
Blast and heat radii from 5000 MT explosion in London. (Plotted with NUKEMAP.)
The fireball stretches from Croydon to Edgeware. Buildings from Dover to Coventry are blasted to rubble. And everything from Newcastle to Paris is on fire.
Admittedly, this is a crude model. The nukemap is designed to deal with man-made nuclear weapons, and doesn’t necessarily scale up accurately to such colossal power. It also doesn’t take into account the curvature of the Earth, which would be significant on this scale. Finally, using this model means assuming that the energy is released all at once. Just as loose gunpowder will burn rather than explode, a more gradual energy release would not create such a gargantuan blast. However, it would still dump the same amount of heat into a very small volume of the atmosphere, so the firestorm effects at least would be broadly similar. It certainly puts the environmental threat from Forrester’s dastardly insecticide plot into perspective.
So, to conclude, there doesn’t seem to be any way to make miniaturisation work. The best case scenario has the miniature person blindly choking to death in seconds. The worst case scenario incinerates half of Britain. Perhaps it’s best if we never speak of this again.
Douglas Engelbart – perhaps the last of the great American inventors – is dead. The newspapers are keen to remind everyone that Engelbart invented the computer mouse, but they are largely silent on the matter of his having personally created almost every one of the concepts we think of as part of the standard human-computer interface, including the very idea of an interactive graphical workstation. This is because a silent army of dutiful piss-ants is, by unspoken agreement, always given credit for the bulk of their betters’ accomplishments.
The video clip below is the opening segment of what has long been known as “The Mother of All Demos.” If you have not seen “The Mother of All Demos,” your education in the history of computing is woefully incomplete:
Who among those living today could hope to produce something equaling the pure novelty – the sheer intellectual audacity – of just a single one of the things which appear in “The Mother of All Demos” ?
“I see a red door and I want to paint it yellow”
“So if you meet me, have some courtesy,
“Have some sympathy and some taste
“Use all your well learnt politesse
“Or I’ll kill you with one hand.
“Because I can, you know. Would you like to hear my joke?”
“I knowOh yeah – I meant to write about a possibly rogue poll that was way better for the Lib Dems than anything else recently, but possibly worthwhile as it was polling about something other than the usual. Remind me, reader.
“It’s only a rogue poll
“But I like it…”
“I’m canvassing apartments on the ninety-ninth floor of my block
“I knock on the door looking through the window and hoping the barking will stop
“Then out comes a guy who’s all dressed up like a Union Jack
“And says I’ve won his vote if I’ll just send those immigrants back
“I said, hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Hey! UKIP! Get off of my round!
“Don’t hang around ’cause two’s a crowd”
“Start me up!That’s one for me, too, obviously. Simon and I once did a pair of set-piece speeches to finish a Lib Dem Youth and Student Conference. Everyone missed their trains. Including me (remember, this article is a “quickie”).
“If you start me up
“I’ll never stop.”
“But I’m all right now, in fact, it’s a gas…should make you think of an even more recently ex-ed MP (and a certain Elephant denies all responsibility for that lyric).
“But I’m all right, I’m jumping lights – flash!
“Step on the gas, gas, gas”
“We all live in a yellow squeaky-clean…”
I read a paper. It left me in convulsions of laughter. It is, of course, an evolutionary psychology one.
The paper “Is Cunnilingus-Assisted Orgasm a Male Sperm-Retention Strategy?” sets out to answer the all-important question which has apparently been bugging the evolutionary psychology community since it evolved the gene to apply a just-so explanation to every aspect of human behaviour: why do heterosexual couples engage in something fun?
They ponder that it must be a strategy for either keeping sperm in there to make sure it all swims the right way, or maybe it’s to stop women cheating. I was surprised to note no mention of the bonobo, a closely related ape which tends to use oral sex as a greeting and fuck everything that moves, presumably because the authors had already ruled out the alternative hypothesis of “oral sex is fun.”
Anyway, following a very short questionnaire where they asked some dudes how hot their girlfriends were, and how hot other men found their girlfriends, whether their girlfriend came, and when they spaffed in relation to going down, the authors concluded that cunnilingus definitely didn’t evolve to keep the jizz in the right place. Therefore, they decided, it must be to stop cheating.
I promise I am not exaggerating this paper. This is a literal, actual paper which was literally, actually published in a literal, actual peer-reviewed journal. And if any of it is correct, I’m damn glad I’m not heterosexual, because their sex lives sound joyless.
Originally published at Sarah Brown's Blog. You can comment here or there.
I have been given to understand that the issue of the spousal veto in the Same Sex Marriage Bill is confusing to those not immersed in trans issues. I appreciate that, because if you don’t understand the processes we have to go through, then it’s not clear what is being vetoed and under what circumstances. I’ll attempt to explain. It’s long, but if you scroll to the bottom there is an executive summary.
Part 1: Corbett v Corbett
In 1970, the divorce of trans woman model, April Ashley and Arthur Corbett, later the 3rd Baron Rowallan, came before the court. In order to avoid giving up part of his substantial estate, Corbett’s team advanced the argument that the marriage was never valid in the first place, because April Ashley was really a man.
The judge agreed and thus set a precedent that meant that trans people were, from that point on, treated by the government as their birth sex forever for all sorts of legal reasons. This didn’t just affect marriage: it also affected stuff like employment protections, what prison you would be sent to if you were found guilty of an offence, and so on.
Prior to this, trans people had been applying for corrected birth certificates and getting them, effectively being recognised in their new gender. This practice ceased completely, and trans rights in the UK entered a dark age.
Part 2: The Gender Recognition Act
Fast forward 3 decades. The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that the government had to legislate to fix the unfairness inflicted upon trans people by the Corbett v Corbett ruling. The government kept dragging its heels, but in 2004 eventually passed the Gender Recognition Act. In a nutshell, the act did the following:
Never wanting anything to be simple, and demonstrating an enduring instinct for screwing trans people over, the civil service (via the government of the day) included a nasty little gotcha: you weren’t eligible for a GRC if you were married.
Of course, you didn’t have to apply for one, but if you didn’t, you didn’t get your rights back. To deal with this, the act created something called an “interim gender recognition certificate” (IGRC). The name is entirely misleading: it’s not a GRC, it doesn’t grant the same rights or anything. All it does is give you a cast-iron reason to initiate marriage annulment proceedings within the next 6 months, at which point the IGRC expires and you go back to stage 1.
If you complete annulment proceedings with an IGRC, you automatically get a GRC and new birth certificate. Anticipating the 2005 Civil Partnership Act, the Gender Recognition Act then allowed you to enter a civil partnership with your former spouse. 151 couples have since done this (I am part of one of them).
If you’ve seen trans people talking about the “confiscated marriages”, it’s those 151 marriages we are talking about, where we were essentially coerced into giving up our marriages to restore our rights.
Interlude: The Equality Act, 2010
In 2010, a year after my marriage was annulled, the Equality Act 2010 passed. This revoked the employment nondiscrimination protections granted by a Gender Recognition Certificate. Thanks guys, appreciate that.
Part 3: Same Sex Marriage Bill
The advent of same sex marriage brings an end to this coerced divorce, or rather it should, but the government and civil service have cocked it up.
Firstly, you still have to end your relationship if you are in a civil partnership, although you can convert it to a marriage first to avoid that.
Secondly, and more offensively, rather than just ending the requirement to be unmarried when you have a GRC awarded, the Same Sex Marriage Bill requires your spouse to consent to the granting of a GRC. This is significant because, despite being gutted somewhat by the 2010 Equality Act, GRCs still restore some rights (the ones we lost in 2010 we just stay without for good). If your spouse doesn’t consent, you get an IGRC instead, on the same terms as before: start to annul within 6 months of return to square one.
So basically, if your spouse can’t, or won’t sign the consent form, you have to divorce them to get your rights. This creates what is possibly the most passive-aggressive legally sanctioned way to initiate a divorce ever, i.e. “I don’t want to divorce you, but I’m going to veto your human rights until you divorce me”.
The government call this “both parties having a say in the future of their marriage”. What trans people call it isn’t actually printable, but in polite company we call it, “the Spousal Veto”.
Part 4: Lobbying
We don’t like the spousal veto. We really, really, don’t like it. Your spouse doesn’t get to veto your transition, your surgery, or anything else. They get to veto this though. In 2013, we are passing a law in the name of equality that makes the human rights of one party to a marriage the “gift” of the other.
So a bunch of us tried to get it changed. Much of the work around this has been done by a dozen-or-so people, including me. We wrote some amendments, which were submitted by my MP, Julian Huppert, aimed at restoring the stolen marriages and ending the spousal veto, amongst a couple of other things (one being that if your spouse discovers you’re trans and you can’t prove they knew before you married, they can have the marriage declared invalid. We aren’t all that keen on this either).
The amendments were rejected by the government at committee stage, so Julian put them again at Commons Report Stage, and gave what must rank amongst the best transgender-related speeches ever on the floor of the Commons.
And then an interesting thing happened: the minister in the Commons, Helen Grant, rejected the amendments using the exact same words that the civil servant responsible for drafting these bits of the bill had used when talking to our little bunch a few days earlier, when we met them in London.
It also became apparent to us that the veto had arisen on the basis of what sounded, when described, like the civil servants pretending they were married to trans people and writing into law what they would want for themselves.
The bill passed onto the Lords, with the veto intact. By now it had become apparent that the government would die in a ditch over not restoring the lost marriages, and I reluctantly gave up campaigning for their restoration to concentrate on the veto – the thing that we all agreed was the single most offensively transphobic provision in the Bill.
Part 5: Lords amendments
A number of us started talking to various Lib Dem and Labour peers, and it came to pass that while the government was adamant the veto needed to stay, they might be minded to give a bit of ground, and could we draft two amendments: what we wanted, and a compromise for if we couldn’t get it. This we did. The first amendment was no veto. The second was a veto, but if annulment proceedings hadn’t commenced (at the behest of either party) within 6 months, or a decree nisi hadn’t been issued within 12, the spouse lost the veto and gender recognition could go ahead.
Our compromise amendment was debated on the floor of the Lords, with brilliant speeches in support by Baroness Barker of the Lib Dems and Baroness Gould of Labour. The amendment was rejected.
This brings us close to the present day. There followed a flurry of desperate emails to try to salvage something. In the end, this week the government published an amendment. They were going to reintroduce the “Fast Track” for getting a GRC, but only for people who have been transitioned 6 years at the point the same sex marriage bill passes, and only if they’re married. The rationale is that some have waited, refusing to divorce, without their rights, and they might not be able to get the original diagnosis any more. These are couples who have put their commitment to their marriage over and above the human rights of one partner, in what must count as one of the strongest testaments to love that there is.
Oh, and by the way, there’s a spousal veto on this as well. Given what these marriages represent, the government could not have been more crassly offensive if they’d tried.
And that was the end of the battle, or so we believed, until out of the blue came the promise of another amendment, specifically to address the veto!
Part 6: The veto amendment
Here is what the government are proposing to do. Instead of saying you need signed spousal consent to get a GRC, otherwise you get an IGRC, they want to say that you need signed spousal consent for the marriage to continue.
As far as I can tell, this is a bit of legal manoeuvring. It seems that to address our objections that the consent is a veto over the issue of a GRC, the government are explicitly recasting it as permission to stay married.
Of course, if your spouse doesn’t grant that permission, you don’t get the GRC, just the same as before. It doesn’t actually change anything – the veto remains.
Summary
That was long, so I’ll summarise it in a TL;DR version.
#725, 26th August 1995
BOXING?
A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren.
Perhaps they had most at stake. It was, in a way, their last great fight. Many other moments define Oasis. Blur are best remembered for different songs. Britpop itself? Well, this was the high tide – probably the main reason Oasis even count – and the rivalry became an ongoing, rather tiresome, pop storyline for years after. But even then the battle is just one of a scrapbook of memories: Britpop had to be a thing already for this tussle to even matter.
The press, though – this is the climax of its 80s and 90s story, its turn away from other music to keep the indie flame burning, and how it saw its favourites gradually win over first the radio establishment, then a wider public. And look – here they are! Top of the charts, ma! Whoever wins, we won, is the NME’s message, but in that final ridiculous week the story had outgrown them. After Britpop, readers dwindled, and no new story emerged: the price of ‘we won’ turned out to be that there wasn’t a “we” anymore.
FOOTBALL?
The run-in, as I recall it. Oasis, releasing their second album, were a coronation away from being the biggest band in the country. Blur, veterans on their fourth, were returning conquerors, Parklife having defined them (and their genre) in the record-buying eye. Singles release dates at first didn’t sync, then did. Alan McGee at Creation refused to blink. The nation held its breath – or ignored all this entirely.
But just as Cup Finals and Playoffs can be disappointing, cagey affairs, so the Battle Of Britpop played out more warily than it might have. Oasis, it would become apparent, had left commercially far stronger singles than “Roll With It” on the bench – the track doesn’t even show up on their Noel-picked Greatest Hits. Blur didn’t – there are better songs on The Great Escape than this, but “Country House” is one of the few that gets in your face enough to do this job.
WRESTLING?
It’s also a honking, parping pantomime. Both bands played up to their image: if you’d written the whole thing as a TV drama and had to fake up convincing singles, you might have ended up with songs rather like “Country House” and “Roll With It”. Blur could be tough to pin down, but “Country House” gave the public more of what they’d already rewarded from the group – uptempo, brash songs with a bit of satire on top. It’s a bustling, dense song – fun-packed and glassy-eyed, with desperation never far away: that niggling two-note phrase cycling under the final choruses, for instance. It pushes catchiness into exhaustion, mirroring the breakdown of its lead character. My first thought is it’s trying too hard, then I realise that’s the point, then I think it’s trying too hard to make that the point. Then I want it to stop. Then I end up playing it again. The grotesque, much pilloried video only adds to the headaches. Modern life is, as they say, rubbish. But were Blur – was this whole stunt? – criticising it, reflecting it, or making it worse?
ADVERTISING?
In the context of The Great Escape, Country House fits nicely: the album is full of brittle people, awful lives, and melancholy just under the skin. It’s an honest taster – as is “Roll With It”: Oasis at this point met expectations, good and bad. These singles were advertising more than just their LPs, though. To the new establishment at Radio 1 – who grabbed the Britpop battle baton enthusiastically from the NME et al – they were a vindication of controller Matthew Bannister’s brutal repositioning.
Bannister inherited a station listened to by about 20 million people, but the audience skewed too old – his vision, backed up by multiple moody, black-and-white promo vids, was of a station where credible presenters would play credible music to a credible audience. It’s a vision that’s endured ever since – shifting Radio 1’s role away from mirror of pop and towards its mentor. In 1995, though, with ratings collapsed and tabloids circling, Bannister needed a win: the Britpop battle gave him one, putting the spotlight on exactly the music his ideal audience segment loved.
In a sense he was lucky, but the showdown couldn’t even have happened a few years prior. “Chart battles” – we’ll see a fair few more – were a creature of the new age of first-week sales spikes: the winner was guaranteed a number one. If this was, as some said, the first time in ages the charts had mattered, they were mattering in quite new ways.
SEALED KNOT HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENT?
The retro angle is something of a red herring in the music, too. Blur had influences, as obvious as their rivals’ – the “Country House” lytic is Kinksy, there’s plenty of Langer and Winstanley’s 80s sound in the horns, other tracks on the album nodded to Numan and XTC – but neither they or Oasis ever really sounded like anyone but themselves. As with Oasis, the voice played a huge part: Albarn’s distinctive, stylised singing could flip from naughty choirboy to music-hall rabble rouser with ease, but whoever he played you could spot him immediately (“..inna cun-TREE” could be nobody else). Most of his styles, to be honest, set my teeth on edge: there’s an ironic, above-it-all veneer to his vocals which seemed to begin as strategy on their early records and settle into habit. If I often end up buying Albarn’s melancholy anyway, it’s because he can be a great melodist, not really because of his singing or delivery.
PLAYGROUND SCRAP? CLASS WAR?
On “Country House”, Albarn’s not really trying to be sensitive – it’s one of his occasional character songs, indulging a taste for social observation. It’s about a guy retreating to the country because he’s going through some kind of crisis and either having or faking a breakdown – but the music does a much better job of capturing this chap than the words. Take, for instance, the Balzac/Prozac bit. It was approvingly quoted, apparently evidence Blur were The Clever Ones in this schoolyard swots v jocks fight – but it feels very rhyme-first, with “Woah, it’s the century’s remedy” clunking in to hammer home how zeitgeisty Blur are being. An unfair comparison perhaps, but on “Sunny Afternoon” Ray Davies becomes his character and the music becomes his world, and so the listener gets inside it too. The geezer in “Country House” is caricature – the one stab at any kind of inner life that mocking “I am so sad, I don’t know why” refrain.
(Meanwhile, over on the other channel, Noel’s “I think I’m gonna take me away and hide / I’m thinking things that I just can’t abide” is a good summary of depressive self-hatred. Liam then sings it in the same surly monotone the rest of “Roll With It” stews in.)
So there’s no empathy in “Country House”, just observation, and bald observation at that. Just as on “Parklife” and much of “Girls And Boys”, Albarn does comic journalism, not storytelling: he’s the Peter York of pop, the songwriting equivalent of jokey pen-portraits of “social tribes” in a Sunday supplement. If the bands’ backgrounds made it easier to overlay unhelpful North v South, Working v Middle Class conflicts on Oasis v Blur, this kind of thing helped the charges linger.
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC, MAN?
Both singles are rescued by their guitarists. Where on “Some Might Say”, Liam bossed the song, he’s flatter on “Roll With It” and the wall of sound has to put in serious work to stop the song becoming a complete trudge. On “Country House”, meanwhile, Graham Coxon puts down a delightful Christ-Are-Pavement-Hiring? guitar solo that’s as endearing as the rest of the track put together.
BALD MAN COMBFIGHT?
The standard anti-Britpop line – the what about Goldie argument, you might call it – hardened quickly during 1995. Why were we paying attention to this charade when there was so much more interesting things happening? How could these throwbacks represent the real, multicultural Britain? I subscribed to this thinking myself, and the “Battle” fuelled it – on paper the idea of Britain’s indie bands straining muscle and sinew to create amazing pop singles was seductive, but if these two weakling, just-about-OK records were the result, the idea was a bust.
Since then I’ve softened. For one thing both “Country House” and “Roll With It” sound a bit better than they did. But also the effects on British indie music, let alone British pop, weren’t nearly as deadening as they seemed at the time. This isn’t as good as Britpop got, but it was as big as Britpop got as a pop event. The noise died down and the charts went on their merry – and increasingly diverse – way.
POSTERITY?
So who won? Oasis won the war and conquered the country. The NME won a last chance to set the agenda. Radio 1 won time to finish its credibility revolution. Graham Coxon, as it later turned out, won a musical argument. And Blur won the Battle of Britpop. Which was just about fair, because of all the records by all the big Britpop bands, none strained so hard to sound like Britpop as “Country House”.
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| Shame I already used "I got your gun". |
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| Figure 17: The working class neighborhood of Northampton Alan Moore grew up in was called The Boroughs |
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| Figure 18: Heroin |
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| Figure 19: The first Jerry Cornelius book remained vaguely in the realm of the normal |
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| Figure 20: Michael Moorcock contributed plotting to the 1972 issue of Conan the Barbarian in which Conan met his literary inversion Elric of Melniboné, which was written for Marvel Comics by Roy Thomas. From Conan the Barbarian #14, 1972 |
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| Figure 21: Text as visual object in A Cure for Cancer, 1969 |
“You can’t tell me this shit can’t get done without people beatin’ on each other, killin’ each other, doin’ each other like dogs — and without all that, you ain’t got Five-0 down here on our backs every five minutes, throwin’ us around and shit. You think Five-0 care about niggas gettin’ high? In the projects? Man, Five-0 be down here about the bodies, yo. That’s what they be down here about. The bodies.”
D’Angelo Barksdale, as was all too common to his tragic character on The Wire, was right, but he was also wrong. Here, he was framing a question that’s quite familiar to anyone who has looked at crime from the outside: why is there so much violence involved, even in crimes that can be committed without violence such as theft, fraud and the narcotics trade? Why is it that, both in real-life crimes and the popular culture they inspire, the endgame so often involves a bloody death — more often than not at the hands of one’s own? There is no end to the speculation: most commonly, prior to the reform movements of the late 19th century, the answer was that criminals were simply a different breed than ‘normal’ people, a “superstitious and cowardly lot” who were prone to violence the same way that koalas are prone to eating eucalyptus leaves.
But this is an outsider’s view, and one of the reasons D’Angelo gets it wrong is because he is an outsider to the straight world just as much as people in the straight world are outsiders to his. He speculates that every other kind of business gets done without cheating, lying, and double-dealing, but this is a mistake. It is not that other businesses, many of which gather profits that make his uncle Avon’s drug empire look like the puny provincial enterprise that it is, do not engage in underhanded play; it is that their operations sport the imprimatur of the law, and the stakes for misbehavior are generally quite low. In all of the shadowy business engaged in over the last few decades by bankers, realtors, financiers, and corporate mavens — business which has resulted in the theft of mega-billions, the crippling of the global economy, and, yes, plenty of bodies — you could count the number of people who have gone to jail on one hand, and have plenty of fingers left over to count the people who were subsequently pardoned or released.
It is the law that criminals fear. In the great dichotomy of crime and punishment, the criminal fears punishment as much as the solid citizen fears crime, and perhaps even more so, because the average person may go his whole life without being the victim of a major crime, but almost every criminal will sometimes have to face the weight of the law. It can even be said, and often has been, that the only reason there is crime is because there is punishment. The most serious consequence of the drug war isn’t the effect of narcotics on their users; it is the ruinous consequences of the illegality of those narcotics. Just as homosexuality would not exist without homophobia, crime would not exist without punishment, and on the endless list of ways humans have developed to ruin each other’s lives, imprisonment ranks very near the top.
So pervasive is the fear of prison that it acts as a deterrent if not a reformer. Most of us are too paralyzed by the fear of jail to even attempt the pettiest of crimes. The bar for entry into the criminal fraternity is staggeringly low; it needs only the willingness to overcome that fear. People who are good at violence are usually no bigger, no stronger, no better trained than anyone else; their greatest possession is the will to fight, and to ignore the consequences. So too with crime. Once the decision has been made, though, the threat is always and forever there, to the extent that getting away with one’s crime is only half the accomplishment. One can rob a bank, can deal drugs, can steal a car or loot a home, and long after the money is pocketed and spent, there is the knowledge that someone is still looking for you, someone still wants to punish you, that keeps you forever in the shadows. Malcolm X, who knew a thing or two about the subject, said that to have been a criminal once is no disgrace; the disgrace is in remaining a criminal. But not everyone can find Brother Malcolm’s escape route, and the criminal mentality stays ingrained in every function of a man until the threat of punishment has vanished.
The portrayals of crime in popular fiction, as in reality, deal with the stakes in different ways. In Richard Stark’s Parker novels, which largely concern themselves with the mechanical plotting of a crime and the audacious and perilous ways in which those plots are carried out, the law is almost entirely invisible; it is an omnipresent threat, but even when everything falls apart, the police are almost never seen or heard. It is understood that the economic, physical, and psychological annihilation represented by a prison term is a fate so unthinkable that any sensible criminal would do whatever necessary to avoid it. In The Sopranos, we see the authorities a bit more, but because we are still forced into an authorial perspective largely lensed through the criminal element, they tend to represent a potentiality rather than a reality. We are, however, made much more keenly aware of what prison represents (no one, from Tony Blundetto to Richie Aprile, emerges unscathed), and how the high-stakes penalties for drug crimes have done to the concepts of loyalty and and the code of silence. Here we get frighteningly close to the reality of why crime is so pervasively violent: though the penalty for squealing can be death, the costs of decades of imprisonment are equally ruinous. Anyone facing arrest must now roll a dangerous pair of dice, with murder, endless jail time, or a life of looking over one’s shoulder are the only outcomes.
On The Wire, we see the police constantly; freed from a narrow perspective and allowed a bird’s-eye view of the interconnectedness of the entire stable of actors, we can see it all. We learn that the men at the top, the ones with the most to lose financially, are the ones who order death for their underlings as the price of betrayal; we learn that the law enforcement community, seeing this same betrayal as their only shot at punishing the men at the top, shamelessly manipulate the people they arrest into becoming informers with hollow threats, empty bribes, and all manner of chicanery; and we learn that for the bottom-rungers, there was never any more hope for them in the game than there was out of it. The takings were low — just enough for new clothes and a place to stay, never the glittering prizes of the higher-ups — and the stakes were high.
Even a successful criminal enterprise is fraught with peril, with the fear of jail driving an easy casualness about death. Two of the most lucrative robberies in American history, the Air France robbery of 1967 and the Lufthansa heist of 1978, were both carried out by the same crew (including Jimmy Burke and Henry Hill); both, as depicted with some accuracy in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, were enormously successful and dazzlingly popular. If any crime should have resulted in exultation instead of bloodshed, it should have been the Lufthansa heist. But its very success was the reason for its bloody aftermath; the take was so much greater than originally anticipated (it netted the equivalent of $20 million in today’s dollars), Burke immediately realized that it would draw all the more police attention, and that its perpetrators, including himself, would face all the more prison time. Determined not to let that happen, he began systematically eliminating everyone involved who might possibly talk to the police; a robbery that went off without a single shot being fired ended with nine people murdered, all for fear of the law.
Still, for all the devastating effects of jail (which one only need look at the state of our African-American population, disproportionately punished beyond reason by the blind brutalities of the system, to see the consequences of), it is not this fear alone that can fully explain the tendency towards violence in the criminal community. Many newer, leaner, younger manifestations of organized crime, indeed, never developed the taste for legitimacy and bourgeoisie contentment cultivated by their more mainstreamed forebears. Black and Latino street gangs, in particular, have made prison life contiguous with their criminal activities; inside as well as out, they keep the business running, dispense judgment and issue commands, and viciously patrol their turf. For them, crime is an atmosphere, not a means to an end, and doing a stretch does little to interrupt the course of their lives. That this does not in any way lessen, and in fact exacerbates, their tendency towards violent punishment for going against the gang will be the subject of our next installment: crime as a tribal institution, and the quest for ‘respect’ and its relationship to violence.
Andrew HickeyThis is a conversation I've been having more and more...
In honor of the 4th of July, this week's Asking the Wrong Guy, is a special all UK edition, because that makes sense!
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RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. . . .[RSS is what creates a website’s feed.]
That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.
Well, fuck them, and fuck that.
