Andrew Hickey

The logic for South Carolina Republicans is simple. They are afraid of refugees — full-gonzo terrified in a spineless, flailing panic. And yet church groups in the state are doing what church groups have done for most of the past century: Sponsoring and assisting and welcoming refugees. Therefore, South Carolina Republicans are going after those churches: “South Carolina Wants Faith Groups to Be Liable if Refugees They Support Commit a Crime.”

Republican lawmakers in South Carolina have tried hard to set an example of inhospitality and craven selfishness. “We’ve got to choose our own citizens over those who are not citizens of our country,” said state Sen. Kevin Bryant. But failing by example and preaching the virtues of viciousness haven’t been enough to convince everyone in South Carolina to turn their backs on desperate families fleeing horrific violence.

So now Bryant and his Republican colleagues hope to force others to comply by threatening them with legal and financial punishments for practicing hospitality.

The bill, which passed by the South Carolina state senate this week in a 39-6 vote, is split into two sections. The first would require the “sponsor” of a refugee — or the group helping them resettle in the state — to register them in database operated by the South Carolina Department of Social Services and available only to law enforcement. But it’s the second provision that has Palmetto State faith leaders particularly up in arms: the proposed law would make sponsors — most of whom are religious institutions — legally liable for any and all crimes committed by the refugee.

“A refugee’s sponsor shall be strictly liable to a person if…the refugee acted in a reckless, willful, or grossly negligent manner, committed an act of terrorism as defined by Section 16-23-710(18), or committed one of the violent crimes defined in Section 16-1-60, that resulted in physical harm or injury to a person or damage to or theft of real or personal property,” the bill reads.

As Sarah Posner explains, this “strict liability” provision is both sweeping and vague:

[The bill] would hold any refugee sponsor strictly liable if the refugee at some point in the future “acted in a reckless, willful, or grossly negligent manner, committed an act of terrorism” or a violent crime “that resulted in physical harm or injury to a person or damage to or theft of real or personal property.” They would be required under the bill to pay civil damages to anyone injured by such an act, apparently committed at any time in the future, by a refugee. … The adoption of the strict liability standard, which would impose liability without a finding of fault, has alarmed refugee advocates, who also say it is unclear whether churches who co-sponsor a refugee would be held liable under the bill.

The word “unclear” there doesn’t refer to any ambiguity about the bill’s content, intent, effect or implications. When they “say it is unclear whether churches who co-sponsor a refugee would be held liable,” what they’re saying is that these cowardly assholes in the South Carolina GOP couldn’t really possibly mean what they’re saying, could they?

Alas, this is not actually unclear. They do mean it. They are voting for it. And Republican Gov. Nikki Haley is likely to sign it into law. Even worse, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant Republicans in other states are already looking to this bill as a model, considering similar legislation in their states as well.

Churches and church-based refugee-sponsorship agencies are, understandably, denouncing this bill. They know refugees, so they’re not worried that these desperate families seeking a new, safer life are going to suddenly start going on violent rampages for which their sponsors will be held criminally and legally liable. And unlike the panicky anti-refugee Republican legislators, they know that refugees face an intense, in-depth screening process that takes years — so they’re not stupidly worried that terrorists are trying to sneak into America by posing as refugees.

But that’s not the point. This liability provision isn’t mainly about actual penalties, but about the threat of penalties. It’s an open-ended threat meant to intimidate churches and other would-be sponsors into turning their backs on refugees. If any of those refugees, ever, at any time in the future, commits a violent crime, or is accused of a violent crime, or of negligence, then that might be the end of your church.

That threat never actually needs to be carried out to have a big effect on reducing the number of churches or other groups willing to sacrifice their time and resources to resettle refugees.

“I fear this may be the start of similar nationwide legislation,” said Jenny Yang, vice president of advocacy and policy at World Relief, an evangelical humanitarian nonprofit group that helps resettle refugees who have been vetted and approved under a federal program run by the State Department.

… Yang called the bill “wrongheaded,” “grotesque” and “anti-faith” and said World Relief worries that if passed, the bill would “infringe on our ability to carry out our mission, which is a matter of carrying out our faith and practicing our religion, to help people who are vulnerable.”

World Relief is an evangelical para-church group, but they’re not a bunch of religious-right culture-war fundraisers prone to this kind of language. They don’t use words like “grotesque” and “anti-faith” lightly. They’re using them, in this case, because they are accurate and necessary. This is a bill that is designed and intended to threaten churches with criminal and financial penalties.

This is an anti-faith, anti-church bill being sponsored, championed and passed by the very sort of South Carolina Republican lawmakers who posture as good, godly defenders of church and faith and family. Jack Jenkins underscores that irony:

All of the bill’s sponsors are Republicans, and all claim to be various flavors of evangelical or conservative Christians. … Yet the bill stands in stark contrast to the position of numerous influential theological conservatives: in December, a group of more than 100 evangelical Christian leaders signed a declaration calling for churches to embrace Syrian refugees, arguing that, “as Christians, we must care sacrificially for the refugee, the foreigner, and the stranger.” Signers included … two pastors from South Carolina … as well as the Urban Resource Coordinator for the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary — where State Senator Lee Bright, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, is said to serve on the Board of Visitors.

The current wave of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee sentiment in the Republican Party exposes the hypocrisy of the vapid “religious liberty” sloganeering that has arisen in recent years. Here is a piece of legislation that deliberately threatens the religious liberty of churches and church groups in South Carolina, but it doesn’t fit into the partisan myth-making that slogan was designed to promote. Hucksters of imaginary persecution — people like Todd Starnes or the various other Hobby Lobbyists — are going to find it hard to continue milking that shtick as anti-immigrant and anti-refugee Republican lawmakers get more aggressive in trying to tell refugee-sponsoring churches what they’re not allowed to do.

The [South Carolina] debate is the latest in an increasingly contentious national standoff between Republican lawmakers who oppose the resettlement of Syrian refugees and faith-based groups that are both deeply supportive of their plight and often tasked with the work of helping them build a new life in the United States. In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to “refuse to cooperate” with religious organizations that settle refugees in the Lone Star State, but most of the faith groups vowed to defy him and settle them anyway.

We’re going to be seeing more and more of that clash: Anti-immigrant Republican lawmakers vs. faith-based groups sponsoring refugees. Republicans vs. Southern Baptists. Republicans vs. white evangelicals. Republicans vs. Catholics. (And Republicans vs. main line Protestants, too, although that’s not a new development.)

These church groups — including many white evangelicals and Southern Baptists — have been involved with refugee sponsorship for a long time and they take it seriously. Before World Relief emerged as an evangelical alternative, many evangelical and fundamentalist churches who might otherwise have had nothing to do with the ecumenical denominations of the National Council of Churches were willing to set that aside to work with Church World Service. I went to school with fundie kids — like, Bob Jones fundie — who participated in CROP walks for CWS. The fundamentalist Baptist church I grew up attending sponsored, housed, and furnished refugee families and that was a point of pride, not of controversy. Thousands of Southern Baptist congregations have long supported refugee resettlement as a necessary corollary to their support for international missions (“the mission field is coming to us”).

Refugee resettlement, of course, is not exclusively the work of church groups. Those agencies — World Relief and Lutheran Services Carolinas in particular — are doing most of the heavy lifting in South Carolina, and thus bear most of the brunt of S.C. Republicans’ anti-refugee legislation. But anybody — secular, religious, whatever — can do this work. Refugees can be sponsored and supported by Rotary clubs or Girl Scout troops, by local businesses, or unions, or Facebook friends. Hospitality and neighborliness is not a sectarian practice.

Increasingly, though, hospitality and neighborliness are becoming a partisan practice. And that’s not a healthy development.

 

Yesterday, Republican front-runner Donald Trump fumbled and stumbled when asked a basic question about abortion policy. He was not prepared for that question and he did not know the Standard Answer.

But the Standard Answer that Donald Trump did not know, and thus could not give, isn’t really an answer at all. It’s an evasion — a practiced, polished bit of Luntzian semantic gymnastics. And the purpose of this Standard Answer has never been to provide the questioner with a satisfactory response. The purpose, rather, is to reassure the answerer that some Standard Answer exists and that the answerer doesn’t need to be troubled by the question or to give it any further thought or to worry that it might raise any significant matters that the answerer needs to consider.

In a sense then, Donald Trump didn’t need the Standard Answer. He was already there. The Standard Answer’s function of reassuring self-deception and reinforcing mental complacency is simply redundant when applied to a person like Donald Trump.

Back when I was a pro-lifer, I needed the Standard Answer. It kept me from flailing like the poor folks in Lee Goodman’s 2007 video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was a teenager, my white evangelical tradition suddenly adopted and began enforcing a new essential dogma of anti-abortionism. I was a good student. I was wholly, loyally, and enthusiastically on-board with the new program and could recite our new catechism without flaw and without fail.

So I knew the Standard Answer that Donald Trump tripped over yesterday, and I recited it automatically whenever I was asked the question he was asked: “If abortion is illegal, do you think women who have abortions should be punished?”

The Standard Answer is this: “Of course no one is talking about putting women in jail. No one has ever said that’s what should be done. We would only punish the abortionists, not the women.”

The substance of the Standard Answer comes last because the substantial aspect — punish doctors, not women — isn’t coherent enough to bear the weight of a satisfactory answer. The load-bearing work is done prior to that insubstantial substance. The key component is the dismissive tone — all that “of course” and “no one is saying …” business that denies the legitimacy of the question and thus denies that any response needs to be substantial or logical or coherent. The boldness of this evasion is softened and diffused by the move from singular to plural and from the particular to a vague, undifferentiated “we.”

The Standard Answer, in other words, avoids engaging the question as “What do I think” by shifting the response to “What we say/think/believe is …” This may seem unimportant to the questioner, but it is vitally important to the answerer because, again, this is the primary function of the Standard Answer: reassuring oneself that an answer exists and that “we” have one, and that therefore I do not need to worry about it any further.

Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-abortion lobby Susan B. Anthony List demonstrated this function of the question today with a bravura recitation of the Standard Answer on NPR’s Morning Edition:

The pro-life movement has never, for a very good reason, promoted the idea that we punish women. In fact, we believe that women are being punished before the abortion ever occurs. In other words, the early feminists believed this was the ultimate exploitation of women.

The real earliest roots of feminism and the women’s movement really embraced the idea that her innermost soul, in Susan B. Anthony’s words, recoil from the dreadful deed, but thrice guilty is the one who drove her to the deed. And who is that? It’s the abortionist. And that who — is who is the one to be punished when there’s a law against abortion.

That rhetorical flourish of the Susan B. Anthony quote garbles Dannenfelser’s response a bit, since Anthony’s reference to “the one who drove her to the deed” has nothing to do with the doctor* performing the procedure.

But apart from that, Dannenfelser sticks to the script and includes all the key aspects of the Standard Answer. She begins with the shift from the individual and particular to the plurally vague. She insists that this vague plural has never, ever suggested anything like the idea that it wants women to be punished for doing something “we” want to be against the law. And she trails off at the end with the suggestion that this needn’t be explored further since all anyone wants to do is maybe put some evil abortionizers behind bars.

I relied on the Standard Answer when I was a good, faithful pro-lifer. It made the question go away, just as it was meant to do. The Standard Answer worked very well for me until one day, suddenly, it didn’t.

It stopped working for me because, alas, I started listening to what I was saying. I started hearing the way I was leaning so heavily on those introductory denials that of course no one should ever suggest that we had ever suggested any such thing as to suggest that … And I started wondering why this insistence needed to be so insistent.

Obviously, I understood why this question arose so often and why we needed to be prepared to respond with the Standard Answer. About one in three American women will have an abortion. I wanted abortion to be illegal. I argued that it was already a crime in the eyes of God — a crime morally indistinct from murder. So logically, if one in three American women was committing a crime, it would make sense that a third of American women should be punished as criminals. And if these women were hiring evil baby-killing abortionists to commit murder on their behalf, it does seem kind of odd to say that this premeditated crime wasn’t deserving of punishment.

But I urgently wanted to ensure that no one thought I was arguing for the imprisonment of women because of two reasons. First, I did not want my questioners to think that I (or “we”) wanted to see those women imprisoned because I realized that criminalizing those women would make my/our political goal of criminalizing abortion more difficult to achieve.** That motivation for the Standard Answer involved some unprincipled calculation, and it was unpleasant to realize that such calculation was a factor in my argument — an argument that I had been taught to believe was based wholly in our superior moral worldview.

That was unsettling, but not as unsettling as the second reason my invocation of the Standard Answer was so insistent. I did not want my questioners to think that I wanted to see these women punished because I genuinely did not want to see them punished. At some basic level — some level at which I had not yet allowed myself to articulate my own thoughts to myself — I did not think that punishing these women would be good, fair, right, necessary or just. I thought punishing these women would be wrong.

Why would I think that? Well, that was the question that the Standard Answer was designed and employed to prevent me from ever asking of myself. I had been trained and catechized to defend against ever thinking about that, but it turns out that not thinking about questions is trickier than it might seem.

What this meant for me, as you know if you’ve read this site before, is that I came to realize I was incapable of defending the central dogma of the anti-abortion religion my people had adopted as the central pillar of our faith — that a fertilized egg is morally and legally indistinct from a human child or a human adult. If that claim were defensible, then I would have no reason not to want to see those women punished and no reason not to try to convince others that they also should want to see those women punished.

Please note what I’m not saying here. I’m not saying I became incapable of believing this claim about the full personhood of the zygote, but that I became incapable of defending it. I’m not sure that anyone is ever capable of believing this claim. Defending it is the closest we can manage to that. Aggressively defending the claim can, over time, come to seem like almost the same thing, but it’s not.

One cannot ever lose one’s conviction of this claim because this claim was never a matter of conviction. It was always a matter of simplicity, and of the clarity that can be enjoyed and indulged thanks to that simplicity. The performance of conviction defends the simplicity, but the simplicity is always the essential thing — the dear thing desired most. That this simplicity is an illusion — a known or, at least, dimly suspected falsehood — doesn’t make it less attractive. That only means that the performance — the defending — needs to be ever-more emphatic, louder, and more categorical.

The Standard Answer is not really an answer at all. It was never supposed to be one. It’s purpose is mainly to give us something we can shout so loudly that we don’t have to hear ourselves think.

– – – – – – – – – – –

* Note: Never say “doctor.” Always say “abortionist.” This is very important. The word “doctor” has too many favorable connotations and implications.

Most importantly, allowing that word to be spoken exposes the absurdity of the central assertion that abortion is a supply-driven phenomenon — an unwanted, unneeded thing pushed onto women by the abortionists of the abortion industry. This idea falls apart when we allow the word “doctor” to be used because thinking of doctors as supply-driven pushers of health care quickly becomes laughable and puts us in the position of arguing, essentially, that if we just closed all the hospitals then there would be no sickness or injury. 

The Standard Answer depends on this supply-side argument. “No one is saying we want to put millions of women in prison. What we’ve always said, rather, is that we want to put tens of thousands of doctors in prison” only makes sense if those doctors are the cause of the problem and bear primary responsibility for the crime. So never say “doctor.” Always say “abortionist.” 

** The Standard Answer is also inaccurate. It’s not, in fact, true. “The pro-life movement” has, in fact, advocated the punishment of women. And it is now — at this very moment — advocating that more women be punished more severely. “No one wants to punish women”? Really? Ask Rennie Gibbs and Purvi Patel and Amanda Kimbrough, Nina Buckhalter, Melissa Ann Rowland, Bei Bei Shuai, or any of the other women charged, prosecuted or imprisoned for murder or feticide or “fetal harm.”

The Standard Answer is a lie. And the anti-abortion activists yesterday rushing to clarify that Donald Trump wasn’t speaking for them because Standard Answer — they were, in fact, lying.

It's March 31st, not April 1st, so I can see no justification for the news being this weird: Ha'arez is reporting that Otto Skorzeney worked as a hit-man for Mossad in the 1960s, Microsoft just announced full native Ubuntu Linux support on Windows 10, and SCO are appealing against the IBM verdict again ...

... Oh, wait: this is a leap year. Stand down, false alarm.

(What utterly surreal symptoms of the Crazy Years have you stubbed your toes on this week—other than Donald Trump, of course?)

Last night, DC Entertainment threw a big birthday party in New York for Al Jaffee, who is 95 years old. Of course, if you fold-in that number, he's only 14…or about the mental age you need to be a successful cartoonist. Al — who still creates his Fold-In page each month for MAD and does other things as well — is a successful cartoonist and has been for a long time.

How long? Well, a highlight of last night's celebration was this announcement: The folks who compile the Guinness Book of World Records have now certified Al as the record holder for the longest career as a professional comics artist. It's 73 years and 3 months…and it grows greater with each passing day.

This certification was the result of extensive research into Al's long time at the drawing table, plus statements of support from prominent experts in the field, myself included. I wish I could have been there last night but I am annoyingly proud to have helped make that recognition possible.

The room at Sardi's was packed with Al's friends and co-workers, plus New York City Major Bill de Blasio was there to officially declare March 30th, 2016 as Al Jaffee Day in New York. I hope they had the decency to close the banks and have a big parade with everyone yelling out Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. You can see photos of the event over at Tom Richmond's site.

The post Record Folder appeared first on News From ME.

[Content warning: mental illness, forced institutionalization, anorexia. As always all patient anecdotes are obfuscated composites of multiple cases with all the details changed in order to protect people’s privacy]

I.

After I wrote about Prison And Mental Illness, a reader recommended I read My Brother Ron by Clayton Cramer, a recent book/memoir arguing against deinstitutionalization. Cramer tells the story of his schizophrenic brother Ron, who was poorly treated because of the lack of an institutional system and so ended up dealing with homelessness and violence, then surveys the history and current state of mental health care in America and the various reasons why deinstitutionalization was a bad idea.

I found the book interesting and engaging, and its arguments intellectually honest and well-written. But in the end I just wasn’t convinced.

But first, his brother Ron. Smart guy, joined the military, did well, finished his tour of duty, went to college, studied electrical engineering. Around 22 – the usual age for this to happen – he started acting weird, dropped out of college, obsessed over weird things like nickels, started thinking random people were plotting against him, et cetera. He ended up in a psych hospital where he got Thorazine and improved quickly – which meant, ironically, that when it came time for his commitment hearing two weeks later, the judge thought he looked pretty normal and released him.

Then he went to live with his family – including his brother the author – where he stopped his medication, started acting violently, smashed windows, screamed at people, and was otherwise a poor housemate. His parents asked him to leave, and he wandered around until he ended up in Santa Monica. There the government gave him a monthly disability check, which he spent on alcohol and a room in a disgusting hotel; when the money ran out around the middle of the month, he spent the next few weeks on the street until he got his next check, after which the cycle repeated itself.

Every so often he would break some law or annoy somebody enough to get arrested, at which point the police would bring him to a psychiatric hospital, he’d be placed on drugs, and he’d get better. Usually he’d leave after a few days to a few weeks. Occasionally he would keep taking the drugs after getting out, become pretty with-it, and try to go back to college. Sometimes he’d stay stable for months, even a year or two. But eventually he would stop taking the drugs for one reason or another, decompensate, and end up back on the streets, his previous progress ruined.

So the author asks: how did we get to this point? He answers with a fascinating history of American mental health care.

II.

Mental health care during the colonial era was surprisingly non-terrible. Mental illness seemed to be pretty well-understood and nobody was accusing psychotics of being witches or trying to beat the demons out of them or anything. Most of the mentally ill lived with families or in their own houses, where other members of the community supported them as best they could. Some were given jobs, with the understanding that they needed the support and their idiosyncrasies would be excused. Some would wander off, and there was a general understanding among colonial towns that if they found a mentally ill person wandering they would return them to their town of origin, who had the ultimate responsibility of caring for them. A few very violent people were locked away, usually in the basements of general hospitals or in prison cells. Getting somebody committed for mental illness was an informal process usually involving finding the friendly local magistrate and explaining why it was a good idea. But this option seems to have been used judiciously, and the incarcerated individuals managed to avoid most abuse and torture. Cramer describes it as “gloriously idyllic…mental illness appears to have been rare, and small town life tolerated all but the ‘furiously mad’ to live in the community.”

The part I found most interesting here was Cramer’s theory about why this system ended. Part of it was the end of small town life; a little village where all the families know each other is more likely to tolerate someone’s eccentricities than a large city of atomized individuals. But a bigger part may have been an unmanageable increase in the mentally ill population.

Urbanization may not simply have been a factor in making Americans more wary of their mentally ill neighbors; it may have increased mental illness rates as well. While we do not know if this was true in the eighteenth century, some recent studies suggest that being born or growing up in an urban area increases one’s risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses. in the twentieth century, comparison of insanity rates revealed that urban areas had much higher rates of mental hospital admissions for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – almost twice as high for New York City compared to the rest of New York State…older statistical examinations of mental hospital admissions argue that at least in the period from 1840 to 1940, while mental hospitalizations increased (because of increased availability) there was no large and obvious increase in insanity. A more recent study of mental illness data shows, much more persuasively, that psychosis rates rose quite dramatically between 1807 and 1961 in the United States, England and Wales, Ireland, and the Canadian Atlantic provinces. A study of Buckinghamshire, England shows more than a ten-fold increase in psychosis rates from the beginning of the seventeenth century to 1986. In 1764, Thomas Hancock left 600 pounds to the City of Boston to build a mental hospital for the inhabitants of Massachusetts. The city declined to accept the gift on the grounds that there were not enough insane persons to justify building such a facility. Massachusetts had a population between 188,000 and 235,000 in 1764; if the population of the time suffered the same schizophrenia rates as today, that would mean that there were about 2000 schizophrenics in the province. Even accounting for the greater tolerance of small town life for the mentally ill, this lends credence to Torrey and Miller’s claim of rising psychosis rates. Urban life today is not the same as urban life then, and even the scale of what constitutes “urban” is dramatically different – but it is an intriguing possibility that the increased rates of mental illness at the close of the Colonial period were the results of urbanization.

Irish immigration may also have played a role in the increasing development of mental hospitals in America. It was widely believed in the 1830s that Irish immigrants were disproportionately present among the insane. More recent analysis shows that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ireland’s rates of insanity were twice or more than that of the United States, England, and Wales. Irish immigrants were also overrepresented in insane asylums in the United States, England, Australia and Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.

To this I would add that even today immigrants get schizophrenia at rates up to four times those of non-immigrant populations, though nobody agrees whether this is because the genetically vulnerable are more likely to immigrate or because immigration is a very stressful experience. Even today, developing countries seem to have less schizophrenia than developed countries do (although of course this is hard to prove with certainty). The idea of a tenfold increase in psychosis over the past few centuries is jarring but not entirely outlandish, and does a lot to explain why the mental health system is so much larger and more relevant now.

Faced with these problems, the early Americans created big mental institutions that attracted prestigious clinicians (I interviewed for a job at one of these a few years ago; they boasted that they were in the “Psychiatric Ivy League”, which was a pretty good window into how they thought of themselves). These could never really figure out whether their job was custodial (ie warehouse mentally ill people so they didn’t cause trouble on the streets) or clinical (treat mentally ill people and cure their psychosis), and the nineteenth century vacillated wildly between people making big claims about how they were dedicated to treating all their patients, versus admitting that it was the nineteenth century and nobody had the slightest idea how to do this. While they argued the institutions grew and grew. Along with the schizophrenics, they became the dumping ground for syphilitics (remember, before penicillin syphilis was a common incurable disease that usually caused insanity in its final stages) and old people with Alzheimers (not officially recognized at this point; before the invention of nursing homes they figured they might as well stick crazy old people in with all the other crazy people). Finally, after the obsolescence of the “poorhouse” but before the beginning of welfare, there were a bunch of poor people just completely unprepared for normal life, and some of them ended up in the mental institutions too for lack of a better place to put them. This sort of put a damper on a lot of the curability discussion; not only could 19th century doctors not cure mental illness, but most of the people there weren’t even mentally ill in the traditional sense.

(not that some people didn’t try. Cramer describes a Dr. “Henry Cotton, who removed teeth, tonsils, and parts of the intestine from hundreds of patients at the Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey. Cotton claimed that there were foci of infections in these organs that were causing the insanity and that removal of the infectious would cause clinical improvement.” And then there was Dr. Wagner-Jauregg, whose bold strategy of deliberately infecting psychiatric patients with malaria actually paid off: many of them had syphilis, and the high fever induced by the malaria killed the syphilis bacterium. Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize for this insight; his later strategy of sterilizing schizophrenics on the theory that the disease was caused by masturbation was perhaps somewhat less Nobel-worthy.)

The institutions continued to grow. In 1954 the national mental health budget was $568 million; in 1959 it was $854 million. In 1951, states spend on average 8% of their budgets on psychiatric hospitals; New York spent one third of its budget on psychiatric hospitals (or not? see dispute in comments). Compare to today, when New York spends only about 20-30% of its budget on education. Psychiatric hospitals (which, remember, also subsumed the function of modern nursing homes) were a huge part of the infrastructure of government.

This started to shift in the 1940s due to what the book calls “dynamic psychiatry” (although they use this phrase a bit differently from how I understand the definition). The old, tired psychiatry was a simple dichotomy between sane people (who don’t need psychiatric help) and insane people (who are totally out of touch with reality and need to be locked up for their own good). And it understood this distinction in relatively biological terms – they didn’t know anything about genes or neurons them, but they figured something was going on. But the new, exciting psychiatry thought of mental illness as a continuum, with everybody having a little bit of mental illness – whether it was just neurosis or anxiety or whatever – and psychotics just being the people whose mental illnesses made it hard for them to function. The new school understood this in very psychosocial, Freudian terms. Schizophrenics were people with oppressively close mothers; autistics were people with distant, cold mothers, et cetera. Psychiatrists tended to like this new school, because it meant that instead of spending their time in scary mental institutions full of crazy people, they could spend their time in nice Viennese parlors talking to rich people about their families.

Around the same time, scientists invented Thorazine, which seemed to produce miraculous recoveries in institutionalized psychotic people. This was before anyone knew anything about the long-term side effects of Thorazine, so everyone figured it was a miracle drug with no side effects and now there was no need for mental institutions any more.

Then we got to the Sixties. Cramer mostly manages to avoid being too transparently political, but it’s hard for him to talk about Sixties Leftists without a bit of vitriol. He describes the genesis of the anti-psychiatry movement – a wide variety of traditions all coming together in an agreement that the mentally ill are just Too Cool And Free-Spirited For Society and anybody who tries to treat them is a bad person who hates creativity and wants to make everyone conform. He describes the jettisoning of centuries of accumulated wisdom about the causes and presentation of mental illness in favor of an unexamined dogma that mental illness is caused by oppressive systems of social control. He describes how some people did a few quick studies showing that schizophrenic people mostly lived in bad neighborhoods full of social decay, and concluded that bad neighborhoods and social decay caused schizophrenia without considering any other possible causal structures (of course, we as a society have long since moved beyond that). Others argued that hospitalization was the sole cause of mental illness, turning otherwise happy eccentrics into violent lunatics (again, a position we have long since moved beyond).

He reserves some of his strongest words for anti-psychiatry psychiatrists like R. D. Laing and Thomas Szaszszsz:

You might wonder how a psychiatrist could believe that there was no such thing as insanity. Would not the exposure to psychotic patients during Szasz’s training have shown him the error of his ideology? It turns out that Szasz may not have had any exposure to psychotics. In a 1997 interview, he describes how he consciously selected a psychiatric residency “that did not include work with involuntary patients”. The chairman of the Psychiatry Department told him, “Tom, you have only one year left of your residency, I don’t think it’s right that you should finish without any experience with psychotic patients. I think you should do your third year at the Cook County Hospital.” So Szasz quit and went elsewhere to avoid that experience.

Szasz was drafted into the Navy after completing his training, and his experiences there almost certainly reinforced his already well-developed belief that mental illness did not exist. “The servicemen didn’t want to be in the Navy and played the role of mental patient. I didn’t want to be in the Navy and played the role of military psychiatrist. My job was to discharge the men from the Service as ‘neuropsychiatric casualties’.” Szasz had gone out of his way to avoid seeing psychotic patients, and then took a job that he describes as certifying that sane people pretending to be insane were actually insane as a convenient fiction. Is there anything surprising about Szasz’s projection of this situation onto the entire profession?

I actually had been wondering about that, and that clears up a lot. As for Laing:

In the mid-1960s, British activists gravitated to Laing’s ideas, arguing that schizophrenia was more “properly human”, in a world of hydrogen bombs, than conventional definitions of sanity…Laing argued that schizophrenia was not a breakdown but a breakthrough. By the 1970s, Laing took the position of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, that schizophrenia was a form of sanity, not insanity. Laing’s position increasingly became a political attack on Western society, and then morphed once again, rejecting the idea of schizophrenia by declaring it as hypersanity. Eventually Laing’s celebrity led him to India and drug abuse, and he became a shell of his former self.

Well then.

Around the time all this was going on, the ACLU was launching an attack of its own on the psychiatric system. Most of what they were saying sounded good – make sure people only get committed if the courts are absolutely sure they’re insane, make sure that they have all of their rights even within the psychiatric hospital – but Cramer references internal memos and discussions purporting to show that the ACLU’s real goal was to make psychiatric commitment so bureaucratically difficult that nobody would ever do it, thus freeing the mentally ill from their oppressors and destroying the psychiatric system. The courts were sympathetic to their cases and established several new rights and standards that made committing people exceptionally difficult.

In exchange, the opponents of institutions promised community treatment. Everybody agrees that community treatment was a good idea. The implementation left a lot to be desired. First, as always, they were seriously underfunded. Second, even the ones that had enough money quickly found that creating outpatient psychiatric centers is fundamentally geographically difficult. Schizophrenics are not known for their ability to go places on an organized schedule, nor for their access to good consistent transportation. The great advantage of the old asylums was that all of the schizophrenics were in one convenient location for the mental health workers to treat. When the new community treatment centers were set up, they tended to serve any schizophrenics who might live within a few blocks of them, and all the rest never made it to their appointments. Third, as per Cramer most of the people operating these new community centers were Sixties Leftists who decided that instead of the “bandaid solution” of actually treating mentally ill people, their real job was to cut out mental illness at the root by protesting capitalism and racism:

One of the officials of the CMHC [Community Mental Health Centers] program later admitted that the CMHCs “were not equipped to deal” with the chronically mentally ill, who were about to be released in large numbers from state mental hospitals. The belief that mental hospitals caused mental illness, or at least made the mentally ill worse off than they were before, combined with an idealized view of how caring communities would be for the severely mentally ill. The activists and bureaucrats who wrote the CMHC regulations were about to start the release of mental patients into caring communities which for the most part did not exist. As one of those involved later admitted, “We were federal bureaucrats on an NIMH campus talking about the community, but really from some conceptual level as opposed to hands-on experience.”

If CHMCs were not primarily serving the chronically mentally ill, then whom were they serving? Two especially notorious examples were Lincoln Hospital Mental Services in New York City and Temple University Community Mental Health Center in Philadelphia. In both cases, the belief that mental illness was somehow an expression of class struggle meant that broader social and political causes – such as landlord/tenant relations, poverty, and oppression – became significant activities of the staff. Racial and ethnic tensions within the staff destroyed both CMHCs, with threats of violence, sit-ins, VietCong flags, posters of Che Guevera and Malcolm X as symbols of the fight.

In the late sixties and early seventies all of these things came together. Psychiatrists wanted to focus on healthy people who were much more pleasant to talk to. Pharmaceutical companies insisted that their new wonder drugs could cure psychosis. Activists wanted to destroy the psychiatric system. Judges were making it much more difficult to commit anybody. And community mental health centers were trying to pick up the slack. The result was the deinstitutionalization strategy called “closing the front door and opening the back door” – that is, making new commitments more difficult, and accelerating the pace at which psychotics already in institutions could be discharged to the new community treatment programs (it didn’t hurt that syphilis had been cured a few decades earlier and the last few chronically insane syphilitics were dying off as well). This went exactly according to plan, the institutionalized population shrunk and shrunk throughout the seventies, and by the time Reagan decided to close the last few psychiatric institutions there wasn’t much left to close down.

III.

Needless to say, Cramer opposes most of these developments. He makes his antideinstitutionalization argument in several parts. But first, some things he doesn’t argue.

Cramer is pretty quick to admit the institutions had their problems:

Many [psychiatric hospitals] remained “snake pits”, to borrow the title of Mary Jane Ward’s very popular 1946 novel about mental hospitals. The American Psychiatric Association created the Central Inspection Board in 1947 to evaluate existing mental hospitals in the United States and Canada. The results were not encouraging. By 1953, it had evaluated 45 hospitals, approved two, given ten a “contingent approval”, and disapproved the rest.

The book frankly discusses the “regimented, often hopeless conditions of state mental hospitals”, talks about a hospital in Alabama where “care was worse than simply inadequate: one psychiatrist for 5000 patients; astonishingly low funding for clothing, food and upkeep of the buildings”, studies showing that institutions never actually got patients’ signatures on the forms that were supposed to waive their rights to court hearings. It describes the case of Edna Long, who was hospitalized for “public drunkenness” and

permanently hospitalized in 1952. As Ennis tells the tale, Long received no treatment during the next fifteen years, but was kept busy working at menial jobs in the hospital. After the death of her husband in 1960, the state hospital had her declared incompetent, and seized her assets to pay for her care. Then, they put what assets remained under the management of an attorney, who made a bit of money from reducing the value of her estate by 86% (according to Ennis, a common practice at the time in New York). Once Long had become too physically ill to continue working, the hospital suddenly found her “competent to manage her own affairs” and released her, to a life of elderly poverty. Most of the money that she and her husband had accumulated had been consumed by attorneys supposedly protecting her assets.

Against this tale of woe, Cramer can say only that it “leads me to wonder if there was a bit more to the story”. Judging from my own conversations with patients and nurses who used to live in / work at these hospitals – who generally report similar stories – I doubt there was.

So what is this book’s argument against deinstitutionalization?

First, it points out that very many deinstitutionalized schizophrenics slipped through the community mental health system and never got further treatment. This was in part due to the problems with CMHCs – poor funding, difficult to get to, sometimes not that interested in mental health at all (though they got a lot better after the Sixties). But it was also due to schizophrenics just generally not being too interested in engaging with the psychiatric system (especially, one might imagine, the ones who had just gotten out of institutions) and no one being able to make them. I 100% acknowledge that this argument is correct.

Second, it points out that many untreated or unsuccessfully treated schizophrenics ended up homeless on the street.

“Of 179 homeless men and women who received psychiatric examinations in a Philadelphia shelter in 1981, 40% were found to have “major mental disorders”. One-third of those examined were diagnosed as schizophrenic, and another one-fourth had a primary diagnosis of substance abuse. A Boston shelter study of 78 residents in 1983 again found that 40% had major mental disorders, and another 51% had less severe psychiatric problems…a survey of 345 subjects seeking food assistance in 1983 Phoenix found that about 30% had spent some time in a mental institution.

A quick Fermi calculation from the book’s numbers suggests that maybe 10% of schizophrenics are currently homeless. Again, I 100% acknowledge that this argument is correct and that these are probably accurate statistics about the percent of the homeless who are mentally ill.

Third, it points out that many of these people die of preventable causes. Many freeze to death on cold nights. Cramer notes that deinstituionalization corresponded with a doubling of US hypothermia deaths (although never above 1/500,000 people = 500 people per year) and that anecdotal evidence suggests many of these were mentally ill. Still others commit suicide or otherwise die of their own predictable poor choices. For example:

In another case, a woman with anorexia was admitted to a hospital after she had been involved in a family disagreement and refused to eat. She had lost a great deal of weight but refused to submit to a psychiatric exam, and since a judge felt her condition was not dangerous in an immediate sense, she was allowed to go home. She died from starvation three weeks later.

Again, I 100% acknowledge this sort of thing probably happened and happens quite often.

Fourth, it says that these people are generally weird and scary and can push everyone else out of public places. Many, for example, end up in libraries, the rare sort of public place you can enter without an admission charge. He tells the story of some such library “patrons”:

Mick is having a bad day. He hasn’t misbehaved but sits and stares, glassy-eyed. This is usually the prelude to a seizure. His seizures are easier to deal with than Bob’s, for instance, because he usually has them while seated and so rarely hits his head and bleeds, nor does he ever soil his pants. Bob tends to pace restlessly all day and is often on the move when, without warning, his seizures strike. The last time he went down, he cut his head. The staff has learned to turn him over quickly after he hits the floor, so that his urine does not stain the carpet.

A friend worked at the main branch of the Santa Rosa, California public library in the 1980s and 1990s. She was awash in similar stories of mentally ill people who would urinate in the corners of the library, make frightening noises, sleep at the tables, and generally create an environment that would have been grounds for at least expulsion, if not arrest and commitment, in any American public library in 1960. The library staff was obligated to work with such “patrons” until their actions became clearly criminal. She recounted what happened when she observed that one of these mentally ill patrons was sitting at a table with his pants down to his knees. Her supervisor was obligated by library rules to attempt to first resolve the problem without the police. He approached this exposed “patron” and diplomatically asked “Sir, are you appropriately attired for the library?”

Why was it necessary for librarians to take such a kid glove approach? Attempts to resolve behavioral problems led to lawsuits, such as happened in Morristown, New Jersey. The behavior and offensive smell of a homeless person named Kreimer led to the adoption of a code of conduct prohibiting loitering, “unnecessary staring”, following others around the library, and requiring those using the library to conform to community standards of cleanliness. The ACLU filed suit against this discriminatory code. At trial, Judge Sarokin ruled that the rules were discriminatory, and that the ban on annoying other patrons violated Kreimer’s right to freedom of speech.

This ruling was later overturned on appeal, but apparently the whole series of lawsuits had cost so much money that the mere possibility of a suit from the ACLU led libraries to adopt a policy of tolerating everyone, no matter how filthy, loud, or threatening they might be. Once again, this sounds like the sort of thing that probably happens and I have no doubt the book is telling the truth. One need not blame the homeless and mentally ill for their behavior to acknowledge that this is a potential argument in favor of institutionalizing people so they have less inconvenient places than libraries to spend their time.

Fifth, Cramer argues the deinstitutionalized mentally ill are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, including some of the flashiest mass shootings. He notes that of a New York Times list of the 100 most famous rampage killers, 47 had a past history of mental health problems, and 20 had been previously institutionalized. Former psychiatric inpatients are 55 times more likely than the general population to be arrested for murder, and about five times more likely to be arrested for lesser crimes like robbery, rape, and aggravated assault. He cites Bernard Harcourt’s work showing a strong negative correlation between the institutionalization rate and the crime rate – although as I’ve mentioned before, I think these numbers are seriously off and that this is more likely related to lead levels. Nevertheless, the general point that deinstitutionalized mentally ill are at high risk of criminality stands – although Cramer admits that the overwhelming majority will never get in trouble.

IV.

So I agree with almost all of Cramer’s empirical claims. Yes, many deinstitutionalized schizophrenics are not receiving adequate treatment. Yes, many are homeless, either broke or unable to manage their disability money in a rational way. Yes, many are dying of preventable causes like freezing to death. Yes, many are going around public places and threatening people and freaking people out. And yes, many of them (though by no means most) are committing terrible crimes. So how can I disagree with his assessment that deinstitutionalization was a mistake, that Reagan and the hippies and Thomas Szasz were in the wrong, and we need to bring back a strong system of long-term state-run psychiatric hospitals?

Well, let me ask a related question. Should we round up everybody from the ghetto and stick them in prison? This policy would have a number of advantages. Many people in the ghetto are desperately poor and living in terrible conditions. Many die before their time. They often make middle-class people who come across them profoundly uncomfortable. And their crime rate is much higher than that of the non-ghetto population. All the advantages of institutionalizing the mentally ill also apply to institutionalizing people in ghettos.

Against this we have a counterbalancing consideration: it is a horrible idea and it would be really mean and everybody involved would hate it and you have no right to even consider such a thing. This is also how I feel about institutionalizing the mentally ill.

First, a digression. Many of the people Cramer mentions – his brother Ron, his case studies of homeless people who freeze to death on the streets, some of the mass killers – have in fact been institutionalized. Ron was institutionalized the better part of a dozen times. Usually they’re in the hospital for a few weeks to a few months, stabilized on medications, and then released. After their release for one reason or another they come off their medications and then experience whatever catastrophe makes them suitable for inclusion in this book.

So if we want to solve all of the problems Cramer brings up – homelessness, crime, library-bothering, etc – we can’t do it by just having people in institutions for a few months or a few years. The second they set foot out of a hospital in this counterfactual world, they’ll encounter the same problems they encounter in our real one. In other words, this isn’t really about treatment, at least in the sense of “we need better commitment laws so hospitals can treat patients and then help them reintegrate into society.” What Cramer is talking about, if he’s really serious about solving these issues, is lifetime institutionalization.

Making someone spend their entire life in an institution is a pretty big deal, especially if, as Cramer freely admits, they often include “regimented, hopeless conditions” where “care is worse than simply inadequate”. Sometimes we as a society decide that criminals need to spend their entire life in an unpleasant institution because they murdered somebody or something, but it seems excessive to say that somebody should be institutionalized for life merely because they are from a population that has a disproportionate (though still not high!) risk of committing some kind of crime in the future. Once again, if we were in that business we should just imprison people for being born in bad neighborhoods. Yes, it’s a tragedy when an anorexic starves themselves to death. But should we lock up all anorexics forever to prevent that one case?

What about the humanitarian argument that we need to institutionalize schizophrenics so that they don’t end up starving on the street? Here we get into some really thorny moral issues. I tend to go by revealed preferences – schizophrenics have voted with their feet to not be in mental hospitals. If there were voluntary mental hospitals, and schizophrenics chose to live in them, that would be great and I would support them in that choice. If you are contradicting schizophrenics’ expressed preference that they prefer not being in mental hospitals – freezing weather and all – to being in mental hospitals, then you have no right to say you’re doing it for their own sake.

I can see a counterargument: psychotic people are not very good at making decisions. What if they would be happier in a nice warm institution, but they are too crazy to realize this? For example, maybe when the person asks them “Would you like to go to the hospital?” they believe that person is a CIA spy who will be leading them to the firing chamber instead?

I agree this is a possibility and a strong argument. Against it I can only say that many of the psychotic people who don’t want to go to mental hospitals are dragged there anyway, and usually continue to not want to be in the mental hospital after they get there and learn what it is like.

An example from my own life might serve to clarify the odd mix of rational and irrational decision-making I think characterizes these choices. When I was a child, my OCD was much worse. I would do things like close every shutter in my room nine times. I won’t say this was the most rational thing to be doing. But if you with your superior rationality had come in and chained me to my bed so that I couldn’t close my shutters, I would have spent the entire night freaking out because my shutters hadn’t been closed the appropriate nine times and that meant the world was unbearably wrong. Given a mind that will freak out for a whole night if the shutters aren’t closed, and supposing for a second that curing the underlying OCD is not an option, then spending a minute closing the shutters is a perfectly rational decision. Likewise, given the weird collections of fears and sensitivities that characterize the typical psychotic, staying out of a psychiatric hospital may be a perfectly rational decision. And this is even granting the extremely dubious premise that the hospital is not abusive, is not disgusting, is not dictatorial, doesn’t involve drugs with terrible side effects, or any of the other hundred ways a psychiatric hospital can be bad even when your judgment is perfectly intact.

I recently learned many of the homeless in nicer cities have laptops. This makes sense – laptops are really cheap these days, way cheaper than houses, and you can carry them around with you on your back. Psychiatric hospitals, in contrast, do not have laptops. Even if you own a laptop, you may not bring it in, since it is theoretically Usable As A Weapon. You may not bring a cell phone, a tablet or any other form of communication device. Some of the very nice psychiatric hospitals, including the one I work at, have a single computer for thirty residents, which you may use for fifteen minutes a day, with a nurse watching you the whole time to make sure you don’t go on any sites that seem likely to make you upset or emotional. This fact alone makes me, personally, with my as far as I can tell totally intact mind, prefer the thought of homelessness to the thought of lifetime institutionalization. My computer is my only lifeline to most of my friends and the only way I have to express myself, and the thought of trading that away just so I can have a warm bed seems – pardon the expression – insane.

And for me it’s the computer. For other people it’s other things, reasonable by our standards or not. A few weeks ago I was woken up by a call in the middle of the night. A newly admitted patient at the mental hospital where I work was making a scene. She had this thing about using her special pillowcase, and pillowcases weren’t on the hospital’s Special List Of Things It Is Okay To Bring In. Sheets? Absolutely. Blankets? Totally fine. Pillows? Knock yourself out. But nobody had thought about pillowcases, so they were officially banned. And I made it to the hospital, still half-asleep, and for a second I couldn’t figure out who was the crazy person, the woman making a William Wallace-esque stand for the right to bring her pillowcase into a hospital, or the woman telling her absolutely not, because it wasn’t on the Magic List. Eventually I asked the nurse if maybe we could just sort of pretend the pillowcase was a very small sheet, and she said that if I specifically ordered her to do so she wasn’t able to contradict a doctor’s orders, and the problem was solved. By which I mean that by the time she figured out something else she needed, my shift would be over and it would be someone else’s problem. Because everything in a mental hospital is like this all the time.

So am I okay with this causing some people to freeze to death? Yes. I don’t think we can be sufficiently sure that institutionalizing schizophrenics is in their own best interest to overcome the burden of proof necessary for overriding someone’s revealed preferences. So if respecting people’s revealed preferences mean some of them go homeless or die, so be it. God help us if we ever systematically decide that people should not be allowed their freedom if the decision carries any discomfort or risk.

I want to stress just how important a decision this is. Back before deinstitutionalization, there were about 500,000 people in US psychiatric institutions, with varying degrees of permanency. Given the increase in the population and mental illness, I expect there are up to a million potentially institutionalizable individuals today. If institutionalization costs the average psychotic 1/3 of a QALY per year (eg moving from poverty to imprisonment on this table) then we’re taking away 300,000 QALYs every year indefinitely. On the other hand, if institutionalization were better for psychotics, they could potentially gain a similar number of QALYs. That makes policy decisions in this area potentially more important than crime, more important than terrorism, more important than education, potentially more important than everything except health care, not starting too many wars, and mass incarceration full stop. These kinds of decisions are the ones you want to be really, really sure about. So far, nothing in My Brother Ron has given me the level of certainty I would need.

I agree kids should have a right to use public libraries without having mentally ill people urinate on them or scream at them. I think the solution in this case is to tell the ACLU to take a chill pill and then let librarians enforce common-sense decency rules, not to lock up a million people for the rest of their lives.

V.

So that leaves the question – what do we do with all of these psychotic people starving on the street? Saying “leave them alone” is all nice and well, but what if they start seeming violent or threatening? Do we leave them alone until the point at which they commit a major crime and they end up in prison for the rest of their lives? What if they’re clearly acting recklessly and about to die? What if we have evidence (maybe from past experience) that they would prefer to be sane and medicated but they’re too far gone to realize it?

The book itself mentions my preferred answer to this conundrum: involuntary outpatient commitment (IOC). This is exactly what it sounds like. If you, let’s say, start trespassing on government property and yelling at police officers (a common way for mentally ill people to come to the attention of the system), and you get brought before a sympathetic judge who wants to help you and doesn’t want to lock you up but would prefer you not do that anymore, he can order an outpatient commitment. This means you’re legally required to see a psychiatrist every so often and maybe get injected with long-acting antipsychotic medication (usually once per month, although I think they’ve recently invented a once-every-three-months version now).

I have seen psychotic patients involved in such programs and they usually do very well. They get the same level of treatment they would in a psychiatric hospital, people will come hunt them down to make sure they don’t miss their appointments or medication dosings, and in the interim they can live wherever they want in whatever conditions they want. If the medications work, which they usually do, then they are hopefully clear-headed enough to either hold down a job or use their disability payments responsibly. If they can’t do that, then it’s probably for the same reason that normal poor people can’t, and nobody says they need to be institutionalized.

Cramer notes that people in IOC programs have half the suicidality rates, half the crime rates, and “substantial reductions in hospitalization, homelessness, arrest, and incarceration.” They are half as likely to be hospitalized, half as likely to be victims of crimes, and “enjoy improved quality of life”.

This isn’t as good as, say, one-tenth the suicidality and hospitalization rates would be. But psychiatry isn’t a discipline with very many miracles. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don’t. Long-term psychotics are notoriously difficult to treat and this is probably about as well as they would be doing in a long-term institution anyway.

Cramer brings this up as part of his political polemic – apparently the same hippies who oppose everything else opposed IOCs, so their success is part of the Grand Narrative Of Hippies Being Proven Wrong. I like hippie-bashing as much as anyone else, but I don’t understand why he doesn’t take this further, say that this is the alternative to reinstitutionalization that he secretly knows we need. He points out that the main reason IOCs are underused is that psychiatrists don’t know about them – I would add that at least in my county there isn’t enough funding to refer enough patients to the program and monitor their medication compliance and so on. But I guarantee you that publicizing the option to psychiatrists and expanding the program is a lot cheaper than reinstitutionalizing people would be.

(my hospital charges $1,000/day/inpatient, though goodness only knows how much of that insurance companies actually pay. Cramer notes that the prison system usually costs $50,000/year/mentally ill prisoner. My guess is that the costs of institutionalization are somewhere around that order of magnitude.)

So in my ideal world, psychotic people who aren’t bothering anybody can do what they want – preferably with the option of voluntary psychiatric hospitalization available, and with some pressure to at least try it once and get a feel for what it’s like. Psychotic people who are bothering other people can get outpatient treatment once every couple of months and remain medicated and monitored by professionals. Preferably there would also be some kind of concept of a psychiatric living will – that is, some way for people who are not yet mentally ill, or who are currently being managed on drugs, to express a wish to be stabilized if they ever become mentally ill so that they can make their long-run choices from a position of sanity.

I acknowledge this is not the ideal world. I acknowledge there are some people who really need institutionalization – people who are constantly violent, who have zero concept of social rules and will scream at anyone they meet, people who are catatonic or need extraordinarily complicated medication regimens that can’t be handled in a normal environment. I’ve referred some of these people to involuntary long-term institutions (which still exist for these kinds of extreme situations), I don’t feel guilty at all, and in most cases I am pretty sure the general public would be pretty grateful to me if they knew the gory details.

But for a million people, most of whom aren’t bothering anybody and just want to be able to live a half-decent life outside the walls of a locked facility? There has to be a better solution than that.

I’m off caffeine now. I miss it every day.

I had quit more than once before, but there’d always be a day when I was asleep on my feet, and I’d have a Dr Pepper “for medicinal purposes.” That would be the start of a full-on caffeine bender that ended with me coming home from Costco with a case of pop and two pounds of coffee beans.

This is why I’ve never tried any illegal drugs. My experience with the legal ones has not set a good precedent.

Note from Missy: Now he gets a three-pound bag of decaffeinated coffee beans at Costco. Health food!

 

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[Read in black and white]

I have various things to say about Trump, and perhaps I will get around to saying a bunch of them.

But what most disturbs me about Trump isn't Trump.

It seems to me that an awful lot of the hand-wringing about Trump – and don't get me wrong, there's much worthy of hang-wringing about Trump – is a distraction, a displacement, a derail from the more uncomfortable thing staring us all in the face.

Sure, he's a terrible human being doing terrible things who will, given the chance, go on to do even more terrible things. But Trump didn't make all those people show up at his rallies. Trump didn't compel them there at gun point. Nor does he have some sort of mind-control device to "brainwash" the masses.

Trump, when informed his "pledge" pose, which he elicited at his rallies, bore a disturbing resemblance to Nazi salute, discontinued it; it was his followers who begged – and may yet still be begging – that he resume it.

Make no mistake: this is grassroots fascism. Trickle-up fascism, if you will.

Trump's genius is not Hitler's gifts of vision or rhetoric – though make no mistake he's a charismatic speaker. Hitler was a kind of intellectual, who convinced a people of his vision for a unified, fascist, triumphant, conquering, genocidal race-nation. Trump has no such vision, much less has he convinced anybody to get on board with one.

No, Trump's genius was is recognizing there was a vast disaffected swath of the American public – possibly enough to carry a national election – who wanted what Hitler had sold. He recognized in the dyspeptic grumblings – about a black president; about job-stealing, terrorist foreigners; about Christian-oppressing gays and abortion-having sluts and welfare queens – a sentiment of wounded entitlement as of that point yet unvalidated by a politician.

Trump's a business man: he saw what those people wanted in exchange for their votes, so he just... took them up on the deal. Trump's genius has always been in recognizing opportunities others didn't, and exploiting them; he is, if you will, a consummate opportunist. The situation he found in American politics was the political equivalent of economists' proverbial hundred dollar bill on the ground.

Trump's genius hasn't been being like Hitler, it has been recognizing that so very many Americans wanted to be like Nazi Germany. They were just waiting for a Führer. He just volunteered for the job.

I'm not suggesting this makes Trump a fine human being or adequate candidate for president of anything. After all, all I'm saying is that while he has no particular desire to murder whole populations, if his "base" does – if he figures it's necessary to keep on the good graces of those whose votes he is courting – he will be entirely willing to go along with it. Hey, gotta break some eggs to make oneself an omelet.

No, what I'm saying is that comparing Trump to Hitler strikes me as less profitable – and much less urgent – than the other comparison it implies: how like to the Nazi enthusiasts of Germany so many of us Americans seem to be.

The problem isn't really him. It's us.

Here's the thing. If I'm right that the situation was a hundred dollar bill on the ground, then Trump, himself, is somewhat immaterial to what is happening. It was almost inevitable. In a nation of 300 million people, we are abundantly blessed, in absolute numbers, with opportunists; for this we need but one with the right skills and resources. Somebody would eventually pick up the hundred dollar bill.

We have to get used to this idea that this is going to happen. In any sufficiently large population, just by the odds, from time to time you're going to have people who stumble across the great idea of pursuing their personal advancement by fomenting inter-group animosity. It's a tried and true recipe, and you can no more hide it from humanity that conceal how fruits ferment to alcohol; where the grapes of wrath flourish, someone will eventually recognize what heady beverage you can make of them. Someone always does.

Perhaps we, as a society, don't need to give them quite so much to work with?

Because, oh, we Americans do – as evidenced by the millions exulting to be lead at last by a candidate who titillates their most bilious fantasies.

This, too, is America, and we have to look it full in the face and not flinch away if we want to have any hope of dealing with it. Talking about the bad individuals who do bad things is not without merit, but too seductive a distraction from the more terrifying problem, which is that millions of Americans like Trump not despite what he says about those they consider others, but because of it.

We can conceptualize this any a number of ways, but I think one of the most useful is to understand it as, at the very least, a widespread critical failure to adhere to – or an outright rejection of – the Golden Rule, in any of its formulations.

I contend this has been writ large on American history all the way along, and if we don't do something about it, it will not go well for us.

---

This isn't news, right?

Black Americans have been saying this for hundreds of years. For much of the last century, they've been trying to get what MLK termed "white moderates" to just believe them that there is a substantial percentage of the US population that is murderously inclined towards them; for the last quarter century white moderates have had trouble believing even that there are many who are merely uncharitably inclined towards Black people. They (we?) would have probably continued in our obstinacy had it not been for ubiquitous cellphone video cameras.

But white moderates cling fiercely to the idea that there is lots of racism but never any racists. Certainly not like "back then" – explicit, unapologetic racial antipathy is something many racism-despising white people locate in a presumed-uneducated past. The idea that white people maybe were – oh, okay, definitely were – like that once upon a time, but they know better now.

In some ways, recent decades' consciousness-raising about institutional racism, implicit bias, and lingering historical inequities have made for a double-edge sword. It's not that these things aren't real and important; they are. It's that they also, despite being real and important, slot neatly into white people's desire to believe that racists are extinct. These concepts provide a way for people – possibly including you, gentle reader – to grant the existence of racism without having to believe there are (still) white people who feel entitled to treat certain people mortal enemies deserving of no quarter, for no reason but race.

This is, when you really think about it, a curious thing: why is it that so many well-meaning, ostensibly anti-racist white people are emotionally resistant to admitting that that sort of direct, unequivocating, conscious "unreconstructed" racism really exists?

An obvious answer is "racism", and it has some merit. But I could have written the above about sexism and rape culture, too. About homicidal transphobia. About antisemitism and islamophobia. It's a pattern that keeps repeating, and is not specific to any one axis of oppression.

I think there's some better answers. I wrote about one back here: the implications – for your own well-being! – of finding out your society is much, much less just than you thought are terrifying. Another such answer is found by turning the question about, and asking what is it about the idea of people being unapologetically if covertly racist that so many white people find so threatening? What is it about the idea of people being flagrantly misogynist that so many well-meaning men find so threatening that they don't want to admit it's "still" a thing? What is it about this sort of bigotry that the people who do not participate in it but are not targeted by it find so threatening to admit exists?

I think it's this: racists scare them, too, because they recognize in that sort of aggressive, belligerent racism something that their whiteness does not protect them from. Bilious misogyny scares them, too, because they recognize in that sort of aggressive, belligerent sexism something that their maleness does not protect them from.

Think of it this way. You know how black-hating racists are usually totally okay with Native Americans and Latinos, and scrupulously egalitarian in their dealings with women? While women-scorning misogynists are non-judgmental about homosexuality and genderfluidity and really good at respecting the autonomy of the disabled? And culture-warrior homophobes are ardent protectors minority religious faiths? No? What's that? You say that that is usually not how it works?

That. That right there. That thing swimming just under the surface.

We all know that any given individual may have varying degrees of prejudice across differing axes of oppression – that a person may, for instance, be a champion feminist and not have their racism under control. But we also know this other thing. We know that there's this other thing out there, a thing that manifests in a person as a kind of gleeful disdain of any and all sorts of people. A kind of broad-spectrum bigotry.

It's not just racism, or just sexism, or just homophobia, or just xenophobia, or just any one specific prejudice. It's something deeper than any of those, that expresses any or all of them.

I think for most of the sort of people who hang out here and read the sorts of things I write, encounters with this thing I'm describing but not yet naming make one's skin crawl. Makes the hairs on your arms lift.

And it's this that so many well-meaning moderate people who disapprove of oppression and prejudicial unfairness want very, very, very badly to believe doesn't exist.

And it is this that has heaved into the light at last, in the person of Trump's supporters.

---

I'd like to propose that there are two modes of moral functioning that people seem to have.

They are based on two differing fundamental ideas about how morality is supposed to work. They differ in how extensive morality is understood to be. One holds that morality extends, at least by default, to all interactions between humans. The other holds that morality only extends to interactions with qualified humans.

The first I'll call Mode 1. In Mode 1, one's moral standard of conduct for interacting with other people by default (there can be exceptions) applies to all other human beings, simply for the fact of their being human beings. Given the demographics of who reads my stuff, Gentle reader, this is probably the mode in which you reason, and with which you are most familiar. Mode 1 is the mode of Kant's Categorical Imperative and "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" and the idea of the universal brotherhood of man. We could say (though it may be a bit of a projection) that the deep presumption of Mode 1 is that morality's whole purpose is to serve as a universal protocol whereby all people – all people – who follow it would be able to live in a productive and amenable harmony.

In the other, Mode 2, one's moral standard of conduct for interacting with other people by default doesn't include all human beings – and that is considered a feature, not a bug. There is some, somewhat flexible, mental category of people to whom one owes moral conduct – but then there's everybody else. In Mode 2, morality only applies to interactions with people in a certain set, and in dealing with people outside that set, morality doesn't apply.

I don't think Mode 2 is very familiar to most of my readers, because the forces that filter who comes here mostly only admit people of the professional classes, and in that class, the second mode is deeply socially unacceptable. Mode 2 remains more acceptable in other classes, but those who function in that mode know that the professional classes feel very strongly about it, and consequently they're mostly pretty scrupulous about not letting on, lest Mode 1 professionals ostracize them in outrage. Well, until recently.

In Mode 2, we might similarly say that morality has a social organizing function, but where Mode 1 tries to make all humans into one society, Mode 2 is about organizing subsets of humans to out-compete other subsets of humans.

That's a somewhat bloodless way of putting a very bloody idea. In its most benign form, Mode 2 is predicated on the idea that people have a right to band together to vie for limited resources. Imagine two villages racing to sail out to fishing banks first to get the best haul.

Of course, there's a less benign form: since in Mode 2, you owe outsiders no debt of morally moderated conduct, there's nothing saying that folks from your village can't sneak into the other village in the middle of the night and drill holes in their boats.

In fact, in Mode 2, there's not actually anything in morality saying one of the two villages can't just wait for the other village to sail back, holds heavy with catch, then slaughter them in their sleep and take the fish.

Now, the villagers might decide not do that because of fear of retaliation, but that's not the same thing as demurring out of scruples: consider what happens if they suddenly get reason to think they can get away with it.

Mode 2 can also be predicated on the idea that people have the right to band together to kill other bands of people and take their stuff. Also, the right to capture and kidnap outsiders and use them as one will: as laborers, as livestock, as sacrifices to one's gods, as playthings to torture or torment for entertainment, as various props in psychological processes.

We can call these Mode 2a and Mode 2b if you like, though, honestly, from the Mode 1 position they aren't really all that different, in how morality functions. In the Mode 2a example, the villagers in one village feel no moral responsibility about the hunger of the children of the other village, should they succeed in seizing the limited resource and their opponents go home with empty nets. The whole point of Mode 2 morality is that it tells you that this is fine: your moral responsibilities are only to your own village. If some other village's children go hungry, even because your village bested theirs, that's not a wrong that requires you moderate your behavior in response.

And, as I hope is obvious, the line between feeling that one has no moral responsibility not to, through one's actions, cause another village's villagers to starve to death, and feeling that one has no moral responsibility not to just slay them directly and take their stuff is a pretty fine line.

(As a side note we could say there's a 1a and 1b, as well: 1a holds that one should have equal moral responsibilities to all people; 1b holds that one should have a minimum moral standard that applies to all people, but one may, for reasons of group membership, have additional moral responsibilities to specific other people. But I digress.)

The thing about Mode 2 is that it's not just a neutrally held belief that, "Well, it's okay to ignore the consequences of your actions on out-group members if you feel like". It's an entitlement not to have to. It's understood as a kind of right – the right not to have to moderate one's behavior towards out-group members. The right to compete against other groups and win if you can.

Most crucially, it the right to treat other humans – out-group members – as as much a natural resource to be exploited as ore to mine, timber to log, game to hunt, or livestock to domesticate. Mode 2 has in it – or can – a right to subjugate, as an outgrowth of this notion of group self-defense.

In Mode 2 resides this idea of usable outsiders. Morality is predicated on sorting humans into two groups: fellow in-group members to whom one owes a moral standard of conduct (e.g. you may not murder them, you may not steal from them), and out-group members to whom one owes nothing, and consequently of whom one is entitled to make whatever use one can impose by force or fraud.

A bunch of really interesting things follow from this paradigm.

---

I want to stop here and say that I don't think that in our society (for reasons I'll explain below) that much of anyone functioning in Mode 2 actually consciously thinks this way or thinks of themselves as thinking this way. Mode 1 is much too socially ascendant; Mode 1 morality is the public morality.

Indeed, that's why I expect a lot of readers to find my description of Mode 2 shocking. If you function in Mode 1, and live in a society which reflects back at you your own belief that Mode 1 is what morality is, then my proposition that there are large numbers of people who are morally reasoning in this other way, which is in flagrant contravention of Mode 1 morality, probably seems pretty outlandish. Surely, I hear someone thinking, people don't actually believe that? Surely people don't actually look at other humans beings that way? I mean, sure, in the past, in less developed countries, but here? Now?

*points at Trump rallies* Yes, here. Yes, now.

This paradigm explains why it is that societies seem to toggle so abruptly into a persecutory culture. A society – such as ours – may seem to be entirely committed to Mode 1, but actually have some large faction actually being Mode 2 functioning, who are just playing along with the norms of the Mode 1 majority. Some subset of these may be consider to be just biding their time until they think they can make a successful push for cultural dominance.

People functioning in Mode 2 haven't generally been able come out in public with their real feelings about, say, how we should handle terrorism or the poor or immigrants or minorities, because those opinions were Mode 1 offending. So they paid lip service to Mode 1.

But, of course, Mode 2 leaks out. You can see it in:

• A deep resentment that they are expected (by the norms of Mode 1 functioning people) not to pursue the subjugation of others, i.e. to moderate their behavior towards out-group members in accord with morality. They complain, "Why CAN'T we just bomb them into glass?". The idea of a "war crime" is pretty antithetical to most Mode 2 reasoning; to someone thinking this way, the idea that war has rules, like a game, is a grotesque curtailment of their people's (however construed) collective rights.

• A constant rules-lawyering around any Mode 1 exceptions they can find to "justify" treating out-group members without moral constraints, a la "Well, we're at war with them, so they're our enemies, so they're an exception to 'no torture'.". A lot of what comes across to Mode 1 people as victim blaming, e.g. "Stand your ground! It was self-defense" and "They were here illegally so they got what they deserved", are actually arguments as to why Mode 1 moral obligations should not be considered in force in that particular case – why Mode 2 conduct is not forbidden by Mode 1 in that case. It's Mode 2 functioning people trying to get away with Mode 2 functioning while arguing they're in compliance with Mode 1.

• An indignant fury that they are prevented from exercising what they consider their rights to subjugate, often framed in terms of a right to economic or group existential self-defense, a la "If we don't, they'll overrun us and destroy us all". Complaints about "political correctness" and "over-sensitivity" aren't just complaints about having to change how one speaks, but complaints at changes in what interactions are socially permitted to consist of: they're complaints about not being "able" (it not being considered licit) to be freely verbally aggressive and domineering to out-group members. Consider men clinging to a putative right to wolf-whistle at women on the street, and white people resentful about not being able to use the N word: these are aggressive, dominating behaviors, that are treasured prerogatives because they are aggressive, dominating behaviors.

• Ecstatic relief when someone validates the idea that, contra Mode 1, no, you don't owe outsiders any debt of moral conduct – which is precisely why so many people are greeting Trump as a liberator.

---

[Continue to Part 2]

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This post brought to you by the 96 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

[Read in black and white]

[Continued from Part 1]

There's this tendency on the Left to characterize what I'm describing as Mode 2 as "hate". But I think that's a mistake, though a subtle one. Call to mind that which in your own mind you have experienced and called "hate". I expect it wasn't a happy occasion for you to feel it. It was probably accompanied by fierce anger, bitter sadness, revolting disgust, seething envy, and/or some such unpleasant feeling like that. It was not a good feeling, and, suffice it to say, you were probably not having a very good time when you had occasion to feel it. In fact, if you were feeling that feeling which you can readily identify within yourself as "hate", you were probably having a really rotten day.

Do the people at Trump rallies seem to be having a really rotten day?

Only if people having really rotten days whoop and cheer and smile and laugh.

Trump's supporters seem to be having a grand old time at his rallies – and any other occasions they have to express their political sentiments. And they never seem to be having so grand a time as when he (or they) are espousing his most aggressive, contemptuous, scornful, disrespectful, bigoted attitudes – which is what, when they do it, gets called "hate".

I'm not going to say you're wrong to use the word "hate" this way. The word has clearly come to mean this other thing, too: an attitude, rather than a feeling.

But having this one word mean these two quite different things leads to something I think is a dangerous confusion.

Lions don't hate gazelles. In fact, if you could ask them, I think lions would tell you they love gazelles – they find them delicious.[*] The man who apparently coined the phrase "keep her barefoot and pregnant" was describing what he thought necessary to "keep a woman happy"; he would no doubt be the first to tell you that he didn't hate women, he loved women – why else was he so solicitous of their contentment?

What the cheering throngs at Trump's rallies are feeling is joy. They're delighted by the uplift of being told, both implicitly and explicitly by Trump, that their Mode 2 morality is good, worthy, and valid. They're energized by and giddy to find themselves in a movement with hundreds of thousands of like-minded people. They're thrilled by the prospect of an overturn of the Mode 1 hegemony in American culture, and the possibility of making Mode 2 the dominant norm of the land. They're feeling glee.

Perhaps you bridle at the characterization. There's this thing in American culture – that I'm not going to explain today – where happiness and virtue get confused. For many Americans (and perhaps others), it feels really wrong to attribute "good" feelings to people doing something one thinks is wicked: if they are bad, the logic goes, they must be unhappy. (God, some Protestants taught, would not suffer the wicked to prosper, so those who are prospering must not be wicked.) Many Americans will all but turn themselves inside out contorting their logic to come up with some more palatable model of the inner life of those they think are sinners, rather than admit those sinners' plainly obvious rejoicing.

If it helps, we could perhaps separate out this other thing, this subjugatory behavior of expressing an aggressive, contemptuous, scornful, disrespectful, bigoted attitude, which Trump supporters do with such relish, by using another term for it. I propose revile. What they're enjoying that Trump does, and what they're enjoying having social sanction to do themselves in public, is reviling others.

Reviling is Trump's jam. Both individuals (such as his fellow politicians) and groups. When John Oliver reluctantly admitted that Trump's mockery of Rubio was "objectively funny" [YouTube], he was acknowledging that as an entertainer who has built his shtick on reviling people, Trump is a virtuoso at his craft.

This is why the topic of "bullies" often comes up in criticism of Trump. That is correct: one of the commonest ways that bullies afflict their victims is by reviling them, for sport and with gleeful relish, as entertainment and ego boost, and inviting others to join in with the reviling for their own enjoyment. And that is, in fact, what Trump does.

This recreational reviling that bullies do is a form of using others for emotional purposes; it is engaging in reviling because it feels good. It is subjugation of others for psychological purposes.

One doesn't have to hate someone to enjoy reviling them. Really, anyone will do for a victim, no? Reviling is its own reward.

One doesn't have to feel the feeling of hate towards someone to want to kill them. One doesn't have to feel hate for someone to be in love with the prerogative to kill them.

Nor does one have to hate someone to want to oppress them, to use their labor, their bodies, their suffering, to one's own ends. It is enough to note that it is useful and pleasing to oneself, and not believe one owes them any better.

That is, one doesn't have to hate someone to want to crush them, conquer them, exploit them. It is enough to enjoy the subjugation of others, whether in the sense of enjoying the fruits of another's labor, or enjoying the experience of dominating another.

In an important sense, Mode 2 says, "Why shouldn't I enjoy the subjugation of others? Why should I have to labor when I can make someone else labor for me? Why should I be deprived of the pleasure of watching the hapless be fed to the lions, or of having a subject people have to cast their gaze down and make display of obeisance when I pass? Why shouldn't I enrich the security and prosperity of me and my people by direct application of the sword?"

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* Hilariously – or not – when I wrote this, I hadn't yet read this Huffington Post piece which observed:

Like many racial instigators, Trump often answers accusations of bigotry by loudly protesting that he actually loves the group in question. [...]

Not long before he called for a blanket ban on Muslims entering the country, Trump was proclaiming his affection for “the Muslims,” disagreeing with rival candidate Ben Carson’s claim in September that being a Muslim should disqualify someone from running for president.

“I love the Muslims. I think they're great people,” Trump said, insisting that he would be willing to name a Muslim to his presidential cabinet.

I swear, I hadn't heard this.

---

[Continue to Part 3]

---

This post brought to you by the 96 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!

[Read in black and white]

[Continued from Part 2]

People functioning in Mode 2 are often fiercely jealous of what they see as their prerogative to subjugate others. If you make your living in the world by subjugating others, well, yes, threat to your prerogative to subjugate others is a threat to your livelihood, and an existential threat.

People have literally gone to war to protect their presumed right to subjugate other humans and keep them captive as livestock. I'm not talking wars of conquest with the purpose of subjugating those attacked. Almost three-hundred thousand Americans went to their graves for that cause, calling it self-determination, in one four year period alone – and, apparently, the vast majority of those who died for that cause had never and would never in their lives the economic and social privilege necessary to actually enjoy their treasured right to own people. Merely the principle of the thing, the principle that they were entitled to subjugate a population of their fellow humans, to exploit them as a natural resource, to base their society's economy on that exploitation of a subjugated people, was so dear to them they would fight and die for it – in staggering numbers. Somewhere between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Americans took up arms for that principle. [Wikipedia]

This problem hasn't gone away.

When people functioning in Mode 2 are enjoined to move to Mode 1, they resist, often indignantly, because by the terms of Mode 2, they're being deprived of their liberty.

There's a thing said in social justice circles, when the privileged cry that they're being treated unfairly, that the privileged often have become so habituated to their privilege, fairness, when it comes at last, feels unfair to them. That is, that the privileged are mistaken, and what they're mistaken about is fairness.

I think that's a real thing and really happens. But it's a thing that mostly happens to people in Mode 1. It's people who are in Mode 1 who think of fairness as something that is owed to all humans, universally. A person who considers fairness a bedrock moral principle for interpersonal conduct is then in a position to attempt to do fairness but get it wrong, for whatever reasons, such as being mistaken about things.

There's a difference between not being fair because one attempted fairness but got it wrong, and not being fair because one doesn't think fairness is required of one. Someone operating in Mode 2 does not object to the Mode 1 idea of extending fairness to all people because they're unclear as to what would be fair. They don't care what would be fair. Because Mode 2 morality says that fairness is simply not pertinent in this case, and that they're entitled not to have to be "fair".

Look at it this way. It probably has never occurred to you, personally, to go someplace far away, where the laws of your country which frown on such things don't extend, and kidnap someone, or several someones, for your personal use: to sell, to exploit for free labor, to torment for kicks and giggles. The idea is beyond bizarre. Quite aside from the "why would you want to" and "wow that sounds like a lot of work and dangerous because people don't usually cooperate with kidnapping" issues, there's the "holy crap why would you ever think that was an okay thing to do to someone else" issue, the "that's super illegal for a reason" issue, the "wow that is evil" problem. Of course you wouldn't do that: the notion is repugnant to the point of absurdity. If you're operating in Mode 1, it's so beyond the horizon of anything your moral sensibilities suggest is even remotely acceptable in interpersonal conduct, that it simply has never come up to be considered, much less rejected.

But people did this. Actual human beings actually did this, in great numbers. And people continue to do this, and various variations on it. It behooves us to ask What were they thinking, that they thought this was an okay thing to do? and any answer we venture to that had better be pretty robust.

The "they just acted that way because they didn't know better" argument is akin to the explanation of people resisting increased social justice because they have miscalibrated fairness. People in Mode 1 like it because it jibes with their introspection, because they think it's charitable ("they're not evil, they're mistaken and haven't had a chance to be good yet"), because it's self-congratulatory teleological-supremacist ("we can't expect past-people to be as morally enlightened as we now-people are"), and most of all because it's trivial and suggests a trivial remedy ("once they know better they'll stop").

And you know, there's people for whom that's reasonably true. And I'm not saying that education has no place in contesting Mode 2. But I don't think any of us can realistically argue that anybody today hasn't heard of the gospel of, e.g., Racism is Bad Mkay? or Thou Shalt Not Commit Genocide. People in Mode 1 persisting in believing that the Mode 2 functioning people around them just haven't heard of Mode 1 are the direct secular analogs of the sort of evangelical Christian who starts their pitch, "I bet nobody's ever told you that Jesus died for your sins."

Indeed – speaking of Christianity – one of the reasons that you can be reasonably sure that anybody in the West who is functioning in Mode 2 already knows about Mode 1, which, you'll recall, is the mode of You Have To Be Moral To Everybody Because Universal Brotherhood of Man, is because Christianity is militantly Mode 1. Mode 2 flies right in the face of Christianity.

In fact, all three of the big Abrahamic monotheisms look like Mode 1 attempts to channel, subvert, and generally manage Mode 2 morality.

Judaism teaches 1b, as if it were saying, "Okay, yes, if you want to special moral responsibilities to other in-group members, we can do that, but there has to be a floor, okay? There has to be a basic set of moral rules that pertain to everybody, whether or not they're in-group or out-group." Additionally, Judaism developed this clever idea that members have a moral responsibility to their god and their fellow in-group members to not treat out-group members poorly, because it is embarrassing, and tends to lead to violent reprisal that puts one's co-religionists at risk.

Christianity and Islam subvert (or attempt to) Mode 2 morality, by simultaneously teaching that (1) all co-religionists are to be regarded as in-group for purposes of Mode 2, (2) it is a moral obligation upon the faithful to get out-group members to join the religion, (3) it is forbidden to exclude anybody from the religion. It's as if they say, "Okay, sure, we can constrain moral responsibility to an in-group... but that moral responsibility includes inviting/recruiting everyone in the world to join our in-group."

Christianity and Islam can be seen as pro-Mode 1 hacks on Mode 2 morality, wherein, instead of confronting Mode 2 directly, in-group and out-group distinctions are allowed to persist, but are pragmatically defeated by designating (hypothetically, at least) all people part of the in-group.
Obviously, this doesn't always work (q.v. history) and also there's some serious problems with making joining a religion a pre-condition of being treated as a person with any sort of human rights. I give them credit for trying.

We might imagine that the idea underlying such a hack is the hypothesis that what distinguishes Mode 1 and Mode 2 morality is conduct in the presence of the out-group, so one could induce Mode 2 functioning people to behave in a way congruent with Mode 1 by eliminating the out-group. Unfortunately there's two big problems with that.

The first is that the out-group isn't necessarily too keen on being eliminated.

The second is that that hypothesis is wrong. What distinguishes Mode 1 and Mode 2 moral functioning is not just conduct in the presence of the out-group.

In Mode 2, the in-group isn't too keen on the out-group being eliminated, either.

---

Well-meaning Mode 1 functioning anti-oppression liberals attempt to explain the behavior and mentality of people who are prejudicial and oppressive by assuming that being prejudicial and oppressive are results following from certain negative feelings or beliefs the oppressive are assumed to have about those they oppress.

Under such logic, male supremacism is a product of men believing false things of women or hating women; and white supremacism is a product of white people being mistaken about, e.g., black people or having feelings of contempt or fear of black people; and homophobia is a product of straight people thinking incorrect things about gay people or having irrational disgust towards them; etc.

It's understandable why well-meaning Mode 1 functioning anti-oppression liberals would think that.

For one thing, we attempt to understand others by introspection. If one only sees the world through the glasses of Mode 1, when one asks oneself "What would lead me to treat others that way", the obvious answers are things like "I would have to hate or fear someone very badly, or be very badly confused to think that it was okay to treat them like that."

For another, it's how people functioning in Mode 2 explain themselves to Mode 1 terms.

In a society dominated by a Mode 1 religion – Christianity – you can't come out and actually admit, "I don't think 'love your neighbor as yourself' applies to [group]". You have to have an excuse. "Well, sure, 'love your neighbor as yourself' – but Jews killed Jesus. And Muslims are in our holy land. And if we don't keep blacks in their place, they'll rape our women. Queers will rape our sons – but we love the sinner, just hate the sin. We only beat our children because we love them; same as our women, who can't help being innately immoral. Commies are atheists and will destroy our way of life. The poor will out-breed us if we don't starve them." Etc, etc, etc.

But that's all they are: excuses. They are meant to justify that for which people in Mode 2 have a very different pre-existing motivation. That's why these sorts of reasons multiply so rapidly, and are so often so stupid, and yet maintained so ardently.

In Mode 2, feelings of animosity and prejudices don't precede the inclination to subjugate others. They follow from it.

In Mode 2, the subjugation of others doesn't follow from prejudices about others or thinking the others are bad people, or being frightened of the others, or hating the others. In Mode 2, the subjugation of others is seen as an obvious good, either because it materially elevates the fortunes of one's own group, or because it's intrinsically pleasing, and because there's nothing saying it's wrong.

People functioning in Mode 2 see subjugating as a natural behavior any reasonable person might reasonably want to engage in.

Thus, people functioning in Mode 2 want to have people to subjugate – but they're not really fussy whom. It's as if Mode 2 says "Just so long as we have somebody we're entitled to oppress."

The Mode 2 desire to – and entitlement to – go around subjugating others precedes any particular antipathies, animosities, or enmities.

Consider this: to say that white Europeans ventured to Africa to capture or purchase already captured black Africans and transported them in great numbers to labor to death in captivity because white Europeans hated black people, or feared black people, or they thought black people inferior, is obviously absurd, but worse, it's a subtle sort of victim blaming. It locates the cause of white Europeans' subjugation of black Africans in their blackness, as if the reason white Europeans did what they did was because they had some problem with blackness.

Of course not. White Europeans enslaved black Africans because white Europeans wanted to have slaves. They thought it would be nice (for them) to force other people to labor for them for free; to trade, for their enrichment, in human beings as property; to live as a kind of superior class and enjoy lording the power of life and death over a great population of others.

That is: all the same reasons white Europeans had been enslaving and otherwise subjugating all the other people they subjugated. (Were you unaware that Europeans enslaved people of other races?)

It had nothing to do with what white Europeans thought about black Africans. It had everything to do with white Europeans' entitlement – their entitlement to subjugate.

This is one of the places where the thing I discussed, above, about being confusing "hate" and "reviling" really matters. If you hate or fear someone, if they disgust you, you probably don't want them around. Your natural inclination will be to avoid them – to open up all the space you can between them and you. But people functioning in Mode 2 feel entitled to have victims. They feel so entitled to have victims to subjugate they will cross oceans to acquire them. They will import them by the millions.

They don't want the people they subjugate to go away, because then they wouldn't have them to oppress. To put it crudely, people functioning in Mode 2 don't want those they subjugate to go away, because then whom would they have to kick around?

For this reason, not only will Mode 2 functioning people resist giving up their putative prerogative to subjugate others, they will also resist the above-described Mode 1 project of trying to manage Mode 2 by getting all humanity into the Mode 2 in-group. They will resist not having an out-group. "You can't leave us with nobody to subjugate! That's not fair!"

We can imagine Mode 1 and Mode 2 in dialog. When Mode 1 says, "okay, we won't ask you to extend morality to interactions with out-group members, but we insist you have a moral responsibility to the in-group to try to get as many out-group members as possible – ideally all of them – to join the in-group", Mode 2 replies, "WAIT A MINUTE, if everyone's in the in-group, then whom do we get to pick on, as an out-group?!"

At this point Mode 1 can do two things. One is to stand up straight, look Mode 2 in the eye, and say, "NO ONE. PSYCH! AHAHAHAHA! SUCKS TO BE YOU. NO MORE SUBJUGATING, KTHXBYE."

Mode 1 wrings its hands, and says, "But Siderea, if we did that, wouldn't Mode 2 just blow us off?"

Yes, Mode 1, they totally would.

"But we can't do that!"

Well, the alternative is to say, "Oh, er, I'm sure we'll come up with someone...." and string them along with promises that there will be somebody, soon, that you'll throw, as it were, to the wolves of Mode 2.

Quite aside from the fact that sacrificing a sub-population to buy off another sub-population with their blood is, from the Mode 1 morality point of view, entirely immoral and deeply evil, there's the problem with that plan: Mode 2 will eventually figure it out. Mode 2 will get very, very, very cranky that they keep getting promised that they'll get to have victims to subjugate, but nobody ever delivers.

And the first time a politician shows up and demonstrates that he gets Mode 2, and seems totally willing to actually give Mode 2 what it wants...?

---

Let me stop here and address some questions and reservations you may have.

I have been scrupulous in discussing Mode 1 and Mode 2 as ways people function, as opposed to ways people are, or as types of people.

I do not know whether functioning in Mode 1 and/or Mode 2 is in any way essential, or necessary, or fundamental to how a person is or thinks or behaves. I do not know whether people can change between Mode 1 and Mode 2, though I think people can move from Mode 2 to Mode 1 – I'm not certain of that though.

I don't know if predilection for functioning in one or the other mode is born into someone; I don't know if it's carved into us by our early life experiences. I do know that culture teaches us, or tries to teach us, which is the right way to be, and I see what seems to be evidence in history that it can work – I think we great mass of Mode 1 functioning people, today, are evidence of that, because I don't think there has, in three thousand years of Western history been such widespread acceptance and endorsement of Mode 1 as we see today.

I don't know if white people of European ancestry are any more or less prone to Mode 2 thinking than any other people on earth. To a great extent, I don't care. As a Mode 1 supporter, I view arguments about the comparative moral merits of Westerners with the jaundiced eye that recognizes in them the venerable rhetorical fallacy argumentum ad but mooooooooom everybody else is doing it. I am far more interested in how Mode 1 and Mode 2 moral functioning play out within Western culture, than how cultures compare.

I invoke the historical patterns of subjugation perpetrated by white people (especially straight, able-bodied, male people) of European ancestry, not because I think they are particularly historically terrible or condemnable in comparison with any other people on earth (though equally, I do not know that they are not), but because, for one thing, it is the corpus of examples that are most familiar to me, and, I expect, my readership, and, for another even more important thing, I am dealing with living in a country where, holy crap, check out what those white people of European ancestry are up to.

Which is where we started with all this: the great and terrifying mass of Americans who think Trump is just wonderful.

I am an unabashed partisan of Mode 1. Today, I am not grading on a curve. I don't care whether the people of the US are more or less given to subjugate than anybody else on earth; I care whether the people of the US are adequately non-subjugating to my tastes. I hope to convince you that they are not adequately non-subjugating to your tastes, either.

I wish to stress that I am not saying that sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. do not exist. Nor am I saying that they exist only as manifestations of Mode 2. They can be primary. They can be primary in both Mode 1 and Mode 2 functioning people. But they look different when they are.

People can -- and do -- have prejudices, biases conscious and unconscious, empathy gaps, and failures to recognize their privileges regardless of which Mode they're functioning in. We can imagine someone who is functioning in Mode 2, who has various prejudicial notions about various ethnic minorities, but has targeted one in particular, or "foreigners", or "terrorists". Indeed, this may explain "model minorities".

Usually explanations of the model minorities phenomenon attribute their model minority status to some property of the minority in question; it strikes me as likely more fruitful to ask what it is about the oppressing majority that causes them to sort minorities this way. Perhaps America's model minorities are those ethnicities about which the white US majority still has prejudices and biases about, but which the covert Mode 2 faction allows into the Mode 2 in-group on sufferance, so long as the covert Mode 2 faction can continue to keep African-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in the out-group as designated victims. Thus people in model minorities in the US would encounter various amounts of discrimination, exclusion, bias, empathy gaps, and so forth – the casual, unintended, and even unconscious racism that arises from ignorance and implicit cultural messages, and which afflicts both Mode 1 and Mode 2 people – but would be spared the entitled subjugation other racial minorities are marked for.

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This brings us to another of the interesting consequences of this model. To people functioning in Mode 2, it matters a lot what groups you are and are not in. Membership in demographics becomes hugely important – literally life-and-death important – and very fraught. Other people have opinions as to what groups you "really" belong to, q.v. "one-drop rule".

Under these circumstances, there's a motivation for those in the in-group to shove fellow in-group members back out over the membership boundary: if they're rendered an outsider, you are permitted to subjugate them. This is true on the scale of an individual, where discrediting someone's claim to in-group membership might effectively authorize you to kill them and take their stuff, as well as on the scale of whole groups, where the re-designation of a demographic as out-group could mean you get to kill any of them and take their stuff.

In a society in which Mode 2 is the predominant way morality works, identity and membership and the status of groups can become – or perhaps often are – highly contested. How safe a person is in that society from fellow members turning on them has a lot to do with how secure their identity claims are. And people who have the power to determine other people's identities have a lot of power.

Which, when you think about it, is something we still see in our society, despite the ostensible dominance of Mode 1: it's great that we have anti-discrimination laws, but unfortunately we need them for a reason. As I described above, people functioning in Mode 2 aren't inclined to cede what they see as their prerogative to subjugate.

So far, I've been discussing in-groups and out-groups as if one has a single, unitary identity, but of course that's false. We all have a great number of identities. We belong not to a single group, but reside in the intersections of overlapping and nested groups, both groups that have entitativity and simple demographic commonalities. We live in neighborhoods which are within municipalities within local regions within states within national regions; we belong to families and faiths and ethnicities and subcultures and classes and genders and political movements and sexual orientations and on and on.

This of course greatly complexifies things in some ways. But in others, the effect isn't very complicated: there are just more fault-lines along which to knap off subjugatable sub-populations, and the odds that any given individual can be construed as being in some out-group or another go way up.

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One of the things that the reality of immanent intersectionality complexifies is keeping track of who's on whose side.

Just today, apparently Trump had a little goof with regard to how subjugatable women are or are not to his base. Some clever person asked him on the record whether he thought women who got abortions should be punished for it, and he answered in the affirmative. This, it turns out, was the wrong answer, even by "pro-life" standards. Women are supposed to mostly be on the in-group – heaven knows, he isn't going to win without 51% of the electorate – so it's just "abortion doctors" that it's okay to punish. Somebody clued him in and he walked back his original statement.

Folks in Mode 2 are keen to bewail "political correctness" as an imposition of Mode 1 poopy-heads, but really, it's just a basic exigency of functioning in Mode 2 that you need to be political: you have to keep track of a vast profusion of teams and players. Mode 2 requires a lot of political savvy and diplomatic skills just to manage all the information about who it is okay to try to subjugate and who it is not, and who is allied with whom and who is not as defenseless as they seem.

Frankly one of the reasons I'm so down with Mode 1 is sheer laziness. That shit was fine playing the occasional spy-thriller LARP, but I don't want to live that way.

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I am often asked about Shabogans.  People want to know whether this or that person they’ve seen could be a Shabogan, or whether this or that group they’ve seen could be Shabogans.  I generally reply that if you’ve seen them, they’re not Shabogans.  As with elves (at least of the household chore performing variety) the quintessential trait of the Shabogan is that one does not see them.  Castellans will sometimes speak of arresting, detaining, charging, and imprisoning Shabogans… but this is simply how Castellans talk.  They certainly spend a great deal of their time doing all these things to other gradations of the plebeian masses on Gallifrey, but Shabogans are never caught.  At least as far as we know. 

There are, supposedly, Shabogan legends about one of their number being caught drawing a moustache on a portrait of Chancellor Tavia, and subsequently being exhibited in chains in the Panopticon for the Time Lords to gaze upon with excited curiosity and thrilled loathing… but as with all accounts of what Shabogans think or say, we must treat it with suspicion, as it comes to us via the Time Lords and their genteel curation of facts.  The story goes that the exhibited Shabogan starved himself to death out of sheer fanatic perversity, despite the best efforts of his captors to save him.  In the accounts of ruling classes, the bravery and principled resistance of lesser mortals is always recounted as fanatic perversity.

It has often been observed that history is, by definition, written by those with the leisure time to sit around writing it.  It is thus, almost exclusively, the history of gentlemen, written by and for gentlemen.  Moreover, it is written by gentlemen who take it as read that, were they retroactively reincarnated in the past, they would be reincarnated as members of whichever patrician class they happen to be writing about.  Of course, when it comes to Time Lord historians, such assumptions have an extra edge of plausibility about them, which only makes them more toxic.

The great difficulty with relating the history of the Shabogans is that there are very few primary sources.  Generally, most historians think that most Shabogans themselves were, and presumably still are, far too busy working and/or rebelling against work, to leave time for writing things down.  Of course, it is equally possible that Shabogans spend a great deal of their time writing, reading, sharing manuscripts, debating theoretical and philosophical positions, etc, and that they simply guard their privacy so closely that no outsider has ever rumbled them at it.  It is, needless to say, illegal on Gallifrey for Shabogans to even learn to read and write, much less to actually do it.  Literacy with intent is a crime for which a Shabogan might – theoretically – be punished with dispersal.  Which is why, for Shabogans, graffiti is such a big deal.  It is not simply the things they might say when they scrawl on one of the green glimmering corrugated walls of the Ministry of Euphemisms or the Permanent Conclave of Obscurantism, it is the very fact that they write anything at all which is so incendiary.  The medium truly is the message.

It is from a consideration of the relatively few instances of Shabogan graffiti which can be relied upon as accurately relayed that we can glean any real hint of what Shabogans are actually like.  (The text of any Shabogan graffito is liable to be subtly altered on its journey through Time Lord retelling to sound more stupid or barbaric… that, at least, is what some Shabogan graffiti tells us.  There is, in fact, an entire subgroup of graffiti which complains in the bitterest terms of how the messages and intents of previous graffiti have been misrepresented, which hints, fascinatingly, that Shabogans read Time Lord histories of themselves!)

The first instance of Shabogan graffiti was recorded surprisingly late in the annals of the Time Lords.  It has been claimed, on the basis of the late date of recording, that the Shabogans never engaged in graffiti until comparatively late in their own existence as a class.  This, however, is a patently false conclusion, clearly more ideological than empirical.  It is in the interests of those establishment historians who tell and retell the catalogue of life through the ages on Gallifrey to portray the Shabogans as dull, slow-witted, bovine, and (paradoxically) energetically violent and sarcastic.  The supposed sarcasm of Shabogans is one of the constants in tales of them.  It is possible that this is because sarcasm is a form of wit that Time Lords claim to despise (though it is often said, not without foundation, that they have also elevated it to an artform… one thing, perhaps, which hints at their much-disavowed underlying ethnic and cultural kinship with Shabogans).  Shabogans are also supposedly given to puns, another form despised by Time Lords for its vulgarity.

One of the telling facts about the Time War is that we tend to speak of it ending with both ‘the Daleks’ and ‘the Time Lords’ being destroyed.  In fact, it was not just the Daleks who were destroyed but also every single one of their colony worlds, and thus also almost every single one of their slaves.  Indeed, it seems that pretty much anyone who happened to be standing anywhere near a Dalek at the time was destroyed.  Similarly, it was not just ‘the Time Lords’ who were ostensibly destroyed but also every single other ethic and class group on Gallifrey, including the Shabogans.  It’s worth remembering that none of these groups had declared war on the Daleks.  When the Time Lords made their altruistic and democratic decision to wage a war for liberty, they made it on behalf of masses of people who had no say in it whatsoever.  The Daleks are at least not hypocritical.  Indeed, it is one of the most remarkable but also most neglected facts about the Daleks that they are pretty much the only imperial power / ruling class / colonial oppressor in the entirety of universal history not to claim that their wars are waged altruistically for democracy and liberty.

It is not entirely true that Shabogans are never seen.  Or rather, Shabogans are seen in metaphorical ways.  There is, of course, the fact that they are perceived via the effect they have on the world.  They might disappear from a room before one enters it, but one notices that the room has been tidied and cleaned, that the wastepaper basket has been emptied, that the floor has been swept, that the charring around the Memory Hole has been scrubbed away, that the biodata extract you are inspecting not sits dust-free upon an ordered desk.  You might worriedly inspect the files that have been carefully reordered upon the desk, looking for dirty finger marks or creases that weren’t there before – any evidence that the Shabogan also took the chance to snoop into things that were none of their business.  (It goes without saying - or should - that without the Shabogans Time Lord society would instantly cease to function, largely because the Time Lords have so long enjoyed the luxury of not even having to know how to sharpen a pencil without stabbing themselves in the eye.)  Similarly, a Shabogan might vanish from a corridor moments before you walk down it, but you still see the nose chipped away from the bust of Pandak III, or the staser blast marks on the Seal of Rassilon, or the impertinent graffiti scrawled across the far wall. 

There is another sense in which Shabogans are seen, though it is more prosaic.  They are represented in theatrical performances put on for the kinds of Time Lords who go in for that sort of thing.  (There is an entire relatively-privileged socio-economic subgroup on Gallifrey which does nothing but put on such entertainments.)  Of course, Shabogans are represented on stage as ridiculous figures, given to malice and stupidity in equal measure, all fickleness and ‘amusing’ malapropisms.  The entertainments are generally written by dilettante Time Lord playwrights, often the same men who write the genteel histories.  Every Time Lord knows what Shabogans look and sound like from having seen such plays at least once or twice in their lives.  They never stop to wonder if perhaps their entire notion of what a Shabogan is might derive entirely from the imaginations of other people who, like them, have never actually seen one.

There are some of these plays which seem to be written from a position of sympathy with the Shabogans.  Gallifrey’s most famous and lauded playwright, Wagstaff, wrote an entire play on the Shabogan legendary outlaw Jack Half-a-Face, in which the titular hero is as grand and admirable as he is cruel and reckless.  Jack Half-a-Face’s most quoted saying, “they make a wasteland and call it order”, actually derives from Wagstaff’s play, and was almost certainly not said by Jack Half-a-Face at all.  Even so, Shabogans seemed to adopt the phrase, and it regularly appeared on walls in the Capitol.  It appeared to fall out of fashion among Shabogans when they realised that it pleased the Time Lords to see aspects of their own high culture quoted to them by their underlings, especially aspects which represented ostensible Time Lord sympathy with democratic ideals.  The tipping point seemed to be the occasion when the phrase was written on the side of a high balcony in Prydon Academy itself and the excessively delighted college Bursar ordered that it be left there.  After that, there are no recorded instances of the phrase reoccurring in Shabogan graffiti.

Shabogan graffiti has, to an extent, been appropriated by some of the more radical or waggish elements in Time Lord society.  There was once a Prydonian temporal biodata engineer, Babel, who sympathised with the Shabogan rebels so much he actually inserted Shabogan graffiti into the genetic code of recruits at Prydon academy.  It had no effect on the behaviour of the Time Lords into whom it was inserted - because genes are not destiny, not even for Time Lords - but there are still Time Lords whose DNA harbours inflammatory slogans, oppositional theoretic pronouncements, and revolutionary rhetoric, all encrypted within their chromosomes.  For many, this was an inspirational act.  For others, a crime against the state.  For yet others, an act of unpardonable bad taste.  There were those who combined the last two attitudes, claiming to base their ideas of what constituted orthodox political behaviour on their own sense of aesthetics, but actually basing their own sense of aesthetics upon orthodox political behaviour.  For yet others who might otherwise have been inclined to sympathise with such an act of detournement, there remains the inescapable problem of bodily violation.  Such considerations are taken extremely seriously in any culture in which the manipulation of genes is a foundation of social praxis – and particularly on Gallifrey.  It is often claimed, by Time Lords, that the reason for the particular sensitivity of Time Lord society to such questions is concomitant upon the fact that Time Lord genetic sequences are altered to include fourth-dimensional information.  There are those who accept this, but there also those who claim that Gallifrey is simply a great deal more vain and paranoid than most technological oligarchies.  The aforementioned Gallifreyan scrupularians of bodily integrity are, needless to say, less concerned about the Time Lords' habitual clandestine meddling in the gene pools of other species. 

It became quite fashionable, even chic, for a while, for Time Lords to boast that they were one of Babel’s victims… or ‘canvases’ as some took to calling themselves (rather missing the point of the graffiti metaphor).  Of the generation of those who were among the intake year upon which Babel worked, only few were worked on by Babel, and he only inscribed a few of those.  Yet, at one point, there were many claiming to be so inscribed, claiming to go through life bearing Babel’s hidden, internal, cryptographic, rebellious, microscopic tattoos.  Of the many claimants, only a small few made the claim truthfully.  Others who were inscribed and knew it, found it a source of shame, and never talked about it.  Some deny it, even though it is common knowledge – and they take great care never to inadvertently place themselves in the way of any evidence, thus preserving plausible deniability.  Some have never been found out.  Some go unsuspected even by themselves.  An enterprising few have had themselves extensively analysed to discover whether or not they bear one of Babel’s inscriptions - either from a desire to prove that they do or that they do not.  Some, as is to be expected, prefer not to know.  Others cannot bear to live in ignorance. 

Such is the prejudice, those who are known to bear the Shabogan graffiti are often viewed with suspicion, no matter what their record of respectability.  There was a Prydonian President, Hebwode, a moderate reformer, who was assassinated by order of a cabal which numbered among its ranks two Cardinals, a Provost-Martial, and the then-Castellan, because it became known that his genes were inscribed with a comparatively mild quotation from the Shabogan legendary figure Jack Half-a-Face.  The President’s affable and gentle liberalism was superstitiously assumed to be a result of his contamination, and so, having been judged a danger to the state by a conspiratorial few, he was pushed down an elevator shaft.  He was then crushed four times by the elevator until all his remaining regenerations were used up.  The deeds were done by a suborned Guard Captain, Axilar, who was (in an instance of communication failure between conspirators) subsequently promoted by one wing of the conspiracy before being assassinated by another.  Hebwode's ghost is still said to haunt the corridors of the Ministry of Labyrinths, muttering to himself about "reductionism".  The ghost of Axilar is also said to haunt the same corridors.  There are reports of occasions when the two ghosts bump into each other, which are said to prove that social awkwardness is one of the few forces in the universe more powerful than death.

Hebwode has become, in standard Time Lord histories, a dangerous demagogue who lusted for personal power, and who was scheming to bring down the entire republican system.  In this telling, he was assassinated by noble men who acted from high motives such as the love of liberty.  In them plays, his fellow radicals try to turn his death to their advantage by engaging in rabble-rousing amongst the Shabogans, who are (naturally) easily persuaded to riot and carnage by such manipulative rhetoric.

As it happens, at least some Shabogans do seem to have adopted Hebwode as a martyr.  In some Shabogan graffiti, he is now routinely confused with Jack Half-a-Face, to the point where the some recent iterations of the legend conflate the two men as regenerative aspects of each other.  This would hardly please either man.  In the tales, Jack Half-a-Face is usually described as being the mortal enemy of all Time Lords, whatever their House, Faction, Chapter, College, or political persuasion.  Jack Half-a-Face has no patience with well-meaning reformers.  Hebwode, for his part, was no friend of the Shabogans.  At best, he wanted to ensure that their gruel was more nutritious, and that the jail cells in the Chancellery were a little more comfortable.  After all, he was a liberal reformer, not a lunatic radical.  It is worth noting that many Shabogans do not appreciate the stories of Jack Half-a-Face being altered in such a way that their hero becomes, rather than a born-and-bred Shabogan, but a disaffected 'spireling' - as they are inclined to call those who dwell eternally within the dreaming minarets and pinnacles and cupolas of the Capitol. 

Oddly, Babel is also said by some to be yet another regenerative aspect of both President Hebwode and Jack Half-a-Face, thus closing the circle.

As for the historical Babel himself, long since disappeared, accounts differ.  Some say that he left the Capitol and became an Outsider, or that he rose in Prydon Academy to become a Professor, specialising in a subject so unpopular and arcane that he effectively disappeared into the system after his first semester of teaching.  Other reports say that he left Gallifrey entirely and became a renegade, supposedly taking the pseudonym ‘The Letterer’, travelling the cosmos for many spans before settling down to pursue a career as a restaurateur.  Yet other accounts have Babel growing out of his youthful rebellious phase, and eventually becoming a high-ranking operative within the ultra-conservative core of the Celestial Intervention Agency... a career path which is perhaps foreshadowed by his youthful indiscretions, as long as we think of political behaviour as having form but not content.  Such a career path would also neatly explain the uncertainty about what became of him.  Still other accounts have Babel regenerating – rather unfortunately - into a central support strut for the Belvedere of Forgotten Details.  This is now thought to be the most likely of the many stories, and the strut has become something of a site of pilgrimage… and also, ironically enough, of defacement by Shabogans.  Textual wars have been fought across the strut, by rival factions of Shabogans, over the question of whether or not Babel is, in fact, a regenerative aspect of Jack Half-a-Face... not to mention the sub-wars fought over precisely which of the struts Babel regenerated into.

There is one further question which I shall dally with today.  Why is it, given that Shabogans are never seen, let alone caught, that they should speak of and cherish a legendary scapegrace bandit who always evades capture?  I can only speculate, but I suspect that it is Jack’s liberation from work which attracts the Shabogans.  Heroes and rebels somehow get by without having to worry about where the next meal is coming from.  Of course, banditry is work of a kind, but it is work for oneself.  Social banditry – of the kind that Jack Half-a-Face engages in – is also work, since it involves redistribution.  But then that very redistribution frees other not only from austerity but also from the need to toil in order to retain even an austere lifestyle.  In essence, Jack Half-a-Face seems to represent that idea of work as something other than a shameful and humiliating necessity.  I may be over-generalising from a specific case, but it is possible that this is the secret heart of all such legends.  The attraction isn’t so much someone who is never caught, but someone who can thus continue with his unalienated labour.  Furthermore, it is not so much that he then gives the poor food, but that the poor are then freed from the necessity to go and scrub toilets in order to earn even a meagre crust.  The barbarism of some of the behaviour engaged in by Jack Half-a-Face (and his gang) is not so much a revenge fantasy as a way of throwing the normalised barbarity of the rulers into sharp relief.

I shall conclude, for now, with an anecdote.  It comes from those genteel histories, and is related in one of those genteel plays, but it is possible (I think) to glimpse something truly inspirational in it, a garbled message from below which nonetheless retains its integrity.

There was, supposedly, an occasion when Jack Half-a-Face was caught.  (It transpires, naturally, that he wanted to be caught and the whole thing was a trick, but that need not trouble us here.)  He is brought before the Prefect of the Plain of Knives, who asked him, sneeringly, “Why did you become a bandit?”  Jack Half-a-Face is said to have stared the Prefect straight in the eyes and replied, “Why did you become a Prefect?” 

 

So lookee here (or here, for popsci coverage). Researchers out of the University of Virginia have successfully controlled behavior in mice— possibly instilled True Happiness, although it’s impossible to be sure about another being’s inner emotional state— using controlled magnetic fields. By hacking into the reward centers of the rodent brain they induced the little guys to assemble on command, drew them to any spot where critical lines of force brought down the rapture. (It’s a little like the “wirehead” tech that Louis Wu became addicted to in Larry Niven’s Ringworld books. Only wireless.) Faster than drugs, deeper than optogenetics, more precise than that run-of-the-mill transcranial magnetic stimulation that induces night terrors and “sensed presence”, the new technique represents “the first demonstration of bona fide magnetic control of the nervous system.”

Wheeler et al rhapsodize about the benefits such methods will ultimately confer. A real boon to research, they say. A way to “better understand neural development, function and pathology.”

Meanwhile the US government is doing its damnedest to force the whole tech industry to break its own encryption. (Don’t breathe easy just because the spooks have backed off on the Apple case; they’ve already got their legal judgment and their cracked iPhone. Remember those heartfelt, wide-eyed assurances that we only want to look inside this one, tewwowist phone, how could anyone object to weakening the security on this single, solitary tewwowist phone? Just kidding! The DOJ have served notice that henceforth the entire tech industry is their bitch and can be commanded to unlock anything at any time, with or without cooperation from “the relevant parties”.)

I don’t know if anyone has drawn a line between these two developments, between happy mice and gloating spooks. To me, that line is drawn in neon.

It’s probably too early to worry about the Magneto tech just yet. It doesn’t work on any old field mouse; the critters have to be genetically tweaked beforehand, their very brain cells reshaped for increased sensitivity to magnetic fields. They had to retcon a whole new set of switches to control ion channels in the brain. The same invasive molecular reconstruction would have to be performed on people before evil government agencies could take over our nervous systems. Relieved sigh, right?

Then again, why wouldn’t evil government agencies just go right ahead and mandate such measures in the name of Security?

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Our watchers employ a wonderful sort of doublethink to extend their reach: they pretend that nothing has changed, then grab more power by arguing that everything has. Why, we’ve always been able to tap people’s phones, or tail them, or bug their apartments: how is sifting through email and using face-recognition algos any different?

The fallacy, of course, is the ease with which one can indiscriminately surveil millions today, versus yesterday’s difficulty in targeting high-value suspects and following them around town in a van with fake FTD logos on the side. Governments and spooks want you to believe that a fishing rod equals a drift net, and they’re hoping you won’t notice that 99% of their haul is by-catch.

Of course, they’re just as ready to exploit the opposite rationale: OMG terrorists and child molesters are everywhere exploiting webcams and end-to-end encryption in ways that have never been done before! We need more power to combat this unprecedented and existential threat! The problem with that being— as I’ve argued before— that the moment you accept mass online surveillance because horrible things happen to innocent children on the Internet, you pretty much have to let Big Brother install cameras in private bathrooms and bedrooms because horrible things happen to innocent children there, too. I’d be tempted to call it “Mission Creep”, were it not for the fact that mission creep is something that happens inadvertently and this whole panopticon project is so damn deliberate.

We can already see it happening with the ambulatory computers we drive around in. A Rand report from last year— on a workshop  exploring the use of future tech by law enforcement— stirred up a blizzard of online commentary thanks to a scenario about Law Enforcement remotely commandeering driverless vehicles. Workshop participants apparently regarded such interfaces as “low” priority”. Still. We’re talking about people who reserve the right to Stingray your cell phone conversations and read your emails without a warrant. We’re talking about people who can prevent you, without explanation or recourse, from getting on an airplane to go visit your mum. People who seem curiously immune to indictment no matter how many unarmed black people they kill. It’s difficult to imagine such folks walking away from the power to remote-control your car from the comfort of their dashboards. Hell, thanks to OnStar, they’ve been remotely shutting down drivered vehicles since 2009. And how can we stop suspected terrorists from flying, yet draw the line at ground-based travel? Does anyone honestly think that evildoers never drive to the scene of their evil deeds?

Of course, evildoers sometimes walk, too.

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You can see where I’m going with this.

One line in particular jumped out at me while reading Wheeler et al: their description of Magneto2.0 as “a prototype for a class of magnetogenetic remote controlled actuators.” They targeted the striatum— a central element of the brain’s reward system— but they could have just as easily gone after the motor strip, provoked a case of alien-paw syndrome instead of a dopamine high. A few years down the road, they might be able to run the motor systems of those mice as easily as the LAPD runs other people’s self-driving 2022 Teslas.

Of course, if you were going to scale up to humans you’d need to tweak our genes first. That’s not as big a barrier as you might think, it’s not like you have to raise the new flesh from embryos or anything.  Wheeler and his buddies used adult mice, injected their customized genes directly into the brain using a virus as a carrier.

And if we can’t handle the inoculation of a few million North Americans, what the hell is all that vaccination infrastructure for?

Evildoers fly to their targets, so we keep them from flying. If they ride overland to their targets we take control of their vehicles, keep them from riding; it’s the same thing. If they walk to their targets— if they disobey a lawful command, try to run— well, how can we stop suspected terrorists from driving, yet draw the line at arms and legs?

Police have always had the right to immobilize suspects, tackle them physically, restrain them. For the good of society.

It’s the same thing, right?

William Gibson was right. The street finds its own uses for things.

Of course, so does the state.

It would not behoove us to forget that.

On the other hand, Nate Silver is pretty pessimistic about Bernie Sanders' chances of winning in most of the remaining states — and winning by large enough margins to amass the necessary delegates. Silver's numbers seem to add up. So that battle could be over before June…maybe as soon as April 19 when New York votes.

I still don't have a big preference in that race. At the moment, I kinda feel Bernie would make a slightly better president but Hillary would make a slightly better candidate…but ask me tomorrow and I may think the opposite. What I really want is for one to have a clean victory — no room for the loser to claim cheating or rigging — and for the loser to congratulate and support the winner in a way that binds the party. Maybe I'm hoping for the impossible.

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This is the next part in an ongoing series on a writing style I’m calling Novelization Style. It may not make much sense unless you’ve read Part One and Part Two.

If you look back at the first post in this series you’ll notice that I identified the narrative voice that opens The Haunting of Hill House not as “Shirley Jackson” but just “the narrator.” I don’t know that the omniscient narrator of The Haunting of Hill House_ bears any resemblance to the literal Shirley Jackson. There’s a concept in criticism called the implied author. It’s a mental image of a work’s author composed of traits and opinions you, the reader, infer from the text. In other words, the implied author is the kind of person you think wrote the story, judging purely from the story. It may not have anything to do with the actual person. For instance, my implied author version of Robert Heinlein resembles Foghorn Leghorn.

The implied author is not necessarily the narrator. The narrator of The Left Hand of Darkness is Genly Ai; the implied author is the idea you get from reading it of Ursula K. Le Guin. Of course, in that novel the first-person narrator is a character (which can be an actual named character, or just a narrator with a personality–for instance, the narrator of Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx is just a nameless third person narrator, but speaks the language of the novel’s fictional world). In a book like The Haunting of Hill House, in which the narrative voice is just… well, a narrative voice, it’s entirely practical to treat the narrator and the implied author as the same thing. (I’m pretty sure the narrator of Terry Pratchett’s novels is Terry Pratchett.) A narrator and an implied author are alike in that they have points of view and opinions, and make assumptions.

A recurring discussion in SF criticism revolves around defaults–the cultural and material details a story assumes go without saying. What customs, lifestyles, habits, and technologies do our stories treat as normal? What do they treat as alien? What don’t they think to imagine could even be different at all? Every story makes assumptions about the way the world works, but in a genre full of imagined worlds these questions take on extra significance.

Failure to question assumptions is a basic hazard of SF. A lot of “golden age” SF projected mid–20th century gender roles into the future, casting women as nurses, secretaries, and space telephone operators. Not that translating parts of our own society into other worlds is always a problem, even when it’s unrealistic. SF is about the real world, and written for an audience that lives in the real world, and SF writers have to do a certain amount of “translating” other worlds into forms that make sense to their audience. I mean, I’m really glad Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings in English and not Elven, y’know? The problem comes when stories unthinkingly duplicate our defaults when we ought to be asking whether they could, or should, be different.

Or, rather, when narrators duplicate our defaults. For assumptions to be made there must be someone to do the assuming. This is where Novelization Style becomes a problem. Novelization style uses transparent prose, which tries to present the story as though transmitted directly to the reader, unmediated. It uses close third person narration, which tries to present a character’s point of view and nothing beyond it, as though transmitted directly to the reader, unmediated.

In effect Novelization Style has no narrator–or, at least, the narrator, and the implied author, is neutral, impartial, and devoid of personality. No one is telling this story. It’s a camera, pointed at a set, with no one behind it.

So you don’t ask “Who is the narrator?” which means you also don’t ask questions like “Why is this narrator telling this story? Why did they make these decisions about the plot, or the characters? What do they want me to think about all this, and do I agree?” The story feels less like something someone made, and more like something that just sort of happened. This does not exactly encourage you to think about what you’re reading. When I read a book like Leviathan’s Wake it’s a struggle to actively engage with the book instead of… well, just sort of skim along the surface with it.

This is where the writing gets tricky, because this disengagement is an accidental side effect. But it’s going to sound a bit like I’m accusing writers of writing this way to discourage questions about what they write. This is not even remotely any writer’s goal. I thought I should pause to explicitly note that, to forestall confusion.

Because maybe, if we’re reading something like those old space operas with no place for women, reading thoughtlessly reinforces ideas we’d be better off questioning. A few years ago, because it seemed popular at the time, I gave Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy a chance. What I remember is that the pro-democracy, reformist male lead gained some political power and quickly became a dictatorial tinpot general because, gosh, going all Pinochet just worked better. The books seemed barely aware they were making a political argument.

When I return to old SF I read as a child, I’m always surprised how much sexism, weird politics, and general dodgy philosophizing just did not stick in my memory. It’s partly because at that age my brain was good at editing out anything it didn’t care to notice. But mostly because in the stuff I was reading (mostly conventional-wisdom “classics” like Asimov and Heinlein, because those were the books I had heard of and as a child I had no taste[1]) took crappy assumptions for granted, and I came across hardly any SF that didn’t take crappy assumptions for granted, and I just uncritically assumed that this was How SF Worked.

Not that the people who write these stories were, or are, Bad People Who Write Bad Things and Must be Censured. It’s just that every writer is a fallible human beings with blind spots. And, again, this isn’t the effect Novelization Style is aiming for. I think Novelization Style is after the stated goal of transparent prose advocates: writing that gets out of the way of the story. But in chasing that goal it reaches for an objectivity it can’t have. Fiction is never objective, because it’s fiction. Someone made it up. Everything in a story was put there, consciously or unconsciously, by a creator.

I implied way back in the introduction, and hinted at a couple times since, that Novelization Style is heavily influenced by movies and television. I’ll start to explain that more in the next post. For now the point is that when we watch a film it’s easy to sink into the assumption that the camera’s view is “objective.” Not in the sense that the movie itself is somehow “real,” naturally, but in the sense that, unless a scene is explicitly framed as a dramatization of a story told by an onscreen character[2], we assume the camera is not an unreliable narrator. Or any kind of narrator at all. It looks like the story is just being, y’know, shown to us.

Which isn’t necessarily the case. It’s harder to notice, but video is narrated as well. I don’t want to get too far into a different medium (for more detail I’ll direct readers to an essay at Eruditorum Press which really explains this better than I could). For my purposes the important point is that a scene’s framing, lighting, editing, and music tell us how to think about the action and, crucially, how the filmmaker thinks we ought to think about it. If you doubt it, take a look at that trailer for The Shining that was famously recut to look like a family comedy. The same performances from the same script. The same footage. But different editing and music change the meaning entirely.

Most importantly, that alternate Shining trailer changes the meaning of the shots just by choosing what to show, and what not to show. It uses scenes that could just as easily appear in a family comedy and not, say, the bit where rivers of blood pour out of the elevators. In any medium, what a story includes and what it leaves out will be a major influence on what meaning we, the audience, take from it. That holds true even when we don’t notice what’s left out, or don’t question what’s included–which become more likely the more the story we’re reading or watching has a veneer of illusory objectivity, a frequent characteristic of Novelization Style.

That veneer is an artifact of the “transparent prose” notion: treating a medium as a pane of glass. I think it’s reinforced by the ways Novelization Style borrows from visual media. That’s going to be the subject of the next two or three posts, because this essay really is rambling excessively. Next up: how Novelization Style tends to focus on physical action, surface thoughts, and immediate goals.

Philip Ryken, the president of the white evangelical Wheaton College, said some jaw-droppingly stupid things when he decided to sue the government because the Affordable Care Act requires health insurers to cover the cost of health insurance.

Ryken’s really dumb statements about human reproduction went largely overlooked at the time. That was understandable, because they were sandwiched in amongst a host of his other statements that were so transparently disingenuous that his brazen dishonesty took all the attention away from his staggering ignorance.

Wheaton, after all, had previously offered health insurance coverage that covered the cost of contraception. They had done this willingly, and never regarded it as controversial or remarkable — which was correct, since it was not controversial or remarkable. Their health insurance covered the cost of health care, which is what it was supposed to do. But after the Affordable Care Act became law, Wheaton dropped that coverage and sued the government, claiming the school was being persecuted for its religious commitment to not having the kind of insurance it had, up until then, freely chosen to have.* And thus most observers noted that Philip Ryken was a ridiculous figure for litigiously pretending to be aggrieved over something that had never previously seemed to bother him at all.

Those observers weren’t wrong. That sanctimonious hypocrisy did make Ryken ridiculous. But so did everything he had to say about the actual facts of birth control — how it works, what its for, what it does — and about the basic facts of human anatomy and reproduction in general. Ryken repeatedly conflated birth control and abortion in a way that suggested that he believed that human personhood begins at ejaculation. Everything he said about the morning-after pill revealed that he didn’t understand how sex works.

So I had some good belly laughs at Ryken’s expense. Here was a highly educated grown man determinedly drawing attention to the fact that he had somehow gotten through all that schooling without ever learning the basic facts that would have allowed him to earn a passing grade in a junior-high sex-ed class. The fact that this man was also an academic — the head of a university that trained biology, nursing and pre-med students — only made it all the more absurd.

But while Philip Ryken’s bewilderment and ignorance is, indeed, astonishing and ridiculous, it’s not exceptional. It turns out there are a lot of other highly educated grown men who, like Ryken, haven’t got a clue about how sex works, or what birth control does, or what health insurance is and how that works.

And several of these other ridiculous, ignorant grown men are employed as justices of the Supreme Court. “SCOTUS Bros Clearly Don’t Understand How Women Get Contraceptives,” Tierney Sneed reports for TPM:

Judging by the questions from conservatives on the court — all men — they’re still not fully aware of how every day people — particularly women — receive health care in the United States, or how health insurance actually works. …

See also Sneed’s follow-up, “Sorry, SCOTUS, Your Ideas For Getting Women Contraceptives Won’t Work,” which features a long string of lawyers and insurance providers gaping in shock and horror at how little Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito seem to understand of health insurance, contraception coverage, insurance law, insurance economics or what’s involved in just going to your doctor.

As Kevin Drum put it: “Nobody expects judges to be subject matter experts on every case that comes before them. But this is kindergarten-level stuff. How can they possibly pretend to produce a reasoned opinion if they literally have no idea how health insurance under Obamacare works in the first place?”

That identifies the embarrassing intellectual and moral failing here. It’s not really so much the ignorance as the arrogance. You could live a full life without ever knowing any more than Philip Ryken does about how contraception and human reproduction actually work — but if you’re going to sue the government, claiming religious persecution, based on your understanding of those things then you become obliged to actually learn something about them. Similarly, most people don’t need to be experts in health insurance law or even to understand the basics of how health insurance works — but if you’re a Supreme Court justice hearing arguments involving that law, then you’re obliged to do your damned homework and correct for that ignorance.

– – – – – – – – – – –

* Wheaton’s retroactive explanation for their previous contraception insurance is that this decade-long policy was “inadvertent.” The state of Illinois began requiring health insurance policies to cover all FDA-approved contraception back in 2003, but no one at the time thought to pretend this requirement was an assault on “religious liberty” because the president at the time was white and Republican. And since the morning-after pill is a form of FDA-approved contraception — and not an abortifacient because Sex Does Not Work Like That — nobody at Wheaton thought to object. As long as the president was white and Republican, nobody there felt compelled to pretend that the morning-after pill was an “abortifacient.”

That abrupt “deep religious conviction” was only adopted, Wheaton’s lawyer explained, after the Affordable Care Act “became part of the news.” That didn’t require anything to change for Wheaton — federal law was simply catching up to what state law had required for them for years already — but because the politics of this had changed, Wheaton’s claims of deep religious convictions had to change, and thus their understanding of How Sex Works had to change. They had to start claiming that the morning-after pill can and does cause abortions, even though it can’t and doesn’t. And they had to start pretending that this claiming makes it so.

 

 

On pockets, and the gendered nature of being unencumbered.

This sounds like some massively cheesy slogan for some TED Talk or “motivational guru”, but it’s mostly how I’m feeling after an evening at my local Libertea – our Liberal Drinks / #libdempint evening that takes place in a coffee shop rather than a pub. We still do the pub on alternating months, and get a slightly different crowd coming to each.

I’ve been reminded of something I may have lost sight of in recent months; the devastation and loss of the General Election gave way to the elation of the Lib Dem Fightback, which slowly but surely ebbed into routine, and perhaps I’ve been going through the motions of campaigning and organising events without stopping to think what it means.

I’ve been reminded that when people joined the Lib Dems in the aftermath of the General Election, they did so because they had an instinct that the fight for liberalism was important. I’ve been reminded that people join political parties to achieve things for the causes they care about, not to act as footsoldiers for an unaccountable clique. And yes, getting people elected is almost always a key part of achieving those things, but we need a holistic view – what we want to achieve and how winning elections helps us achieve it – to inspire people to campaign enthusiastically.

I’ve been reminded that not only can peoples’ attitudes and behaviour actively put people off getting involved, but also frustration at not being able to achieve what they joined the party to support. I’ve been reminded that it’s the job of us not-so-newbies to use our experience to help our new members experience the power of a political party to achieve positive liberal change, to see the whole picture of how an idea becomes a policy, becomes a campaign, becomes a candidate, becomes a councillor or Parliamentarian, becomes a victory, and how the cycle repeats and overlaps.

So thanks to all those at Libertea who have inspired me to double down and help our newbies get a real sense of achievement out of being a Liberal Democrat, to clear the obstacles and smooth the road so we can deliver a Liberal vision of the future, together.

My copy of the new Liberator arrived this morning. I have already started serialising Lord Bonkers' latest diary, but I thought I would share some of Radical Bulletin with you too.

The lead item looks at the Gurling review of the Liberal Democrats' performance at the 2015 general election:

James Gurling and his colleagues have pulled few punches. If their report has a weakness it's that it all too well reflects the general election campaign's fundamental mistake of seeing political problems and offering organisational solutions ... 

The elephant in the room throughout ... is Nick Clegg himself, Its conclusions painfully reinforce the now clearer view that he lacked the political experience for the job having had one term as an MEP - so semi-detatched from UK politics - and only two years as an MP before becoming leader, in both cases parachuted into safe berths.

I am sure you would like to read more, but to do so you will have to subscribe to Liberator.

Radical Bulletin, incidentally, was originally a separate publication, latterly edited by John Tilley and Ralph Bancroft.

It merged with Liberator in the early 1980s, where it survives to this day as a section of the magazine.

Think of the two publications as the radical Liberal equivalent of Whizzer and Chips.

From the Maine Antique Digest:

A lawsuit filed in federal court in New Mexico in June 2015 pits Harvard University, which has about a $37 billion endowment, against Steve Elmore, an antiques dealer who patched together $36,000 to self-publish a book. The suit may hinge on the definition of the word “manuscript.”

. . . .

In 2015 Elmore of Santa Fe, New Mexico, self-published a 217-page book, In Search of Nampeyo: The Early Years, 1875-1892. It was the culmination of decades of work and research. His publication was also the result of Elmore’s being rejected by the Peabody Museum Press, the publishing arm of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

In its suit, Harvard claims Elmore used photos he took in the Peabody Museum after signing an agreement that specified how he would use the photos and restricted their use. Elmore counters that Harvard released all its rights to the manuscript and wants to publish his decades of research without crediting him.

According to court documents, in August 2010 Elmore signed a contract with the Peabody Museum Press to write a manuscript on Nampeyo. The contract noted that the manuscript was subject to peer review and promised “potential publication,” and Elmore was paid $1500 to conduct research at the museum.

. . . .

“The first version of my manuscript was sent out for peer review, with two out of three reviewers recommending publication with revisions. The editor asked me to revise the book for the more scholarly ‘Peabody Museum Papers’ series. She asked me to explain my methodology and to link my work to art history, which I did. The new version of my manuscript, complete with my photos, took me another year and added 100 pages to my manuscript. In November 2013 I submitted this final version…and it was rejected with little comment in January 2014 by the Peabody Museum Press board of directors,” said Elmore.

The rejection letter’s language is the subject of dispute.

In a letter dated January 21, 2014, Joan Kathryn O’Donnell, director of the Peabody Museum Press, rejected Elmore’s manuscript because it was not a fit with the Peabody’s “editorial and publishing priorities and standards.” Elmore’s approach to the material, the letter said, was “inappropriate” for the Peabody’s scholarly publication series, and it quoted a board member who leveled a stark criticism. “We are an academic press, and this is not an academic book,” the unnamed board member said.

The rejection letter stated that the Peabody Museum Press was returning to Elmore “all rights in the manuscript…including all versions of the manuscript submitted to the Peabody Museum Press.” O’Donnell encouraged Elmore to publish elsewhere, even offering ten to 15 high-quality photographs and suggesting American Indian Art Magazine as a possible venue. “We tried very hard to make this project work,” O’Donnell lamented.

Elmore took O’Donnell’s advice but didn’t go the magazine route, and he didn’t accept the Peabody’s offer of photographs; he self-published the book through Spirit Bird Press, an entity he created.

. . . .

On December 10, 2015, a federal judge granted Harvard’s motion for an injunction, stopping Elmore from advertising, selling, and distributing his book. Elmore had already sold over 900 copies of the book that cost him $36,000 to produce, had a deal with Amazon.com in place, and had media kits ready to promote his book.Maine Antique Digest reviewed the book in the April 2015 issue.

Elmore is fighting back on two fronts: he’s filed a countersuit in federal court and launched legal action in a state court in New Mexico. His countersuit alleges breach of contract, breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealing, tortious interference with contractual relations, conversion, and more.

. . . .

In an e-mail to M.A.D., Elmore states his case. “Here’s my take on the Permission to Photo agreement. First, that agreement is Harvard’s attempt to strip photographers of their copyright of their work. The intention of the agreement is for Harvard to avoid U.S. Federal Copyright law and for Harvard to assert itself between the photographer and his own copyright, thus placing itself above the law. Right now, Harvard acknowledges I own the copyright to my photos, returned in the ‘all rights’ letter, yet insists I can’t publish them. What else does copyright mean? I’m not denying I signed the agreement, and I would not have published without their returning to me in writing from the Board ‘all rights’ etc. and ‘recommending’ I publish elsewhere.

. . . .

Harvard’s lawyers claim the injunction is necessary. “It is extremely important to the Museum to have control over and approval of any published photographs of its collections, because the quality of those photographs and the way they are presented reflect directly on the Museum, and either enhance or degrade its reputation.” Harvard claims that Elmore’s photographs are blurry, washed out, or inadequately lighted.

Link to the rest at Maine Antique Digest

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A short story:

John and Rebecca sat silently as they ate their dinner. They’d first heard the reports on the radio early that morning as they got ready to go to work but John had dismissed them with a joke. Now things weren’t so funny.

It had been the only topic of conversation in the office all day. People tried to make light of the situation, but it was obvious that they were scared. There had been wall to wall coverage on all of the television news channels and the tabloids had gone crazy. The prime minister had tried to reassure the public, but by lunchtime, Guido Fawkes had got hold of a secret memo stating that there were plans for the Royal family and key members of the cabinet to be airlifted to a remote, secure location. The only thing preventing the country from descending into chaos and panic and rioting was the strangeness of the threat. No-one was ready to believe it. “It’s like the Millennium Bug all over again” people insisted, trying to convince themselves as much as each other.

After dinner, John started loading the dishwasher, a job he usually enjoyed. “It’s like playing Tetris, but with plates!” he’d say to Rebecca. Nearly every night for the last ten years he’d made the same joke and each time Rebecca smiled as though hearing it for the first time. Tonight, however, it didn’t give him the same level of joy. It felt like a redundant act. If the rumours were true, then he didn’t want to spend his last night on Earth playing Tetris with plates. “I’ll do it in the morning” he said with what he hoped was an optimistic smile. Rebecca could see the fear in his eyes as she silently nodded.

The two of them went into the front room where Charlie and Archie were playing. They’d managed to shield them from the news all day and had done their best to hide the fear they felt from them too. Normally, they’d be putting the kids to bed around this time in the evening, but tonight they decided to let them play for half an hour longer. They both looked so innocent. Their whole lives ahead of them. John squeezed Rebecca’s hand.

Soon the kids started to get ratty. They were tired. “OK, time for bed I think” Rebecca said. Where normally this statement would be met with protests and pleas of “just five minutes more”, today Archie and Charlie accepted their fate.

The two of them sat on the sofa watching the news in silence. Experts took it in turns to exaggerate and then belittle the threat. “For fuck’s sake,” John said, “I don’t know if any of these people are telling the truth or if it’s all bullshit. Is this a genuine fucking debate? Is there actual doubt about what’s going to happen or is this just some misguided attempt at fucking bullshit balance? Impartiality can go fuck itself right now as far as I’m concerned. Just tell me what the fuck is going to happen.”
“Switch it off,” Rebecca said. “If it happens, we’ll know soon enough. We don’t need to hear it from Huw Edwards.”
“I thought you liked Huw” John said, momentarily distracted.
“I do. That’s why I don’t want him to tell me I’m about to die. That would really put me off him.”

It was just after 9pm when Rebecca finally said it. “Do you think it’s going to happen? I mean really? Is it really going to happen?”
John sipped from his glass of wine and looked at her. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Earlier you said it just the Millennium Bug for that thing you always say.”
“The Millennium Bug for the WhatsApp generation,” John said.
“Yes, that. Now you don’t seem so confident.”
“No. I’m not. I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
“What are we going to do?” Rebecca asked.
“What can we do? The way people are talking it sounds like it going to be like the fucking blitz. The blitz for the WhatsApp gen-”
“The blitz! The fucking blitz! The shelter! The fucking shelter!”
John bristled slightly at being interrupted during his WhatsApp generation joke, but realised that Rebecca was right and had probably saved her life, his life, the life of both of his children and that of his mother and so quickly forgave her as he smiled and repeated her words, “The fucking shelter!”

“Where are we going?” asked Charlie, rubbing sleep from his eyes in the back of the car.
“We’re going to granny’s! We’re going to have a sleepover in the Castle!”
“But I have school in the morning! We only stay at granny’s at the weekend!”
“Don’t worry, the school phoned while you were asleep and said that you and Archie had been such good boys that you’ve been given a special day off! You’re both very lucky children!”
“Archie!” Charlie squealed, “Did you hear that?”
Archie slept in the back seat of the car all the way to granny’s house.

The car pulled into the driveway outside John’s mum’s house. He jumped out and banged on the door. He could hear Murphy barking, and saw a figure get up and approach the door. The hallway light came on. The sound of a key turning. The door opened.
“Oh, John. Oh, John! What’s happening?” his mother sobbed.
“I don’t know. It might be nothing. I hope to fucking god that it’s nothing. But maybe it’s something.”
“What have you told the children?” she asked.
“Nothing. We said we’re all going to have a sleepover in the Castle.”
“The Castle?”
“The fucking Castle!”
“You know I don’t like you swearing.”
“I think it’s justified.”
“I guess. The fucking Castle. Of course the Castle. Fucking hell. The fucking Castle.”
“Mum.”
“Shut up you prick, let’s get in the fucking Castle.”

The Castle wasn’t actually a castle. It was a WW2 Anderson shelter in John’s mum’s back garden. It had served variously as a bomb shelter, a slightly optimistic nuclear bunker, some sort of generic hideout, the Batcave, Castle Greyskull, the Cats Lair, the Fortress of Solitude and then more recently as wherever Ben 10 lives. Throughout all these incarnations, the Castle also housed a number of half-empty tins of paint, a broken patio chair, a hardened bag of cement, a single gardening glove and until recently, a family of foxes. Under normal circumstances, it was not the kind of place that any adult would want to sleep in. It was a cold, damp shithole. The kids loved it.

Rebecca took the kids to the Castle, trying to maintain a difficult balance of pretending that this was a fun adventure but nothing so exciting that either of them would fully wake up and start asking difficult questions. Meanwhile, John and his mother grabbed supplies from the house.

“What do we need?” John asked. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly 10pm. “We don’t have long!”
“I’ll go upstairs and get blankets and pillows!” his mother shouted, “We’ll need food, water, candles, a torch, I don’t know, grab everything you can!”

John raced around the kitchen, frantically opening cupboards and drawers and picking up everything he could find that seemed like it might be useful. He made repeated trips, running between the kitchen and the Castle. He felt like a contestant on a particularly shit episode of Supermarket Sweep, where instead of looting a pretend supermarket run by Dale Winton, he was ransacking his own mother’s kitchen in preparation for a weird apocalypse.

Midway between the Castle and the kitchen, John thought he heard a distant thud. And then a second. And a third. He looked at his watch, it was quarter past ten. “Fuck!” he thought. “It’s happening!”

He ran inside the house. “Mum! Mum! Come on! Get in the Castle! It’s happening!”
“Where’s Murphy?” his mum shouted.
“What?”
“I can’t find Murphy! I’m not going in the Castle without Murphy!”
“Rebecca’s got him!” John lied. “We’ve got to get in the Castle!”

Much to John’s relief, when he and his mother crawled into the Castle, it turned out that his Murphy lie had accidentally been true; Rebecca was feeding the little dog half of a Mini Cheddar from a packet she’d found in the car. They all huddled together in the darkness. The children were asleep. Murphy was eating a dog chew that John had grabbed during one of his trips to the kitchen. The ground began to vibrate and the barrage of dull thuds grew louder.

“Do you think we’re safe in here?” Rebecca finally asked.
“Well, it’s designed to withstand bombs,” John’s mother said.
“Yes, Lynne, but these aren’t bombs, are they?”
“No,” she replied. “Is this better or worse than bombs?”
“I don’t know. Bombs are pretty bad, aren’t they? They’re designed to be bad. There are no good bombs. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m just talking about bombs. I don’t know anything about bombs. I teach French at secondary school. There’s very little about bombs in the teacher training. I’m just saying words now, Lynne. I’m just saying words,” Rebecca looked at John, “John, it’s your turn to say some words.”

There was a slight pause, during which the horrific sounds outside grew louder and louder and the ground shook more and more. “Some music!” John said, trying to distract himself and the others from the noises outside. “Orange Juice!” John fumbled with his phone. His battery was at 68% and he put it onto Airplane mode.

The three of them sat and listened to Edwyn Collins singing about trying to catch a salmon in New York and his words made more sense than the situation they found themselves in. The thuds and splashes and screams outside became deafening. The shelter rocked and shook and trembled. The children screamed. The dog barked. The sky thundered. In the distance, they heard sirens, alarms, explosions.

And then silence.

John slowly opened his eyes. Beams of light poured through cracks in the shelter. He blinked and looked at his watch. It was 6:03am. He looked over at Rebecca, at the children, at his mother. He sat up. He was covered in debris. He shook his wife awake. She coughed. “Are you OK?” he asked.
“I think so. Are the kids OK?” she asked, “And your mum?”
Rebecca crawled over to check on Archie and Charlie, while John shook his mother awake. Miraculously, barring a few scratches, everyone seemed OK. Lynne looked around anxiously, before seeing a lump moving around under a blanket and then smiling as Murphy stuck his head out from underneath.

“I’m going to take a look outside,” John said to Rebecca. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like, so don’t let the kids see outside until I say so.”
“OK. I’m just so glad we’re alive.”
John kissed Rebecca on the forehead and forced open the door of the shelter. “Fucking hell,” he said to himself, to Rebecca, to anyone. “Fucking hell.”

He crawled back inside the Castle. “Put the radio on,” he said blankly. Rebecca turned the radio on. Nothing. “Long wave” he said.

The battery-powered radio crackled as glimpses of voices appeared and disappeared. Something incomprehensible in French, something incomprehensible in something unidentifiable, and them something in English.

“And now the latest on the situation in the United Kingdom. Millions of people were killed last night across the UK following devastating scenes in which homes were destroyed, hospitals were demolished, and motorways and train lines were reduced to absolute carnage. Downing Street have issued a statement on behalf of the Prime Minister which confirmed that last night for the first time, at just around half past ten, for the first time in history, it started raining men. The Prime Minister rejected calls for him to resign, saying that the security forces take all threats to the nation’s safety extremely seriously and that appropriate measures were in place. However the leader of the opposition has claimed that not enough was done to protect the public given the specific nature of the intelligence that the security forces had received.”

“The Weather Girls,” John spluttered. “We should have known . Those crazy disco bastards.”

Since I have no interest in seeing it, I'm not the guy to spend a lot of time discussing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I suspect a lot of industry folks and industry observers are wrestling with a dilemma this morning. The movie made a ton o' money over the weekend — more than enough to be considered a smash hit on one level.

Then again, its grosses also plunged over the three days suggesting that bad word of mouth kept people away, as did the mostly-contemptuous reviews. At WonderCon, I heard from some who loved it but there seemed to be a lot of "buzz" that it's not only a bad movie but one that defaces its lead properties. A lot of people didn't exit the theater disappointed so much as angry.

So now you have the question: Is this film a model to be emulated in the future? Or an example of what you shouldn't do if you get to make the next movie of Batman or Superman or any established character with a lot of history? The level of box office drop-off in the coming days may help some answer that. The ancillary income from merchandising that ties-in with the movie may provide additional clues. But right now and maybe for a long time after, heads in Hollywood will be spinning over this conflict.

Big companies which own big properties need to deal with the fact that a great character has his or her breaking point; that you can devalue a precious commodity by letting this producer do one version of it, another writer do that version of it, another director do yet another version of it, etc. The more that is changeable about a character, the less he or she is really about. And the more different interpretations you have out there, the greater the chance that some will damage the affection that audiences have for the character or that the variance will water it down to the point where it's not very special at all.

Is Superman a dark, gritty, maniacal character or is he a sunny, positive force with a personality as grand as his powers? If he can be one in some appearances and the other in others, eventually he becomes not about either. He's just a name and maybe a visual which can be altered a lot.

Characters like that can go from hand to hand. The creator(s) usually has/have the best take…though admittedly there have been creators who didn't seem to know what they'd created or didn't care what you did to them. If you made Batman into a Transvestite Nazi, Bob Kane would have probably praised it as true to his vision if his credit and the amount on his check were both of sufficient size.) Thereafter, the character's value has a lot to do with the sensitivity and skill of those entrusted with him or her. Ideally, you hope they land with someone who can and will say to the right proposals, "No, no…that's not right for this property!"

The problem when a character like Superman or Batman (or Bugs Bunny or Yogi Bear or a thousand others) is controlled by a company the size of Time-Warner is that so many different parties have input or temporary control that some are by the sheer law of numbers, going to be wrong. And at times, there may be no one who can take the long view of the character and say, "No, no…that's not right for this property!" Since Mel Blanc passed, no one at Time-Warner has even settled on one actor to talk for Bugs. Every time a different producer or director is in charge of a Bugs Bunny project, he picks from about eighteen people who do Blanc imitations of varying fidelity. The wabbit no longer speaks with one voice and from appearance to appearance, he varies in other ways as well.

I'm not writing this to say that Superman and Batman are wrong in the new movie. Well, maybe I am but since I haven't seen the film, my opinion there ain't worth even as little as it usually is about anything. Still, when so many people walk out of a movie saying, "That's not my Superman and/or Batman," something is wrong. If even half the moviegoers walked out of a James Bond film saying, "That actor is not James Bond," that actor would probably not be 007 in the next installment in the series…because it's supposed to be a series. There's supposed to be some consistency and continuity and there are certain things about James Bond that make him James Bond.

Just as there are certain things about Superman and Batman that make them Superman and Batman and it's not just the names and an approximation of the visuals. Great characters have great premises and great concepts and there are things about their stories that cause people to fall in love with them. The audiences will put up with a certain amount of variance and interpretation and modernization but if you lose the basic core of Superman and Batman, you've done something wrong.

Those of us who love Superman and Batman are used to seeing versions of him that seem wrong to us. There are Batman lovers who bought his comic book through whole decades when they thought he was in the creative custody of writers, editors and other folks who didn't understand what the Caped Crusader was all about. The same is true of Superman…but it's easy to shrug off a thirty-two page comic book that defaces your favorite hero. There's another issue going on sale next week and someone else is writing that one and eventually, someone comes along who does it right and sales go back up. As one of his editors once said of Superman, "He's indestructible! Even bad stories can't harm him."

A string of bad movies? Maybe. A lot of superstars have found that to be worse than Kryptonite.

The post Creative Oversight appeared first on News From ME.

In the days when I was an agent or produced election leaflets I discouraged the idea that we should rebut the claims of our opponents in the literature we put out.

My reasoning was that it was much better to concentrate on our own positive messages. If that wasn't enough then we were never going to win away.

Some support for this position comes from psychological research discussed in a 2007 Washington Post article - thanks to @sundersays for tweeting the link this morning.

The Post describes a study by the University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine." 

When ... Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual. 

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The same phenomenon, says the Post, has been observed in other experiments.

And Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has found that people tend to forget that someone was denying accusations over time - they just remember the association between him and the accusation:

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.

What do do?

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu ... did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" - and not mention Hussein at all.

It is not always easy to keep to this, but I am happy to publicise peer-reviewed science that chimes with my hunches or prejudices.

At the behest of Patreon
today I will be filling in some holes in the story of Baldur’s death
as originally told by cowardly murder victim Snorri Sturluson
(hehe holes)
(I’m sorry)
(I didn’t want to turn this opening paragraph into sexual innuendo)
(do you ever feel like you’re trapped in your life?)
(like every successive boner joke sucks out a little more of your life force?)
(hehe, suck)

Right so Baldur is dead
we covered this years ago
but what we didn’t talk about
was his FUNERAL
WOOO FUNNNNNN

okay I was being sarcastic when i said woo fun
but actually the funeral is pretty dope
I mean you guys know what a viking funeral is right?
it’s when you put a dead body in a boat
and then set the boat on fire
aka THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE WAY TO BE CREMATED

obviously Baldur is a viking so he is getting a viking funeral
but the problem is that Baldur is the most viking viking ever
which would not be a problem if he was alive obviously
but is a problem now because he has THE BIGGEST BOAT IN THE WORLD
his boat even has a NAME i don’t give a shit about
so the gods load Baldur’s body into the boat
but then they’re like “shit
how are we going to get this boat into the water?”
and Thor’s like “Uh, hey”
and the gods are like “If only one of us was strong enough to push it”
and Thor’s like “Hello guys, hey”
and the gods are like “Hmm … looks like we’re going to need a giantess for this”
and Thor’s like “HEY COME ON.”

But they do it
they invite a giantess named Hyrrokin
and she shows up riding a wolf
with DEADLY SNAKES as a bridle
probably wearing a leather jacket and smoking like 9 cigarettes
and Thor is like “Somebody’s trying a little too hard”
but nobody hears him because the motor on Hyrrokin’s wolf is too loud

So then Hyrrokin gets off her wolf
and Odin sends four berserkers to hold it
(and remember
berserkers are the elite viking warriors who are SO VIOLENT
that if you’re sending them into battle
you better make sure there are enough enemies to kill
because if there aren’t, they’ll make up the quota with your dudes)
and the four berserkers can’t calm the wolf down
without beating it totally fucking senseless
so Hyrokkin walks away from this bloody wolf melee
not even looking back
takes off her shades
and is like “Yo
Somebody call for a boat moving specialist?”
and everybody’s like “SO COOL”
and Thor is like “I mean i have a hammer only I can lift but whatever”

Then Hyrrokin goes up to the boat
and she’s like “Haha is this the boat you need moved?
I almost didn’t see it because it’s SO SMALL AND INSIGNIFICANT
it’s like a rowboat had a baby with another, smaller rowboat
fucking adorable
now watch this drive”
and she punches that boat into the water SO HARD
that the logs they put under the boat to help it go into the water
CATCH FUCKING FIRE
and there’s an EARTHQUAKE
and Hyrrokin is like “Wow that was easy
what’s next?
yall got some jars you need opened or anything?”
and Thor’s like “I’LL OPEN YOUR JAR YOU FUCKING SHOW-STEALER”
but before he can whip out his hammer everybody’s like “Whoa dude
chill out
don’t know what you’ve got against our cool new best friend Hyrrokin
no need to get mad
just because she was literally the only one strong enough to do this”
and Thor is like “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALRIGHT THEN
JUST GONNA BLESS THIS FUNERAL PYRE WITH MY HAMMER THEN
YOU KNOW
THE HAMMER I HAVE BECAUSE I’M THE STRONGEST”
and everyone’s like “Cool dude whatever”

Then Baldur’s wife is really sad for some reason
so she throws herself on the fire and immediately dies
and they throw Baldur’s horse in the fire too
and that golden ring that shits out other rings
so basically all their best stuff
and during the ceremony
Thor kicks a dwarf named Litur into the fire too
and nobody says anything about it
because fuck dwarves.

So the moral of the story
is next time you go to a funeral
show up riding a fucking wolf

the end

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March 28th, 2016: I keep talking about Romeo and/or Juliet but I still think it's a rad book! YOU SHOULD BUY IT; I DUNNO – Ryan

A lot of people are watching the spectacle of Apple vs. the FBI and the Homeland Security Theatre and rubbing their eyes, wondering why Apple (in the person of CEO Tim Cook) is suddenly the knight in shining armour on the side of consumer privacy and civil rights. Apple, after all, is a goliath-sized corporate behemoth with the second largest market cap in US stock market history—what's in it for them?

As is always the case, to understand why Apple has become so fanatical about customer privacy over the past five years that they're taking on the US government, you need to follow the money.

Apple wasn't very good about customer security in the early days of iOS. Early iterations of the iPhone notoriously lied about the security of SSL connections to email servers; my understanding is that this led to them being banned from some corporate and government accounts for a few years. But then they seem to have realized that security wasn't merely a useful feature to pitch to their customers, but a necessity. And the reason it's essential is Apple Pay.

It used to be a truism that General Motors was an insurance company wit a car-manufacturing subsidiary. GM's pension fund had grown so large (over most of a century) that GM had to invest the money somewhere in order to generate a return on investment that would keep the pensioners going: selling cars was simply not a big enough business. And today Apple is sitting on the largest cash stockpile in US corporate history. Its legendary $120-150Bn in cash has attracted the attention of activist investors like Carl Icahn, but even share buy-backs will only get you so far when you're taking 90% of the profits of the entire global smartphone industry. Some analysts have opined that if Apple maintains its current turnover and earnings, and continues to buy back shares at the current rate, by 2024 AAPL will revert to private ownership ... and still be sitting on $100Bn in cash.

Of course, if you have a tenth of a trillion dollars you can't just rock up to a bank and say "please accept this deposit, how much interest do you pay"? For one thing, if you have $0.1Tn, you have enough money to buy several banks. For another thing, money doesn't exist when it's not moving: it's a coefficient of economic velocity. Money needs to be invested and generate a return. Over the past decade Apple leveraged their cash pile to ensure they had a lead over their competitors. Given a five year product roadmap, they could project the need for some critical piece of hardware—synthetic sapphire phone displays, for example, or 5K monitor panels—years in advance. Such components didn't actually exist, but they knew suppliers who could provide them if someone loaned them the cash to build a factory (typically in the high hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars). So Apple would find a company like Sharp and say, "we're going to need a million 27 inch 5 megapixel displays in four years time. We'll front you the money to set up the factory at just 1% over the bank base rate, in return for an exclusive option to buy the first million quality-compliant components to come out of it". Everyone wins: Sharp get a factory that can mass-produce new high resolution display panels, Apple gets an exclusive lead on these panels for consumer sales, and Apple also gets to invest its money in a way that generates far more profit than merely handing it over to an investment house.

But ... Apple has too much money. From roughly 1998, when Steve Jobs returned, Apple began growing like a dot-com startup, at high double-digit annual percentage growth rates—only it started doing so from a billion dollar a year turnover base, not two guys in a garage. By 2008 it was probably clear to Steve Jobs and Tim Cook that if their strategy of becoming the dominant company in the consumer side of the post-PC world succeeded, the problem of where to find enough mattresses to stuff the $500 bills was only going to get worse. When you're making $50-100Bn a year in profit, you can't put the money in a bank: you have to become a bank. And that's what Apple Pay is about, and that's why Apple have become fanatical about customer privacy and electronic civil rights (in one very narrow field).

I'm going to assume you know what Apple Pay is: you use your iPhone, iPad, or Watch as a trusted, authenticated identity token in a shop to pay for stuff. It ties into your bank account and basically your phone swallows your debit and credit card.

Ultimately the banks are going to discover—the hard way—that getting into bed with Apple was a bad idea, about the same way that getting into bed with Amazon over ebooks was a bad idea for the Big Five publishers. Apple is de facto an investment bank, right now: all it needs is a banking license and the right back end and regulatory oversight and risk management and it will be able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Chase or Barclays or HSBC as a consumer bank, too. And Apple has a very good idea of how risky their customers' behavior is because unlike the banks and the credit card settlement network they're not running on incrementally upgraded legacy infrastructure designed in the 1950s. Note those two words a couple of sentences ago: "risk management". Banks are not in the business of holding your money or making loans; they live or die by how well they manage risk. Apple, like Google, has a much richer relationship with their customers than any bank. They can (for example), with a customer's position, know roughly where the customer's phone or watch is moving, and thereby spot faked payment credentials if someone clones the device and tries to use it to buy something a thousand miles away. The CC networks have velocity checking but it's a really crude metric for spotting fraud: Apple can massively improve on it.

But that's not where anti-fraud methods begin and end. For example, Apple have got reasonably good fingerprint readers on their current devices, backed by long PINs and password management. The newer phones have trusted hardware stores for the cryptographic tokens that are used to unscramble the addresses where data is written in the phone's on-board storage: they support (and encourage the use of) two-factor authentication. Some analysts report Apple is working on improving their front-facing cameras to the extent that they can do iris or retina scanning. On the long-term horizon, there are already ultra-compact low-cost DNA sequencers out there; if you really want to authenticate a user via biometrics, about the ultimate trust level is a combination of a shared secret (their password) with a mixture of biometrics tested simultaneously—a fingerprint reader that can quickly confirm a match for their genome while the front camera recognizes the retina of the person holding the device. Their phones are, in many respects, more secure than the ATMs and credit card infrastructure we've used to accessing our bank accounts. And that gives the phone vendors an opportunity to leapfrog over the existing banking infrastructure in the efficiency of their risk management protocols, by reducing fraud while simultaneously knowing much more about their customers' habits and being able to spot potentially risky activity patterns early enough to reduce their exposure.

Here's my theory: Apple see their long term future as including a global secure payments infrastructure that takes over the role of Visa and Mastercard's networks—and ultimately of spawning a retail banking subsidiary to provide financial services directly, backed by some of their cash stockpile.

The FBI thought they were asking for a way to unlock a mobile phone, because the FBI is myopically focussed on past criminal investigations, not the future of the technology industry, and the FBI did not understand that they were actually asking for a way to tracelessly unlock and mess with every ATM and credit card on the planet circa 2030 (if not via Apple, then via the other phone OSs, once the festering security fleapit that is Android wakes up and smells the money).

If the FBI get what they want, then the back door will be installed and the next-generation payments infrastructure will be just as prone to fraud as the last-generation card infrastructure, with its card skimmers and identity theft.

And this is why Tim Cook is willing to go to the mattresses with the US department of justice over iOS security: if nobody trusts their iPhone, nobody will be willing to trust the next-generation Apple Bank, and Apple is going to lose their best option for securing their cash pile as it climbs towards the stratosphere.

Discuss.

This post is the second part of an ongoing series on a writing style I’m calling Novelization Style. It’s not complete in itself and if you haven’t yet read the first part you should go take a look before starting part two.

***

Novelization Style, like omniscient narration, usually spends time with multiple POV characters, some of whom might have the point of view for only a few paragraphs.[1] Unlike omniscient, Novelization Style tends not to vary its distance from the characters or step outside their points of view. It switches from one character’s close point of view straight to the next. And those points of view all sound pretty much the same.

Novels with varied points of view often vary their voices to match them. Sometimes that involves subtle changes in prose. Take a random book I grabbed off my shelf, Clifford D. Simak’s Way Station. The main characters are a CIA agent and a 120-year-old Civil War veteran. Chapters set in the agent’s office are written conventionally for mid–20th century SF: snappy with lots of dialog. The veteran’s chapters have less dialog, longer sentences, less contemporary phrasing, and more repetition.

More often it’s not the prose that changes. It’s what subjects a point of view chooses to focus on, and what it will or won’t say about them. The Haunting of Hill House’s style doesn’t change radically between the framing passages and Eleanor’s point of view. There are more striking stylistic differences between the conventional close third person narration and Eleanor’s stream of consciousness. Still, the bookending narrator is distinct from Eleanor: it doesn’t just know more than she does, it’s more knowing.

In Novelization Style the stylistic differences between the characters’ points of view, if any, are so subtle they might as well not be there. In Leviathan Wakes Holden’s point of view sounds just like the POV of its other protagonist, Detective Miller, and also just like the POV of the character in the prologue. Leviathan Wakes does not narrate the insides of these characters’ heads differently.[2]

This is because Novelization Style tends to be written in transparent prose. I’ve complained before about this great literary ideal of SF fandom. The idea is that transparent prose vanishes while you’re reading it, like you’re watching the novel through a window. It uploads pure unmediated story directly to your brain. Which doesn’t entirely make sense inasmuch as the novel is in fact made of prose. It’s like pretending a brick wall doesn’t contain bricks. To me “transparent prose” means the flattened style you get when you’re trying not to have a style, like a cinematographer who points a camera straight at the set and walks away.

Genre Shouldn’t Mean Generic

I prefer prose that isn’t going for transparency. Not necessarily prose that’s poetic, baroque, or drowning in obscure adjectives. Look at Philip K. Dick’s prose–it’s plain, but it’s got personality. I just mean prose that’s willing to be idiosyncratic or original. That pays attention to sound and rhythm and imagery and knows that if the audience is occasionally aware of the artifice, that’s okay.

Here’s the thing: if it’s done at all well this kind of prose actually communicates more than transparent prose. Let’s turn back to the first three sentences of The Haunting of Hill House, which is straightforward and easy to read but not, y’know, transparent.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

A more obvious way to begin the first sentence might be “Nothing living.” “No live organism” is not the phrasing that would come first to most people’s minds. But it’s absolutely right. This sentence doesn’t just say that to stay sane every living thing needs dreams. (Stated baldly and without irony, the sentiment is banal and entirely un-Shirley Jacksonish.) The word choice implies extra levels of meaning: “No live organism” sets a tone of scholarly detachment, indicates the narrator’s other-end-of-the-microscope perspective, and distinguishes the narrator from Eleanor’s less worldly point of view. “Even larks and katydids” is also a specific choice of words; “pigeons and beetles” or “owls and wasps” would have had different associations. A lesser writer might have just gone for “even insects.”

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

You’re reading about living creatures but the next sentence is about a house, and it’s described as “not sane” as though this house has a mind to not be sane with. This is standard gothic imagery, nothing new, but even so it sparks your imagination in a way “The dark old house stood in the hills” wouldn’t. What’s more interesting is how even an unexpected possessive pronoun can make a big difference: Hill House stands against its hills where most writers would say the hills. Which immediately tells you what kind of house it is and what kind of people once lived there.

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

So Hill House is not insane in the conventional way. Jackson doesn’t describe it with any of the usual clichés: crazy angles, broken windows, rotting floorboards. Hill House is neat, firm, and sensible. Respectable, but mad.

Three sentences, the first not even mentioning the house. And even if you’ve never read the book or seen the movie[3], even without knowing Hill House’s location or architectural style, you probably have a pretty good idea what kind of house Hill House is.

Now–and I realize I’m being horribly unfair here–let’s look at Leviathan Wakes.

Let’s admit it: Leviathan Wakes is boring. There’s nothing wrong with it, exactly. The writing is perfectly competent…but it’s competent the way an encyclopedia entry is competent. It conveys the story with minimal fuss but it doesn’t have… well, I guess you could say it doesn’t have hooks, in the pop song sense. Rhythm, rhetorical devices, anything to hold your attention. Descriptions and word choices are unsurprising; that “improbable bones” line I quoted above is as good as it gets. All very functional, but bland. In places it’s downright awkward:

If the Canterbury sensed an anomaly, it would alert her. If a system errored, it would alert her. If Captain McDowell left the command and control deck, it would alert her so she could turn the music off and look busy when he arrived.

For the first two sentences that’s a good attempt at parallelism, but the way the third sentence carries on past “it would alert her” is the prose equivalent of a power chord interrupted by a droopy slide whistle noise.

Style aside, what’s striking is how little sense we get of what being on the Canterbury is like. Not that I want blueprints and infodumps. Nothing kills a novel like over-describing everything. What I’m missing are a certain kind of detail–interesting word choices and unexpected images. The kind that can, for example, tell you what sort of house you’re dealing with in just three sentences. The Canterbury is a stock set, a Default Spaceship. All we learn that isn’t a standard spaceship tropes is that it lacks the usual giant viewscreen, and that the medical officer debrides wounds with maggots.[4] Without contradicting anything in this chapter the Canterbury might resemble the Enterprise or the Nostromo or the Serenity or even the TARDIS–environments that not only look different but would feel different to exist inside, the way your home feels different from a library or a supermarket.

Different settings feel samey in transparent prose for the same reason different points of view sound similar. Transparent prose is trying not to feel or sound like anything. Characters have voices and personalities. Paradoxically, transparent prose wants to convey those voices and personalities while effacing any sign of voice or personality in itself.

---

In the next post, a little bit more on what Novelization Style’s close third person/transparent prose pairing does to a story. After that I’ll (finally) start detailing the content and story structure I see in this style.

I fear his evisceration of Johnson won’t matter. Men like him thrive because they know that hardly anyone cares about the detail enough to go to the Treasury select committee website and watch its members expose him. 

Johnson understands that in the 21st century a pat joke and a cheap stunt can take you a long way, maybe all the way to Downing Street. Lies take time to unpick, and by the time your accusers have finished unpicking them, the bored audience has clicked on to another screen.

Nick Cohen writes in tomorrow's Observer about Boris Johnson's encounter with Andrew Tyrie, but he could just as well be writing about Matthew Parris's slaying of him in The Times this morning.

The whole thing is lodged behind The Times paywall (you may find samizdat copies on Twitter), but a Guardian article has some of the more damaging charges:

“Incompetence is not funny. Policy vacuum is not funny. A careless disregard for the truth is not funny. Advising old mates planning to beat someone up is not funny. Abortions and gagging orders are not funny. Creeping ambition in a jester’s cap is not funny. Vacuity posing as merriment, cynicism posing as savviness, a wink and a smile covering for betrayal … these things are not funny.”

And:

“But there’s a pattern to Boris’s life, and it isn’t the lust for office, or for applause, or for susceptible women, that mark out this pattern in red warning ink. It’s the casual dishonesty, the cruelty, the betrayal; and, beneath the betrayal, the emptiness of real ambition: the ambition to do anything useful with office once it is attained.”

I sense Matthew Parris felt it was his duty to write like that in an attempt to save the Conservative Party from Boris Johnson.

Is he already too late? Nick Cohen thinks so.

Cohen's analysis reminds me of an article by the novelist Jonathan Coe in the London Review of Books.

He is critical of the ubiquity of satire in modern Britain and suggests that Boris Johnson has seen where this has taken us:

Boris Johnson ... has nothing to fear from public laughter at all. These days, every politician is a laughing-stock, and the laughter which occasionally used to illuminate the dark corners of the political world with dazzling, unexpected shafts of hilarity has become an unthinking reflex on our part, a tired Pavlovian reaction to situations that are too difficult or too depressing to think about clearly. 

Johnson seems to know this: he seems to know that the laughter that surrounds him is a substitute for thought rather than its conduit, and that puts him at a wonderful advantage. If we are chuckling at him, we are not likely to be thinking too hard about his doggedly neoliberal and pro-City agenda, let alone doing anything to counter it.

Maybe it is not too late. I sense that his leadership of the Leave campaign is exposing Johnson to proper scrutiny for the first time and that he is not enjoying the experience.

If we stop laughing at him and treat him like any other politician, we may yet be spared having Johnson and his shabby act as our prime minister.

All of us understand how archaeological and documentary evidence can help us to build up a picture of our past. Historical linguistics, however, is a less well known field. It’s complex, but this is the essence of it: by studying how languages have changed over time, experts attempt to reconstruct earlier forms of language, and from those reconstructions, conclusions can be drawn about the speakers’ culture.

The manner in which variant languages descend from a common ancestor is reminiscent of the evolution of species. Languages are arranged into ‘families’, with each family sharing common descent from the ‘proto-language’. So, the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, such as English and German, is proto-Germanic; the common ancestor of the Celtic languages, such as Irish and Welsh, is proto-Celtic; and so on.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the common ancestor of all the Indo-European languages, and would have been spoken from approximately 4500 to 2500 BCE. You can read more about it, and listen to what experts think it would have sounded like, here.

It is possible to attempt the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European myths by comparing the common elements of known myths that were told by speakers of the Indo-European languages, and also by analysing the names of characters in those myths to discern their original meaning. For example, we can attempt to reverse-engineer the creation myth of the Proto-Indo-Europeans by comparing the myths of Romulus and Remus (the mythical founders of Rome), the Norse creation myth, and the creation myth in the Rig Veda. This article explains how the process works.

The common elements in these creation myths are the sacrifice of one being by another, the creation of the world from the dismembered body of the sacrificed being, and twins. What is fascinating to me in the above is that the Norse myth, which involves the death and dismemberment of the giant Ymir, says nothing about Ymir being anyone’s twin. However, the name Ymir can be shown to derive from a root meaning ‘twin’, providing a depth of additional meaning to the story that had been lost over time.

From comparing cognate elements in related languages, we can postulate earlier ancestral forms of the mythic figures we already know about, and thus reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European pantheon and their myths even in the absence of any documentary or archaeological evidence.

One such reconstructed figure is the Proto-Indo-European Goddess of the dawn, Hausōs. This Goddess is considered to be the ancestor of known dawn-goddesses such as the Vedic Ushas, the Greek Ēōs and the Roman Aurora.

As the ever-helpful Wikipedia informs us, the name Hausōs derives from a root meaning ‘to shine’ and which has cognates meaning ‘east’, ‘gold’ and ‘springtime’.

The identification of the PIE deities is significant not only for what it can tell us about the distant past, but for the light that can be shed upon the myths of the daughter societies, as with Ymir above. Even though Bede’s mention of Eostre is the only textual evidence we have of her, a Goddess with a major springtime festival and a name cognate with other dawn-Goddesses would fit the existing pattern perfectly. If Bede was speculating, he was doing so with exceptional insight.

The Anglo-Saxon Eostre would have had to derive from an earlier Germanic form, which is where Grimm’s proposed reconstruction ‘Ostara’ comes in. The lack of any primary evidence for Ostara, however, along with the lack of any further evidence for Eostre, is somewhat daunting and we are obliged to admit that the reconstructed PIE myths do not prove the existence of such a deity. Dr Philip Shaw, whose research into Eostre has energised the pagan sphere perhaps more than he knows, in fact rejects the pan-Germanic Ostara proposed by Grimm.

For the purposes of my layman’s essay, however, I find the PIE material convincing and inspiring. When the enduring cultural impact of the Eostur festival - which I cannot believe was wholly secular – is also taken into account, the case for Eostre is solidly made.

There still remains the unpleasant task of clearing up the midden heap of self-serving nonsense that has been spouted about her over the years, from ‘Eostre’s Bunny’ to the ‘Celtic Mother Goddess of the Spring Equinox’ and beyond. And don’t even get me started on Ishtar.

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

Brian Bilston

Previously on this blog I’ve done my level best to cast doubt on the descriptions of the Anglo-Saxon months given by Bede, pointing out that he was known to have speculated. In one place (Modranecht) he admits he is relating his own suspicions of why an event has the name it does, rather than giving facts of which he had first-hand knowledge. This admission logically places all of his analyses of the month names into the category of informed speculation, and by extension undermines the validity of his account of Eostre. From this perspective, Eostre looks very much like a false eponym - a folk etymology similar to the belief that Britain was named after a Roman called Brutus.



While the above is still a legitimate reading of Bede, it is also possible to approach his account of the Anglo-Saxon months in a radically different way, one which takes account of an intriguing textual oddity that the ‘speculation’ approach does not.

The oddity I am referring to here is Bede’s habit of refusing to provide information that would have been obvious to him as a speaker of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and which one would expect him to provide if he really did have a straightforward intent to explain the Anglo-Saxon months.

For example, he says of Blodmonath that it was the ‘month of immolations’, that is, sacrificial burnings. But the literal translation of Blodmonath is ‘blood month’. Bede mostly spoke and wrote Latin, but Anglo-Saxon was his mother tongue. He would have known perfectly well that Blodmonath meant ‘blood month’. Why, then, does he not say so?

Precisely the same thing happens with Solmonath, which Bede must have known meant ‘soil-month’. And yet he says that Solmonath ‘can be called “month of cakes”’. He doesn’t even bother to translate the word ‘Giuli’, choosing instead to focus discreetly on the way the two Giuli months fall on opposite sides of the Winter Solstice. This is characteristic of Bede’s whole approach to the Anglo-Saxon year. He is much more comfortable talking about embolismic months and purely calendrical calculations than about what his heathen forebears actually did.

The irresistible conclusion here is that Bede is embarrassed to write this section, and yet he feels he has to write it despite his discomfort. ‘It did not seem fitting to me that I should speak of other nations’ observance of the year and yet be silent about my own nation’s,’ he writes. Note the subtle double negative here: he not saying that his own people's past ways deserve to be recorded, he is saying that he shouldn't remain silent about them. Generally, things that you feel you mustn't keep silent about are in the nature of unpleasant or difficult admissions, such as confessions that weigh on the conscience until divulged.

I get the impression from the double negative that Bede would rather have remained silent. The chapter on Anglo-Saxon months has been left until last, and he includes the above text almost by way of apology, as if it were awkward and uncomfortable to be reminded of his ancestors’ heathenism.

Seen in this light, the passage on Modranecht seems to have made Bede cringe worst of all. Modranecht was the heathen antecedent of Christmas: ‘That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word Modranecht, that is “mother’s night” because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night.’

Why on earth does Bede choose to focus on the word ‘night’ here, rather than the word ‘mothers’? We know from archaeological evidence that the Mothers, or Martres, definitely existed as figures of worship and that animals were sacrificed to them. He points out that Hrethmonath was named after the Goddess Hretha and Eosturmonath after the Goddess Eostre; what could be stopping him from stating that his heathen ancestors sacrificed to the Mothers on Modranecht?

I see only two explanations. Either Bede did not know about the Martres, or he is choosing to remain silent about them. If he did not know about them, then the credibility of his whole account is thrown into question. We would also have to explain why the worship of the Martres, which was widespread in north-western Europe and for which we have prodigious evidence, somehow escaped his notice.

If he knows but is keeping silent, then we have an explanation for the peculiar incoherence of his statement. The second half of the sentence simply does not fit the first half. Look at it again. Bede is building up to a horrified contrast between old Anglo-Saxon ways and Christianity here:

‘That very night, which we hold so sacred, they used to call by the heathen word…’

What bombshell is Bede about to drop? What pagan event was so horrible that Bede has to emphasise its striking contrast with Christmas? ‘Gallons of blood night’? ‘Prisoner-roasting night’? ‘Devouring-the-livers-of-Christians night’?

‘… mothers’ night!’

Wow, Bede. ‘Mothers’ night’? THAT was what you were building up to?

It’s obvious that on the face of it, ‘mothers’ night’ is innocuous. There is nothing scandalously heathen about mothers in general that would warrant such an emphasis.

It is only when you know that the Martres were heathen deities, and that sacrifices were made to them, that Bede’s hyperbole over Modranecht makes any sense at all. In short, he must have known about the Martres.

This means that the blustering exegesis that follows, with its tautologous focus on the word ‘night’ rather than the more obvious word ‘mothers’, is nothing but dissimulation on Bede’s part. In speaking of the meaning of Modranecht, the interjection suspiciamur, ‘we suspect’, now looks like Bede distancing himself from the subject. It is not that he does not know what happened at Modranecht. He does know. But he does not want the reader to know that he knows. Hence, ‘suspiciamur’. He presents his observations as the detached suspicions of a learned Christian scholar, because the subject is acutely embarrassing to him.

Bede rounds off his account of the Anglo-Saxon year and its various heathen observances with a grateful (and relieved) address to Christ:

‘Good Jesu, thanks be to thee, who hast turned us away from these vanities and given us to offer to thee the sacrifice of praise.’

The chapter on the Anglo-Saxon year thus begins with a justification for tackling the subject at all, and ends with a pious statement of gratitude that those days are now over. This, I think, demonstrates that Bede would far rather have left the chapter out, but found the Anglo-Saxon measurement of time too pertinent to ignore. His discomfort is a tremendous boon to us.

This re-evaluation of the import of the key word ‘suspiciamur’, then, allows us to reappraise Bede’s entire account and treat it not as speculation, but as the guarded, reluctant testament of a scholar who - in the words of Jacob Grimm - tells us less of the heathen world than he knows.

Continue to Part 3: Meanwhile, Six Thousand Years Ago...

A Facebook discussion I was in the other day ended up talking about the mechanics of Tory leadership elections, and it prompted a few thoughts. Just to be clear, these are all about electoral strategy for candidates in that putative election, not about their policies or personalities except in as much as they might influence their strategy.

A leadership election is a two-stage process. In the first round, MPs nominate candidates and then a series of eliminative ballots are held. The candidate with the least votes in each ballot drops out until only two candidates remain. Those two then go to a ballot of the party membership which decides the victor. If only two candidates are nominated, the process jumps straight to the membership ballot, if only one candidate is nominated (as happened with Michael Howard in 2003) they’re elected unopposed. Another important point to note is that there’s no provision for candidates to enter the race after the initial close of nominations – despite media speculation, the rules don’t allow for a stalking horse election.

Even without stalking horses, there’s still plenty of scope for strategy within the initial stage of the process. Candidates are not only concerned about getting themselves into the membership ballot but also who they’ll face while they’re there. This can be seen in the final MP ballot of the 2001 election where several of Iain Duncan Smith’s supporters reportedly backed Ken Clarke in an effort to ensure that it was Clarke, and not Michael Portillo, who Duncan Smith would face in the membership ballot. (It was perhaps a foretaste of his abilities as a leader that the scheme came close to a horrendous backfire as enough of them switched to Clarke that he only beat Portillo by a single vote)

The interesting effect of this system is that while they can’t end up with someone supported by a small group of MPs become their leader, it is possible to become leader if you can get a third plus one of the Conservative MPs to support you. With current numbers, that’s 111 MPs. If you can rely on that many supporting you, there’s no way that you can be stopped from getting into the membership ballot. Every vote short of that target makes it easier for your opponents to co-ordinate their strategy and block you.

This presents us with an interesting situation if we have a candidate who only has limited popularity with the MPs, but is popular with the membership. Assuming that candidate can persuade around a third of the MPs to back them, the other challengers face three options: they can try and coordinate their voters to exclude the other candidate from the membership ballot; they can fight it out between them for the remaining two-thirds of the electorate and see who does best; or they can agree to rally behind one candidate. The latter option would be accepting that the candidate with membership support would be on the membership ballot, but would ensure that his rival is seen as the clear choice of the MPs in the hope members would react positively to a candidate with clear Parliamentary support.

To illustrate this, assume a contest has got down to the final three candidates: A, B and C. A and B both believe that C is more popular with the membership than they are, so would prefer them not to face the membership. Both A and B would also prefer the other to C given the chance, and think they would have the chance to beat them in the membership ballot. Their best course of action depends on how popular they think C is amongst the MPs. If they think C has the support of less than a hundred MPs, it makes sense for them to keep competing with each other as both are still likely to beat C and make it to the membership ballot. If C is more popular, but still short of 111 MPs, then there is an incentive for them to co-ordinate their voters so that both of them still get more than C. If, however, they’re sure that C will get 111 or more MPs supporting them, then the incentive becomes to pick one of A or B to give them a resounding victory in the final MP ballot and go to the members as the clear choice of the Parliamentary party, in the hope that will help them beat C.

Where this gets interesting is that these courses of action give C an incentive to make their support look smaller than it is. If we assume there have been more than three candidates, and there have been other MP ballots before, it’s in C’s interest to get enough support to make it through to the final three and no more. The further A and B believe C is from having 111 MPs backing them, the less incentive there is for A and B to co-ordinate to stop C. C thus has an incentive to hide their real number of supporters until the final round in order to create their best scenario for winning: getting themselves on the membership ballot without a strong ‘unity’ candidate against them.

In other words, when the next Tory leadership election comes around, expect there to be lots of shenanigans and behind-the-scenes manoeuvring where the actual vote tallies may not reflect the real support candidates have. It’ll be fun to watch, if you can forget that whoever emerges from it all will likely be leading the country afterwards.